Writing fantasy about trans characters has me thinking about how we use language in genre work, especially anything set in a nebulous "past." As much as I love genrebabble, it would just feel kind of disingenuous to have to substitute every nuanced piece of trans language for a wholly made up word (or worse, moving the transness to the layer of metaphor entirely). Not to even mention how much having to make up words for and then explain how, for example, a character would say transsexual instead of transgender would balloon my word count just to be legible, even to trans readers.
So I use modern language around transness, which means I end up using modern language for a lot more. It reads smoother and is far less stop-and-start in the reading process but still, it sits in the back of my mind. How much is fantasy trying to sound like fantasy when its characters talk? How much of this just comes from age, when a lot of books written decades ago might sound out of date because they just are, even if they weren't when originally published.
