Young Writers Society

Feel free to ask any and all questions you have about character creation here! I will do my best to answer them.

I don't know... How do you go about it?

The contest is closed, @Holysocks! You're actually.. 9 hours late. xD

Oh, I see... Thanks Iggy!

@Holysocks If you want a guide on how to write non-binary characters, I know of one being written. It just needs to be polished up before it's posted. I can provide a quick and rough guide in the meantime, if you want.

Sure! But what's a 'non-binary character'? Sorry if that's a dumb question.

Not dumb at all. We're all here to learn!

Non binary refers to a character's gender. See, gender isn't made up of "boys" and "girls". It's really more like a giant, tangled up ball of boy, girl, neutral (neutrois), none (agender), ????? (genderqueer or questioning) and fluctuating between some or all of them (genderfluid). Whether or not you're any of the genders listed above has absolutely nothing to do with what your biology is (referred to as your sex).

Gender= what you feel fits you best
Sex= What you were assigned at birth as

Also, you can look any way you want regardless of what your gender or sex is. How you look is your gender expression, and it's independent from your gender or sex.

So a non binary character is basically a character who's not a boy and who's not a girl! They can use any sorts of pronouns (Singular they, xe/xer/xey, zi/zir/zey, ze/hir/hirs, and a whole bunch more...), have all sorts of expressions, and be assigned any sex at birth.

Oh, interesting....

Non binary characters (and transsexual characters, aka people who went from women to men or men to women) get very little representation in fiction, so it's important to find out more about them and accept it when people say their gender's changed, or not boy or girl!

Hey, when writing a nonbinary character (which I haven't done yet but want to try in the future), does it matter whether you use the xe, ze, or zi pronouns? I mean, do they mean different things, or are they just different options for describing the same thing? Like, do they refer to different genders in the nonbinary spectrum? (Like one pronoun is assigned for agender people, one for genderfluid people, etc.)

And! Same with trans characters--I haven't written any yet but I was thinking about it one day, and I was wondering...so, like, my experience with trans people is that they've got their preferred pronouns, which are generally "she" pronouns for trans women and "he" for trans men. But let's say I'm writing a story that revolves around a trans character, but the fact that the person is transgender is not central to the plot. Like, you know how, right now, a lot of LGBTQIA stories revolve around a character coming out or somehow gaining acceptance or whatever, right?

But if I wanted to write a story about a transgender character, but it wasn't that sort of story--like let's say Christian, in The Book Man, was trans, right? It's a fantasy story. So he would be trans but his state of being a trans man would not be the main plot of the story. So in the case, how do you have a trans character, and give transgender people some representation--and more importantly, some representation as a normal character in an outside genre, rather than some representation as a person who's trying to get their parents/friends/whomever to come to terms with them being transgender--and use the proper pronouns, while still getting across the fact that they are transgender?

Do you know what I mean, or did I just make that really confusing?

@BlueAfrica

Okay! So the thing with gender-neutral pronouns when writing a non-binary character is that non-binary people will choose their own. There's xe, zi, nem, singular they, and many, many more (I chose "xe", myself). Sometimes they're fine with gendered pronouns, sometimes they don't care and let other people pick their own. It really just depends on the person.

As for pronouns when writing a transsexual character:

ALWAYS use the character/person's preferred pronouns. If you're writing a transsexual woman (a woman born with male genitals), refer to her as "she", because she is a girl. If writing a transsexual man (a man born with female genitals), refer to him as "he", because he is a boy.

Also, I do say mention that s/he is transsexual. The plot doesn't need to center around that, but you're still going to want to throw in hormone treatment, and, if your character goes for reassignment surgery, you'll probably want a surgery arc (which still doesn't make it central to the plot- it's just an arc).

If you throw in a transsexual or non-binary character and never mention that they're trans/non-binary, then nobody knows that they're trans/non-binary, and it's not really representation, you know?

But never use "he" when referring to a trans woman and never use "she" when referring to a trans man UNLESS the character whose POV you're writing in doesn't know that your trans character is, well, transsexual.

Hope this helps!

Also, it's generally a respect thing to refer to trans people with preferred pronouns when talking about their past. You do not refer to a trans man as being a "little girl" because he never was a girl!

There are lots of things to throw in for various trans/non-binary characters. Such as:

- Microagressions that are basically little annoying things, such as "it's just a phase"
- Systematic discrimination in the form of binary everything gendered (in terms of transsexuals, this can be in the form of bathrooms and not knowing which one you'd be allowed in)
- Acts of violence such as using the wrong pronouns (yes, erasure and disrespect are acts of violence!)
- Acts of violence such as physical violence (check the murder rates for trans women)
- Any products required: binders, packers, stuffing, materials for tucking. These can be for binary or non binary trans characters, depending on their look and physical sex.
- Hormones, which as not exclusively for transsexuals but also non binary individuals

I'm trans myself (somewhere between agender and a transboy), and I'm planning on doing a novella about a transgirl. It's essentially a story set in an alternate earth, where everything is exactly the same except for one thing: parents choose the gender of their child at birth like they choose their name.

It's centered around the life of a transgirl (Eve). It begins shortly before she's born and ends when she's about 17; the majority of the story takes place in her teenage years, with maybe a quarter of it occurring before.

Anyways, there are two things I was looking for advice on: the first is how to handle writing her before she even knows she's trans. It's told in third-person, present tense, and the reader does not know Eve is trans until Eve realizes it herself. Since it's present tense, should I use male pronouns before Eve realizes she's trans? If so, when, exactly, should I make the switch?

My second question is about how to write the universe. If I mess up writing it, this story could send a very wrong message. I plan on writing it with the message that nothing can decide someone's gender for them, but it could be perceived saying that genitals should be the only thing deciding someone's gender. How do I make sure that the message is received correctly? I was thinking I could just completely refrain from mentioning biological sex or genitals. Would that work?

I cannot answer those questions.

Get trans women to read it. They put up with a ton of bad stuff, and have final say on what's offensive and not. I am not a trans woman, so I cannot make a call on how to best represent them.

I'm not a trans woman myself either, but I'll try to ramble out some thoughts from a more technical/writerly side. If I say anything wrong and there's someone reading this who knows it better and from experience, I'm sorry, and please do speak up.

queerelves wrote:Anyways, there are two things I was looking for advice on: the first is how to handle writing her before she even knows she's trans. It's told in third-person, present tense, and the reader does not know Eve is trans until Eve realizes it herself. Since it's present tense, should I use male pronouns before Eve realizes she's trans? If so, when, exactly, should I make the switch?

Seeing as you're telling it in present, the reader should feel like everything is happening right now - meaning not that the story already ended and they're now told about it, but that the story IS HAPPENING, and who knows what will eventually happen in it. Although I understand and support what Shane said in the post above (always to use the right pronouns), I'd say in this case you should use the pronouns of the gender she was given as a child, until she figures she's in fact trans. She could be thinking about herself as a woman, or you could make it obvious enough in some other way throughout the book, but the narrator in present tense is closer to the reader than the character, in a way, and it it doesn't yet know what will change in the story until it happens.
It might be a little confusing for the reader, but that's okay - I'm no expert, but I imagine it's somewhat confusing for a transgender person at first as well. Not so much the part with feeling like another gender, but the part with using different pronouns, especially publicly. I don't know what your plot looks like or what her personality is like, but she might need to repeat a couple of times to herself that she's in fact a she now, and/or the people around her could use the wrong pronouns on occasions - that might serve as some sort of middle phase, helping the readers to catch up but not seeming unnatural or out of place.

My second question is about how to write the universe. If I mess up writing it, this story could send a very wrong message. I plan on writing it with the message that nothing can decide someone's gender for them, but it could be perceived saying that genitals should be the only thing deciding someone's gender. How do I make sure that the message is received correctly? I was thinking I could just completely refrain from mentioning biological sex or genitals. Would that work?

I must be sure I understood correctly first. They're born and then the parents decide on the gender, right? As in, regardless of which genitals the child is born with, the parents can choose the gender, yes?

In that case, to address your questions.
Would not mentioning genitals/biological sex at all work? I don't think it would. This is a very interesting question, and I can see how it can send the wrong message (there's always a risk with that, though, regardless of your topic - people really just interpret things in thousands of different ways, often choosing the one that suits their beliefs anyway). If you completely refrain from mentioning biological sex or genitals, it will seem like you're obviously avoiding it because a) you don't know how to deal with it or b) you know that might send a different message and you don't want to let your readers perceive it that way because you want to impose your opinion on them. The readers couldn't know if any of that is true, and they probably couldn't miss the fact you never mentioned these matters.

So, I think you should mention them (maybe not directly going with some "So here's the deal with my genitals." sort of way, but you're a good enough writer to know what I mean), and change the way this parallel world is looking at them.

The people in it had their genders chosen for them by their parents and will choose it for their children. They live in this world, hence they would know that there are women born with penises and men born with vaginas and that wouldn't be strange for them. I don't think, in that setting, they'd even refer to them as "male/female reproductive organs", as body and biology would have no meaning in deciding on someone's gender. Why would there be such a thing as biological sex, if it wouldn't ever matter at all? They might refer to the parents' choice as "biological" - or rather, "supposed", "real", or something along those lines - because they wouldn't have even been raised to see male genitals as male as female as female. They would've been raised with belief that gender is a choice of the parents, and they'd raise their kids with the same beliefs. If that's how the world functions, then you shouldn't even throw in this world's way of thinking, because they couldn't be the same.
Hence, your message would end up being that no one/nothing can impose a gender on you or choose one for you - but also that the body is really pretty irrelevant - while at the same time you wouldn't seem like you're avoiding a part of the issue which you don't know how to deal with.

Did that make sense? I do hope it did, and that I was maybe able to help out a bit here.

edit - I looked around a bit and found these blogs~
http://christenbustani.blogspot.com/p/w ... dered.html
http://transwomantimes.blogspot.com
http://zoewarriorprincess.tumblr.com
They're all written by trans women, and speak of the time before they realised/told anyone, during it and afterwards. They might provide you with some insight on how your character might think/act/feel.
Warning for language and content, though. There are some pretty ugly words in some of the posts, and you might find a situation or a few which could be troublesome or triggering to read about.