#representaiton

 (anon w/the felon question lol) i do have other trans characters in the story, but they are minor characters. also, my MC is hesitant to interact with/help the felon character at first when she finds out she (the felon) is a criminal. is this problematic? i don’t want to imply that trans people are linked to crime or violence, and i’m happy to clarify/add/subtract from the story if anything seems iffy! thanks so much for all your hard work! (2/2)

EDIT: Oh my god I answered this based on my misreading your trans character as the felon. You’re totally fine regardless.

First thing, if your character is an adult trans woman, I would highly rec avoiding using the term ‘girl’ because a lot of trans women do find it diminutive. (This is advice from my transmisogyny-affected partner.) Your mileage may vary but if you wouldn’t call a cis person of the same identity and age a girl then maybe avoid it for a trans person. (Unless with real people and they specify.)

Trans folks, especially transmisogyny affected and racialized trans folks (triply so for BIPOC trans women who are sex workers), are often criminalized and experience the repercussions of governments assuming criminality in extreme ways. Even when trans women do commit crimes* the punishments are rarely balanced and there’s a higher risk of police brutality and jury hostility, and other awful stuff.

I think it’s okay to depict how the criminal justice system is often flawed. I think the most important thing here is that the takeaway impression your reader gets needs to be that of understanding these things, even just on a preliminary basis.

If you’re down to read through some sociology textbook level stuff, I highly recommend looking into Thomas Theorem. It’s basically the idea that assumptions have consequences associated with those assumptions. If a beggar is going to be labelled as an addict no matter what they do, barred from places and resources, that will affect them no matter if they do use any drugs or not. (Which is awful on so many levels because addicts deserve respect too.) Same goes for trans women affected by being labelled criminals.

Another big example would be the myth of the trans life expectancy. There has never before been a study on the life expectancy of trans individuals. And yet, there are numerous resources around that have claimed it is anywhere from 23-30 over the past ten years. All they are doing is citing each other. Trans people hear this and have planned our lives around this, with so much of our trauma being surrounding it. So much anguish is caused by telling someone they won’t live past a certain age when there is absolutely nothing indicating this to be factual. Being trans is not a terminal illness.

Anyway I’ve gotten kind of lost in the weeds, but I just want to give you some ideas which would probably help to ponder or incorporate as themes in your story. 

What you’ve got as a concept is totally okay, in making the criminal character being a good person regardless of this brush with the law. Being a criminal doesn’t make a person a bad person in general. (Or even most of the time, especially with nonviolent crimes, but I degress.)

(Also I’ve maybe mentioned this before, but I have been arrested once before. I do not regret what I did because I helped to divert police away from innocent people being persecuted for what should be their rights. In my opinion, what is legal is independent from what is moral, and the legal systems that be aren’t exactly the most equal and up-to-date thing we should always use to guide what we do. There’s a sense of compassion in our hearts that law cannot account for.)

- mod nat

Clearly it’s not obvious to everyone though–since some of the asks I’ve already posted are by fans of the show who stated that it wasn’t at all clear. 

“Obvious to anyone with half a brain”? Or is it “obvious to anyone who was seeking confirmation of what the interviews had already said”? 

You say it didn’t need to be confirmed by the showrunners. Not for you, but obviously for some people it did, and it should have been. 

Which makes me ask: Why not? Why wasn’t it stated explicitly? Why was it left to the interpretation of viewers when it only takes a tiny bit of dialogue to make it explicit? Why not say the word “boyfriend”? 

Like literally no one cares that you disagree? Plus this is not a matter of disagreement- a literal lgbtia+ rep got erased so ur opinion doesn't even matter you idiots. In their defense, tv shows are normally different from books or comics so it doesn't matter if Jughead was allo instead of ace. I was ready to break the phone at this point.

What is the "Women in Archaeology"?