By way of clarification…

Yesterday’s post about swapfic? Not the only thing to be said about swapfic. Nor, incidentally, do I think that every incidence of swapfic is something that someone has written with the intention of producing a trans narrative. Nor am I in any way outraged by the existence of swapfic. I don’t regard it as a moral evil. I don’t even have the same reservations I have about it as I do with mainstream m/m romance and slash. And yes, I know that swapfic can be something more complex and challenging than “VWOOP! new body, let’s shag!” and that this more complex thing can touch on trans themes under the right circumstances.

BUT.

While I like to think I’m speaking the obvious in explaining why I think there’s a distinction, I also encounter a lot of people in my daily life who think they understand dysphoria and what happens under the big trans umbrella a lot better than they really do.

While most of my friends are pretty savvy people, and a great many of them are LGBTQ, sometimes people I know are otherwise intelligent say some really appalling things to my face. It always baffles me when this happens, like “how could you miss this really obvious thing?”

Given the virtual absence of trans characters in fiction, and how unevenly transness is treated in fanwork, I’m saying an obvious thing. I’m laying it out and supporting it. Not because I’m outraged or awash in a sea of things that make me angry, but because there’s genuinely a case to be made for this being a point of confusion to people who are not savvy in the way my friends are (usually) savvy.

And that “usually” is there for a reason. Because my cis friends? Do fail sometimes. And if they fail, what will less informed people make of these things?

This post has been mirrored from Christian A. Young's Dimlight Archive. To see it in its original format, visit dimlightarchive.com