Writing Prompt: There’s More to Transgender People than Just Transitioning
We’re all three dimensional people. Let’s show this to the world!
This post was inspired by an idea Kitty Whitemore offered in a conversation. This idea is elaborated upon here with her permission.
I am keeping this prompt outside of the paywall for anyone to view because I believe this is an important message to spread through our community.
We all already know that we are complex human beings, that we are more than just our medical, social, legal, or internal transitions. We are all layered individuals with many great stories to tell that have absolutely nothing to do with us being transgender, yet are informed peripherally by our unique perspectives.
Sometimes it feels like the algorithms accidentally erase this aspect of us as writers.
I know that the designers of algorithms probably don’t think about pigeonholing a person into their gender identity or queer niche, but it happens. It’s a problem that all of us face. It’s one thing for our niche to be something like travel, food, or engineering. People take for granted that a writer has a life outside of such things and is still a complete human with interests outside of travel, even if that’s all they ever write about here.
It’s another thing for a “niche” to be a writer’s gender, race, language, culture, disability, or something else so integral to our day-to-day experience that people who dehumanize us try to view us as nothing more than as an embodiment of one of these single simple facts of our existence.
On this note, we’d like to mess with the algorithms a bit in favor of humanizing us as three dimensional beings.
Support your fellow brothers, sisters, enbies, gender fluid, agender, two-spirit, and genderqueer writers in showing ourselves as full humans with full lives. I want to welcome all LGBTQ+ people to join in this challenge as well, but especially those of us who live at intersections requiring this boost to be seen outside of a single strand of identity.
This sentiment isn’t new. It’s echoed in these responses to James Finn’s writing prompt “I’m LGBTQ, but You Don’t Know THIS About Me”:
- Michelle Paquette’s “I’m Trans. I’m Human. I’m a Weird Old Lady.”
- Meagon Nolasco’s “After 15 Years of LGBTQ Living, I Forget I am Queer Sometimes”
Here are 3 example responses that I’ve already written to this prompt: a writing centering a transgender/queer narrator (i.e. yours truly) that has absolutely nothing to do with transitioning or queerness directly.
- When You’re the Son of an Airline Employee | by Logan Silkwood | Jan, 2022 | Medium
- The Short, Tragic Life of Funkster the Bunny | by Logan Silkwood | Jan, 2022 | Medium
- That Time I Accidentally Flew in a Plane with a Teenage Pilot | by Logan Silkwood | Jan, 2022 | Medium
Here is an entertaining and informative response from Zuri C. Davenport:
Here are 3 favorite responses from Jenny Starr✨ :
Please leave links to your writings that fit this prompt in the comments, even if you wrote the posts before the prompt existed. I will create a follow-up post collecting and showcasing links to each of the writings that are linked in the comments section here.
Please support your fellow queer and transgender writers by clapping and/or commenting on these writings, too!
