I’m still angry enough a day later to actually blog about this topic. Brace yourselves.
Yesterday, a book crossed my path that features yet another straight guy fooled into romance by a cross-dressing gay man. Someone, somewhere, thought this was a good idea to write, edit, and publish.
Can we please just not?
I’m not even linking to this book. There’s no need; it’s one in a sea of very similar books. I’ve edited more than one where I’ve told the author to please consider revising the plot. There’s clearly a market for it, which in itself is disturbing.
This isn’t your run-of-the-mill Gay for You or Straight to Gay plots. Those are bad enough, but they are at least honest. No one is being tricked into a relationship there. “I thought he was a woman,” though, is in a class by itself. It not only has the standard homophobia found in a lot of GFY/STG stories. This one is outright transphobic.
Let’s start with the fact that this is what people think trans women do: they are “really” men in dresses who trick unsuspecting people into loving them. We don’t need any more books with a premise of actual men in dresses fooling people into loving them.
I’m sure that trans women can more eloquently and accurately describe all the other problems with this trope. But since I’m not a trans woman, I’ll tell you why it’s a problem for non-binary people too.
First, this conflates two things: Gender expression and gender identity. Clothing and makeup aren’t what make a person a woman, and they aren’t what make a person non-binary. A non-binary person may do those things, but if someone identifies as a man, some lip gloss and a prom dress won’t change that.
Second, someone who is not attracted to men won’t suddenly become attracted to men just because they put on dresses and makeup. The reverse is true as well. Even if you presume a man could look so much like a cisgender woman that it would fool a straight guy, as soon as the straight guy knew he was talking to a person who in no way identified as a woman, that conversation would be over. This is a really gross idea, that men need to be fooled into same-gender encounters because they won’t choose it otherwise.
Third, there’s a common belief that drag queens, cross-dressers, and non-binary people are “ideal” partners for bisexuals.* It’s a two-for-one, right? You get someone who looks like a woman but with “man bits” under the skirt. Hooray! Uh…no. That has all the very wrongest assumptions possible. It implies bi folk are “50/50” in how attracted they are to men or women. (The Kinsey scale is a bit outdated, but geez, even that has room for having a preference!) It assumes “non-binary” is some singular thing that has no variance within it. It fetishizes non-binary people and sees us and/or people who love us as some kind of kink. And it again conflates expression with identity.
Fourth, it uses non-binary identity as a vehicle for bisexual people resolving their internalized homophobia. Sorry, we’re not here for that. Bisexual people aren’t necessarily “ideal” partners for non-binary folks either.** A cisgender person should not be using a non-binary person as a means to get over their fear of sex with a person who has the same genitals they do. That’s weird and creepy. It would be weird and creepy if it worked the other way too, that a presumed-gay person would use a non-binary person to get over their revulsion for genitals different from their own.
All of this would be bad enough, but on top of that, these scenarios are often played for laughs. This is awful by itself. But it does something else, too. It makes it harder for those of us writers who explore the complexities of gender and sexuality. It means we will be perceived as using the same horrible tropes even when there are key differences in our approach.
The most disturbing aspect of this is that it’s almost exclusively done with men or male-assigned non-binary people. Maybe someone else has heard of one, but I can’t think of a single book in which a straight woman “turns bi” (or “turns lesbian”) because she was fooled by a woman cross-dressing. And even if such books exist, they are so few and far between that they’re not on most people’s radar. No, this is something special reserved for people with penises.
I would love to self-righteously suggest it’s only non-queer women pulling this kind of thing, but it’s not. I see bi women and non-binary people (who aren’t trans feminine) do it all the time too. We collectively need to address the deeply embedded fear and hatred of trans women in our books, especially now when there’s so much at stake in the real world.
Do better, writers.
*The “ideal partners” thing is a separate conversation, but the short version is that it’s ironic. On the one hand, bi people aren’t supposed to be attracted to non-binary people because “bi = 2, 2 genders, male and female.” And we’re supposed to not like trans people of any sort because “bi = 2 = cisgender men and women.” But on the other hand, trans/non-binary people are our perfect partners because somehow “both genders” are embodied. This is ridiculous non-logic rooted in the ideas that bi people are transphobic, view people as sexual prey/objects/kinks, and are prone to cheating because we can’t be satisfied with just one gender. So essentially, the belief is biphobic in nature.
**At the same time, bi and trans folk often do gravitate towards each other. Lots of us are both, and lots of us feel we “get” each other in ways other people don’t. But our reasons are almost never because “only a bi person can understand my gender” or “I like trans people because they’re a woman’s brain in a man’s body.” Ew, no.
