I Crave Gay Violence

[rynling]

"The fact that this character is of indeterminate gender is irrelevant to the story," the copy editor wrote. "You may want to consider deleting this description."

"On the contrary," I absolutely did not reply, "the cursed Gothic manor being casually inhabited by nonbinary staff and artists isn't hurting anyone, and moreover it's a special treat to me, the nonbinary person writing the story."

Then I did not reach through the computer screen to crush the copy editor's fingers with a hammer.

Comments

[runicmagitek]

10/10 no notes. Signed me, a fellow nonbinary 🥂

[rynling]

Thank you friend 🍹

Being a copy editor is a tough job. I could never do it myself. I understand that you have to get into a certain mindset in order to be nitpicky about a manuscript you didn't write yourself, and I respect people who can do this.

At the same time, I always seem to get these sorts of comments about gender and gender performance. Like, "you may want to specify this character's gender," or "I'm not sure this [gender] character would say this." That sort of thing really drives home the fact that nonbinary identity is deeper than a label. I always knew that, of course, but still. "You're not performing gender correctly in your writing" is a strange editorial comment to receive.

Every so often I think about the mess surrounding the "I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter" story and wish people would just chill out a bit. Like, the people in my story have magic. If the reader can imagine that, maybe they can imagine non-traditional gender expressions too, you know?

[runicmagitek]

> "You're not performing gender correctly in your writing" is a strange editorial comment to receive.

Damn I feel this in my soul. Even within fandom spaces, it can be rough to explore the possibilities and figure out what resonates with you and the blorbos when the vocal majority have already had a meeting you weren't invited to and decided what The Fanon Opinion is, so god forbidden you don't 100% align with THAT 🫠 it IS an extremely strange editorial comment to receive, even more so when it's like... what, you expect the nonbinary writer to stick with black and white labels/identities in their creations? Really??

All this to say I hope you keep writing about magic and gender fuckery. That's the good shit right there 💕

[lassarina]

your restraint is epic. fuck that bullshit noise twice with a chainsaw.

[rynling]

Oh for real. I don't think the editor was being homophobic or whatever; I think she was concerned that maybe I was being homophobic... or that I might be mistaken for homophobic? Like maybe she was concerned that I was using nonbinary identity as window dressing. Which, to be fair, I absolutely was. But still. I get to.

It's funny, a lot of what my early academic career entailed was very politely attempting to explain that, if someone is out in the world making reams of gay art, it stands to reason that they're not 100% straight. Back in the mid-to-late 2010s (and unfortunately continuing on Twitter through the present day), it was a serious argument that everyone writing gay fanfic and drawing gay comics was a heterosexual cisgender woman. Which was not true, obviously, but people liked to accuse creators of appropriating queer identity.

And I think that might have been what was going on here, which is all the more reason to throw a chainsaw at it.

[lassarina]

It gets weird, because of course many people are engaging in tokenism, but also the only way to normalize characters who are [queer or any other marginalized identity] is to have them just there doing things. Unwinnable.