Eshe Smites

His response: "No, it's my name now."

I went to the pharmacist yesterday, his nametag is my deadname. He informed me he's immigrating and in the process he's changed his first name to my deadname to have an English sounding name. That's why he's now able to get a reprint of his nametag to be my deadname. And repeated, with the intense seriousness of someone who is going to die on this hill: "It's mine now. Not yours. I'm taking." His tone indicated that decision is final.

The Rodeo Rule: you only have to do it for the first time once.

The Rohan Rule: if you are at a social function full of new people and you want to be liked, find someone doing important work like setup or food prep and offer to help.

The Tutorial Mode Rule: to navigate an unfamiliar situation where you fear you will mess up an interaction, preface the interaction by mentioning that you've never done this before, and let them know if you have a specific concern or question.

The Rocket Science Rule: most new things you want to try seem very complicated but are simple when taken step by step.

The [X] Will Remember That Rule: if you need to make small talk with the same person on a regular basis, try to save one fact or current event in their life from a given conversation and bring it up next time you talk.

And as someone who is currently writing a book where the two main characters and the main relationship is gay I’m a lil scared.

I’m don’t identify as gay or a man, I identify as AroAce Agender. I was wondering if anyone has any opinions on this? I’ll probably write the story anyways (worst case I’ll keep it to myself), but I would like to know of other peoples opinions on this.

The argument that if you are not X sexuality you can’t or shouldn’t write characters who are that sexuality is the same bullshit argument that people use to say if you’re not a POC you shouldn’t write characters that are POC or that people of one gender can’t write characters of another gender. That ‘advice’ is small minded and inherently broken because it assumes that if you don’t have X characteristic, then you can’t possibly understand people with that characteristic. It’s othering.

That’s not to say that writers don’t have a responsibility when writing characters with characteristics they don’t have. Do your research. Talk to people with those characteristics and learn about them. Ask someone from that group to read your work and point out issues. Really interrogate your work to find if you’re including any unconscious biases. Make sure you know the difference between a character flaw and a stereotype.

Writers are always writing characters who don’t share characteristics they have. If they didn’t, most of fiction couldn’t exist. Writing is how we explore the world, our community, and ourselves, and how we invite others to share in that exploration. One of my favorite pieces of my own writing is a short little story about a first date between a bisexual man and a man who is only just coming to realize he may also be bisexual. I’m an ace woman who has had a single kiss with another woman. Just because I didn’t share the characteristics of being male or identifying as bisexual didn’t mean I couldn’t relate to how my characters were feeling or how they would react to each other. I could use my own experiences trying to identify myself and translate them for my characters.

People are people, no matter what characteristics they have. The idea that a characteristic like sexuality, gender, or race would disqualify you from being able to write a person with a differing characteristic is fundamentally based on the (incorrect!) assumption that those characteristics are enough to make one person entirely alien to another, and that’s the road to fascism, baby!