This comes out of a conversation with Sonata two nights ago that I have no idea how we got into. Also, full disclosure: I identify as both trans and genderqueer and thus have strong personal feelings about this stuff. Okay! That said.
Basically: The Pokemon universe, to the best of my knowledge, has almost no characters who are canonically trans or genderqueer; see![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
pseudogeek 's comment below for some implicitly genderqueer characters, and Akari from the How I Became A Pokémon Card manga. (Please correct me if I am wrong!! I haven't read PokeSpe yet so I might be missing something.) Fortunately, that has never stopped fandom with anything at any time, so there's still fic (and art, and probably other media too) where some of the characters meet one of these descriptions. At the bottom of this post I'm including a list of the things I happen to have run into and will totally add things to it based on recommendations --- I don't get out of my personal little fanfic hole very much so I am sure there's a ton I am missing. I've run into a bunch of genderswap fic in which a character is written as if they have always been another gender/sex, but not that much where one of the characters transitions or comes into a different gender identity as a child or adult. In this post I won't be considering the genderswap fic, not because it's not interesting or important, but because I think it's a different kind of interesting/important. There's also crossdressing as a kink but while that sometimes can shade into trans stuff, I'm not really considering it much either. (Though I went and read a bunch to see if I should list any of it, and... not my kink. Oof.)
What I most want to see in fiction, at least right now, is stories with trans characters that don't shy away from discussing that transness but also aren't strictly speaking about it. This is what I've tried to do with Julie/N in New Game + and Collections of Elegant Formulas; I don't think I nailed it perfectly but I think the sense of it being important, but not the only important thing, comes through. I hope? Most of the other things I've found have been kink meme fills, and often the transness is part of or all of the kink, and so even when the stories are really well-written they are about transness and not too much else. I haven't seen any kink meme participants or such asking for genderqueer specifically, but that doesn't mean it doesn't exist. One of the things that excites me about stories that include trans characters is that the presence of the trans character can illuminate the relationships of the people around them to gender. I don't mean to suggest that trans characters should be used as ciphers to help better understand the cis characters, who are obviously the important ones --- that would be exploitative --- but anything that tugs at a thread in the gender norms blanketing society bunches them up in other places in interesting ways.
Other than N transitioning postgame (which is rocksolid in my headcanon even outside of the comaverse), I don't have any characters who I think of as trans in the Pokemon universe. Amanita strikes me as the sort of nerd woman who doesn't care about gender but not caring means going with the gender she's assigned because doing something else would get in the way of computers. Genderqueer Silver makes (perfect) sense but doesn't fit with the narrative in my headcanon; Cheren being a trans man makes a whole lot of sense to me but is and idea I ran into only recently so I'm not sure if I want to integrate it into my headcanon or try writing it yet. What other characters might be good choices for this? Are there characters you think of as trans or genderqueer, or think would be interesting to write that way? I kind of want to play with writing this stuff more, but I am not really sure where to go, so I'm asking both in general because I think it's interesting and also because I might try writing based off of other people's ideas to see where they take me?
Here's the list of stories I've found with some brief commentary. Most of these are from anon memes, partially because they are well-tagged, and partially because that was basically all I could find:
( the list )
What am I missing? Have you written or read something like this that I should add to the list? I checked a couple of people's lists/journals but couldn't find anything obvious. Thanks tokeltena who helped me find a bunch of things on tumblr, pseudogeek who also sent recommendations, and sharonaparadox who mentioned Akari and added another link!
Basically: The Pokemon universe, to the best of my knowledge, has almost no characters who are canonically trans or genderqueer; see
pseudogeek 's comment below for some implicitly genderqueer characters, and Akari from the How I Became A Pokémon Card manga. (Please correct me if I am wrong!! I haven't read PokeSpe yet so I might be missing something.) Fortunately, that has never stopped fandom with anything at any time, so there's still fic (and art, and probably other media too) where some of the characters meet one of these descriptions. At the bottom of this post I'm including a list of the things I happen to have run into and will totally add things to it based on recommendations --- I don't get out of my personal little fanfic hole very much so I am sure there's a ton I am missing. I've run into a bunch of genderswap fic in which a character is written as if they have always been another gender/sex, but not that much where one of the characters transitions or comes into a different gender identity as a child or adult. In this post I won't be considering the genderswap fic, not because it's not interesting or important, but because I think it's a different kind of interesting/important. There's also crossdressing as a kink but while that sometimes can shade into trans stuff, I'm not really considering it much either. (Though I went and read a bunch to see if I should list any of it, and... not my kink. Oof.)What I most want to see in fiction, at least right now, is stories with trans characters that don't shy away from discussing that transness but also aren't strictly speaking about it. This is what I've tried to do with Julie/N in New Game + and Collections of Elegant Formulas; I don't think I nailed it perfectly but I think the sense of it being important, but not the only important thing, comes through. I hope? Most of the other things I've found have been kink meme fills, and often the transness is part of or all of the kink, and so even when the stories are really well-written they are about transness and not too much else. I haven't seen any kink meme participants or such asking for genderqueer specifically, but that doesn't mean it doesn't exist. One of the things that excites me about stories that include trans characters is that the presence of the trans character can illuminate the relationships of the people around them to gender. I don't mean to suggest that trans characters should be used as ciphers to help better understand the cis characters, who are obviously the important ones --- that would be exploitative --- but anything that tugs at a thread in the gender norms blanketing society bunches them up in other places in interesting ways.
Other than N transitioning postgame (which is rocksolid in my headcanon even outside of the comaverse), I don't have any characters who I think of as trans in the Pokemon universe. Amanita strikes me as the sort of nerd woman who doesn't care about gender but not caring means going with the gender she's assigned because doing something else would get in the way of computers. Genderqueer Silver makes (perfect) sense but doesn't fit with the narrative in my headcanon; Cheren being a trans man makes a whole lot of sense to me but is and idea I ran into only recently so I'm not sure if I want to integrate it into my headcanon or try writing it yet. What other characters might be good choices for this? Are there characters you think of as trans or genderqueer, or think would be interesting to write that way? I kind of want to play with writing this stuff more, but I am not really sure where to go, so I'm asking both in general because I think it's interesting and also because I might try writing based off of other people's ideas to see where they take me?
Here's the list of stories I've found with some brief commentary. Most of these are from anon memes, partially because they are well-tagged, and partially because that was basically all I could find:
( the list )
What am I missing? Have you written or read something like this that I should add to the list? I checked a couple of people's lists/journals but couldn't find anything obvious. Thanks to
keltena who helped me find a bunch of things on tumblr, pseudogeek who also sent recommendations, and sharonaparadox who mentioned Akari and added another link!
