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.
I have always reacted with visceral disgust and horror to any forced transformation story that also contains an element of the transformed person undergoing a forced mental transformation to be happy with their new form. Like, full on if I encounter that without a content warning I’m gonna feel gross for a couple of days, will probably block the person who shared it, that level of disgust.
Involuntarily developing a form I hated is something I can relate to because I went through the wrong puberty. I lived that. I can find catharsis in sympathy.
But the idea that puberty could have also made me forget who and what I was, that it could have erased my dysphoria not by making me into the correct form but making me stop caring that my form was wrong? That’s a nightmare I cannot stomach. I hate how much my dysphoria hurts some days, but I’d endure a thousand years of that than one single day where - against my will - I believed I was a cis man.
