Diversity Punching Bags
Content warning for discussion of transphobia, bio-essentialism, and sexual assault.
I came across a rather nasty book the other day. It has a non-binary character. They enter the narrative by being severely beaten up, misgendered, and finally informed that they’re going to get sold off to be raped and then murdered.
One character speculates whether the non-binary character is a ‘hermaphrodite’, there are multiple excruciating tone-deaf conversations about pronouns, a doctor harps on about their ‘sexless’ anatomy while they’re unconscious, the character’s gender is tied purely to physical characteristics (their genitals or rather the lack thereof, their facial features, their voice). As far as the text and this character are concerned, biology is destiny is gender. If you’ve seen how Cyberpunk 2077 handles gender, you’ll have a good idea: this is the shitlord’s grudging, sneering approach to ‘inclusion’.
There’s a possibility that the author (a cis man), somehow, meant well; he certainly insists so in interviews. This is not an uncommon approach. A writer tries to show one or both of these two things
The setting is very gritty and
Evil people are bigoted
The result is almost inevitably diversity tokens who are set up purely to be punching bags, whether it’s characters who aren’t cis men getting threatened with rape or characters of color being subjected to racist violence. Villains may do the threatening or beating, but sometimes if the protagonist is an ‘anti-hero’ they may join in the fun too.
Katelyn Burns writes of J. K. Rowling’s detective novels:
For a more alarming look at Rowling’s thought process when it comes to the trans community, it's useful to examine a scene from her novel The Silkworm, published under the pen name Robert Galbraith. In the scene, a trans woman, Pippa, follows and tries to stab the protagonist, Cormoran Strike, before getting trapped in Strike’s office. After demanding Pippa’s ID, her trans status is revealed and her visible Adam’s apple is noted, while it's noted that her hands were jammed in her pockets. Pippa tries several times to escape the office before Strike finally says, “‘If you go for that door one more time I’m calling the police and I’ll testify and be glad to watch you go down for attempted murder. And it won’t be fun for you Pippa,’ he added. ‘Not pre-op.’”
After the reference to prison rape, Pippa is described as appearing “unstable and aggressive,” though it should be noted that the other characters in the scene pity her.
The author of the nonsense above treats his non-binary character slightly better—a low bar—and grants them slightly more narrative agency (not by much: they are an object of pity and victimization, and exists to give the cis characters teachable moments about pronouns). While the intention may differ, there’s a similar ugly core: to write marginalized bodies as recipients of brutality so as to appease the privileged (in this case, cis) gaze. Look, isn’t it hard to be trans? Here’s the fifth agonizing interrogation about pronouns in as many pages. By the way, gender is determined by your genitals only.
I don’t speak for anyone, being cis. But my guess is that this book wouldn’t exactly be a hit with most trans readers.
On the reading front I picked up Detransition, Baby by Torrey Peters though I haven’t gotten started yet (and have no preconceptions about in particular) as well as Black Buck by Mateo Askaripour.
I’m still really delighted by Love Kills Twice by Rien Gray, which is precisely everything I want in a book, and looking forward to the sequel Love Bleeds Deep (out presumably later this year). The book has a non-binary butch assassin as one of the protagonists, very much of the ‘urbane killer in a suit’ variety that I adore, and which I almost never find in science fiction/fantasy books. Which is odd—SFF is the perfect genre for that kind of character, but SFF butches are rare and tend toward loud, rough-mannered and vulgar, or dumb jocks. Oh well, I’m not bothered reading outside SFF, but it seems like a shame.
Speaking of which! I self-promote pretty often but I’ve been told on occasion that people missed some of the Machine Mandate short stories, so if you’re interested in my space opera/cyberpunk universe, this free story is a good starting point.
Where Machines Run with Gold is a retelling of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight where a butch cyborg super soldier plays a dangerous game with an AI and steals zer wife, as you do. I obviously changed a lot from the original story, where Sir Gawain is the virgins’ virgin; here the Gawain figure is instead, er, very eager to answer the lord’s wife’s passion. Lieutenant Anoushka and her lover Numadesi go on to continue their story in Now Will Machines Hollow the Beast.