part 1: my ex is a transphobic asshole
It’s 3am on a week night. I’m sitting on my bed, lights off, only the soft f.lux dimmed hue of my computer screen lighting the room. On my computer screen, a common ‘dirty pleasure’ is displayed — fanfiction. But instead of reading stories of ‘what ifs’ after a TV series has ended, or cheesy alternative universe romances, I am reading an explicit description of how I have sex — as written by my ex.
When we were still dating, my ex appeared as a semi-supportive cis person. Sure, some of the things she did and said were odd, but she passed the “sniff test” of transphobia. It wasn’t until we broke up that things began to become rancid. I quickly realized that her support for trans people extended as far as she could fuck them. After a particularly shitty moment, where I asked her to stand up for trans people more (on the day Doug Ford’s party called gender identity into question) and she told me she no longer wished to speak to me, I blocked her and figured that was that. I still saw her at events, in particular events centered around trans people, which I figured was her way of “supporting” trans people she found attractive and fuckable. In that same vein, I figured she would forget me, chalk me up to a ‘diversity fuck’ and move on.
I didn’t expect to be staring at a piece of fiction and feel my stomach roil with anger and disgust.
All the (fiction and fanfiction) stories my ex had ever wrote had a grain of reality to them. All good stories do — a good tale has a living, breathing heart to it that you can feel. Even if you try to hide it behind a sci-fi setting (“The Broken Earth”), or sneak it in as a magical metaphor (“Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars”), you can always feel the pulse of a story or event that really happened. It is what gives stories power, and what gives them truth. Telling the right story to the right people at the right time that resonates with who they are or what they have gone through can make people feel less alone, bring people together, and help incite change.
This story did not change my world. I didn’t feel less alone — in fact, all I felt was sick. This was not some grandiose frat-boy-esque brag of the ‘best bang you’ve ever had’. This was not a piece on exploring different bodies, and making people comfortable in their own. This wasn’t even just a shitty smutty fanfic. No, this was a piece that focused on my body in ways that made me feel wildly uncomfortable. This was a cis person looking at my trans, nonbinary body and fetishizing me in the worst ways. It took subtextual potshots at the way my body and sexuality exist in the world, and she explicitly wrote about my ‘sexual downfalls’ — specifically, how she viewed aspects of my chronic illness interfering with sex, writing me as a cyborg character who ‘just can’t feel things the same way’.
I am not going into great detail about this, because these are things I don’t like sharing. The story of my body is my own to tell, was the thought that kept going through my head as I sat, shaking with rage, reading her oh so clever self insert character fucking my broken, cyborg fanfic-simulacrum of a person. And then, another emotion surfaced — shame. The feeling that I was wrong. A feeling that no one should feel about their own body, the home they live in. It sank like an anchor in my stomach, sitting there, weighing me down.
I did nothing, of course. We weren’t on speaking terms. She had plausible deniability — “It’s a work of fiction” “It’s not about you” “Why would you read this anyway?” or “So what if it is? I have the right to tell any story that happened to me.”
I shut off my computer. I never read another fanfiction from her again, and I have never spoken to her about it. But two thoughts drifted through my head, and took roost among my neurons.
“I never want to tell a story that makes anyone feel the way I did reading that.”
and
“What is ethical storytelling?”
part 2: ethical storytelling
There has been a trend of queer and trans folks calling themselves story tellers. It’s become akin to calling yourself an influencer, a community organizer, or an activist. There is no requirement, you can just call yourself that because anyone can tell a story of what has happened to them. Of course, I’ve heard varying degrees of skillful story telling over the years — some of the worst, for example, were people talking about traumatizing and triggering events on open mics at poetry slams, treating the audience like free therapy. Some of the best were moments I can only describe as sacred — stories told of surviving grief, learning lessons from pain, shame-abolishing tales. Those are the stories I carry with me to light my way.
Stories exist in all aspects of our lives, for many different reasons. When I was a student within the healthcare field, I was often in hospitals or outpatient offices for my education. In those settings, too, stories are told — amongst physicians and allied healthcare professionals. Sometimes these stories are called “case studies”, obtained and presented with patient consent at grand rounds as a learning opportunity for people to learn about specific ailments or new treatment protocols shown in research studies. Sometimes they are whispered among nurses and social workers, stories that speak of ways to talk to families watching their loved ones receive a terminal diagnosis, stories of resiliency and triumph, stories that tell of patients who stuck with us, stories that are told to relay instances of vicarious trauma those in healthcare often go through — and through those stories, connect with others who are going through the same.
Healthcare, too, has a long and traumatic history among trans and nonbinary people — specifically around stories. Health providers not offering referrals for hormones or transition related surgery unless their stories “check out” and fit a certain medically mandated plotline. Case studies featuring trans people not focused on an unusual presentation of an illness, or a new surgical technique for removing an appendix, but treating being trans as THE illness. A case study carnival, touting out the trans people as the main stars of the freak show as we bleed out on the ground.
Although things have improved, cis healthcare providers still sometimes rely on trans people to educate them. To become story tellers and educate physicians, even when very sick themselves. But despite illness, a greater fear is that cis people will become the sole story tellers of trans existence and trans stories. That if we don’t educate healthcare providers, who will? And will they do it ‘right’ — or will they speak over our wants and needs, as they’ve done for years?
This problem doesn’t exist just in just in healthcare, but in all the media we consume — movies with trans characters played by cis women, books written by cis people focusing on our pain, representation pushed to the sidelines. Cis people writing exploitative, fetishizing fanfiction about us. And although this piece is rambling, the point is this: trans people should be the ones telling our own stories, unless prior consent is given, and that is ethical trans storytelling at the bare minimum. I am generally the last person to tell other people what to do, but cis people have stepped over the line for YEARS. This shitty incident with my ex was simply the last straw on my back of cis people taking stories of trans people, real or perceived as reality, and regurgitated them as trauma porn or ~inspirational stories~. And ‘consent’ does not mean ‘my trans friend told me I could tell the story of this other unrelated trans person’ — it means not telling the stories of other people unless those specific, other people tell you it is okay to do so.
The stories of pleasure and how trans and nonbinary people see our bodies are sometimes painful, sometimes beautiful, and honestly potentially every emotion under the rainbow. And what stories we chose to share are impacted by the cis gaze — for example, ALC’s piece on her vagina being a ‘wound’ was seen as wildly damaging among trans women. Not because her feelings were invalid, but because cis people crave those stories of trauma and pain and ‘mutilation’, and push out stories that do not adhere to that plotline. Those stories then go on to impact what people see in the media, in popular culture, and yes, in healthcare. To then see a cis person, especially one whom I was once close to, and also in the healthcare field, look at my body and only see brokenness and write my story as though I am inhuman… is one of the more disgusting things I have experienced lately. And, sadly, not unexpected for a cis person.
No matter what I say, people will continue to write what stories they will. There will be reasons and/or excuses (“I have the right to write about anything that has happened to me”, for example), and the truth is that for all I plead and all the reasoning I provide, it will not stop people from doing what they want to do.
All I can ask is that you think of the stories you tell.
And if they are yours to tell.
