Huh. That’s a good question, anon. It doesn’t seem like it to me, but then I’m not trans. So.
Just from thinking about it a bit, I think that probably what’s transphobic is writing gender (and biological sex, for that matter) as if it’s inevitably one stereotype or the other.
I mean, when I think about it, transphobia really seems like it’s in the same family as misogyny, homophobia and all the rest. All of it really seems to stem from the same fear, hatred and resistance to the idea that people can be more than just locked into a box of traditional male or female roles.
Cis women have the right to be not particularly feminine. So do trans women. And trans men. And nonbinary people. Identifying as female—or being identified as female, for that matter—doesn’t mean that, for example, nature has pegged you as a natural victim, or that your role is to be a sex object.
In the real world, you have to have a uterus to get pregnant. But that doesn’t necessarily mean you’re a woman. Or, if you are, it doesn’t necessarily mean that your personal experiences and choices about living as a woman have to match up to some imaginary list somewhere.
So. Personally, I feel like mpreg, sex-swapping, all that kind of thing…what makes it transphobic—as well as misogynistic, and probably other flavors of bigoted—is when you prioritize your adherence to socially constructed ideas of gender over respect for and willingness to explore the characters as individuals and what it means to them to be…whatever you’re writing them as.
Because the forces that inform a character’s experiences in the world are going to shape the person they become. If you take the very same character and give them a different sex or gender, or different biological capabilities that affect what’s expected from them in terms of their reproductive future…well, assuming they spent their life so far living that way, they are not going to be exactly the same. They’re going to have opinions about that. They’re going to have made choices based on how they feel about what’s expected of them.
And of course, roaming further afield in terms of AU, in any world that has the ability for biological males to get pregnant, you’re inevitably going to be dealing with very different constructions of gender to begin with, so why would it even look all that much like ours? For that matter, you’re dealing with a different definition of ‘biologically male’ in a world like that. Or, if you’re telling a story about somebody who identifies as male with a non-cis male biological configuration, then that would pretty clearly not be transphobic, assuming you weren’t a bigoted failwhale of an author, of course. (Now that I think of it, I’ve never seen a story like this, but it seems like it would be awesome.)
Good question! I’ll have to keep thinking about this one. In the meantime, some people who know what they’re talking about better than I do might comment, in which case obviously listen to them over me.
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