February 12, 2014 / Guest Post
Clicking – Susan Jane Bigelow
Jim C. Hines / Susan Jane Bigelow /
Today, please welcome Susan Jane Bigelow, talking about the portrayal of gender and the click of recognition upon finding characters like you. As well as the pain of those characters being played as a source of laughter and disgust.
Tomorrow's guest post will be by Charlotte Ashley, talking about "The Princess Problem."
I remember the first time it happened: I was watching "Saturday Night Live" at some point during the early 1990s, long before I'd ever even thought about words like "transgender," when a sketch came on called "Lyle: The Effeminate Heterosexual." Dana Carvey played a straight guy whose effeminate mannerisms made everyone assume he was gay. In retrospect it's incredibly offensive, and even at the time it wasn't very funny. But at the time I thought to myself, ah! This is what I am!
Because I wasn't gay. I was just … girlish? Effeminate? I didn't have any interest in other boys, but I was decidedly un-masculine and sometimes I cross-dressed, so what was I? It was the early 90s in white, suburban America; there were just no other words. Something about Lyle clicked in my teenage mind, and that sketch stayed with me for a long, long time. I'm Lyle, I would think. The effeminate heterosexual!
It didn't really fit, but at least it was a start. It took me forever to sort out what I was, and where I really wanted to be. My sense of my own gender evolved and changed over time; I wasn't the sort of person who knew from the age of five and stuck with it. I'm wonderfully clueless in some ways. But I'd still feel that same click of recognition whenever I came across characters in fiction that I knew, somehow, were sort of like me.
For instance, Belize, a drag queen in Angels in America, gave me that sense. Angel in the musical "RENT," which I was lucky enough to see on Broadway when it was still in previews, was another — here was a man who was very effeminate, and sometimes used female pronouns. Later, I discovered Bel Thorne in Lois McMaster Bujold's Vorkosigan Saga, a hermaphrodite whose presentation wandered freely across gender lines. I felt that little shock of identification with the gender variance embodied by each of them.
There were a lot of negative portrayals, too. There's a very obscene reveal of a transgender woman in both Ace Ventura: Pet Detective and The Naked Gun 33 1/3, both of which I saw in the theater. The main characters reacted with disgust; Leslie Nielson's character runs and throws up in a tuba. The audiences laughed.
I laughed, too, but inside I cringed and pushed that gender variant piece of myself down a little further. I was lucky; I wasn't really aware of where I was headed yet, or why I felt the way I did. If I'd been more aware, those movies would have crushed me.
After I finally figured it all out and transitioned I started actively looking around for more media, especially in my favorite genres of science fiction and fantasy, where people like me were portrayed positively. There wasn't much, and there still isn't — though that's changing now.
Because of that, I decided to take a risk. My own books were finally coming out, published by the excellent and progressive small press Candlemark & Gleam, and I decided to make the protagonist of the second "Extrahumans" book, Fly Into Fire, a transgender woman. I didn't put a flashing sign over Renna's head, but it's pretty clear in the text who she is.
I hesitated about doing that. I wondered if I was going to be pegged as "that transgender author," and if I'd find it hard to break out of that mold. I worried about backlash. I also wondered that when I wrote the story "Ramona's Demons," an urban fantasy short for the Lambda Award-winning The Collection from Topside Press. But then I thought about how little there was out there, especially in genre fiction, and how important those few positive characters who were enough like me to click had been, and decided it was worth it.
Not every book or story I write has transgender people in it, though I almost always have queer people of one sort or another, and almost all of my protagonists identify as women. I also don't sell a ton of books. That's life in the long tail! But every once in a while I get a fan letter from someone saying Thank you for Renna or Thank you for Ramona, and that makes it all worth it.
A big thank you to Jim for hosting this piece, and to all his wonderful readers.
Susan Jane Bigelow is a librarian, SF/F author and political columnist, among other things. She started writing science fiction when she was little, but her first published novel was 2011′s BROKEN (Extrahumans #1). Since then, two more Extrahumans novels, FLY INTO FIRE and THE SPARK, have been published. The first book in a new series, THE DAUGHTER STAR, came out in May, 2013. She writes a weekly political column for the Connecticut political news website, CT News Junkie, where she focuses on politics inside and relevant to the Nutmeg State. She also likes biking, reading, walking, Doctor Who, My Little Pony and all kinds of other things.
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Muccamukk
Excellent article, Ma'am. I am thus proceeding to check out your books.
Two guest posts today! | The Extrahuman Union
[…] got one up at Jim Hines's blog about being trans and looking for representation in […]
Tina Smith Gower
Very Awesome Susan!! I think one of the things that is a huge shame is that I'd like to read a more realistic world in fiction (which means including better cross section of the diversity in thoughts/feelings), but it IS hard to find. Thankfully that's changing. I totally remember the Lyle skit on Saturday Night Live. I think it's an example of a skit where most people who would laugh then, would not laugh now.
This has me thinking back on yesterdays post and the comments on representation. It was rough having inadequate representation and it was often alienating. I can't imagine what having not just inadequate representation but mostly negative representation must have been like.
Representation matters! We need to see ourselves in a positive way in our books and movies and TV shows and everyone should have the opportunity to find that representation. I am so glad you have chosen to take that risk and include those characters in your writing. I have to hope that the more this happens the more "normal" it will seem and the more it will happen until our entertainment worlds can start to reflect the real world.
Avilyn
Thanks for the thoughtful post! I admit I was unfamiliar with your work, so I checked out the blurb for Broken on Amazon, and it sounds intriguing. Added to my wishlist for future purchase. 🙂
Susan Jane Bigelow
Thank you! I appreciate that! 🙂
Thank you! I think you're right about Lyle, it was mostly just a crude way of making fun of men who acted in "feminine" ways. I hope it wouldn't be shown now!
There are definitely lots of people publishing more diverse SF/F–but they can be hard to find!
It definitely messes with your head when there's mostly negative representation, when there is any at all. You start thinking that what you are is wrong and shameful, and it can take a long time to get over that! I have to think that things will change for the better, there's lots of good folks doing great work out there.
Thank you! I really appreciate that. 🙂
From a buyer's perspective, it's nice to be able to get drm-free copies straight from the publisher's website. Ended up getting the first book in both series, as they both looked good and I couldn't decide. And I was supposed to be buying less books this year. OH WELL.
Thank you–I hope you enjoy them!
I know I always mean to buy fewer books, but it never works out!
Susan, THANK YOU for another insightful and enlightening post! And again, THANK YOU Jim for providing the platform!!
Lisa Pendragyn
Thank you for writing this and putting yourself out there this way. And for your bravery in writing characters who don't fit the current oh-so-narrow "norms".
Nice article, Susan. Thanks for sharing this.
JUDI COLLAZO
Although I am heterosexual I have always had gay, big, and transgendered friends. I remember being delighted when I first read Ursula LeGuin's Left Hand of Darkness. Now I have to seek out your books as well. Thank you for sharing your experiences.
The '90s were still the Dark Ages in some respects… I'm left trying to imagine what it's like when your closest thing to a fictional role model is a slightly-less-savagely-hostile-than-normal stereotype. [shudders.]
Laura Resnick
I'm currently reading IN AND OUT OF CHARACTER, the autobiography of Basil Rathbone (best known for playing Sherlock Holmes in the 1940s series of movies). In the chapter I read last night, he talks about appearing on Broadawy in 1926 in the English translation of a French play whose title I can't recall (and I'm too lazy to go into the next room to look it up), said to be semi-autobiographically based on the playwrite's first marriage. The lead character (played by Rathbone) winds up in an unhappy marriage with a woman who's a lesbian. He knew this before the marriage, but was so in love he married her anyhow, despite his father's warnings that it would be an unhappy union (and by the third act, it certainly is), and also in part because the woman begs him to marry her, which she thinks will "save her" (though it does not).
Rathbone (and the playwrite, and his fellow actors and crew) believed this was an important play which humanely addressed a "social sickness" that no one talked about. And that was the -kind- view of lesbianism in this story, since, in fact, the play was shut down by the city of New York and everyone involved arrested and tried for indecency–which is why the play forms a whole chapter of Rathbone's book, as it was a play which turned into such a major personal experience. He and his fellow actors stuck by the play, believing firmly in the need for art to explore a "social sickness" that society was afraid of.
In this book, Rathbone comes across as a charming, warm-hearted, and humane man–but one born in the Victorian era, with values that are sometimes a cold slap in the face for the 21st century reader. He was, after all, a man willing to go to prison for this play, if need be, rather than agree that homosexuality should just be accepted as an unspeakable crime punishable by law without further consideration (which was the case in England at the time, and remained so until after Rathbone's death).
Reading that chapter was a reminder to me of how much societal attitudes influence our seeing the world as we think it is rather than as it actually is.
Marti Verlander
March 3, 2014 @ 12:05 pm
When I worked for a local defense contractor, I was also a karate instructor in my own dojo. One of my male students, who also worked for the contractor, transitioned to female while working there. She tried to make things as easy for everyone as possible, including an explanatory letter, written at least in part by her medical professionals. She had a really tough time of it, especially at first, and I was one who made it a point to treat her as I always had–but it wasn't as easy as it should have been, as long as she'd been my student. As I told her, it takes some getting used to for those used to knowing her before. But I was also gratified when she competed in a performance competition (she was a great singer, whichever gender she was) and the biggest complaints I heard from others in the facility were that she should have won, and that she'd lost for the wrong reasons.
Knowing what Cheryl went through with her transition–especially so publicly–I'm in awe of anyone who has the courage to be who they really are, when so many make it so hard for them.
Guest Post – Tragic Tropes: Transgender Representation in Contemporary Culture | The Geek Melange
March 7, 2014 @ 9:46 am