how strange it is to be anything at all

if you want the rewards of finding a new favorite song then you have to submit to the mortifying ordeal of listening to unfamiliar music

[ID: tweet by @ J_Salzer reading: My friend Bobby just casually said “if art is how we decorate space, music is how we decorate time” and I was like hold up hold up hold up. end ID]

What I can tell you as a transgender woman is that occasionally I will read trans woman characters written by cisgender authors. And I can pretty much always tell when the author is cis, even if the character is portrayed respectfully, because they get some details wrong or something. But I certainly don’t think that they shouldn’t be allowed to take a stab at it, and I actually appreciate any representation that isn’t egregiously harmful. And I certainly don’t think that only transgender women should be allowed to write transgender women because then it falls on me, and that’s rather tokenizing, isn’t it?

Also it seems like demanding that only #OwnVoices authors should be allowed to write certain characters is an excellent way to enforce a situation where most books are about cishet white people.

And no: you probably won’t get all of the specific details of someone else’s lived experience correct, in much the same way that most authors don’t get all of the specific details about how, say, nuclear reactors or space work. But so long as your character passes as realistically human and not a one-dimensional caricature of what you think that other types of people are like, then I think that that’s reasonable.

People will straight up call your cellphone and expect you to answer