It’s early(ish) morning, the start of a busy day leading into an even busier weekend. I should be working on my NaNoWriMo novel, catching up on my word count. And I will, I promise. Later. Last night, I said I felt a blog post in the works, so I’m putting my thoughts down here first to clear my head.
We were conversing a bit about non-binary gender and writing and such because my colleague Jeanne G’Fellers is putting together The Enby Book List. It’s a great project, still in the early stages. Every book needs to be vetted. It’s a much-needed resource; books by us are common, but books about us are harder to come by, and books for us are rarer still.
I was an active book reviewer for multiple sites for several years, and I still occasionally take one on my own as the mood strikes. If I’ve read a book I enjoyed, I try to at least rate it, and I’ll review on my blog as well. Over the past 5 years or so, I’ve read hundreds of books. I’ve also been a social issues blogger, and I’m a non-binary bisexual person myself. So there you have my credentials, if you needed them, before I make my next statement.
There are few books I enjoy with non-binary characters (main or secondary or side; take your pick). A lot of them are badly written stereotypes or used to make a statement. Sometimes that statement isn’t even about gender, as is the case in “The Outcast” episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation.
The majority of books I’ve read with non-binary characters weren’t written by people identifying as non-binary themselves. Neither have been most of the recommendations about “good” representation. Listen, I know cisgender folks mean well. But binary-identified people (cis or trans) don’t get to tell us what is “good” or that our hesitation over a thing isn’t valid because they liked it.
(Side note: “The Outcast” is actually about homosexuality. But as a young teenager, this was one of the first times I saw genders outside the binary. I loved that episode, and until realizing my own gender identity, I had no idea why. It’s not particularly good representation, and it’s not meant to be about us enby folks. But it meant a great deal to me at the time. I can’t speak to others’ experiences. I’m only pointing this out to say that enby folks are our own best judges, and our opinions will differ on what is or isn’t “good.”)
Fictional representation of the murky middle space of gender (and gender outside the scale entirely) is often poor at best. We’re reduced to gender-based stereotypes with little nuance. Without naming and shaming, two of the worst books I ever read had this problem. One had a “non-binary” sex worker who walked around in his (yes, he used he/him) underwear, punched a woman for daring to have breasts, and was referred to as appealing to men because he looked like a woman but had the hidden surprise of a penis under his clothes. The other had a character (also using he/him) who was flamboyant/femme/camp gay and referred to breasts as “fashion accessories.” Both books, not surprisingly, were written by people who did not identify as non-binary themselves, and both had the problem of coming off as writers who heard of non-binary people last week and thought it would be a good idea to jump on the trendy train.
I’m going to say what I often say in these situations involving non-own-voices books: Please, for the love of all things queer, don’t write our coming out stories if you’re not one of us. Please. Empathy is not a substitute for the actual lifetime of doing it yourself. (If you are a cisgender person feeling defensive about this, perhaps you should take a minute to think about why you would rather defend your right to tell whatever story you feel like rather than listen to the very person whose story you’re attempting to tell.)
In books, non-binary people are overwhelmingly represented by assigned-male people. When we aren’t, then we are still usually heavily gendered by our genitals, typically romantically paired with a cis person whose bits match. It makes it easier to divide the books into “male-male” and “female-female” pairings. I have, so far, only read one book with a non-binary female-assigned person in a relationship with a man, and one book with a male-assigned non-binary person who has relationships with both men and women. I have read one book (and one novella) with a non-binary person in a relationship with another non-binary person.
That’s three books that break the pattern. Out of the 500+ mostly queer books I’ve read in the last 5 years. Three.
When I first dipped my toes into publishing, it was during a big wave in popularity of MM (male/male) Romance. It was probably at its peak, or one of them, anyway. The community was a fairly hostile place, with a lot of overt disgust for bisexual men (fictional and real-life), gay men writing #OwnVoices stories, and gender expression outside hypermasculine/”alpha male” types. There was pooh-poohing of anything outside Romance Genre and a metric crap ton of misogyny. (It could be argued there are still some of these issues; I wouldn’t know because I stopped being part of the community ages ago when I realized it was so hostile.)
I wrote my second novel immediately after leaving a fundamentalist religious community. The story was born out of my personal pain and anger, my growing sense of gender identity, and my fury at the MM community for refusing to acknowledge the entire spectrum of gender and sexuality. In there, one of my most beloved characters—a non-binary person—was born.
Writing non-binary characters (and bisexual characters) is entirely natural for me. I’ve never felt any need to provide explanations, not even when that character is exploring gender identity:
Cat sighed as well. “And you thought I might be a girl too?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “Micah, just look at me for a sec.” When Micah’s eyes traveled down his body and back up, Cat continued, “This is me. This is what you get. I can’t promise you for sure nothing will change, but I am who I am, and I like that person. It took me time to get here, but I’m happy.” He squeezed Micah’s hand. “This is why I like saying I’m queer—it’s sort of everything about me. I like being a bit of a genderfuck.” He grinned. “I like messing with people’s ideas about what it means to be a man. I’m not a woman, and I don’t want to be one. But I’m not just fem-presenting or cross-dressing, either. I guess….I’m just me, and I don’t know how to label that.”
—Passing on Faith, 2015What had always frustrated him hadn’t been his sense of self; it had been the way others always seemed to want him to pick a side and stick with it. They wanted everything about him to reflect their perception. He’d never been able to make that choice. He sat up, realizing what struck him. Boy. Girl. Man. Woman. It wasn’t that he felt the need to choose. It was the knowledge that whether he did or not, nothing he did would change his genetics. He would still have to face the long-term consequences of the disorder that ravaged his body, made him bleed into his joints and kept him from healing properly. Things that only happened because of his damaged chromosomes. People who said it didn’t matter hadn’t lived their whole lives knowing if they’d been born with a different set of genes, they’d have been healthy.
—Walking by Faith, 2016Another, more intrusive thought works its way in. What if I were who Elliot wanted? I think about it sometimes, what it would be like to be a boy. It never feels quite right, any more than wearing a dress and twirling my hair into a scrunchy-wrapped bun feels right. Boy and girl, at least the way our church defines them, both feel like ill-fitting costumes. But I still wonder what it would be like to be a boy kissing another boy in the same way I wonder how it would feel to kiss a girl for real, not in a messy, Cheeto-dust-covered trial run.
—Year of the Guilty Soul, 2018It’s more than five minutes by the time Jax is done grooming. They look fantastic, and even in his second-best clothes, Luke feels drab in comparison. Jax’s makeup is flawless, a little darker for an evening out. They’re wearing a flowing white blouse and tight black pants made of some kind of buttery-soft fabric. Luke’s dark jeans and plain long-sleeve T-shirt seem inadequate.
—Tree of Life, work-in-progress
I suppose it’s the clearest-cut example of “write what you know.” When I’m inside the mind and life of someone whose gender doesn’t fit neatly into a category, it’s effortless, as natural as breathing. This is what I long for when I read. It may seem like a subtle thing or something that can be duplicated with the right amount of research or empathy or grandiose dreams of a world free from gender confines. It’s not, though. I can tell when a contemporary author has never experienced this. And I can tell when it’s philosophical and not a matter of someone’s reality. I can tell when they are co-opting gender identity as a metaphor for something else, something they think is more important.
This is already overly long, but I’ll end with this: Go check out The Enby Book List. It’s short but growing. Trust us to know what is or isn’t good instead of demanding we see it your way. Enjoy whatever you like, but please don’t insist that we simply haven’t tried hard enough or looked in the right places or read that “wonderful” book you think we should have. And of course, read books by us!
