Thing: Gender Gap: Gender Discussion/Expression in (Fan)Fiction

[chasingtides]

So, I'm writing a story and I'm unsure of how to label it. Because I came up with this idea in church, I'm going to call it divinely inspired, but I'm mostly exploring boundaries in fiction that I am curious about in real life. And the purpose of exploring these boundaries, is, in part, exploring them as a dialogue, so I will be doing it through

Comments

[not_rude_ginger]

Hi, not sure if this idea will be any help at all, but here we go

[chasingtides]

I actually wasn't thinking of Jack as transgender at all, but another sex entirely, outside of male and female. And logistically, if he is, I don't know, a schlee in Boeshane, 20th century English in Cardiff doesn't exactly have word for schlee, since the Welsh in the 20th century haven't encountered Jack's ancestors yet and therefore have no concept of Jack's sex/gender status. If he appears mostly male, then it would probably also be easier to pass as such than to sit people down in 1869 and try to explain that sex is not a binary and, by the way, he's technically still engaging in heterosexual relations when he's with a man, so why don't they let him get married to a man, too?

(I can also only imagine what Victorian Torchwood would put him through if they knew he could carry a child/wasn't male or female. Considering how they tortured him, I'm imagining something like forced pregnancies and then torturing the babies after taking them from him.)

[not_rude_ginger]

Well, that was exactly my point. Jack wouldn't be a transgender at all if he had an alien ancestor who was a totally seperate gender from male and female. But if the ancestor's people encountered humans, say on Boeshane, perhaps they would have catagorised their genders to aid in translations by saying that two of their genders shared some characteristics of human males and the other two had some characteristics of females, so Jack can be called male by everyone in Cardiff, he's happy to identify as male, because in his culture he was, but he was aware that he wasn't the same kind of male as, say, Ianto is. That doesn't make him a transgender, it makes him a seperate gender, but uses the 20th century pronouns because he's used to it from his childhood. And yes, by that logic he is still engaging in heterosexual relationships.

[chasingtides]

Exactly.

Sorry if I was incoherant enough to sound like I was disagreeing with you - mostly I was trying to do a resounding yes while looking at traditional representations of alternate sexes/genders.

[phaetonschariot]

You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

Trans, like transitory, is a state of change. Transgender is someone who, for example, is born male, but identifies as female and seeks to change their body to match their perception (with variants of stopping at certain points along the way - only having top surgery, having no surgery but wearing female-perceived clothing, etc).

The usual word used for this context is intersexed. Inter, meaning, between. (Though there are problems with this as well - I was reading an article the other day on intersexuality and one commenter noted that they didn't like the term because it sounds like homosexuality/heterosexuality and intersexuality has nothing to do with sexuality. But at least everyone understands what it means, mostly.)

[not_rude_ginger]

Yeah, I did understand the concept that transgender means a change, and that it's a transition from one gender to another, but I did not know the word Intersexed -but it definitely fits what I was trying to say much better. So thank you, that's a new fact for me, and next time I'll be able to be more clear with what I'm saying.