Well friends. Remember when I deleted all the G!P stuff? (it's still gone I fear). I think I want to just make a quick update about it. I'd previously said that I thought the genre was fetishizing trans women. And there are definitely going to be instances where that is entirely the case when it comes to fanfic.
But I've been digging deeper into myself and my own identity. I thought about why I wrote g!p. I was quite young when I did. I'd never heard of such a genre and I was excited to explore it. Being a teenager, I didn't exactly explore the genre through a very nuanced lens. I looked back on these stories as an older person and decided I had been using it as an excuse to fetishize a very real minority.
I am non-binary. I fall under the trans umbrella, albeit in a different way. I've come to learn about what it means to have a gender and express that. It's very confusing. It can be daunting to claim you identify as goddamn anything! As I've gotten older, grown, met friends of different identities, loved and lay with people with all sorts of body parts, I've come to realise that if somebody wants to express their gender through writing bad fic, then that's okay. I think I was exploring a part of myself without even realising it. And I need to be a little more forgiving of myself if I wish to further explore such a thing IRL.
The written word is a wonderful way to express gender identity and liberation. It's a good thing, though, to ask yourself why you want to write something like g!p, of course. For the "spectacle"? Or something deeper?
Just thought I'd share. Stay safe. Be kind.
