Five Trans Fem Authors Talk Romance, Monstrosity, and Fantasy — Part 1
This roundtable is done by contributors of the My Monster’s Valentine 2023 bundle.
Benjanun: So one of the common themes in our shared universe anthology is that, by coincidence (and maybe by dint of the setting), everyone ended up writing about monsters and the women who love them — and we have an incredible variety of monsters! Weretiger, an intestines lady, a giant bone snake and more. Nor are they, generally, nice: these are monsters who delight in bloodshed and will get what they want through ruthless means. Would anyone like to talk about the appeal of monstrosity from a queer lens?
C.S.: Ooh! Pick me! There’s something reassuring in eschewing the normal anxieties of whether a queer relationship, or lifestyle is ‘monstrous’ and instead embracing it, opening yourself and the story up to new nuances, and fun (often very hot) ideas. Sort of pushing the envelope, taking a relationship which would normally be shown disproportionate scrutiny and saying ‘well certainly, this is a monster and she’s hot and she loves me, what of it?’ Is a very fun, liberatory exercise. My question would be — what inspired your story? What made the leap from a passing idea to the page and how did it get enough momentum to do so?
Emily: I can talk about it but it’s going to be grim, because being queer in this world is grim and we can (and do) sugarcoat it to make it more bearable for ourselves, but if you want a really meaningful discussion around this theme, I don’t think we’re going to get to the heart of the matter by talking around the sharp bits.
So the obvious part is that society paints queer people as monsters; the somewhat less-talked-about part is that society only does so to excuse any amount of violence and abuse towards us. Society doesn’t really see us as monsters that they’re actually in danger from: it sees us, to be blunt, as objects they’re entitled to make use of — to enact their fantasies, from the relatively harmless social ones (the ‘gay best friend’, the ‘victim in need of my benevolence’) to the sexual and sadistic and violent ones. The ‘monsters’ part is abstract, only invoked to justify to their own conscience whatever harm is done to us by using us, or by making us stop resisting being used.
That doesn’t mean we don’t constantly get told we’re monsters, though! So monster romances is one part saying: so what if we are monsters, monsters are still desirable, monsters can love and be loved. And the other part is: what if we were real monsters, not just ‘called monsters as a justification to hurt us while we’re actually harmless and defenceless’ — what if society actually had to fear us, as it keeps lying it does to justify abusing us? It’s a fantasy of actually having power for once, and that’s catharsis from the blatant unfairness of being called dangerous while factually being society’s defenceless punching bag, and not even the people punching you really believe you’re dangerous, but they keep saying it anyways.
So basically it takes the ‘monster’ that we get called, and inverts it in two ways: what if the monster was actually something to fear, and what if the monster is desirable and lovable regardless?
Jemma: Well, I think Emily has probably given the definitive answer on queer monstrousness. For trans people, particularly closeted or newly out, there is a subtle part, which would probably be still true in a slightly nicer world; we are apart, at least for a while. Like vampires and faeries, mirrors do not always show us: or at least, what they show us can seem wrong or monstrous, for a time.
We live in a world of shadows, where material existence is not all that there is. We can wear the same clothes, but one minute we’re in disguise, pretending to be a man, the next moment we’re ourselves again. Same clothes, the only difference is in the minds of ourselves and others; are we safe enough to emerge?
We are aware of this dual layer over our history; that our memories are of a girl, but, often, our parents recall a boy. Like faeries or demons, our names are very important; sometimes almost like summonings. I have to be ⬛️⬛️⬛️ for this conversation, but I can be Jemma for that one with friends.
No wonder monsters appeal; we are other. Except, of course, the might of monsters is that we are not alone, not othered from everyone. There are good monsters among the people on the bus, in the store, within friends, within families. We might not see them, to start with, but they are there. The hot monsters have discords.
Most of the time I don’t really understand why I write; something just seems like a cool/hot idea, and none of my friends were writing it. Or a genius writer asks me to collab. But there was one particular thing that inspired me to write Walk Away; the realisation that at some point I’d changed from mentally defining transfem as “woman (bootleg)” to “woman (special extra difficulty challenge edition)”. In other words, it was about cis-longing, trans-inadequacy vanishing. The point at which a monster looks at the mundane crowds, and thinks: “do I actually want that?”
Devi: I saw that title drop you managed to sneak in, Jemma; clever girl.
I disagree with an aspect of Emily’s answer, more as a difference of outlook than of fact. I think you’re right about trans people — and queer people more generally — serving as patsies and acceptable targets for a wide swath of society. But I also believe that there are parts of society that really, truly do see us as monsters that endanger them.
Society is about order and control. It weds explicit compulsion backed by force with the tacit unspoken pressure of mores and received wisdom. These twin streams feed into each other, defining and delineating and shrinking the world from all conceivable possibilities into something that is safe and accepted and that propagates itself.
And in this worldview, we are monsters. We’re the thing that lurks in the dark forest, just beyond the last village light; we’re the infiltrator that wears the face of a loved one until the terrible moment of betrayal. We don’t fit; we are grotesque, our standards of beauty profane, our gods alien. Our mere existence is interpreted as a violent threat to the system — and they’re right. We’re proof that the world is bigger than their rules and structures, that people can live and be happy without and beyond their love and happiness, that we don’t need them. We offer a counternarrative to a story that seeks to be the only story, that wants to eradicate all other ways of thinking of the world.
So they hunt us, like the monsters we are.
Meghan: Nodding my head very enthusiastically at the conversation surrounding queerness as a social threat in the same way monsters are and how that kind of moves in and out of what we represent to ourselves and what we represent to heteronormative society, and I think something about that makes me ponder a more base component of the appeal here: monstrous bodies. Devi suggests an element of that by observing how our standards of beauty stand apart and I do think there’s a very visceral component of bodily pleasure in monsters and romance. Queerness, like a lot of marginalised identities, is often separated from straight culture by assigning certain looks, or certain bodily types, as “normal” and a lot of things that don’t meet that standard as alien or “ugly”.
I think monstrosity’s appeal has a couple of facets there; as Goop observed right up top there’s a celebration in fiction — we’re other and that’s good. Our trans bodies, our queer identities are beautiful. But I think also there’s an element of resonance in the horror of monstrosity. Look at a lot of classic werewolf films for instance, there’s all sorts of focus on the fear and anguish of the body rupturing in unexpected ways. I’m sure a lot of queer (and especially trans) people can relate to a sense of alienation from their own bodies, and the strange journey of trying to figure out what (if anything) needs to change, not to mention the “second puberty” angle and the bodily changes you can’t control. Perhaps then romancing the monster is in some way an act of becoming. You take all that strangeness and that beauty and that fear of the self and you find that it fits, that your hopes and your loves and your horror make sense.
Emily: Ah, disagreement! Now we enter the dreaded realm of queer discourse! No, just kidding, I actually think Devi’s version is also true, and doesn’t contradict mine. Society thinks they fear us, but all they factually have to fear is discomfort. To borrow a turn of phrase: Cishets fear queers will discomfort them, queers fear cishets will kill them. And cishets think these two are equivalent — because they don’t really see us as people: our deaths are equivalent to their discomfort, the way one might consider the comfort of a human worth the death of the fly buzzing around their head.
That, and us being the monsters that they get to be heroic for vanquishing is yet another cishet fantasy they feel entitled to make use of us for..
To answer Goop’s question, in this case I wrote the stories that other authors I admired were willing to collaborate with me on. In general, the ideas I pick out of the maelstrom of my mind to actually write into full stories are the ones that offer me a new twist — something I haven’t written before yet — on my favourite theme. That theme being, as will not surprise you if you’ve read this far: “How do monsters love in a world that tries very hard to get them killed?”
Though of all authors assembled, I think my monsters are the least literal: most of the time they’re humans who commit monstrous acts, possibly justified by the world they live in, or maybe not — let the reader be the judge. In my contributions to this bundle we have Viveca, Yves, and, a little more offscreen, Olesya and Dallas and Savita all struggling with how to love in unconventional arrangements necessitated by their nature. This of course is also easy to interpret as a queer metaphor: we love what society deems monstrous, and we have to figure out how to make our love work with zero guidance from convention, in a world where the conventions are trying to kill us.
Vyria: I wanna get fucked by dragons. Humanity is but a boring chrysalis from which far more interesting states of existence can and should emerge. And some of those should be dragons, which should include me, and the other dragons should be fucking me.
Jemma: Oh gosh, I can’t believe Vee has messed up our serious musings with thoughts of being a dragon. Ridiculous. Dragons are overgrown geckos.
Now, I want to be a Space Octopus. An alien intelligence, with many strong, flexible, inquisitive tentacles. For… er, crafts. That’s right, some macrame, with some lovely Earth women. Much more sensible!
What about the rest of you?
Meghan: Oh I’d be a space monolith. Shear, featureless, hideously inscrutable. The girls go mad for that.
I like Goop’s question because I have a really dumb answer for it: I was literally on a train going through some countryside when I caught a shape in a field in my peripheral vision. Might have been a tent, or a tree, or entirely imaginary. Something about it made me go “wouldn’t it be funny if that was a person”, and then further into the journey “no but actually though”. I made a very nonsensical note, forgot about it for a bit, then returned to the idea when I was rendered without any technology bar my notebook for a week. I’d already been thinking about playing with some fanfiction in Bee and Devi’s then-upcoming novel because they’d both been very encouraging about people doing something creative with their ideas. It was originally going to be a pretty short and blunt narrative in a sort of tiresome Pulp Fiction style from the POV of three non-magical minions getting completely annihilated by Dallas, but something about that half-imagined flight of fancy transformed the idea very quickly and I found myself handwriting an entire first draft.
So I guess the lesson there is keep making notes and letting your brain make weird connections between them?
Emily: Oh, I suppose I’d be a Dryad or a Nereid. Mind you though: not the kind that cishet men imagine, where they’re basically just beautiful women lounging by a tree or a lake, respectively. Nonono, the original ones were forces of nature who only took the form of a woman when it suited them. Being a spirit of the forest or the ocean, yes, that appeals, because it’s away from human society but you’re still part of something greater — representative of something greater. Human society goes out of its way to insist very hard that we, queer people, aren’t representative of them, and they certainly don’t have our backs. So imagine being representative of a huge ancient forest, or the ocean, and the entire forest or ocean having your back? See the appeal of the monstrous to queer fantasy?
