Just because a story is trans/queer doesn’t mean it’s good

We deserve better than checkbox marketing and tokenism in media

By Jane Migliara Brigham

The past few years has seen an explosion of queer and trans stories made by and for their intended audience.  This boom has been excellent for our ability to tell our own stories, especially when we don’t have to deal with editors and publishers who will smooth over the parts that cishet audience members might not understand.  I for one love this development.

Despite the constant threats to our way of life, we are in a golden age of trans and queer art.  

The very digital infrastructure that allows us to communicate with one another has allowed us to tell our stories at a scale that was never before possible.

That being said, a lot of stories which are otherwise not very good or which are unpolished are able to promote themselves on nothing more than the status of the characters involved.  For example, I have seen a ton of books advertised primarily on the basis that they are filled with lesbians, trans people, etc..  

To see what I mean, look at many of the advertisements for queer and trans books.  Very often,  the fact that the main character is queer is the first and most prominent part of the advertisement.

Sometimes, it’s not even the main character that is used to justify a story’s queer rep status. There’s an unfortunate trend of “sapphic” being used as a marketing term when the stories involved don’t contain lesbians or others in sapphic relationships, rather having a lesbian or bisexual side character that ends the story with a man.

I am not talking about genres such as yuri, yaoi, etc., where the gay romance is the entire appeal.  I am talking about stories of every genre being marketed on the basis of their identity, even when it is wholly irrelevant to the plot of the story or the reason that the story is worth reading to begin with. 

What this implies is that the reason you should be interested is not that the story is good, but that the story fills a checklist of things you already feel comfortable with.  This is part of a broader trend in books where the tropes of a story are what get people to read it.  

In other words, the gay/trans status of a character becomes nothing more than a marketing trope.

If you are going to market a story based on the gay/queer/trans characters within them, is it so much to ask that their identity at least be relevant to the story being told?  If not, you are expecting readers to pay you for whatever gets put in front of them that fills the right boxes.

If creators think a trans or queer character alone is enough to get money from our people, will they spend time crafting a meaningful story about transness and queerness, or will they just use it as set dressing and a marketing checkbox?

This is not to say that being gay/trans can’t be an integral part of a story.  This paper is full of reviews for stories which are by and for trans people.  I want to promote the stories that my people tell each other.  

That being said, I have felt pressure to review stories that I think are only popular because they advertise themselves as queer stories.  The quality of the narrative takes a back seat to the qualities of the characters within them, and how much they line up with the qualities of the reader.

If I want to say that a story is good, I should not have to emphasize that the character(s) are similar to the reader.  Even if, for example, the story is about some aspect of the trans experience, the transness alone has only a degree of bearing on whether or not the story is good.  A story isn't good or bad because of the subjects it covers, it’s good or bad because of how well it deals with that subject matter.

For example, I wrote glowing reviews of Castration Movie 2 and Persona.  Both of these are fundamentally about certain parts of the trans experience, and would be very hard to understand if the viewer didn’t understand what the stories were drawing on.  That being said, their ability to draw upon parts of the trans experience that resonate with me is not what makes them good.  

These examples are good because they are made by artists who know how to make a compelling narrative.  They are both trans art that is good because of its high quality, not because it’s trans.  

There are plenty of other similar stories that draw upon the same fundamentally trans experiences which didn’t leave as much of an impact on me.  Those stories weren’t any less trans, I just didn’t think they were as good.

So what separates the stories I loved from those I hated or didn’t care for?  In general, the stories I like tend to be well crafted and know how to tug at the heartstrings of the viewer.  I don’t mean to imply that there is a subjective way to understand quality (there isn’t), but the craftsmanship of a work is usually a decent predictor of its quality.

You should expect more than slop marketed to your identity, especially if the slop lacks the very things that make your identity important to you.

In a world where there are countless skilled storytellers working with a trans audience in mind, where excellent trans stories are released every month, where trans stories now cater to every niche, and where all of this can be found with relative ease, there is no reason to fawn over every book or story that happens to have a trans character.  

We don’t have to settle for tokenism from storytellers, cis or trans.  We have a right to demand quality in our representation.  We can and should distinguish between literature and slop.