When I was in college I wrote a lot of stories from the perspective of a female. I figured, at first, that since I was dating women and really wanted to know how to figure out these ladies I was dating on a psychological level–basically so I could have a better understanding of why I kept breaking up with them. More than one person thought I was gay. A college male who has a healthy respect for women’s shoes, digs home design, and writes women must have a secret desire to have sex with men.
I wrote women, and I learned about authentic writing, because my writing wasn’t authentic. I wrote what I researched and what I desired women to be. I didn’t write with an honest sense of who women are. I had occasion to spend a few hours with author Julie Ann Peters, who writes LGBTQ YA fiction. One of the things she told me was that her book, Luna, which is about a transexual person, was originally from the transexual’s perspective. However, that perspective felt false. So, she had to rewrite the story from the perspective of someone close to the character, as this perspective is clearly a lot more accessible to the writer
Be authentic when you write. In each story there is a character whose POV you can write honestly. It may not be the protagonist you had, but it is the character and thus the character arc that you know how to tell.
Some Thoughts:
1. Having a handful of nascent friendships isn’t as desirable as a handful of deep friendships. I am working towards the latter, though my late life has been the former.
2. 33 states have no law protecting against gender identity discrimination. There are still more frontiers in the equal rights debate. As a result, transgenders are more likely than any other LGBTQ groups to experience violence in their lives, this is notwithstanding the attempted suicide rate of 41%.
3. Thinking about transgender, it is interesting to note how many people are forced to try to pass, because of how society is unwilling to let people be who they need to be. One day I need to task my students to build a hierarchy of discrimination–ranging from most margnalizaed group to least…