How To Write Trans Women
One of two parts.
(This article is one half of a dyad, which can be read in either order. The other half is here.)
So you are an author and you want to write a transgender woman.
The most important thing I can tell you is that you should take your draft to a transgender woman and compensate her at fair market rate for a diversity read. Listen to her and take her advice, unless it’s bad.
But before you do that, here are some questions you should be able to answer:
CONTEXTS: How does this transgender woman fit into the world around her?
Transgender women, or people who would be transgender women in a modern social context, are historically either exoticized as sacred (as with the Galli of Cybele) or, more typically, relegated to marginalized roles - as forcibly third-gendered scapegoats and sex workers, etc1. What does this transgender woman’s society perceive her role to be, and how does it push her towards fulfilling that role? What portions of her society push her in what directions? In what ways does she deviate from her role-as-ideal? How does this perception of what she should be affect her?
How does this transgender woman, as a marginalized person, make her living? What costs does she pay for her transgender womanhood (in coin, or blood, or safety)?
How does her transgender womanhood affect her social interactions and class? How is she racially categorized, and how do the stereotypes associated with that racial categorization intersect with her transgender womanhood to determine her gendered expression?
How does she interact with people on an individual level? Transgender women typically seek out and befriend other transgender women on the basis of shared experiences and finding them safer to be around, but may find themselves isolated in male-dominated fields. Are her friends, family, and lovers transgender women as well? What does that say about her? How does she interact with other transgendered women? How does she interact with cisgender women? How does she interact with people who aren’t women at all?
INTERNALITIES: What might it feel like to be a transgender woman?
Any transgender woman will tell you that her transgender womanhood informs but does not strictly define everything about her — though sometimes it feels like a prison. Yet the line between influence and definition is not nearly so clean-cut as many would like to pretend. For the most part, transgender women, like people of any other gendered positionality, do the things they are told to do, want the things they are made to want, and live the way they are told to live. The consequent commonalities between them are obvious to anybody willing to look.
Consider for a moment yourself what it would be like to be a girl being raised to be a man, with very little say in the matter.
What would that do to your emotions? Your patterns of sexual attraction? Your relationship to your body? Your sense of self? How would you react to the psychic pressures of being made to fit that particular mold, especially as a child?
How would you come to understand yourself? How would your presentation and attitudes and likes and dislikes and strengths and weaknesses be different?
And keeping that in mind: how would you be the same?
Can you really know that?
REALITIES: What are the pressures applied to transgender women, and how do they affect your character?
While it’s true that you should write a transgender woman as a person first, rather than as a set of identity tags, it’s also true that being raised by parents aiming her towards manhood tends to shape a transgender woman in certain ways. Creating a transgender woman character should ideally take these pressures and realities into account.
Being raised to be a man means being taught that depending on others is a weakness. Obviously agentic transgender women exist — but they carry out one supreme act of agency and they hate it. Individual transgender women are more likely to prioritize results over the smooth functioning of a group and ask questions when she, or another woman needs clarification — though of course the possibility that she retreats completely into her shell exists. They have often been freer to express competitiveness than cisgender women; this may present its own issues.
Transgender women are women, and have women’s problems. There are two major related double-binds leveled against all women: “Be feminine, but not too feminine,” and “Be desirable/sexually available, but not too desirable/sexually available.” Transgender women often grapple with these problems later in life, but that doesn’t make them any more prepared to solve them; your transgender woman character may still be figuring her answers out, or changing them as she goes.
How femininely does your transgender woman present herself? How does she feel about presenting that femininely? In what circumstances does her presentation change, and how does she feel about that change? What is her relationship to her sexuality like? To shame?
While a transgendered women will likely come to understand that she was not raised in ideal ways (and after all, who is?) she is hesitant to abandon entirely the circumstances which created her, and so she picks and chooses the pieces of her upbringing to carry on. Which pieces has your transgender woman character chosen to discard? How ambivalent is she about the pieces she has chosen to keep? Does she consider herself honorable, value forthrightness and competitiveness, or consider the ability to commit violence if necessary part of her self-image? What cycles will her choices perpetuate, and what continuities will they destroy?
Various fraught social realities create social complexes as they perpetuate themselves through women as a class. These social complexes lead to ‘natural’ associations between certain thematic approaches/conflicts and transgender womanhood or womanhoods. A transgender female protagonist may make a useful device for authors wishing to investigate:
The relationships of traditional societal systems (family in particular) to the individual, particularly regarding assimilationism and the maintenance/disruption of norms
Moral purity and innocence and the expectations surrounding them, especially of the loss thereof, slanting the Bildungsroman towards independence
Roles and expectations; both of others and of the self. Subjection and subjectivity; objection and objectivity; the abject, which is defined against.
The destruction of futurity, or the creation thereof
The destruction of a hideous and evil world by those who have suffered, or the creation thereof
Dynamics of power and control; power relations and fantasies of weakness and empowerment both
Reactivities towards the unchangeable, or that which is perceived to be unchangeable. Fatalism, nihilism, existentialism, absurdism.
Emotional textures; “painterly” character work
Of course, your transgender woman protagonist does not strictly need to interface with any of these thematic considerations — but it is likely that at least one of them has impacted her life in some way or another. Which? How? And how has she dealt with them?
Finally, but not least important: Why is this character transgender? What does it mean for your story that she has had these experiences and has come to exist as herself in this way?
Now go read the other panel of this diptych.
Discussion Questions, to be completed after finishing both articles.
1. Why do you think these articles were so similar, or perhaps, so different?
2. What might the juxtaposition of these two articles be intended to suggest?
3. What about men? Transgender men specifically? Why don’t you as a lesbian write about them? People keep asking me this so I thought I might as well ask you.
4. Did you feel more strongly about one article than the other? What might that suggest about the world? What might that suggest about you?
membership in one category does not preclude the other; see prostitution as rite in the Fertile Crescent and the supernatural luck-bringing attributed to both hijra and femminielli
hi halimede, im going to try to best answer your discussion questions in an attempt to try and work my critical thinking muscles:
1: (and 2, as an extension) i think the articles are similar due to the innate truth that trans women are women. obviously there are differences in the two texts, specifically with certain details like the societal roles of both subsets of women or what themes to explore with writing them, as societal expectations and the subset's relationship with each theme are circumstancially different. the juxtaposition is meant to both illustrate the similarities and distinguish the innate differences (few as they might be) between women of both identities, possibly in an attempt to bring a less-knowledgable reader to an understanding that the two subsets are, indeed, women.
3: I don't personally write about men (or trans men in particular) as a lesbian because I have been scorned by an ex-boyfriend who was coincidentally the reason i started questioning my own gender identity. i think, possibly, the people looking for you to write on trans men are trans men themselves, feeling left out as your writing centers mostly on women (a group they have understandably divorced their identity from.) sue me if this comes off as transmisandrist.
4: personally i felt stronger about the article focusing on transgender women (shocker, as im also a trans woman.) im unsure how to translate this to a worldwide opinion, but i suppose it does bring to light how the world treats both subsets, cisgender and transgender, in similar ways on the basis of them both being women. as for what it says about ME that i felt stronger about the transgender article, i suppose that the mentioned examples and themes struck closer to home, as i have personally felt these influences and societal expectations in my life.
altogether, thank you for your writing. i have no intent on writing about women (im not an author, really) but i appreciate the insight your work brings on how trans women are treated, how they're expected to act, and what roles they're expected to fill in society. i also enjoyed answering your discussion questions, and hope that i didn't miss anything you wished for readers to touch upon in their reflections.
Oh, this is a fun exercise!
First, to answer your discussion questions:
1. I think it's plain that they are similar, primarily because they are asking: How do you write someone who has a gender in a gendered society? In particular, how do you write someone who is a woman in a patriarchal society (particularly one similar to the contemporary West and its ideas of white hegemonic masculinity)? The primary difference comes when you throw in the twist that a transgender woman is (typically) raised to be a man, and has assumedly assimilated to that role, to some extent.
2. Comparing the two pieces side-by-side clearly intends to show that trans and cis women are more similar to one another than they are different. Where they differ seems to highlight the notion of socialisation (being raised as a member of a gender category) and a little more dramatic how bad the world is someone who has multiple marginalisations (both trans and a woman).
3. What about men? You could certainly write something very similar about being raised a cis man vs. a trans man. The main difference is that the cis man presumably, due to relative lack of marginalisation, has less reason to question the patriarchal order. Even a marginalised man (poor, disabled, non-white) still enjoys dominance over women similarly situated, even though he may still be required to submit to less marginalised person (such as a white, wealthy, cis woman). In the case of a trans man, he is likely to be presumed to have born and raised into his position in society.
As to why write about men? I do think that lesbians do get some greater mental distance from men. Lesbians may still have friends and family who are men, but in many ways our lives don't quite centre men the same way that it does for men or women who want to have intimate, romantic, or sexual relationships with men. And, that's okay. Don't enough people write about men, anyway? We live in a patriarchal society where man is the default! Asking lesbians to write more about men just another pressure to put men in our minds; we have chosen not to.
4. I didn't read the articles back-to-back, so I can't say I was in the same state of mind when I read them. I react more strongly about the trans article, as a trans woman. What does it say about the world? No idea. What it says about me? I'm trans, and I have some issues with this characterisation.
After a bit of thought, I think it comes down to these points:
1. The focus here seems to be largely on socialisation. As such, it misses out on how different cultures have different ideals of feminity/masculinity (even if they might generally be patriarchal and influence by Western culture). The femininity taught to a white, upper-class, Christian woman in the U.S. is going to differ from that of a black, working-class, Muslim woman in Kenya. There may be some overlap, but they are distinct in cultural expectations.
2. Probably more significantly, these don't really deal with other axes of marginalisation (class, race, socioeconomic status, ability, sexual orientation, etc.). Generally speaking, the closer you are to the top of a hierarchy, the less you are inclined to question your place within the hierarchy, and the more you can take comfort from your proximity to power. The more steps you take away from that proximity to power, the greater your inclination (if not ability) to question the patriarchal order and its associated gender norms. In the US, broadly historically speaking, a white woman may be expected to submit to white men, but she still has power over black men. Neurodivergent people may have a harder time understanding gender norms and more readily question them or fail to live up to them. Given that heterosexuality is really baked into the patriarchal mode, non-heterosexual cis people are also more likely to question gender norms. (To be fair, the realities sections do cover some of these things, but often the sex/gender reality isn't the most significant one to a given person.)
3. Something that is not explicitly stated in the realities section is that while the threat of gendered violence does apply to all women, it is probably more of a threat to trans women—-the trans panic defence still exists in many jurisdictions. Additionally, some of this gets internalised, too. In a potentially romantic/sexual situation, some trans women may have an internalised transmisogyny that holds them back from making a first move in fear of being seen as a predator.
4. Finally, the biggest likely difference between a cis woman and a trans woman is that a trans woman has absolutely had to question their sex/gender. My impression is that most cis people just take their sex/gender so plainly obvious. They may question gendered roles and expectations, but they don't typically question their gender. All trans people at some point do have to question their assigned gender and reject it. When they do so, they consciously have to make choices about their gender in ways that cis people generally do not.
And this is where, I feel, a lot of the socialisation question gets really messy. How did a trans woman take to her male socialisation? Did she work hard to fit into it, trying to be a hypermasculine man in an effort to combat her dysphoria? Did she reject it and choose to be a feminine man before she made the realisation she wasn't one? How has her relationship to gender, gender roles, and gender expression changed before and after transition? What about her relationship to the patriarchal order?
For me, the most memorable line in Jennifer Finney Boylan's book 'Cleavage' is this: 'I can tell you that, of all the trans women I now, the most predictable indicator of success post-transition is whether they were feminists *before*'. I feel like there's some amount of truth to that. I certainly have known of many trans women who have idealised womanhood (usually in a very patriarchal way) and have really struggled with their transition as a result.
Much of this I think is due to the fact that by choosing to transition means taking a big step down in the patriarchal order from cis man to trans woman (which is arguably a lower rung than cis woman, especially if she doesn't pass). For many trans woman, this may be the first time they have to really confront marginalisation. Even for women who have had to deal with marginalisation in the past (by race, ability, etc.), the step down from being perceived as a man to a woman is still full of surprises. If she were a feminist pre-transition, it is less surprising. However, if she has unrealistic expectations of womanhood, she could be in for a rude awakening.
There's more to trans women, though. Is she early in transition? If so, being trans is probably a bigger part of her life as she figures out how to live life as a woman. She might be dealing with grief over the time she spent not living as herself. If she's well into transition, she will likely have found a form of womanhood that suits her, and she might be more likely to see herself as just another woman (especially if she has fully medically transitioned and passes well). At what age did she transition? There's the invisibility that comes with being an older woman; did she grow into it or did she transition into it?
I obviously have a lot of thoughts, and I am sure I could write out much more, but here's what I was able to put together relatively quickly. In the end, I suppose the only conclusion I can make is that people are complex; they are more than their sex/gender. Their past experiences and relationship with their gender interact with society in complex ways that are hard to summarise and understand. I really do appreciate the thought exercise, though.