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Fanart meta: genderswap, crossdressing, and trans-ness
Note from 2017: I wrote this when I identified as a cis woman, I have now realised I'm genderfluid. I still agree with the basic gist of the post (and now realise avoiding issues of non binary gender was partly a matter of avoiding a personally sensitive subject), though I've edited it a little here and there. But note that many other "cis" people have used genderswap etc as a way of exploring and ultimately coming to terms with a trans/nb identity. And as a genderfluid person in a world where 99% of fictional characters are cis and binary gendered, works involving cis people who change genders or crossdress are still the closest mainstream approximation to my personal experience. It is absolutely the case that genderbends can be transphobic and hurtful, but policing this stuff too narrowly hurts trans and non binary people too. That said, I realise my experience is not universal, and that trans women in particular deal with heavy issues I don't.
Also note that fannish meta in 2010 was all about fanfic and ignored fanart entirely. I've edited to use Rule 63 for "swapping cis men and cis women" since it avoids the implication that everyone is cis by default, I don't think I had encountered the term when I first wrote this post. It was a dark time.
So.
I love messing about with gender with my art, but unfortunately it is very easy to cross the line into transphobia and/or heteronormativity/gender essentialism etc. I've seen various meta about the issues with "genderswap" fanworks but they've tended to concentrate on kink, or fanfic which is about people's sex changing during the story, while I tend to make gen Rule 63 fanart. The one exception I've encountered is I've genderswapped a canon!male just to draw her in a man's suit. Where does that fit in?, which is definitely worth reading (especially the comments), but doesn't cover everything. Since I haven't been able to find much on the subject I'm probably interrogating things from the wrong perspective, sorry :/ (For example: I have a feeling "trans and crossdressing" is not a sufficient catch-all, though no better one comes to mind)
Thinking about it and doing some searching (note from 2017: including trans people's opinions. Dear cis people, do not just go with your gut!), there's kind of a three pointed continuum on which all gender/sex-changing fanart seems to sit: sincere expression of a trans or crossdressing POV (on the part of the character and possibly also the artist), exploitative porn and humour, and explorations of gender and character from a cisgendered POV which happen to involve characters cross-dressing or switching gender/sex but aren't really about that.
The first sort is unfortunately in the minority, and not always easy to recognise from my cisgendered POV. Searching DeviantArt I found some trans and crossdressing members and groups. It's not fanart, but for example I found a cute set of autobiographical comics Cross Physics. I think the issues around drawing/writing trans or crossdressing characters in a realistic way as someone not in those groups are roughly similar to those around representations of race, gender etc.
There's a LOT of creepy exploitative stuff out there. Searching for "transgender" rather than "genderswap" got me some particularly dodgy art. Most cis people seem incapable of drawing what they think of as a trans character without gratuitous references to their primary and/or secondary sexual characteristics :/
This last sort, exploring gender from a cisgendered POV, is what I tend to make, and so what I'm mostly looking at. For example this Rule 63 Hellboy poster, which was primarily intended to poke at how gendered the original image is. Not being deliberately about the trans experience doesn't mean such art can't go to a bad place, however.
Note that this is a continuum and a rough model, and that one can explore gender while being exploitative, respect the trans experience while being sexy or funny etc.
Also, there's no neat line between cisgendered and trans, and crossdressing is particularly complex, since most women and many men have crossdressed to some extent. One can be entirely cisgender but still have an uneasy relationship with traditional gender roles, and boundaries and identities are always vague and amorphous. But that doesn't mean those identities don't have meaning or consequences, and for example just because rule 63 can be an entirely valid form of expression for cisgendered people doesn't mean we don't have to consider it's impact on trans people.
Now to the issues (from my limited POV!).
First off: the very idea that there's only two genders is wrong. Non binary people exist!
Also, swapping gender is not the same as swapping sex. The subtext to most Rule 63 works is that there's some set of quintessentially male/female traits and you can just swap from one to the other. The worst example of this I remember encountering was a "sexswap" fic where the female version of a male character woke up with longer hair. Not all women are short, have delicate features, have breasts or a vagina etc. This tends to be more obvious in art, though then there's stories where characters suddenly like fashion/sports etc.
Now I can kind of justify my Rule 63 art by saying that I'm imagining the characters as cast by Hollywood (or whatever), this is most obviously true with Genderswapped Star Trek. So the men will be cisgendered and tall and chisel jawed and the women will be cisgendered and short and delicate with at least moderately sized boobs. This is even more straightforward with animated etc canons with a very clear cut visual dichotomy between genders. But it could be argued that the more gender essentialist a canon is, the more important it is to subvert that gender dichotomy, otherwise you're implicitly supporting it.
One way to explore "what if this kind of cis male character was actually a cis woman" without bumping up against the knotty issues around trans-ness is to create an original character fitting that description. For example, I get annoyed that Warrior Race Guys are presented so differently from Warrior Race Women (I also get annoyed that such stereotypes exist at all) So I sex-swapped Ronon from SGA, but for Dragon Age I drew an original female character with a similar backstory. I'm still poking at the differences between these two approaches: is it less transphobic if the female original character still fits the same narrow cisnormative expectations?
There's also the related topic of crossdressing, including having a character dress as another specific character of a different gender. One of the big dangers there with male characters is having a (sub)text of "Lol, he's forced to wear a dress, how hilariously degrading". Here's a fairly typical example of this joke being done deliberately (EDIT: Ok, there's some question of that, so here's an Inuyasha one that's more unambiguously transphobic). But would it be ok to dress all the Avatar characters as the appropriate Sailor Scouts in a non humourous way, or to have the humour be about the general ridiculousness of Sailor Moon + Avatar? Is it heteronormative to object to the male characters being put in skirts? I love "Character A dresses as character B" art and it feels weird to avoid the stuff that happens to cross gender, but I'm hard pressed to think of many that approach such situations well. One Piece crossdress picture subverts the usual cliche which is something. I also drew the Merlin characters as their Dragon Age counterparts without cross-dressing by taking advantage of the fact that Dragon Age has male and female versions of all it's outfits. But that dichotomy between outfits (and, in the game, body types) is itself very cisnormative.
I haven't discussed the issues around sex-swap/crossdressing as a kink since that's not why I do it and there's a whole bunch of complex issues there I don't feel able to address properly. But they definitely exist. I've also not addressed androgyny, genderqueerness and intersex characters, which is related but not something I've had much contact with. (2017 edit: lol)
So. Have I missed anything? Any thoughts? I am totally NOT INTERESTED in cisgendered people telling me I'm worrying about nothing.
EDIT (2015): "What if this cis male/female character was a cis woman/man" is, in my opinion, a perfectly valid and interesting AU question, much like "what if this character was born 50 years later" or "what if these characters from different canons met" etc. The fact that we ask it far more often than "what if this cis male/female character was a trans woman/man/non binary person" is transphobic, but that doesn't make the individual examples of the first question transphobic, in the same way that the popularity of stories about men is a sign of sexism but writing an individual story about a man isn't an inherently sexist act.
The transphobia associated with Rule 63 is a symptom of a larger problem, and not a sign that the genre is inherently problematic. The solution is to encourage creators to be less transphobic and cisnormative in general, not to forbid Rule 63 in particular. That said, it has a lot of common transphobic pitfalls cis creators of Rule 63 works should be aware of and make an effort to avoid.
Also note that fannish meta in 2010 was all about fanfic and ignored fanart entirely. I've edited to use Rule 63 for "swapping cis men and cis women" since it avoids the implication that everyone is cis by default, I don't think I had encountered the term when I first wrote this post. It was a dark time.
So.
I love messing about with gender with my art, but unfortunately it is very easy to cross the line into transphobia and/or heteronormativity/gender essentialism etc. I've seen various meta about the issues with "genderswap" fanworks but they've tended to concentrate on kink, or fanfic which is about people's sex changing during the story, while I tend to make gen Rule 63 fanart. The one exception I've encountered is I've genderswapped a canon!male just to draw her in a man's suit. Where does that fit in?, which is definitely worth reading (especially the comments), but doesn't cover everything. Since I haven't been able to find much on the subject I'm probably interrogating things from the wrong perspective, sorry :/ (For example: I have a feeling "trans and crossdressing" is not a sufficient catch-all, though no better one comes to mind)
Thinking about it and doing some searching (note from 2017: including trans people's opinions. Dear cis people, do not just go with your gut!), there's kind of a three pointed continuum on which all gender/sex-changing fanart seems to sit: sincere expression of a trans or crossdressing POV (on the part of the character and possibly also the artist), exploitative porn and humour, and explorations of gender and character from a cisgendered POV which happen to involve characters cross-dressing or switching gender/sex but aren't really about that.
The first sort is unfortunately in the minority, and not always easy to recognise from my cisgendered POV. Searching DeviantArt I found some trans and crossdressing members and groups. It's not fanart, but for example I found a cute set of autobiographical comics Cross Physics. I think the issues around drawing/writing trans or crossdressing characters in a realistic way as someone not in those groups are roughly similar to those around representations of race, gender etc.
There's a LOT of creepy exploitative stuff out there. Searching for "transgender" rather than "genderswap" got me some particularly dodgy art. Most cis people seem incapable of drawing what they think of as a trans character without gratuitous references to their primary and/or secondary sexual characteristics :/
This last sort, exploring gender from a cisgendered POV, is what I tend to make, and so what I'm mostly looking at. For example this Rule 63 Hellboy poster, which was primarily intended to poke at how gendered the original image is. Not being deliberately about the trans experience doesn't mean such art can't go to a bad place, however.
Note that this is a continuum and a rough model, and that one can explore gender while being exploitative, respect the trans experience while being sexy or funny etc.
Also, there's no neat line between cisgendered and trans, and crossdressing is particularly complex, since most women and many men have crossdressed to some extent. One can be entirely cisgender but still have an uneasy relationship with traditional gender roles, and boundaries and identities are always vague and amorphous. But that doesn't mean those identities don't have meaning or consequences, and for example just because rule 63 can be an entirely valid form of expression for cisgendered people doesn't mean we don't have to consider it's impact on trans people.
Now to the issues (from my limited POV!).
First off: the very idea that there's only two genders is wrong. Non binary people exist!
Also, swapping gender is not the same as swapping sex. The subtext to most Rule 63 works is that there's some set of quintessentially male/female traits and you can just swap from one to the other. The worst example of this I remember encountering was a "sexswap" fic where the female version of a male character woke up with longer hair. Not all women are short, have delicate features, have breasts or a vagina etc. This tends to be more obvious in art, though then there's stories where characters suddenly like fashion/sports etc.
Now I can kind of justify my Rule 63 art by saying that I'm imagining the characters as cast by Hollywood (or whatever), this is most obviously true with Genderswapped Star Trek. So the men will be cisgendered and tall and chisel jawed and the women will be cisgendered and short and delicate with at least moderately sized boobs. This is even more straightforward with animated etc canons with a very clear cut visual dichotomy between genders. But it could be argued that the more gender essentialist a canon is, the more important it is to subvert that gender dichotomy, otherwise you're implicitly supporting it.
One way to explore "what if this kind of cis male character was actually a cis woman" without bumping up against the knotty issues around trans-ness is to create an original character fitting that description. For example, I get annoyed that Warrior Race Guys are presented so differently from Warrior Race Women (I also get annoyed that such stereotypes exist at all) So I sex-swapped Ronon from SGA, but for Dragon Age I drew an original female character with a similar backstory. I'm still poking at the differences between these two approaches: is it less transphobic if the female original character still fits the same narrow cisnormative expectations?
There's also the related topic of crossdressing, including having a character dress as another specific character of a different gender. One of the big dangers there with male characters is having a (sub)text of "Lol, he's forced to wear a dress, how hilariously degrading". Here's a fairly typical example of this joke being done deliberately (EDIT: Ok, there's some question of that, so here's an Inuyasha one that's more unambiguously transphobic). But would it be ok to dress all the Avatar characters as the appropriate Sailor Scouts in a non humourous way, or to have the humour be about the general ridiculousness of Sailor Moon + Avatar? Is it heteronormative to object to the male characters being put in skirts? I love "Character A dresses as character B" art and it feels weird to avoid the stuff that happens to cross gender, but I'm hard pressed to think of many that approach such situations well. One Piece crossdress picture subverts the usual cliche which is something. I also drew the Merlin characters as their Dragon Age counterparts without cross-dressing by taking advantage of the fact that Dragon Age has male and female versions of all it's outfits. But that dichotomy between outfits (and, in the game, body types) is itself very cisnormative.
I haven't discussed the issues around sex-swap/crossdressing as a kink since that's not why I do it and there's a whole bunch of complex issues there I don't feel able to address properly. But they definitely exist. I've also not addressed androgyny, genderqueerness and intersex characters, which is related but not something I've had much contact with. (2017 edit: lol)
So. Have I missed anything? Any thoughts? I am totally NOT INTERESTED in cisgendered people telling me I'm worrying about nothing.
EDIT (2015): "What if this cis male/female character was a cis woman/man" is, in my opinion, a perfectly valid and interesting AU question, much like "what if this character was born 50 years later" or "what if these characters from different canons met" etc. The fact that we ask it far more often than "what if this cis male/female character was a trans woman/man/non binary person" is transphobic, but that doesn't make the individual examples of the first question transphobic, in the same way that the popularity of stories about men is a sign of sexism but writing an individual story about a man isn't an inherently sexist act.
The transphobia associated with Rule 63 is a symptom of a larger problem, and not a sign that the genre is inherently problematic. The solution is to encourage creators to be less transphobic and cisnormative in general, not to forbid Rule 63 in particular. That said, it has a lot of common transphobic pitfalls cis creators of Rule 63 works should be aware of and make an effort to avoid.