Fan Fiction and Trans Identity

I’d been meaning to return to the subject of fan fiction and trans identification—just as I’ve been meaning to return to about 50 other subjects—and then I got a reminder that next to nobody understands the role fictional worlds play in shaping fictional identities. So I dug back into all those notes I’d taken and carefully filed away, and found one of those telling expressions that crop up so often in my research: fan fiction “tenderized my brain to the point where I could accept [being trans] as a possible reality.”

Tenderized? 

Freud would, of course, have had many things to say about turns of phrase like this. Sometimes these mischosen words betray what they ought to have concealed. Sometimes an attempt to be poetic is to blame. Poetry always betrays the poet, always insists on some expression that lays everything bare and no other words will do. Therefore, tenderized.

“It wasn’t for very long—less than a year before the trans realization—but I read a ton of yaoi and slash fiction in the run up to realizing I was actually a gay trans guy. It’s like it tenderized my brain to the point where I could accept it as a possible reality. I was so heavily in straight-girl denial land that I needed something really explicitly gay, yet not too “real,” to make me able to start imagining what it might be like to be male. I had mainly social dysphoria, so reading about male relationships was my way of experimenting with gender euphoria at first, not really with guys clothes or other physical stuff.”

Like so many passages in my research files, this requires translation. The words she so casually drops seem to have been turned inside-out (gay and trans and guy, denial, etc.).

Before I, a young straight woman, came to understand myself as a “gay trans guy,” I consumed a lot of anime and fan fiction that featured gay relationships. Consuming fictional content—content almost invariably created by other straight women—about gay relationships led me to imagine what it might be like to be male and gay, rather than female and straight. This was my way of experimenting with a trans identity.

Online FTM and transmasc communities are full of testimonials for the role of fan fiction in discovering one’s trans identity:

“Being in fandom and reading and writing slash fic definitely helped me on the path to working out my gender identity.”

“Yep. Fanfiction was pretty integral to my realization, both reading and writing it. Still is, actually.”

“I got pretty hard into yaoi/slash for a year or so leading up to realizing I was trans.”

“This… This is a big part of how I realized I’m trans.”

“I realized I was transmasc because of a fanfic binge that lasted a few days where I barely left the room.”

Fictional depictions of gay intimacy are described as real but “not too ‘real,’” just as the online spaces where these stories are shared are real and unreal at the same time, offering “room to talk to people that one… might never meet out in meat-space… That’s a pretty good environment for experimentation with new forms and ideas.” Online spaces are unbounded places that foster the illusion of a greater unboundedness. Online, you are what you pretend to be. But, over time, what we pretend to be binds us, too. One poster described being “sent to a dark place… when I had some people treating me as male and some treating me as female.” A split-screen existence brings its own problems. Spend too much time sunk in a fantasy world and you’ll experience reentry problems. The discrepancy chafes.

Meanwhile, the young women in these forums are keen to draw distinctions between their own experiences of compulsively reading gay fan fiction as ‘gay trans guys’ and the experiences of straight ‘cisgender’ women compulsively reading gay fan fiction. This is because they do not, of course, see themselves as straight women but it’s also because there’s something distinctly problematic about a straight woman consuming gay content.

I find it rather amusing to look back on the countless hours I spent reading gay fanfiction before I realized I was transgender. I never read it for the “omg two hot guys together” mentality that most of its female readers seemed to enjoy it for. Instead, I’d imagine myself in the place of one of the characters. I longed to live a life as a gay man, yet I had somehow convinced myself that I was a straight woman. So, I lived vicariously through gay fanfiction for years.

Imagining oneself in the place of a character in a work of fiction is, of course, how most people, regardless of sex or sexual orientation, relate to what they read, but OK. Sure. You’re different.

I know it’s pretty common of an interest for straight women (check out all the millions of gay romance novels on Kindle unlimited), but I realized I was into it because I felt like a gay man, not because I wanted to voyeuristically watch gay men do cool stuff.

So they don’t want to be seen as straight girls and they don’t want to be seen as ‘fetishizers’ or ‘voyeurs’ either. No, they consume questionable content for irreproachable reasons.

this is exactly how i felt like before i figured out i was trans. mlm [men-loving-men] romances were always more appealing to me and i was so invested in any kind of media with mlm contents. and i hated myself for that. i felt so gross and fetishizing and abnormal. now i know there was more to it because not only did i want to.. look at “guys kissing” or whatever 12 y/o me did but deep down i wanted to be in a mlm relationship… five years later i know that I’m a gay trans man and I’m not afraid of my preference for mlm romances anymore.. well,, i still feel weird about it sometimes, actually

Still, they feel self-conscious or even disgusted by their own sexual desires and—like just about everything in trans world—these real feelings get mislabeled and mobilized in service of a faulty premise. Their embarrassment at being lumped in with other straight women who are turned on by the same things becomes evidence that they’re really gay boys. Their revulsion at the suggestion they might be fetishizing gay relationships means they’re not fetishizers—“you wouldn’t worry about whether you’re fetishizing if you’re not trans”—the same way that the fear that you might be faking your trans identity confirms you’re not faking it.

Members of online FTM/transmasc communities tend to talk about fan fiction and anime the way they talk about sexual trauma or autism. Of course, someone can be trans and also have a traumatic past. Of course, you can be trans and autistic. Everything is incidental. Sure, I read a lot of fan fiction in the years before I came out as trans. You could even say I was obsessed. But one thing didn’t lead to another. Their self-understandings are pure and untouched in the way that nothing is ever pure and untouched. But to be human is to be adulterated, to be the ever-changing composite of influences chosen and unchosen.

Maybe consuming fan fiction was a “dysphoria coping mechanism” or maybe it was an irritant, the strange incubator of impossible desires and intolerable discontents.

Along the way, community members drop hints about the underlying reasons fan fiction was so appealing. These accounts are heavy with heterosexual despair: “i cried myself to sleep over never being able to experience the kind of love i liked to read about so much,” one poster wrote. “This was the only way I was comfortable exploring my sexuality,” another observed.

Detransitioners finish the sentences that trans-identified girls and women let trail off. Fan fiction offers sex and romance without baggage, without sexual inequality, and without risk. Or, sometimes, simply: it turned me on. It didn’t mean anything.

“When you have been taught that heterosexuality is too dangerous but still have the natural urges the vast majority of females have, well, there you are.”

“I never saw myself in female characters. They were always flat or stupid to me. (Internalized misogyny? Also bad writers) I only saw myself in male characters”

“I probably romanticized homosexual content because they couldn’t have any unwanted or accidental pregnancies… I still identify as childfree and I don’t want to become pregnant.”

“I read lots of gay male fanfic because I had sexual urges but found male/female sex triggering because of my sexual trauma. I fetishised gay male relationships and could only ever see myself enjoying sex if I was a man. I felt safer as a man.”

“I think I love yaoi not just because I find male characters aesthetic, but because I only like to see characters that are not my own biological sex doing it, I feel great discomfort from sexualizing myself, and by extension other women.”

“I began to identify with these representations of boys written by other young females, and the themes within male/male fanfiction were so much more titillating than anything in mainstream, professionally produced media, or even heterosexual fanfiction for that matter. The pairing being same sex seemed to give writers and readers the freedom to explore these characters and their relationships without being constricted by the norms that come with heterosexual dynamics. It became this liminal space where I could explore what interested me about boys and fantasies about relationships, connecting it to whatever my media obsession was at the time, without the pressure of interacting with real boys, as real boys made me painfully bashful.”

“To me, it felt more neutral and lightweight, not as burdened with… um… gendered tropes let’s say? … I believed (or was at least strongly influenced by) sexist tropes, and the gay constellation set me free from that. Like more of an eye-to-eye relationship where you’re both just persons rather than fulfilling a role, and everything remains cozy and romantic no matter which way you play.”

These are not new problems and desires, but old ones that have vexed and inspired generations of female artists and writers, animating works of fiction like Ursula K. Le Guin’s lovers in kemmer, who go to bed genderless, uncertain which partner will rise expecting a child. These are the sources of the harnessed rage that runs under Adrienne Rich’s poems and musings, and that guided the pen in her hand when she wrote that “the body has been made so problematic for women that it has often seemed easier to shrug it off and travel as a disembodied spirit.”

What is the Internet but the realm of disembodied spirits, erased distances, broken silences, daring fictions, and impossible transformations? But what exists there and only there cannot be smuggled into the ‘real’ world without harm.

Sometimes, what I want to say more than anything is, simply: read something else. Play with some other idea. Don’t hold onto anything too tightly. Use your own words. Take breaks.