Trans Representation in “The Dysasters”: The Good, The Bad, The Bigotry
I’ve been an avid reader of young adult books for many years now, and there are a lot of reasons I keep coming back to the genre. There’s often a rawness and a realness to the voices of these stories that I haven’t really found in most of the adult or new adult literature I’ve read. It has an infectious energy. There’s also an appeal to the coming-of-age story versus reading about someone more jaded and experienced. But that’s not to say that YA is without its flaws. More and more as I read YA, I find it a bit… same-y.
One area I see this a lot is in queer representation. While there are certainly many more queer characters in YA than there was ten years ago (and many more openly queer authors writing Own Voices stories, too), I find that much of traditionally published queer lit falls into the same categories: The plot and conflict is centered on being queer, or the queer character fulfills some sort of gay best friend role. And it is often specifically a gay character — the bi, pan, ace, trans, and other queer representation is few and far between.
So when I finally get my hands on a book that does handle queer characters even the slightest bit differently, I’m elated. It’s refreshing. And I desperately, desperately want to be able to love and celebrate that book.
One of the books I’ve read in the last year that features a queer character is The Dysasters by P.C. Cast and Kristin Cast. It’s a sci-fi story following genetically engineered teens scattered across the United States, trying to understand their powers and the havoc they’ve wreaked on their lives while also running from a group of genetically altered villains known as the Core Four. The main characters are fairly typical of YA — Foster, a gorgeous, straight, white heroine and Tate, her gorgeous, straight, white, male love interest. There’s nothing new there. One of the other genetically altered teens, however, is a breath of fresh air. Charlotte Davis is a young trans woman.
When readers are introduced to Charlotte, they spend a few pages with her as she drives along, talking on the phone to her grandmother and fantasizing about the university degree she is pursuing. We have time to get to know a little about her before she is outed to the audience, which helps set the tone that we are supposed to view her as a person first, a trans woman second. Her transness is part of her identity rather than defining it entirely.
This is good. This is exciting. We have a trans character whose entire identity does not begin and end with her transness.
But… some other aspects of this story are, to use a buzzword, problematic.
Troubled Waters
Getting it right with one character does not mean the book does well with the others.
The Dysasters has a somewhat colourful cast, despite its rather white bread main characters. Foster’s adoptive mother, Cora, is a black woman. Cora’s husband and Foster’s adoptive father, Dr. Rick, is also black. He has a biological daughter named Eve who is part of the Core Four. Later on, readers meet two other black characters, Finn and Sabine. It’s good to see a variety of black characters in a genre that is often very monochromatic (i.e. white).
The problem is the way these characters are written.
Cora is heavily exotified, with her eyes described as “deep-henna” (Cast and Cast 2019:3) and her voice having a “spicy calmness” that is “creamy and rich with a little kick, like Mexican hot chocolate.” (Cast and Cast 2019:4) She has a bit of a sassy flair to her characterization, too. Dr. Rick is the main antagonist in the book and he’s a drug addict — sort of. His drug of choice is the crystals that grow on his daughter Eve’s skin as a result of her genetic alterations, from which he can syphon some kind of energy that gets him high. In other words, Eve is a living drug. For the icing on the cake, Eve is also referred to as a “Nubian princess”. (Cast and Cast2019:64) Then we have Finn, who is basically The Help for Foster and Tate at their safehouse, tending to the property and its animals. His girlfriend Sabine becomes Foster’s sassy black best friend almost immediately upon introduction. Her braids are mentioned five times over the first ten pages she appears in, she has “rich Tiger Moth brown” skin (Cast and Cast 2019:162), “deep fall leaf-brown” eyes (Cast and Cast 2019:169), and plump lips, as any stereotypical black woman should. Honestly, an entire essay could be put together just based on how Sabine is written.
Okay, so the book doesn’t handle writing its black characters very gracefully. They’re mostly minor characters, though, so it shouldn’t be that big of a deal.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t stop there.
Every single one of the villains is suffering from some kind of mental illness. The Core Four all deal with a variety of conditions as a result of their genetic alterations, and several of them were rejected by their biological families and handed off to Dr. Rick at a young age specifically because of their mental illnesses. The Core Four’s entire motivation for capturing Foster, Tate, Charlotte, and the other genetically altered teens is the belief that doing so will give them the necessary resources to treat their illnesses. And, as mentioned previously, Dr. Rick himself suffers from addiction. Mark, one of the Core Four, suggests that Eve overdose Dr. Rick on her magic crystals in the hopes that he’ll die. No other solution is suggested for his addiction aside from killing him or running away from him. His addiction makes him irredeemably villainous.
There are a lot of other little things, too. The few fat people who appear in the book are invariably gross, dumb, and sexist, and they are also implied to be poor. They exist solely for the purpose of creating someone for the audience to hate, and there is no mistake that the traits we hate in them are correlated to their fatness.
The way the book treats women is also dubious. Several characters awkwardly boast about their own feminism, only to immediately call a woman a “bitch” (Cast and Cast 2019:79) or say the current generation is made up of “pussies.” (Cast and Cast 2019:264, 266) And there’s a brief conversation between Foster and Sabine that seems to imply that looking pretty is important for a woman’s sense of self and likeability.
Moreover, the book just… isn’t that well-written. I read an ARC copy, so I can’t comment on the more technical aspects like punctuation and spelling, but there’s almost too many problems in this book to list. There are tons of continuity errors, the science makes no sense, the pacing is terrible, the narrative voice within scenes is inconsistent, and a lot of the conflict is contrived.
Is It Too Much to Ask?
Maybe I’m being too harsh. Is it okay that the book is a little sketchy about how it handles black characters when it does an okay job with its trans character, given how comparatively sparse trans representation is? Can we overlook all the problems with how it handles mental illness and anything outside of its straight, white bread characters? Should I not stress over the fact that the actual plot and writing isn’t very good? It’s so refreshing to read a story with a trans character, especially one the narrative always refers to with the correct pronouns and who says she is a girl, not she wants to be a girl.
Part of my dilemma is that the extreme lack of trans rep (and queer rep in general) makes it really easy to set the bar low. Even as I looked back at the book to write this review, it occurred to me that even Charlotte, the one good thing about this book that I can honestly say I appreciated, wasn’t actually handled that well.
I said that she is introduced as a person first, trans woman second and that the story frames her to highlight that her transness does not encompass her whole identity. But once that initial introduction is out of the way, Charlotte turns into a very flat, one-note character. She’s a Southern Belle who has been rejected by her parents because she’s trans, and she wants to study Marine Ecology because the element she’s genetically bonded to is water (though she doesn’t know that yet). To be fair, there aren’t a lot of chapters from her perspective, so future books might flesh her out more. I really, really want to be able to hope for that.
I want to look forward to reading more of this character. I want to be able to continue supporting a series that teases me with the possibility of a well-rounded trans character who helps save the world. I want a queer character whose primary conflict is not her queerness and how people respond to it, who has conflicts that exist outside of her and her identity. I want Charlotte to get the same kind of treatment as Foster and Tate, whose primary conflict was hiding from the Core Four and learning to live together and trust each other while navigating their newfound powers.
But that’s not actually what we got from Charlotte and, based on what I’ve read, I’m not sure we will get that. Of the 22 pages told from Charlotte’s perspective, half included some discussion around her being trans and the conflict it creates in her life, as well as one page outside her perspective where Dr. Rick and the Core Four comment on her being trans. Any conflict that existed for this character was connected to her identity as a trans woman, right up until the very end where she got pulled into the book’s central conflict.
It’s hard to support this kind of queer rep when it’s surrounded by so many other stereotyped, harmful representations of minorities, and it would still be hard even if Charlotte was a fantastically well-rounded, deep, complex character. I’m not sure I could bring myself to buy the next book in the series just based on the hope that things get better for her characterization.
But I have to wonder what happens if readers don’t show their support for this kind of book. Are we going to create a situation like that which surrounded female superhero films for so long? A situation where, for years, nobody would produce a female superhero film because it was too high risk, simply based on the ratings for a very limited number of poorly executed films in the genre. (Berger 2015; Donaldson 2017) Does the failure of one book with a trans character risk the publishing industry blaming the trans character for that failure?
On the other hand, if we do throw our money and support at this book and the series that follows, even if that translates to more trans characters in more books overall, does that risk all of them being of a similar quality? If we support the subpar representation in YA literature, is that going to get misread as an invitation for repeats of the same poorly produced and problematically written content?
My Take
Ultimately, I can’t bring myself to support this series. Even if I want more characters like Charlotte, I can’t throw representation for black people, mentally ill people, fat people, women, and other disadvantaged groups under the bus just for one sort-of-promising character. It feels too much like making a deal with the devil.
There’s hope, though. Even when reading books like this make me lose heart. I know there are other books that do better by queer representation, that I can celebrate without feeling like I’m betraying another underrepresented community. I think it’s worth the time and effort to seek out those books that handle these characters and these subjects thoughtfully and effectively — especially those books that would ordinarily get lost in the shuffle against series like The Dysasters, which are written by big name authors and automatically get a lot of support and publicity behind them. Instead of letting my energy be sapped by anger and despair for the bad representation, I want to pour my energy into finding and sharing and loving the books that do it right.
References:
Berger, Laura. 2015. “Marvel CEO Doesn’t Believe in Female Superheroes.” Indie Wire. Retrieved April 4, 2019 (https://www.indiewire.com/2015/05/marvel-ceo-doesnt-believe-in-female-superheroes-203801/).
Cast, P.C. and Kristin Cast. 2019. The Dysasters. New York, NY: St. Martin’s Press.
Donaldson, Kayleigh. 2017. “Why Have Female Superhero Movies Failed (So Far)?” Screenrant. Retrieved April 4, 2019 (https://screenrant.com/why-have-female-superhero-movies-failed-so-far/).
-x-
Originally published to Vocal in 2020.
