hi! I'm cis, working on a story where the MC is a trans girl. I have a couple questions and looked through your trans tags to see if I could find answers but wasn't sure still so I decided to send it in. the premise of the story is that the MC befriends a convicted felon, but in the end the felon ends up either wrongfully accused/did the crime for right reasons (idk which yet) and is overall a good person. my question is whether this is bad for portraying my trans MC as connected w/crime (1/2)
 (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 donât want to imply that trans people are linked to crime or violence, and iâm 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. Youâre totally fine regardless.
First thing, if your character is an adult trans woman, I would highly rec avoiding using the term âgirlâ 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 wouldnât 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 thereâs a higher risk of police brutality and jury hostility, and other awful stuff.
I think itâs 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 youâre down to read through some sociology textbook level stuff, I highly recommend looking into Thomas Theorem. Itâs 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 wonât live past a certain age when there is absolutely nothing indicating this to be factual. Being trans is not a terminal illness.
Anyway Iâve 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.Â
What youâve 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 doesnât make a person a bad person in general. (Or even most of the time, especially with nonviolent crimes, but I degress.)
(Also Iâve 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 arenât exactly the most equal and up-to-date thing we should always use to guide what we do. Thereâs a sense of compassion in our hearts that law cannot account for.)
* Regardless of reason. Like Chelsea Manning being currently re-imprisoned as a whistleblower, Cece McDonald in self-defence, an old friend of mine shoplifting allergy meds because she couldnât afford them.