26th Nov 2018

Transgender Awareness

by Katherine Wyvern

I am absolutely thrilled to write a post for Trans Awareness Week on the Evernight Blog!

I have always been fascinated by transgender characters (there was already one, Helenay, in my debut novel, Black Carnival) and my affection goes especially to gender-fluid characters, in part because I can relate to their experience, in part because they seem to be more “complete” (and courageous) human beings than most.

When I wrote Woman as a Foreign Language, Nina was a pretty autobiographic character and her gender-queerness was straightforward writing for me, but the male-to-female crossdressers that populate most of my transgender romance did require some research. There were so many things to learn about the mechanics of m-to-f crossdressing, and the experiences (sometimes heart-breaking, sometimes hilarious) that go with it. I read a lot of material on the subject, and was privileged by the friendship and confidence of people who answered the most mindboggling-ly embarrassing questions with fantastic humour and generosity. I can assure you that there is nothing like a several thousand-words e-mail exchange about the fine points of tucking to color the day with a fine sense of the surreal.

It was a journey to a different planet, one that I hope to show you in my books.

The whole topic of transgender people has become a lot more present in the media lately (sometimes in rather perplexing forms), but it’s amazing how much of the discussion pivots on the most extreme aspects of it, acute dysphoria, sex reassignment procedures, transgender children and their treatment.

Because of this many people are under the impression that transgender equals transsexual, but in fact transgender covers a lot more ground than that and I wanted to write stories about those people who, despite not being transsexuals, do not identify so easily as just man or woman, but are somewhere in-between, often in unlabeled places of the in-between, and, I think, the more beautiful for that. To me this is the true meaning of non-binary, and it’s been incredibly thrilling to explore the complexity of this topic both as a chance for character development, and as a twist on erotic scenes.

My goal when writing these stories has been very much to disclose the subject in a way that could be appealing and approachable to cisgender readers. I do believe we need more such stories, if the gap of understanding is to be bridged.