From a tumblr post asking about if a trans protagonist was coming
While I never say “never,” the likelihood of a transgendered lead character is so slim as to be invisible.Here is why. I support myself with my writing; I do not have the luxury of writing books for special-interest audiences. In my limited experience, so much of a transgendered person’s life and thought is tied up in their gender difficulties, the ordinary reader would swiftly become bored with such a character; even Vanyel’s whinging grates on some peoples’ nerves. A wider audience wants to see a character with problems that are solvable; in a modern or sf context, a transgendered person could solve the situation with surgery, genetic modification, body-swap, or whatever. Those options are not available to a fantasy author.[a tumblr user that I can ID, but choose not to because they already got dog-piled for this daft take in 2021, and perhaps amended some of their notions.]
Rescued from a short twitter thread in 2021
This is the post (obscured) that started me off.
From a tumblr post asking about if a trans protagonist was coming
While I never say “never,” the likelihood of a transgendered lead character is so slim as to be invisible.Here is why. I support myself with my writing; I do not have the luxury of writing books for special-interest audiences. In my limited experience, so much of a transgendered person’s life and thought is tied up in their gender difficulties, the ordinary reader would swiftly become bored with such a character; even Vanyel’s whinging grates on some peoples’ nerves. A wider audience wants to see a character with problems that are solvable; in a modern or sf context, a transgendered person could solve the situation with surgery, genetic modification, body-swap, or whatever. Those options are not available to a fantasy author.[a tumblr user that I can ID, but choose not to because they already got dog-piled for this daft take in 2021, and perhaps amended some of their notions.]