#gowaniiyaps

Put him BACK. I’m not saying you have to like him, but he was there, he mattered, and pretending he didn’t exist is just weird.

What Your Dialogue Is Actually Doing

There's a piece of advice that gets passed around a lot: dialogue should do double duty. Reveal character and advance plot. Two birds, one stone. It sounds elegant in theory, and the writers who say it aren't wrong exactly—but it understates what good dialogue actually has to carry, and it understates how often writers get dialogue wrong because they're only thinking about those two things.

Dialogue, when it's working, is doing about six things at once. When it's not working, it's usually because it's been reduced to a delivery mechanism—for information, for character beats, for plot—and it's forgotten to be a conversation between people who exist in bodies and have histories and are, crucially, not fully listening to each other.

Let me break down what I mean.

The Exposition Problem

The most common dialogue failure is what I call the information delivery scene. You've read it. You've probably written it. It's the scene where two characters discuss something they both already know because the writer needs the reader to know it.

"As you know, Marcus, the council hasn't met since the war ended five years ago."

Nobody talks like this. Nobody tells someone else something they already know in this way. When writers do this, they're using dialogue as a vehicle for narration, and the seams show immediately. The dialogue stops feeling like a conversation and starts feeling like a press release.

The fix isn't to cut the exposition—you might genuinely need to convey that information. The fix is to find a reason for it to be new to at least one person in the scene, or to let the characters have a reaction to the information rather than just transmitting it. Two people who both know the council hasn't met aren't going to recap that fact to each other. But one of them might say: 'Five years, Marcus. Five years and they still won't meet.' Now you have the same information, and you also have bitterness, and history, and someone who's been waiting.

People Don't Answer the Question That Was Asked

Real conversation is oblique. People dodge, deflect, answer the question they wish they'd been asked, or respond to the emotional subtext rather than the literal words. Written dialogue often fails because it's too direct—question asked, question answered, question asked, question answered—which produces something that reads like a deposition rather than a scene.

Think about what happens when you ask someone a question they don't want to answer. They change the subject. They answer a different question. They get defensive and bring up something unrelated. They go quiet. They make a joke. That gap between what's asked and what's answered is where character lives, and where subtext lives, and it's one of the most powerful tools you have.

Consider:

"Did you talk to her?"

"I made coffee. Do you want some?"

This tells you more than any direct answer could—that they did talk to her, that it didn't go well, that they don't want to discuss it. And it didn't require the writer to explain any of that.

Voices Must Be Distinct, But Not Theatrical

Every character having a distinct voice is real advice, but it gets misapplied constantly. Writers trying to differentiate their characters often end up with caricatures—the one who always speaks in formal complete sentences, the one who uses slang in every single line, the one whose every statement is a philosophical observation. Real people are more internally inconsistent than that. They code-switch. They're different in different company. They talk differently when they're exhausted than when they're caffeinated and nervous.

What makes voices feel distinct isn't necessarily vocabulary or speech patterns, though those help. It's what a character notices and chooses to comment on. It's their preoccupations. What they keep coming back to. What they're evasive about. Two people can use similar vocabulary and still feel completely different on the page if they're paying attention to different things and reacting to the world from different emotional positions.

The Action Beat Isn't Just Stage Direction

There's a tendency to treat action beats in dialogue as purely functional—a way to avoid writing "he said" over and over, a way to anchor the conversation in physical space. They are those things. They're also much more.

The action beat you choose tells us where your character's attention is. It tells us what they're doing while they're speaking, which often tells us what they're not saying. A character who starts making tea while having a difficult conversation is doing something with their hands because they can't stand still. A character who keeps rearranging the same objects on a desk is not listening as carefully as they're pretending to. These aren't just physical tics—they're windows.

What you want to avoid is the action beat as pure filler. She nodded. He smiled. She looked away. These aren't wrong exactly, but they're doing the minimum possible work. Ask yourself: what is this character doing, and why, and what does it tell us about where they are emotionally? A character who laughs at something that isn't funny, a character who stops what they're doing entirely to listen—these beats carry weight. A nod is just a nod.

Silence Is Dialogue

This is the thing most writers underuse: the pause, the silence, the thing that doesn't get said. A character trailing off mid-sentence. A response that takes too long to come. A question nobody answers. These are dialogue moves too, and they're often the most effective ones you have.

When you write "He didn't answer," you're writing dialogue. When you write "She started to say something, then stopped," you're writing dialogue. The absence of words is still a communicative act, and it can carry more weight than any words would. Readers are very good at understanding what a silence means. Trust them.

Final Thoughts

Good dialogue isn't about cleverness. It isn't about giving your characters quotable lines or witty exchanges (though those can be delightful when they emerge organically). It's about two or more people who want different things, who have histories they're not fully sharing, who are paying imperfect attention to each other, trying to navigate a moment together.

When dialogue feels flat, the question to ask isn't "is this realistic?" but "what does each person in this scene want, and are they getting it, and at what cost?" Tension in dialogue doesn't come from dramatic subject matter—it comes from competing wants, from what's unsaid, from the gap between what characters mean and what they say.

Read your dialogue out loud if you have to. Read it to someone. If it sounds like a memo, revise it. If everyone is answering the question that was asked, make someone dodge. If your characters are being too honest with each other, ask yourself why a real person in this situation might not be.

The conversation is always about something other than what it's about. That's the thing to keep in mind.

buckle up. this one's personal and it's long and I need you to read the whole thing.

trigger warnings: transphobia, transandrophobia, medical discrimination, femmephobia, discussion of violence against trans people, misgendering, erasure, suicide statistics

I'm transmasc. Transmasc non-binary, specifically. And one of the most consistent experiences of my life has been the particular exhaustion of existing in a world that has decided, mostly without consulting me, that I either don't exist or don't count.

Not in the way that trans women face violence and hypervisibility and constant public hatred—I want to be clear that I'm not making a competition out of this, and transmisogyny is real and brutal and a separate conversation. But there is a specific, grinding, well-documented form of erasure that transmasculine people experience that doesn't get talked about with the same seriousness, and I want to lay it out properly.

the visibility gap: what the data actually says

Trans discourse—in media, in activism, in public conversation—centers transfeminine people. That centering has real reasons behind it: trans women, especially trans women of color, face catastrophic rates of violence and murder and are targeted by an enormous amount of political and cultural hostility. That's real and it matters.

But the effect is that transmasculine people—trans men, transmasc nonbinary people, gender nonconforming AFAB people—become functionally invisible in the very spaces that are supposed to represent us.

A 2021 study published in Participations: Journal of Audience and Reception Studies examined how transmasculine people engage with screen representation and found that transmasculine characters, when they exist at all, are overwhelmingly secondary. The study's framework draws on George Gerbner's concept of symbolic annihilation—the idea that when a group is consistently absent, underrepresented, or trivialized in media, the cultural message is that they don't exist, or that their existence doesn't matter. [¹] One participant summed it up precisely: "I tell people I'm trans, and their impression of me is... like... you're still a woman. It's a dis-acknowledgement of me because it's not a real thing." [¹]

Another participant in the same study noted that while Laverne Cox is a prominent trans character in Orange is the New Black, every transmasculine character the groups were shown was secondary—background, supporting, a detail in someone else's story. [¹] The study concluded that transmasculine individuals consistently practice disidentification with media characters because the representations that exist don't reflect them, and the absence of representations that do has real effects on how they understand their own masculinities and gender identities outside of media contexts. [¹]

A 2019 review of transgender representation in media published in PMC found that media representation of trans people operates on "a binary logic" that includes the systematic erasure of trans men as a category. [²] The representation that does exist skews heavily toward a medicalized, transition-focused narrative that erases trans people who don't follow a specific binary trajectory—and since transmasculine people are already less represented, the transmasculine people who *are* represented are overwhelmingly the ones who fit the most legible, hypermasculine, medically-transitioning template. [²]

femmephobia and the hypermasculinity trap

Here's one of the specific mechanisms driving transmasc invisibility that doesn't get discussed enough: femmephobia.

Femmephobia—the cultural devaluation and hostility toward femininity as an expression and identity—was named by Julia Serano in her 2007 book Whipping Girl. [³] When it fuses with transphobia in transmasculine spaces and in broader culture, it creates a specific trap: transmasculine people are only legible as "real" if they perform a sufficiently masculine gender presentation. Transmasc people who are femme, androgynous, soft, or who don't conform to a hypermasculine presentation get told—by cisgender people, by other trans people—that they're not really trans, that they're "transtrenders," that they're "just cis women pretending." [⁴]

A CUNY thesis examining femmephobia's impact on transmasculine people found that femme and androgynous transmasc people face a double bind: they don't "pass" in the way a hypermasculine trans man might, so they're not "clocked" as trans by cisgender people—meaning their transness becomes invisible in mainstream contexts—but within trans spaces, their femininity makes them targets of policing. [⁴] One subject described being attacked online, accused of making a "mockery" of transmasculine people, and told by another trans person: "We're just cis women pretending to be trans for fun." [⁴]

Trans men are also held, as the same research notes, to a higher standard of masculinity than even cisgender men. [⁴] A transmasculine person who wears nail polish or makeup is read as less authentically trans than one who doesn't—a standard that no cisgender man is subjected to. The implicit message is that transmasc identity is only real when it produces a specific kind of masculinity, which is both a transphobic and a deeply misogynist position.

This also operates within activist and community spaces. There's a persistent narrative—sometimes stated outright, sometimes just structural—that transmasculine people are "safe" in a way that transfeminine people aren't, and that therefore their needs can be addressed later, after the people who are really at risk. This "more vulnerable group first" logic, as one Medium piece on anti-transmasc erasure put it, "contributes to the system that has bound thousands of transmasculine people to subsistence or survival sex work, with no recourse and little to no resources, while the general understanding says that people like them are included within groups of people who are drowning in resource and privilege." [⁵]

healthcare: where invisibility kills

Transmasculine invisibility is not just a cultural annoyance. It has measurable consequences in healthcare settings, and those consequences are serious.

The 2015 US Transgender Survey—the largest survey of transgender people in US history, with 27,715 respondents—found that one-third of transgender respondents who had seen a healthcare provider in the previous year reported at least one negative experience related to their gender identity. [⁶] That includes being refused care, being misgendered, being subjected to harsh or abusive language, and being physically rough or abusive treatment. By 2022, that number had risen: the 2022 USTS found that nearly half (48%) of trans people who saw a provider in the past year reported at least one such negative experience. [⁷]

But here's the part specific to transmasculine people: a 2020 study using USTS data found that transgender men had significantly higher odds of avoiding healthcare due to anticipated discrimination than transgender women (AOR = 1.32). [⁸] This is the invisibility problem made concrete—transmasculine people are less represented in public trans discourse, less visible in cultural conversation, and as a result healthcare providers are less prepared for them, less aware of their specific needs, and more likely to misgender or mishandle them. The result is that transmasc people avoid care at higher rates, which produces worse health outcomes.

A 2021 study in PMC specifically examining the healthcare experiences of transgender, nonbinary, and gender-expansive people assigned female at birth found that 70.1% reported at least one negative interaction with a healthcare provider in the past year. [⁹] Those who had pursued gender-affirming care had 8.1 times the odds of reporting a negative interaction. Misgendering, inappropriate questions about gender identity, and being referred to non-affirming specialists were among the most commonly reported experiences. [⁹]

Research in the American Journal of Epidemiology found that the conflation of sex and gender in health research—using "female" to mean cisgender woman, using binary categories that erase transmasculine experiences—produces systemic erasure at the data level, meaning transmasculine health needs aren't being adequately researched, counted, or addressed in the first place. [¹⁰] If you don't collect data on a population, you can't identify their health disparities, which means you can't address them. The erasure in cultural representation maps directly onto erasure in research, which maps directly onto erasure in care.

There's also a specific healthcare nightmare that's uniquely transmasculine: the intersection of transmasculinity and reproductive healthcare. A 2022 study published in the International Journal of Transgender Health documented how transmasculine gestational parents in healthcare settings experienced what researchers called "total erasure"—having their gender denied outright by providers, being called out by incorrect names and pronouns, in some cases being told by medical professionals that they couldn't be trans because of their pregnancy. [¹¹] One participant described going to hospital during a pregnancy complication and being called by their name—only to have staff say "no you're not," denying their identity at a moment of medical vulnerability. [¹¹]

erasure within the community

I want to name this directly because it's uncomfortable: some of the most consistent sources of transmasc erasure come from within queer and trans spaces.

There's a tendency in some trans discourse to position transmasculine people as benefiting from male privilege once they pass—which both erases people who don't pass or don't want to, and misunderstands how male privilege works for someone who is also visibly trans, or who isn't visibly trans and therefore has their transness erased entirely. There's a tendency to treat AFAB nonbinary people as "basically women" or to question whether transmasculine nonbinary people are "trans enough" to belong in trans spaces. There's the "transtrender" accusation, disproportionately directed at young transmasculine people and femme transmasc people. There's the dynamic S.L. Void described in their essay on anti-transmasc erasure: the "deliberate erasure of the actual majority of trans men and transmasculine people" that "exists primarily so that violence can continue to be enacted against them behind closed doors." [⁵]

This is not a claim that transmasculine people are more oppressed than transfeminine people. It is a claim that the erasure is real, that it has real consequences, and that it is happening partly inside communities that should know better.

transandrophobia: naming what's happening

So there's a term for the specific discrimination transmasculine people face: transandrophobia. And before I explain what it means, I want to get ahead of the discourse around it, because the second you use this word in public someone will crawl out of the woodwork to tell you it's not real.

The term was coined as a deliberate alternative to "transmisandry," and that choice matters. The people who created and use it have been explicit from the start: transandrophobia is not a claim that misandry exists, that cis men are oppressed, or that trans men have it worse than trans women. Nothorses, one of the primary writers to develop the term's framework, put it plainly: "It does not imply that trans women oppress us, only that we have different experiences." [¹²] The "andro" in transandrophobia doesn't mean men-in-general the way "misandry" invokes a systemic hatred of men—it refers specifically to transmasculine people and the way cissexist society responds to us: not as women, not as men, but as something it doesn't have a category for and is uncomfortable with. [¹²]

The critique of the term—that it's an "unpaired word" because androphobia isn't a real axis of oppression—is an argument that nothorses addressed directly, and I find the response convincing: compound words don't always inherit the full meaning of their components. As one Tumblr respondent in the same thread put it, you can't break down "disaster" into "dis" and "aster" and conclude disasters aren't real. [¹³] The whole point of the compound is that you can't fully separate the "trans" from the "andro"—the discrimination transmasc people face is inseparable from our masculinity and how our masculinity reads to a cissexist world.

So what does transandrophobia actually describe? The specific, overlapping ways that transphobia, bioessentialism, and misogyny combine to produce discrimination that is uniquely targeted at transmasculine people. Some examples drawn from nothorses' primer: [¹²]

Stereotyping transmasc people as "soft" or "men lite"—as lesser men, not quite real. Treating our masculinity as performed or adopted rather than inherent. Refusing to use gendered language that actually credits our manhood—the "boi" instead of "boy" phenomenon, the softening of language around us that nobody applies to cis men. Scare resources or nonexistent resources for abuse inflicted on us, because domestic violence and sexual assault resources are built around a framework that functionally excludes trans men. Medical professionals refusing to believe we are who we say we are, leading to unnecessary procedures, miscommunication, and misdiagnosis. Mistreatment at women's clinics for looking like an "intruder" while simultaneously being excluded from men's healthcare spaces. Being perceived as a "gender traitor" for transitioning—framed as "choosing the easier side" or abandoning feminism and womanhood, as if our identity is a political statement rather than a fact about who we are.

The transandrophobia-explained resource (drawing on the work of none-gender-left-man and nothorses) maps this further into the specific double-bind transmasc people occupy: [¹⁴] we are simultaneously told that we have "male privilege" (ignoring that being read as a trans man in a cissexist world does not function the same way as being a cis man) and told that we are "just women" who have internalized misogyny. These two positions are mutually exclusive, they're both deployed against us, and they both function to erase transmasculine identity from different directions.

The data backs up that the underlying phenomenon is real, whatever terminology you prefer for it. From the 2015 USTS, trans men reported being denied hormone coverage at higher rates (32%) than trans women (18%). [⁶] Trans men were more likely to be denied surgery coverage (57%) than trans women (54%). [⁶] Trans men had the highest lifetime suicide attempt rates in the survey at 45%, compared to 40% for trans women and 39% for nonbinary respondents. [⁶] A 2023 PMC study on transphobia as a "social disease" in the lives of trans men found that transphobia experienced specifically in healthcare institutions produced a cycle of self-exclusion—participants described being discouraged from seeking care not just because of individual bad experiences but because institutional transphobia had eroded their sense that care was for them at all. [¹⁵]

The debate over whether "transandrophobia" is the right word for all of this is a real debate within the trans community and I'm not here to declare it settled. What I'm not willing to accept is the move from "this terminology is contested" to "this phenomenon doesn't exist." The phenomenon exists. It's documented. It has a body count. We can argue about what to call it.

what this costs

The 2022 USTS found that 78% of trans respondents reported lifetime suicidal thoughts and 40% reported lifetime attempts. [⁷] These numbers are not reducible to any single cause, but the research consistently shows that discrimination and harassment are associated with worse mental health outcomes and that support and visibility are associated with better ones. [⁷] Invisibility is not a neutral condition. It does not make people safer. It makes people more isolated, less likely to seek care, less able to find community, and less likely to encounter the reflection of themselves in culture that research shows contributes to psychological wellbeing.

When transmasculine people are erased from media, from healthcare research, from trans discourse, from activist spaces—when we're told we're not controversial enough to depict, not vulnerable enough to center, not masculine enough to be real, or not feminine enough to be women so we must be confused—the cost is not abstract. It lands on real people navigating real lives without adequate care, community, or representation.

I'm one of them. And I'm tired of making this argument in a vacuum.

sources

[¹] Banks, B. (2021). "A visible absence: Transmasculine people on the screen." Participations: Journal of Audience and Reception Studies, 18(1). https://www.participations.org/18-01-04-banks.pdf

[²] Capuzza, J. & Spencer, L. (2019). "The Rise of Transgender and Gender Diverse Representation in the Media: Impacts on the Population." PMC. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6824534/

[³] Serano, J. (2007). Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity. Seal Press. Via Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whipping_Girl

[⁴] Belderiver, L. (2020). "Femmephobia's Stinging Impact on the Transmasculine Community." CUNY Academic Works (Graduate Journalism thesis). https://academicworks.cuny.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1404&context=gj_etds

[⁵] Void, S.L. (2025). "Not transmasc invisibility, but erasure: Antitransmasculinity as erasure." Medium. https://medium.com/@thewarmvoid/not-transmasc-invisibility-but-erasure-148bea710483

[⁶] James, S.E. et al. (2016). The Report of the 2015 U.S. Transgender Survey. National Center for Transgender Equality. https://transequality.org/sites/default/files/docs/usts/USTS-Full-Report-Dec17.pdf | via AMA Journal of Ethics summary: https://journalofethics.ama-assn.org/article/how-cisgender-clinicians-can-help-prevent-harm-during-encounters-transgender-patients/2022-08

[⁷] National Center for Transgender Equality. 2022 U.S. Transgender Survey: Health. https://ustranssurvey.org/report/health/

[⁸] Kcomt, L. et al. (2020). "Healthcare avoidance due to anticipated discrimination among transgender people." SSM—Population Health. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7276492/

[⁹] Moseson, H. et al. (2023). "Reports of Negative Interactions with Healthcare Providers among Transgender, Nonbinary, and Gender-Expansive People Assigned Female at Birth." PMC. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10252942/

[¹⁰] Morrison, T., Dinno, A., & Salmon, T. (2021). "The Erasure of Intersex, Transgender, Nonbinary, and Agender Experiences Through Misuse of Sex and Gender in Health Research." American Journal of Epidemiology, 190(12). https://academic.oup.com/aje/article/190/12/2712/6354680

[¹¹] Kerppola, A. et al. (2022). "'It's Total Erasure': Trans and Nonbinary Peoples' Experiences of Cisnormativity Within Perinatal Care Services in Aotearoa New Zealand." International Journal of Transgender Health. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/23293691.2022.2155496

[¹²] nothorses. (2021). "'Transandrophobia' Primer." Tumblr. https://www.tumblr.com/nothorses/684908105774104576/transandrophobia-primer | nothorses. (2022). "A crucial part of the conversation around transandrophobia..." Tumblr. https://www.tumblr.com/nothorses/703648872719958016

[¹³] vaspider et al. (2024). "transandrophobia isnt real the way transmisogyny is..." Tumblr (thread). https://vaspider.tumblr.com/post/770232511674597376/transandrophobia-isnt-real-the-way-transmisogyny

[¹⁴] transandrophobia-explained.carrd.co — "Transandrophobic Fundamentals and the Intersections of Trans Masc Marginalization." Drawing on none-gender-left-man and nothorses: https://transandrophobia-explained.carrd.co/

Great question!

I think Robin spent like 6 months thinking Nancy was straight and out of her league only for Nancy to kiss her during an argument.

Nancy has a meticulous planner. Robin steals it to doodle in the margins.

Robin talks constantly when she's nervous. Nancy has learned that the correct response is to take Robin's hand mid-ramble, and Robin will just... stop. Settled immediately.

Nancy is a chronic overthinker who spirals quietly. Robin is a chronic overthinker who spirals loudly. They cancel each other out about 60% of the time and make each other catastrophically worse the other 40%.

Robin thinks Nancy's ambition is the most attractive thing about her. Nancy thinks Robin's unself-conscious weirdness is the most attractive thing about her. They have said neither of these things out loud but they are both correct.

Robin gives the most chaotic but somehow always correct advice. Nancy has started going to her before she goes to anyone else.

They share a jacket.

D'ya get what I mean?

Like instead of usual pica behavior or whatever you turn around for one second & when you turn back he's gulping down a sock.