There’s this really beautiful concept called “writing to learn”, which describes a way that one can acquire knowledge on a topic. It’s similar to the idea - and scientific findings - that we learn best when we teach content to another person, or even just prepare to teach, because of the depth of understanding that’s required in order to transfer knowledge to another person. I’ve done writing to learn before myself: one of the two books I’ve had published is a textbook that I used to learn the skill it teaches as I wrote it. Writing to learn is a great tool to use when you are trying to understand abstract concepts, figure out a philosophical conundrum, or maybe trying to understand yourself better.
But there is one type of writing to learn that, in my opinion, crosses the line into nefarious, and that is writing to learn about something that you hate. More specifically, recently I’ve come across a couple of examples of cis authors writing fiction about trans people in a harmful way. This isn’t about gatekeeping - I don’t think you necessarily have to be a member of the same group to write a character - but writing fiction about a member of a marginalized group when you don’t believe in their existence is taking it too far.
Take Exhibit A, a novel I found through NetGalley where you can read and review Advanced Reader Copies - books that haven’t come out yet. I tend to focus on the LGBTQIA+ category, and thus I came to read this book about a family in which the father (who keeps using that term) comes out as a woman and leaves the home she shares with her wife and children to discover herself outside of the familial constraints. The premise bizarrely centers around a cishet therapist who treats all members of the estranged family, both one-on-one and in group sessions (which, by the way, is totally absurd). While the novel is purportedly about this therapist, the majority of the space is dedicated to the jilted wife, who is horrified and outraged by her spouse’s life choices and talks about her disrespectfully, to put it very mildly. Ergo, it becomes very obvious why the trans spouse chose to leave, although that’s never addressed in the novel and her choice to “abandon the family” is still examined through the transphobic wife’s lens.
The therapist takes no sides - essentially validating that the desire to be oneself is as offensive as the vitriolic hatred of another person towards someone who is doing so. Having said that, it sort of seems as though the author was trying not to write a transphobic book - which makes the lack of self awareness more scary - as the trans woman is mostly gendered correctly by the therapist who is mostly trying to be awkwardly careful not to completely invalidate her. But the book then abruptly ends with the wife perpetrating physical violence against her own spouse as part of an anti-trans mob that has gone on a rampage attacking trans people around their town. We hear about the mob throughout the book, so I guess the “twist” is that the wife herself is involved - so not only does she get to speak about trans people in a dehumanizing way throughout the book, she also ultimately gets to enact her revenge.
More upsetting than the fact that this book by a cis person was ever written or published is the fact that, besides my own, it has excellent reviews. Mercifully, it’s not a book anyone has heard of, so the reviews are few and far between, and based on the reviews it seems no other trans people have read it, but a few reviewers from the author’s demographic (or maybe just her friends) showed up to say how much they enjoyed the book and learned from it. Learned what, you might ask? That violence against trans people is ok if the trans person leaves you?
Exhibit B is not a finished product, but one in progress. This author, unfortunately, has a larger platform than the author of Exhibit A, and recently has been exchanging literary letters with another author and publishing them on her Substack. I was subscribed, a paying subscriber even, when I noticed a red flag: the author wrote in her letter that in the novel she is currently working on, she would like to explore something she really can’t get her head around, which, she says, is “people who consider themselves to be another sex to that which they are born”. I double checked with her in the comments whether she really meant that she doesn’t understand trans people and therefore (?) is writing us into her novel. I specifically said us to identify myself as trans.
While waiting for her response, I Googled the author’s name and immediately landed upon transphobic vitriol of the most basic kind, including retweets of JK Rowling, rampant and intentionally hurtful misgendering, and obscene rhetoric that I won’t repeat here. There is no way that someone who is openly sharing such extreme negative opinions is writing to learn about the target of her hatred in good faith.
To be fair to this author, she didn’t block me, which is what I thought she would do when I broke my own rule by asking her a bad-faith question about her bad-faith writing. In her response to me, the author said yes - that writing memoir is a way to understand yourself, whereas writing fiction is a way to understand the world. That sounds like a nice platitude on the face of it - but is it fair to expose others to your lack of understanding? What happened to talking to the people you are trying to understand in order to understand them? How will you write yourself into better understanding without going to the source? There are respectful and demeaning ways of talking about people, and if your default setting is demeaning, you are not going to be able to break out of it by writing yourself in circles. If you come from a place of not believing in how someone feels, how can you write about them experiencing those feelings?
There’s writing to learn, and then there’s writing to harm. And we can tell the difference when you’re writing about us.
You bring up a painful and sad topic, indeed. I often find that until a person is faced with a similar situation to one they do not understand, they find it hard to change their perspective or opinion. Unless their empathy and compassion develops for other reasons, they remain with their prejudice and cannot disconnect from it on the basis that human beings should be able to show compassion and kindness to one another. Whether this writer believes people who are trans or nonbinary or experience anything different from their own subjective life or not, the fact remains: Every person lives their own life and no one has the privilege of telling them what is right or not for them. If it is a personal matter, then it is the person's prorogative, plain and simple.
I'm glad to say that sometimes, there are occasions where people change their mind and become more open-minded. A great example for that is Megan Phelps-Roper, who gave a fantastic TED talk about her reasons for leaving the extremist church in which she grew up. Here is a link:
https://www.ted.com/talks/megan_phelps_roper_i_grew_up_in_the_westboro_baptist_church_here_s_why_i_left?language=en
My mother once told me about a film she really enjoyed. It focuses on a lesbian family with kids who have been conceived with a donor. The kids grow up to meet the donor and the donor infiltrates the family somehow. Of course one of the parents then has sex with the donor because "that's every fantasy of a lesbian parent" (according to my mom). I never watched it.
It always feels gross when someone creates content with queer or trans characters (or nonfiction) without doing any research. Add to that how utterly impossible it is for actual queer authors to get published and you set the stage with our stories and our information all gatekept and policed by cishet society.
Our stories and our culture deserve so much better.