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Plausible Transitions
Here's a message that, with some hesitation, I am planning to send to the TG_Fiction mailing list later tonight.
My delay in sending it is not related to my mental hesitation. I'm working right now on The Project From Hell after several very bad (read: non-productive) days, the dogs are barking at my heels, and it's a long way to bedtime yet. Anyway, so I'm logged in using the Dialup Service I Don't Pay For, and I have to switch to the Service I Do Pay For in order to send mail.
Which is why it's even odder that I diverged from my workflow for the half hour it took to mentally set my thoughts in order and type this. Somehow I felt driven, just like I feel driven to send it to a group of people who don't know me and could care less and will probably not appreciate the spam.
Why is this important?
It began because of a comment someone else made, in a thread on why stories with transgender transformations rarely get critiqued. The comment itself was a tangent, an issue of plausibility:
Recent comments have emphasized that many readers want to see the transformee gracefully shift into the new role, even if mindbending is required; I want to see the struggle.
My reply:
Ooof. That one hits close to home because I'm fighting accusations that I've gone too far in the other direction.
What follows is, of necessity, long and autobiographical. I apologize in advance; feel free to skip the rest of this message. Only a few readers here will find it of interest.
First off, the reason I don't post many messages on this list (this week being an obvious exception) is that I don't write a lot of transgendered fiction. I worry (and my reader comments bear this out) that since I'm transgendered myself, if I put any of that in a story, people will think it's either autobiography or wish-fulfillment. Both of those ideas bother me - I have an online journal for autobiography, fiction is no place for that - so I avoid the whole thing. The Superman fanfic you'll see on Jenny North's site is the only story with TG elements I've written in five years.
However, my first novel (the bane of my existence) does have TG and it does have an autobiographical character. This novel has never been published. The original concept is about ten years old now. Every two years I dust it off, rip its guts out, and essentially rewrite the novel, to the detriment of my other, more sellable writing projects. I have hope that I'll sell it one day, but I'm not sure what "it" will be by then. Right now I have spent so much time building up all the "other parts" - the parts not relating to the character who gets a sex change - that her story is now The Part That Doesn't Belong. She's the center of the novel but no longer fits into it.
Anyway. She gets a sex change more-or-less magically, due to A Mysterious Device which is the book's main plot motivator. This sex change is wish fulfillment for her - she's always wanted to be a female; the book makes this quite clear, and describes her cross-dressing habits before the change, et cetera.
All of the recent crop of readers have had a problem with her ease of transition. They claim she should suffer more psychological repercussions from this; that she should be more emotionally shook up. My reply: Huh? This is someone who's dreamed of being female since she was sixteen, has had a lot of practice walking the walk and talking the talk, and she's going to be broken up because she all of a sudden can't take her breasts off at the end of the night? I mean, yes, there are what I call "paperwork problems," but it's also made clear that she is in exactly the right frame of mind to chuck it all and start over - hates her job, has no emotional ties, et cetera. All her real friends accept the change fairly quickly and embrace her, and she finesses a new driver's license through a clever piece of trickery - what's to be upset about?
I suppose this really chafes me mostly because I figure that if I woke up as a female one morning, Kafka-like, I wouldn't be too upset. I might have to find a new job, but my jobs work on programming skill and not employment history, and the headhunters are beating down my door as it is. And then again, I might not have to find a new job, given that my boss doesn't have a problem with my makeup, earrings, women's blouses, et cetera. My fiancee I am sure of, my best friend would think it was cool - and I hardly see anyone else in person. My family is not something I worry too much about; they're half a country away and I see them once a year.
The point of all this is that if one accepts a magical sex change - all at once with no physical pain or suffering - then the really implausible part has already been swallowed. A smooth emotional and paperwork transition, to me, is not nearly as much a leap of faith. Put another way: it's a lot easier to construct a convincing set of reasons why little or no angst is involved, than to come up with a good McGuffin for the change itself.
-columbine
© Columbine
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