#asha'man

[Send me a 🌶️ and I will give you one of time-tested zone-approved Spicy Takes!]

Heh. I'm glad that one's doing well! I think it's one of those takes that's lived in my mind for so long I kinda forget that it's not a common understanding in the fandom.

In the same vein, while I admire the pretty common 'grey tower' head canons that pop up in post Last Battle stuff, I think it's a fundamental misread of the social pressures and dynamics at play. One of the core themes of the series it that their is no going backwards, only forwards. Any attempt to return to the 'grand state' as represented by a gender-unified Aes Sedai is a fool's errand that will end with one group subjugating the other- most likely the Aes Sedai subjugating the Asha'man by forcibly integrating them into the White Tower power structures which will inherently disadvantage and dis empower them.

Any gender-unified group of channelers in the Westlands needs to be either from scratch entirely, with none of the baggage that the Asha'man and the Aes Sedai carry around, or needs to directly confront and work through the collective inherited trauma of 3000 years worth of pogroms and lobotomies.

I am disappointed by the lack of WoT fanfics which explore trans characters in the way that I want them to be explored. Most of the ones which do feature trans character go about it in a way that is unsatisfying for me.

I'll preface this by saying that I don't dislike this representation, nor do I think it is bad. Ppl can and should write whatever the fuck they want.

With that out of the way, my personal gripe with the handful of WoT fanfic I've found which explore trans channelers, is that most of them take what I'll call the Cosmic Validation approach, where a trans character is born with a soul that matches their gender, but not their body's sex. I think this is largely done for two reasons:

First, is that there's technically precedent in the story, with at least one character who has explicitly had the experience of a soul whose sex did not match that of their body.

Second is the namesake of the approach. I think that, for many people, writing a trans-male character as having a female-born body, but a male soul which channels Saidin fills a fantasy of cosmic validation. This character is, definitively, a man, because their soul is that of a man.

Setting aside that the sole example of an ambiguously trans character was the result of unnatural influence from the Big Bad Evil Guy, and that the character in question almost explicitly exhibited autogynephilia (fictitious paraphilia which was invented to invalidate trans women) after their forced transition, I still, personally, do not like this form of transness for a couple of reasons.

The first is that, I just personally do not like cosmic validation as a concept. No shade to those who like it and find comfort in it; more power to them. I don't like it because I feel like creating a setting with such cosmic validation, which would ostensibly skip all of the bullshit we're currently dealing with in the real world, is very uninteresting. Seeing how the world deals with a person they initially perceived as a man or woman in every way, even down to which half of the power they channel, deciding that, no, I'm actually going to be not that, feels like a more interesting and compelling prospect to me. That, and it either ignores non-binary people, or relegates all of them to the status of non-channelers.

Second is that I also just feel that it does not reflect my experience as a trans person. In my experience as a trans woman, most of the dysphoria I experienced in my life has been neurological. I often think like a man, and not just in ways that are socially conditioned. I did not know it at the time, but when I was in highschool, I had a strong feeling of envy for many of the depressed girls I knew. Looking back, I am able to recognize that this was because I was depressed, but it did not manifest in me the same way that it did for them, and I felt that it should manifest the way theirs did. So, bringing it back to WoT, I find that exploring the trans experience in a world where sexual dimorphism extends to one's very soul has very interesting potential.

I also feel that exploring channeling dysphoria could be interesting, particularly because channeling is repeatedly likened to sex in the books. The idea of somebody being dysphoric about the half of The One Power that they channel is very interesting to me. I imagine trans men and women deliberately trying to burn themselves out because of how awful they feel, with some of them accidentally dying as a consequence. But I also find the idea interesting because I imagine trans who don't experience channeling dysphoria, reflecting my experience as a trans woman who does not experience bottom dysphoria (and honestly feel that I would rather channel Saidin).

That said, I would ideally like a setting with both. You'll have the rare AMAB person who has soul that is connected to Saidar, many (but not all) of whom transition into women, and then you'll have some people who identify contrary to their sex, body and soul.

So, yeah. I've been unable to find fanfic which explores trans characters in a way that I would prefer, and that upsets me.

With all that said, I have found one fanfic that I'm really enjoying, which explores the cosmic validation approach. Fair warning though, the author updates extremely slowly, and has no intention of picking up the pace: