Kiko Klyde

A funny thing happened today. Last night (well, more like early this morning but who is even counting anymore) I published the 7th chapter of my current project, Transliterated. Today, two different friends talked to me about how interesting a certain plot point was entirely unprompted. It was one that just kinda came naturally to me when writing and I didn't think twice about until it they highlighted it and got me thinking about how uncommon it really is.

The spoiler-free version of the scenario is that I wrote about an unwilling TF victim, you probably know the type. The hapless human who through no fault of their own (or perhaps some fault) ends up as something else and just has to cope. Usually it becomes the catalyst for a great improvement in their life and all manners of self discovery, even if they're grouchy about it at first.

What I did instead was write about an unwilling TF victim who would have been a willing TF beneficiary in any other story. You also probably know the type. The miserable human who just can't quite get a grip on what's wrong with them, only that they don't feel right in their own skin. Then they get the opportunity to become something else, or else have their subconscious wish granted, and it is a joyous and fulfilling experience for both character and reader.

So what you have is someone who yearns to be something other than human getting the monkey's paw version of that wish. They became something else with no regard to their own wishes or preferences, becoming a creature that in no way resembles their idealized self, but is still so distant from what they knew that they don't have human comforts to cling to either. What does one do in that scenario, when you still don't feel right in your own skin, only it's not your own skin, it's completely foreign on top of it all?

In retrospect, I shouldn't have been surprised that it stuck out to people, given all the fiction in the genre that I have already consumed. But it didn't strike me as weird at all.

Because I'd already lived that.

has to be tama. everyone's favorite station master. look at how proper and proud she is

If you're surrounded by people who call trans people by their deadnames, you're most likely in a hate group. But a possible alternate explanation is that you're in academia. And it's not because that many academics are openly transphobic -- they just don't know that the site they fully trust, Google Scholar, is telling them to do it.

Google Scholar was developed in 2004 and has changed very little since then. It supplanted a lot of hard-to-use library search indices by providing a Google-style interface with a single search box. Now it's the most name-recognized site for searching for almost any paper by almost anyone. One aspect of the design was, authors are just a kind of search term. An author is a cluster of different ways to abbreviate a name, like Firstname Lastname, Firstname M. Lastname, and F Lastname, and you might see different forms in different places, but the underlying name will never change.

This is because Google Scholar was built by, and for, cis men with unchanging Western-style names. The "almost anyone" who you can search for excludes trans people, among a lot of other people it represents poorly. And because Scholar will not change, it should perish.