While I was away, I was included in an interview about the Out on the Page and Audible Pride List of Queer Storytelling. I was one of the nominators for this amazing list of queer stories and storytellers. It’s a brilliant resource if you’re looking to expand your queer reading.

Attitude magazine interviewed me, along with Shivani Dave and Juliet Jacques about our own relationships to queer storytelling. This was particularly exciting, for me. All my published books to date have been non-fiction, but I do attempt to tell queer stories through these books, particularly the graphic guides. Also I’m increasingly creating more fictional and comic/zine stories alongside that work, and exploring queer creativity specifically. It’s affirming to be thought of as a queer storyteller.

You can read the interview with me, Shiv and Juliet here, and read my answers in full below.

How has the writing process aided you in your gender journey?

In so many ways. I’ve been fortunate to be paid to write about gender for a general audience. Writing Gender: A Graphic Guide with Jules Scheele enabled me to learn all about gender, weaving together history, psychology, sociology, biology, cultural theory and more to come to my best attempt at making sense of how it all works. Writing How To Understand Your Gender with Alex Iantaffi helped me to reflect – again – on my own gender and to write the book I wish I’d had as a young person.

Nowadays I write fiction to further explore the multiple gendered parts of myself and to bring them into better communication with each other, as well as journaling in dialogue between them – both for myself and on my blog.

Who would you say is the most influential gender-diverse writer in history? 

I’m going to say all the gender diverse writers who never got to write and who we’ve therefore never had the chance to read. Thanks to the rigid white Western binary model of gender, and the way it’s been enforced around the world, so many voices have been silenced. Even now – as writers like Travis Alabanza and Juliet Jacques have pointed out – we only hear particular narratives of gender diversity: those that fit the dominant culture’s narrow sense of allowable transness. This severely closes down the options of how we can understand, experience and express our gender diversity and creativity.

I would point people towards Kit Heyam’s wonderful history book Before We Were Trans which tells the stories of gender diverse people across time and place, including those who have been silenced or written out of history in various ways.

Who are the most influential gender-diverse characters? 

Anna Madrigal from Tales of the City was the first gender diverse character I remember reading as a late teenager. Armisted Maupin’s books had a huge impact on me way before I realised my own transness, and on so many other people I know.

The depiction of a wise, kind, older trans woman was radical for the time when – as the Disclosure documentary shows – gender diverse people were generally depicted as objects of ridicule, dangerous perpetrators, or disposable victims, if they were depicted at all. Maupin’s later books – and the TV shows based on them – include many other great depictions of various forms of gender diversity. 

What text exploring gender-diversity is most important to you?

I picked Akwaeke Emezi’s Freshwater for the Pride list because it depicts a plural experience of gender diversity – someone who has several different selves, or spirits, of different genders – as well as exploring how gender and spirituality can be interwoven. This was huge for me as there are so few books that depict plurality as part of life – outside of mental health memoirs. 

I also picked Becky Chambers because she writes so affirmatively about many types of gender, sexual, and relationship diversity, and about relating kindly across difference. Her most recent series has a non-binary lead character without that being a big deal or central to the plot.

What are some of the most common obstacles faced by gender-diverse writers and how do we change them?

Juliet Jacques, Travis Alabanza, Juno Roche, Shon Faye, CN Lester and others have written eloquently about the ways in which only certain stories of gender diversity are welcomed, such as stories that centre our transness (and often white middle class transness), that focus on medical transition, that draw on the ‘born in the wrong body’ narrative, and that present us as poster children for trans by being normative in every other way.

They have also highlighted the fraught cultural moment that we are writing into – where we are still often assumed to be deluded and/or dangerous – and how incredibly hard it is to write honestly about the complexities of gender, and about our experience, when we know how people are likely to misrepresent us and attack us.

We need everyone’s support to shift the current toxic culture around gender diversity so that it becomes safer to tell diverse stories of gender, and so that people can find the stories they need to help them on their own journeys.

How can the literary community better support gender-diverse writers?

I was very struck by an answer Juno Roche gave at a book launch event where they were talking with H Howitt. A cis person asked Juno how they could best write trans characters. I think we were all expecting Juno to say something like ‘don’t’ or ‘educate yourself and talk to lots of trans people’, but what they actually said was along the lines of ‘find the trans person in you and speak from them’. 

Personally I love this challenging of the trans/cis binary. I think the most helpful thing that people in wider communities – including the literary community – can do is to undertake deep reflective work around their own gender diversity, their own gender transitions, and the ways the rigid gender binary has hurt them. Then it won’t just be trans people who have to write about this stuff, and we can work for change in the gender system – and other intersecting systems of oppression – in solidarity.

What is the best way to respond to the rise of book banning in schools and libraries?

I couldn’t say that I know the best way to respond. I guess I would say it’s important to do our best to make sure that there are as many places as possible – on and offline – where people, including young people, can access stories and supportive resources around gender diversity. It’s also great to encourage young people to create their own stories and resources in ways that are safe enough in the current climate.

What books from Audible and Out on the Page’s collaboration have you read and added to your reading lists?

There were so many books on the list I haven’t read! I suppose I’d want to reassure people that that’s ok. We can so easily get the sense that we should have read all the things, or even that we’re not queer enough unless we have an encyclopaedic knowledge of queer literature. I believe it is fine to focus on the stories and voices that speak to you, even returning to them time and again as trusted friends, rather than forcing yourself to read everything. 

We also need to challenge any sense that certain kinds of writing are superior or inferior. It’s so fine to be into genre fiction or comic books, for example, and some of the best queer writing I’ve read is in online fanfic communities. 

When we expand our understanding of queer to include being neuroqueer we have to acknowledge that people take in information and stories in very different ways, which is part of why having books available in audio format, as well as diverse kinds of fiction, non-fiction, graphic books and poetry, on a list like this is so important.

That said, hopefully a list like this can give you a flavour of the kinds of amazing books that are out there, and why people love them so much, so you might flick through some of them and pursue them if they grab you. 

Personally it was lovely to see how many other people chose my old favourites like Alison Bechdel (who Shivani Dave and others mentioned), Jeanette Winterson, Alice Walker, and Mary Oliver, and to get some pointers on other authors I might like to read. Particularly I came away wanting to read some of James Baldwin’s fiction (having only read essays by him). Love and Other Thought Experiments by Sophie Ward really appeals because it uses multiple genres in one book. I definitely want to read Here Again Now by Okechukwu Nzelu, which several people nominated. Two of the books that Juliet Jacques recommended grabbed me in her descriptions: Lote by Shola von Reinhold and Tell Me I’m Worthless by Alison Rumfitt which plays with haunted houses and explores cultural transphobia. As a comic fan I also fancy The Pride Omnibus by Joe Glass which Alex Bertie says is like the Avengers but queer.

Why are campaigns such as this important to you and the rest of the LGBTQ community?

For me what stood out was the way it celebrated diverse writing forms, genres, authors, and stories, from around the world and across time. For me there’s far more to queer storytelling than representing LGBTQ people, it’s about representing diversity within queerness and raising more marginalised voices. It’s also about telling stories that challenge normative narratives of what it is to be a person, to love, or to have a successful life, for example. Hopefully the list will inspire others to read these books and to explore their own creativity in different ways as well.

What is your advice to an aspiring writer who is gender-diverse?

When I was asked about this by JKP I said: go where it is live and juicy and vulnerable-as-hell and write from there. My experience is that writing from that place really speaks to others, and that’s far more important than how good your vocabulary or grammar or any of that stuff is. All of that can be fixed up after.

We have to learn to create in the ways that feel nourishing for us, not the ways we feel we should do it, or the ways the world expects us to do it. Finding what that is for us is hugely important. As gender diverse people we’re already treated non-consensually enough. It’s vital that we treat ourselves consensually when it comes to our creativity, and what we put out there and when. It’s fine to create just for ourselves, or to share only with trusted others. It’s absolutely okay to not write at all. The best writing comes from a radical acceptance of not writing.

My nominations

Becky Chambers – A Psalm for the Wild Built

Becky Chambers is my favourite novelist. Her sci-fi books are filled with tender characters doing their best to relate across difference. A Psalm for the Wild Built is the first in her Monk and Robot series, which features a non-binary lead character as well as imagining beautifully queer, sustainable forms of loving, living, and community building. Becky’s stories are just the kind of gentle, warm, hopeful read so many of us need right now.

Travis Alabanza – None of the Above

None of the Above is a beautiful, profound, and heart-breaking memoir by Travis Alabanza in which they time travel back through their life via various comments people have made which stayed with them. The book raises vital questions about why it is the non-binary person – rather than the white western capitalist gender binary system – who is called upon to explain themselves. I love Travis’s embracing of paradox, complexity and liminality, as well as how they question all of the binaries imposed on us in order to determine who is valued and who is not.

Akwaeke Emezi – Freshwater

Freshwater is non-binary novelist Akwaeke Emezi’s semi-autobiographical book about a girl growing up containing ogbanje (Igbo spirits). It’s a stunning book, and a wonderful literary depiction of multiplicity, which meant a lot to me as someone who experiences themselves as plural. I love the way that Akwaeke questions the spirit/body binary as well as the gender binary through their writing, and how they write across multiple genres rather than restricting themselves to one.

More on Queer Writing…

• What is Queer Writing?
• Queer Comics
• Queer Creativity
• Advice for Queer Writers
• Free Book On Writing

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How can straight, cis people be respectful in LGBTQ+ spaces?

This is a topic that comes up a lot around Pride season. Some of the bigger prides becomes so inundated with straight, cis people who want to enjoy the parade and festivities that it stops feeling like a proud – or safe enough – space for the LGBTQ+ people it was designed for. This also often elevates the prices making them increasingly inaccessible for more marginalised LGBTQ+ people.

Similarly LGBTQ+ friendly areas like Brighton, London Soho, or Canal Street in Manchester have become go-to places for stag-dos, hen-dos, and other straight, cis celebrations, perhaps seen as appropriate places for people to experience one final ‘walk on the wild side’ before tying the knot.

Why are queer events and spaces important?

It’s worth remembering the roots of queer venues and celebrations like Pride. Back in the late 1960s in the US gay, queer, and trans folks had to fight not to be ejected from venues like the Compton Cafeteria in San Francisco, or raided by the police in pubs like the Stonewall Inn in New York. The first Pride marches had their foundations in the riots that took place to protect these queer spaces, often led by those who were also working class, sex workers, and/or people of colour.

It’s easy to imagine that things are far better now than then, but rates of homophobic, biphobic, and transphobic hate crimes and discrimination have all gone up markedly since the Brexit vote, and we’re in the midst of a huge moral panic against trans people, as well as ongoing battles around how sex, gender and sexuality are taught in schools. Globally there’s still the need for a trans day of remembrance every year to mourn the frightening numbers of trans people – mostly trans women of colour – who are murdered annually. Related to all of this, mental health and suicide rates among – particularly young – LGBTQ+ people remains a big concern.

In many places LGBTQ+ people still don’t feel safe enough to express themselves – or their relationships – openly. Even where they do the backdrop is of heteronormativity: the assumption that people are straight and cis unless they ‘come out’ otherwise, and that being LGBTQ+ means being different from the norm in ways that we need to explain and justify in some way, with pressure to prove that we’re ‘normal’ in every other respect. Many LGBTQ+ people have strained or non-existent relationships with previous friends and family, so building their own friendships, support networks, and social spaces is important.

LGBTQ+ people often become used to having to come out repeatedly, to being asked intrusive questions about their bodies and sex lives, and to being treated as an object for people (the weird one in the office, or the gay best friend, for example). They have to be part of everyday workplace and family conversations which assume that everybody wants – for example – to find a partner, get married, and have (and gender) kids, and that those things require celebrating in ways that transitioning, finding a community, or coming out, do not. It’s understandable that they might want some spaces where they don’t have to worry about that stuff or self-monitor constantly: where they can assume that everyone will ‘get it’, relax, and breathe easy.

Think about your motivations

So if you are straight and cis and thinking of attending an LGBTQ+ space or event, think about your motivations. Generally speaking it’s probably a bad idea if you’re looking for the following:

• To share your opinions about LGBTQ+ people or get into arguments or debates
• To see something strange, exotic, or titillating
• To flirt or get off with somebody LGBTQ+ because you’re curious or want to have a story to tell – this involves treating people as objects for your pleasure, not full human beings
• To have a laugh by doing something a bit crazy and out-there
• To exploit or appropriate the coolness of LGBTQ+ culture in some way

These are better reasons:

• You want to support your LGBTQ+ friends who are keen for you to go along
• It’s an event or space that’s particularly looking for allies to support it – and the people going
• You’re genuinely questioning whether you might be LGBTQ+ yourself
• It’s an educative space and you want to learn something

What not to do

• Go with your straight, cis partner and get off together very publicly in the space – remember that everyday spaces are safe for you to do that in a way they aren’t for the rest of the people there
• Go with your straight, cis mates and take up a lot of room in the venue with your bodies or your noise – many people will feel less safe if you’re doing that
• Go to places with a maximum capacity which are already pretty full – better to let LGBTQ+ people be the people who get to use the space
• Ask intrusive questions of anybody there or touch anybody without consent 
• Get super drunk or high so others have to look after you

What to do

• Check beforehand whether you will be welcome there – with staff or others attending
• Be friendly and treat people as full human beings, not just their sexuality or gender
• Do your homework if it’s an unfamiliar community for you – there are plenty of vids out there about things LGBTQ+ people are sick of hearing, or what not to ask them, as well as easy 101 introductions to language
• Be kind, consensual and unobtrusive – it’s not your space and you’re privileged to be welcomed here

And LGBTQ+ people need to remember…

Not everybody who appears to be straight and cis in an LGBTQ+ space actually will be. There are plenty of people who, for whatever reason, are not safe to be out as LGBTQ+, or don’t identify with that terminology, but are still attracted to the same gender or more than one gender, or living in a different gender to the one they were assigned at birth. There are also lots of people who don’t look like the common image of an LGBTQ+ person (which is so often white, young, slim, non-disabled, and middle class). There are many who aren’t into the LGBTQ+ ‘scene’ but are still LGBTQ+. This is often an issue particularly for bi people. Remember that just because somebody is with a different gender partner, or hooking up in that way, doesn’t mean they are straight. And even if they are straight, they may not be cis. They may be there because they are trans. Also femme women can feel very invisible in LGBTQ+ spaces.

Many people may access LGBTQ+ spaces because they’re questioning their gender and/or sexuality and that’s a really good reason. Insisting that they make definite decisions, identify or express themselves in certain ways is not okay. Also remember the + on LGBTQ+. There are good reasons to consider including asexual, intersex, kinky, and/or non-monogamous people, as well as sex workers, under the broad umbrella of people who are excluded from heteronormativity and discriminated against by virtue of their gender and/or sexuality. There are legitimate conversations to be had about who should and shouldn’t be included, and in what contexts – for example, not all intersex folk want to be added to the LGBTQ+ acronym and it’s very important to respect that – but generally it’s worth being as careful when making assumptions about somebody who doesn’t appear LGBTQ+ as we’d want people to be when coming into contact with somebody who does.

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Give it a read if you fancy learning more about queer activism and queer ideas, including some of the tensions around Pride marches: Assimilationist &/or radical? Normative &/or challenging the norm? Intersectional or one-dimensional? lG(bt) &/or queer?

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Two friends attended EuroPride to be on a panel about bisexuality. They reported back how they were faced with the usual stereotypes about ‘making your mind up’ and scepticism about the existence of bisexuality. Another friend attended a Pride London event where the words ‘gay’ and ‘homophobia’ were used throughout by speakers, despite Pride London claiming to be an LGBT+ event.

Other friends attended the London DykeMarch, the week before London Pride, and were met with a protest by a group of Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminists (TERFs) who shouted transphobic abuse at one of the speakers. The speaker in question has written about this here. Whilst we may well have reached a transgender tipping point – and media representation has certainly improved dramatically in the last few years – trans remains a serious point of contention in some feminist movements, and there is also a good deal of scepticism around non-binary genders now that these are receiving media attention.

I think that this trouble around bisexuality for gay/LGBT+ movements, and around trans and non-binary genders for feminist movements, stems from the same place. Recognising this provides a way forward that will not only be more inclusive for B and T people, but will be better for everybody, if we’re brave enough to do it.

The roots of feminist and gay rights movements

Very broadly speaking, feminist and gay rights movements emerged in similar ways.

With feminism, the world in which it emerged said that there were men and women, and that women were inferior to men. Feminism therefore began to work to get women treated equally to men.

With gay rights, the world in which it emerged said that there were straight people and gay people, and that gay people were inferior to straight people. Gay rights movements therefore began to work to get gay people treated equally to straight people.*

The problem is that while early feminist and gay rights movements rightly challenged the second part of what the world around them said about gender and sexuality (the inferiority bit), they generally accepted the first part (that everybody could be divided into the binaries of men and women, gay and straight). They didn’t realise that the first part was also an intrinsic part of the patriarchal and/or heteronormative systems that they were trying to challenge.

Of course many feminists and LGBT+ rights movements since then have noticed – and corrected – this error (intersectional feminism and queer activism being just two examples). However many mainstream feminist and LGB/T rights organisations and campaigners retain those underlying binary assumptions. And it is generally their voices that get heard.

Retaining binary assumptions

I think that this explains why, when I talk to people from many LGB/T organisations and media outlets, they argue that they need to keep working to get gay and lesbian people accepted, and homophobia eradicated. Only once that has happened can they start to address bisexual people and biphobia (despite the fact that there are probably more bisexual people than LG people, and research suggests that they suffer from even higher rates of mental health problems). This results in the strange situation whereby some campaigners who know lots of bisexual activists, and who even experience sexuality in non-binary ways themselves, still default to talking about ‘gay’ people and ‘homophobia’. The concern is that bisexuality might ‘muddy the water’ because of the binary assumptions that their campaigns are based on. They don’t seem to consider the possibility that it might point the way to an alternative model of sexuality which could be more – rather than less – palatable to the people whose opinions they are trying to change.

The acceptance of binary assumptions also explains why some feminists are so troubled by trans and non-binary genders. The basis of everything they’ve worked for has been that there are two categories of people – men and women – with one oppressing the other. It therefore feels important that that those categories are stable (that people remain in the gender they were assigned at birth), and that those categories are easily readable off a person’s general appearance and genitals. If this is not the case, then people worry that campaigns based around women’s experience, or what men do, might be called into question, as well as there being difficulties in creating safe spaces for women.

Thinking about it this way helps us to understand why the LGBT+ movement often looks like a GGGG movement, and why some radical and liberal feminists struggle with trans and non-binary genders. There is a real, profound, and understandable fear of engaging with fluid and non-binary sexualities, and with genders that don’t map onto those assigned at birth, or which are beyond the binary. The fear is that – given that the whole movement has been based on a binary assumption -any questioning of that assumption will somehow challenge, or even invalidate, everything that has been done.

But we have to return to those assumptions

However, we do have to return to those assumptions, and not just because of the exclusions of B and T people.

We have to return to them because they are wrong: because gender and sexuality simply do not work like that. And we have to return to them because those assumptions are an intrinsic part of the very patriarchal and heteronormative systems that we are trying to change. We won’t be able to change these systems if we accept a major part of what they are based on. Perhaps the very reason that we seem to keep stalling on achieving the eradication of sexism and homophobia, is because we are working from a starting point which enables those very things.

An alternative: Gender and sexual diversity (GSD)

So what alternative am I – and many others – proposing? It is this: that we start talking about gender and sexual diversity (GSD) rather than about men and women, straight and gay.

To give one example, current campaigns encourage school education to include LG(B) people and to empower girls and raise boys’ awareness of sexism. We could achieve these same goals – and many more – through a broader education about gender and sexual diversity.

For example, education about the range of sexual experiences (including attraction to different genders, enjoyment of different practices, and having different levels of sexual desire) could benefit not just young people who aren’t heterosexual. It could also help all young people to understand that there are (often safer) alternatives to penis-in-vagina sex, and that is okay to want sex and to not want sex, and to have all kinds of desires. This could enable them to communicate more openly and consensually about sex, and to respect it when they find that other people have different types and levels of sexual interest to themselves.

Education about diverse genders could not only benefit trans and non-binary young people, enabling them to find ways of making sense of their experience and articulating it to others. It could also help everyone to understand the ways in which narrow gender roles restrict their possibilities, and help them to find ways of experiencing and expressing their genders that don’t limit them (whatever their gender) or constrain others. Such an approach would also lend itself to exploring how sexuality and gender intersect with other aspects of experience (e.g. race, class, ethnicity, age, and religion), and how oppressive systems function across all of these areas.

Education is just one example. A GSD approach also has a great deal of value in terms of how we address gender and sexuality in relation to health, crime, the workplace, and media representations. And it is particularly appropriate in relation to international campaigns where we are often working with cultures who do not understand gender or sexuality in a binary manner anyway (otherwise attempts at feminist and LGBT+ rights interventions risk enforcing compliance with a western understanding of these things in a very problematic way).

Conclusions

It is understandable that some feminists and LGBT campaigners are fearful of returning to the underlying assumptions of their movements and changing them. This would involve challenging how they’ve been doing things in some radical ways, and it is really hard not to be invested in the ways we’ve been seeing the world and fighting for our rights for so long.

But I think there is a real possibility that, far from undermining our movements, such an approach could give them more strength and power than they’ve ever had before. Research suggests that between one and ten percent of people identify as LGBT (depending on which study you read), and probably similar numbers identify as a feminist. However, well over a third of people experience attraction to more than one gender, or find that their attraction is not tied to a person’s gender but is about other things, or don’t experience sexual attraction at all. Studies of young people are finding that many of them are using terms other than straight, gay, lesbian or bisexual to identify their sexuality. Similarly over a third of people feel to some extent like the ‘other’ gender to the one they are seen as being, or as being ‘both’ genders, or as being neither. And young people are using a wide variety of terms to capture their gender experience.

If we come from a starting point of gender and sexual diversity, we open up our movements to all of these folk as well as to those who identify explicitly as LGBT or as feminist. With numbers like that we could really change the world.

Find out more…

In my books Queer: A Graphic History, and The Psychology of Sex, and my free resource Gender, Sexual and Relationship Diversity.

* Thanks to several people for reminding me that this is an over-simplification. Of course it was only in a specific, western, context that gender and sexuality were viewed in this way (not across the whole world – a vital point I return to later in the post), and even there this binary thinking was a relatively new thing, with gender and sexuality having been understood in quite different ways in the past. Also right at the start of the gay movement, the term ‘gay’ was used more widely to refer to same-sex attraction and there was more of a sense of sexuality being on a continuum, thanks to Kinsey’s research in this area amongst other things. This only evolved into the widespread idea (in the gay community) that there was something inherent and fixed about being gay around the late 70s and early 80s (influencing the world in which the current wave of gay/LGBT+ campaigners grew up).

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