I want more trans lesbian fictions
I was re-reading my most recent post and I felt like there was so much more I wanted to convey specifically on the topic of being trans and a lesbian, so here I am again trying to do that.
The gist of this post is its obvious title: I want more trans lesbian fictions.
By this, I mean a variety of things.
I want more lesbian fictions that casually have transfem people. I don't want the notion of lesbian fiction to automatically imply "cis lesbian characters unless otherwise specified". Heck, I want lesbian fictions that actually confront this assumption the audience has.
I want transness to exist as a casual thing in some sapphic fictions. Like, yeah, this is a story of two girls (or more!) who love each other. One of them is just trans. Or several of them are just trans. This is not the point, but it's unapologetically there.
I also want this to be a topic in some stories. Because there's so many things to say on how to survive in a society that sees you as a delusional boy in a heterosexual couple. So many things to show on how removed from reality that assumption is.
And there is so much to explore on representing the sheer joy of being a girl among girls who love girls, and on loving being a girl as a part of that. There is so much to show on lesbian and larger sapphic communities that don't assume everyone is cis, and how simple that can be.
I want lesbian fictions broader than two girls in love, too. I want this to encompass fictions that are not a romance, but are instead centered on lesbian communities. Fictions on lesbian characters exploring their identity without this being crystallized by one single romantic relationship, either because they showcase a larger part of their lives including several relationships, or because they are polyamorous. Fictions on nonbinary lesbians, on transmasc and he/him lesbians, and overall that show how sexuality and gender are often porous and malleable things in queer circles. And obviously, fictions that have a grasp on the split attraction model and include a whole spectrum of aromantic and asexual lesbians, and sapphic queerplatonic relationships.
And I want all of those to have transfem characters.
I want trans sapphic fictions in general, of course. I will often say "lesbian" in this post because it is what I use the most considering my own situation, because it is often more politically charged, and also because I want to see tackled the harmful stereotype that somehow transfem people would invade lesbian spaces in particular (please, burn this with fire, thank you). But my need is for trans sapphic fictions in general, and bi or pan transfem characters are obviously included in this plea.
Part of my actual main point here is, I want trans fictions that are not just focused on a character discovering they are trans1. I want trans fictions that actively explore a trans character's romantic and sexual attraction, that question those as a package deal with gender in general. Digging further in that direction I also want to see more representations of how hard it can be to be a trans woman and to date men; and I want to see addressed, notably within trans communities, the often disparaged experiences of straight trans women.
Questions on a trans character's attraction, and dating while being trans, and navigating anything sex-related, are so often evacuated from fictions that show us: trans characters, when they are front and center in a narrative, are often reduced to a neat single arc on gender. Of course, this is a general trend in representing all kinds of minorities: making one (1) element of our multifaceted identities our single "character quirk".
But in this specific case, I want to see us exist in our identities without the early steps in our transitions being the backbone of our stories. I want to see more depictions of navigating the world and our daily lives as trans people in queer bodies and as part of larger queer communities. I want to see how our transitions actually intersect with our friendships and romantic relationships (and also how they don't), how they encompass questions on our sexuality and generally figuring ourselves out entirely, how our trans identities just coexist with so many other things that make up our daily lives; much more than what is shown pretty much everywhere right now.
I do want to see our early transition hardships and joys depicted, of course; they are definitely important to show. Works that depict them have been of prime importance to me at some point just as they are for a lot of trans folks. But I-- I don't know. I don't want to be reduced to a character arc.
A good deal of fictions on trans characters feed into this, purposefully or not, by virtue of being mostly focused on coming in, coming out, and our early transition steps. They end up congregating into a general assimilationist message of the form "oh yeah you transitioned, now you've found yourself and you've reached a new socially stable life again (often where you more or less pass as cisgender and don't rock the boat anymore)".
Just to be clear, as individuals it is oh so understandable to wish for some kind of social stability, notably as we live in such violent transphobic societies; and no transition is lesser than any other for desiring and sometimes finding joy in elements of that. Passing, notably, is one heck of a touchy and difficult topic on which I have so many conflicting feelings at the same time - it is a system I want to burn to the ground and yet a source of euphoria in specific instances, and, ugh.
My beef is with the general message this overwhelming "character arc" representation conveys. It gives the idea that a trans person undergoes some changes, sure, but then they can be "normal" again at least to some extent (whatever that means), all queer elements of their life swept under the rug, and that this is the one desirable outcome. In reality, the interface between our bodies and choices and the rest of the world, which is in some ways what makes our transness2, keeps existing - and we often keep bearing the brunt of queerphobia in small ways even when we try to keep up with a cisgender society. And similarly, representations of our transitions shouldn't be reduced to a time-bound blip when our trans identities actually affect so much of our lives.
I believe this vision of a neatly wrapped "social assimilation" arc is responsible for a lot of things, notably the absurd lack of representation of non-binary characters in mainstream media; or trans characters where their trans identity and their queerness are still active, relevant elements of their life after their transition (once again, whatever that means - we keep transitioning as we grow older).
Similarly, and to get back to the part where transness intersects with relationships, I think this general assimilationist trans narrative may be partly responsible for the lack of trans lesbian representation, and of trans characters questioning their sexuality more generally. This deeper kind of representation, truer to the whole package of questions coming with questioning one's gender in real life, is evidently messier and probably too "transgressive" for a cishet audience3.
(Once again, none of this is to feed into a "who is the most transgressive person" competition as individuals; that mindset is toxic. This is a broader realization that fictions that represent us tend to sand down our more vindictive, non-normative, activist sides and our intersectional elements to preserve a cisheteronormative social peace.)
I'm rambling, but I want to see fictions that reflect how being trans affects the things we like and the ones we create, the activism and political changes we fight for, the daily lives and the growing older we build together. Fictions that reflect queerness, realistically or metaphorically. And I want the exploration of our attraction (or lack thereof) to be a part of that.
Of course, a lot of what I'm writing here also applies to representations of trans men, with gay trans men in particular (for whom the situation of representation in fictions seems to be even more dire), and enby people. I'll be mostly focusing on what resonates with me, but part of those statements can be very much broadened.
Earlier this year my lover told me "could you imagine if in some of your favorite yuri mangas one of the characters happened to be trans?". The joy and the longing from this thought experiment has been haunting me ever since. It's not that the idea never struck me before, and trans headcanons in particular fandoms with sapphic shipping have been in my mind for a long time. It's simply that imagining picking up a yuri manga and realizing as I read that one of its sapphic leads is casually a transfem character still feels mostly like a distant dream.
In practice, it is absurdly hard to find transfem characters in yuri mangas in the first place4. In the few more or less good ones that exist, the transfem characters have girls crushing on them but are not themselves sapphic. Or they happen to date a girl when they're still figuring themselves out but the focus is heavily (and sometimes messily) on gender stuff, and the sapphism of their relationship is a briefly-commented closure element.
Often I feel like the bar to clear as an actual intersectional work on trans and lesbian identities is like, this textless oneshot. It's low.
If you allow me to ramble on intersectional yuri works for a hot minute, I must add that there are comparatively a bit more works with characters on the aroace spectrum, or disabled in some way, or with heavy hints that they are neurodivergent, for instance. I wouldn't say there are much of any of those, and they are all still sorely lacking broader representation, but I can at least confidently name two or three that fall under each of those umbrellas and that I find good.
Sadly enough, dark-skinned5 or fat characters are harder to find, though not entirely absent. This seems to be part of a lack of diversity in bodies in yuri and possibly more generally in manga; and in its own way this phenomenon intersects with the absence of trans yuri.
Anyway.
The gist of all I've said until now is that trans lesbian representation doesn't sprout much from primarily trans fictions because those are often focused on our transitions and figuring ourselves out, (not so) surprisingly letting the twin package of figuring out our sexuality behind. And it doesn't sprout from primarily lesbian fictions because it requires actual commitment to push against the default and include us as girls loving girls. We slip away from most minds or are straight-up not entirely considered girls in the first place, because it is extremely easy to discredit both our transness and our lesbianism at the same time (echoing an estrangement from the concept of girlhood that also happens to cis lesbians for loving girls in the first place6). There's just so much of lesbophobia, transphobia, and gender essentialism that interplay in the way we are socially perceived, and that contribute heavily to our scarce representation at large.
All this hopefully conveys how important, how momentous it feels each time I discover media that actually feature trans lesbian characters. Most of those have rewired my brain chemistry a little, and I am grateful to so many writers and artists who keep contributing to that, little by little.
When I said in my last post that I could count on two hands the number of trans lesbian fictions, I was exaggerating a little. They do feel absurdly scarce in general media, mind you. But there's still a world of those to explore on some websites, like itch.io7 (check also here), scribblehub (which has some pretty prolific transbian authors) and AO3. They are full of games and stories and fanfictions of which I have only scratched the surface.
(Well, I know a few of those itch.io games already, and I love a good bunch of them to bits; and I will probably write more about them in details at some point. And I've heard very good things of others that are still waiting on my desktop right at the moment. But that still leaves room for a lot of things to try and play to - I'm really looking forward to it.)
But aside from that, the general state for trans lesbian fictions is still quite dire. And I'm not the only one with a need for this and confronted with such a limited amount: there are a few reddit threads here or here or there that ask more or less the same question8. Somehow that question seems to be particularly asked for books more than other fictions, which may be my biggest blind spot. There seem to be a bunch of options around, though.
Interestingly, aside from video games and a few series that come back reocurringly in the answers to these general reddit threads (Sense8 and Euphoria, none of which I have watched despite knowing them by name), part of the suggestions are also webcomics. Which is fun and oddly relevant to me as I have been exposed to a few of them; a question of timeframe, I suppose, as I was grappling with my identity in 2019-2020. Be them within a main or a side couple9, they feature trans lesbians and have sometimes found their footing as they went. I consider some of them a bit clumsy here or there in retrospect, but they're all passion projects that have impacted me positively10.
Heck, some feel so niche but have stuck with me in big ways somehow, and their authors have repeatedly impacted me through their works.
It's been a strange trip down memory lane to reread some of those recently. They all capture something from before my yuri era. The latter started when I began craving lesbian content so much I've been unlocking a whole subbranch of girls kissing, holding hands, and promising stuff to each other, among other things girls in love do. Yuri mangas have also been tremendously impactful on my sexuality at times; but it's all been at the expense of, you know, not really seeing trans bodies in there except fetishized.
I'm compensating with artworks from transfem sapphic artists the best I can (though I also miss cohost for this).
At this point, I can add to the pile the adult stuff, too, and you can click if you yourself are an adult interested in that.
From the writings that have stayed with me for years to several recent games very favorably reviewed in their own niche: just as everything else, it's scarce; but it's meaningful too, you know?Up to exaggerating a little: early trans memes and webcomics made me a girl. Yuri made me lesbian11. A few fictions heavily contributed to making me both. But it's the mix of all these works that moved me, and all the people who were there to help me with the canvas of me, that's made me, and keep making me, me.
... I've also somehow awakened my foxgirl side from a weird combo of LARPing, furry anime girls, foxes videos, and a preexisting love for the color orange. What is a life, sometimes12.
I don't exactly know what this post is. I didn't exactly aim for a recommendation post; that may come more formally at some point. So it is more of a disjoint and strange combination of wishlist and reminiscing, which kinda sprouted from finding with pleasant surprise some fascinating horror fiction with trans lesbian catgirls in the recent ShortBox comics fair. And I suppose it's a way of sneakily putting a lot of links to stuff to bring them to your attention without necessarily having to detail or endorse the entirety of their content myself, and for you to take what you want in all this, and leave the rest - providing the best of a chaotic library I can around that topic.
There's so much in this collective body of queer works that has been tidbits of lightning in a bottle for younger me, and that continue to live rent-free in my brain me sometimes. Things that light me from the inside and show me fragments of my own experience rearranged within other people's stories.
There's so much to find in trans lesbian works. And there are so many more to create still.
And I can't wait to experience them; and to write more, in my own way, about this.
I hope some get to impact you too.
I am not counting in this secondary representations, where transness still often feels like a blink-and-miss-it reference on a non-main character: more or less evasively mentioned or hinted at once, but without real impact. They are still important to some extent - to show that we're here - but I feel myself craving for so much more.↩
I suppose this is as good a place as any to link to the French poem Je suis pas trans dans la forêt by Léa Rivière among the writings that live in my head on that topic. I sadly couldn't find an English translation.↩
Interestingly, I think this is also why lesbian representations (and even more general narratives!) are often centered on telling one single romance, too. It's less messy and it makes for a more compelling character arc: the characters realize they're into each other, confront external obstacles, get together, the end. As much as I love lesbian romances and girls kissing, I wish more fictions took liberties to explore wider and more activist lesbian narratives.↩
when we put aside a few stories that are primarily gender bender stories, even if they can still be highly relatable; or the plethora of fetishizing oneshots filed under categories generally regarded as slurs, in which we may still sometimes find bits of ourselves from lack of any better option.↩
From what I've seen, dark-skinned characters in yuri seem generally limited to either some kind of exotization or a "cool tanned gyaru" trope. This is extremely regrettable, all the more considering that one of the cornerstones of yuri fiction had a front and center interracial sapphic couple in 1997 with Utena and Anthy.↩
This is also something that has been theorized by lesbians in good. See for instance Monique Wittig's The Straight Mind idea that lesbians are socially not women because womanhood is notably defined by adhesion and participation to a heteronormative system, and being a lesbian means contributing to dismantling that system. This is something that should, and in some circles does, intersect with transness as a rejection of a heavily binary gendered society, because it goes hand in hand with heteronormativity.↩
Keep in mind however that itch recently delisted from its search function a lot of works with adult themes; it has also been banning works featuring fetishes, or exploring non-consent or incestuous themes, despite so many of those providing heavy content warnings accordingly. This is part of a recent crackdown from payment processors pressured by right-leaning organizations in the name of public morality. We do need frameworks as safe as possible for discussions and representations around touchy, triggering or otherwise difficult sex-related topics; but this outcome will much more likely happen through methods like Archive of Our Own's wonderful tagging and content warnings system, than through repression. To get into a related, more general tangent: moral panics around sex-related topics, often fostered by heavily right-wing groups through the leveraging of extreme objectionable edge cases, are echoed in a lot of very broad social media restrictions around NSFW content in recent years. These restriction end up forcing people wanting to talk about sex-related topics to inventively circumvent censoring not to get banned, by not referencing their posts or works or accounts with appropriate tags for instance. This - and black box suggestion algorithms - consequently decreases the audience's ability to filter what is relevant to them, to find what they want, and to give their informed consent to what they are exposed; all of which should be the primary focus of any decent platform. These same restrictions obfuscate discussions on how to talk about and represent heavy sex-related topics, they often end up serving extremely puritanical agendas that repress adult content in general, and they disproportionately target authors addressing queer experiences and sexuality and/or kinks and fetishes.↩
Some of the mistaken answers people give feature both transfem characters and lesbian characters as part of a general queer cast - consider for instance the great webcomic/series Heartstopper - but not transfem lesbians, which goes to show how lacking it is even in queer fictions as an intersectional identity, and how needed it is.↩
Or sometimes as originally transition-focused fictions, that are slowly getting there as trans lesbian fictions. Some remain quite iconic in this niche.↩
This is also true of several merely trans (but not lesbian) or lesbian (but not trans) webcomics which have had a big impact on me - foundational things I now regard a bit more critically on some parts but still love a lot, and which made me find authors I've been happily following ever since. Add a few comics with a general queer cast to taste, and you may start getting interesting results.↩
a sentence I've been dearly holding onto to make a post title someday; but not today.↩
I would of course welcome more specific fictions in that aspect too. Like, I don't know, transfem lesbian foxgirls. It's unsurprisingly not an empty niche either - it's just all the more specific.↩