rowyn

Sometimes, when people talk about trans people in a "wow, there sure are a lot of trans people now" way, I think about how long I have known trans people.

I have been an extremely online person from the moment I got to college and had access to "online", in the late eighties. I created a character on FurryMUCK in 1990 or 91, played for a few weeks or months, and then left. I returned in '92, I think, and remained active there for some years. I also flitted between various other online spaces before/between/during my FurryMUCK years, but Furry is the space I remember best from this period.

MUCKs were text-based MMOs but without the "fight monsters and get loot" part. People built rooms and lands and worlds and characters out of text descriptions, and hung out there together to chat. Like Discord, but with a lot more atmosphere. FurryMUCK was -- is, it's still around -- a MUCK for furries. And furries have always been a queer lot. In the late 80s and 90s, people created characters with every kind of gender: male and female were the most popular, but neopronouns and nonbinary characters were commonplace. The last was often fetishized -- but not always. "Nonbinary" wasn't a term yet. Most of the enby characters labeled themselves as "hermaphrodites"; some of them as "neuter."

One of the many things that's changed about "online" in the last thirty years is the gender ratio online. In the late 80s and early 90s, most people online presented as male in person. It was so overwhelmingly male that even most people who presented as female online presented as male in person.

I don't really know how many of those people who played female or nonbinary characters on Furry were trans. It was undeniably easier to get attention with a female character. I rarely played male characters myself, not because I disliked male characters but because when I played one, I recognized how hard it was to stand out from the crowd. I knew several AMAB people who preferred to play female characters online but who, so far as I know, were cis men.

The first trans woman I met was in the early 90s: 1991, perhaps? She came to one of the periodic furry meet-ups that one of my friends hosted. She was older than most of my friends, although I do not know how much older; I'd guess she was in her thirties or forties, when most of my circle were in our early twenties. She was polyamorous and kinky and dated one of my friends who was perhaps twenty-one. I don't know how that relationship turned out in the long run, but they struck me as happy together. I hope they did well.

One of my closest friends on Furry usually played male characters. But she* played one character who was a water elemental and genderless. She used "it/its" for that character. At one point, she told me that character was the one she most wanted to resemble, but that she had a hard time playing it because it was too much her idealized self. She didn't feel like she could live up to that ideal.

*I'll use her present in-person pronouns for her.

Years later, she came out to me as a trans woman. To my everlasting shame, I argued with her over it. I didn't think there was anything wrong with being trans -- my logic was something like 'you don't seem especially feminine to me and you never played female characters so you can't be a trans woman.' (To be clear, this is complete nonsense and I had no idea what I was talking about.) I didn't argue for long -- it was one conversation that went roughly:

Friend: "I'm a woman"
Me: "what no you can't be"
Friend: "NO REALLY"
few more exchanges
Me: "...okay, I don't understand, but I do support you"

Later, she told me that she would have preferred to not have a gender at all. But getting recognized as nonbinary in the late 90s was basically impossible and transitioning to a woman was something cis people could wrap their heads around, and "woman" was much more acceptable to her than "man." That stuck with me, because it fit so well with everything else I knew about her. She had always been one of those feminists who'd thought the world would be better off without genders.

Another person I knew on Furry in the early 90s played a shapeshifter character. Most often, I saw them* in female shapes, but they had male and neuter shapes as well. Sometimes changing little but the pronouns from one description to the next. (They used it/its for the neuter forms. I recall they had one exaggeratedly mixed-gender shape that existed solely to make fun of other people's fetishized/sexualized descriptions which gave prominent attention to three or more sets of genitalia.)

*likewise using their current pronouns here.

Years later, when I knew them much better, they told me that their preferred pronouns were it/its. Many years after that, they started asking people to use they/them, because they being treated as nonbinary was important to them and because too many people would assume that anyone using it/its would be doing so to be offensive.

Around 2016, as I was thinking about my next book, I realized that I had finished three books in three different settings, and none of them had an explicit trans or nonbinary character. I'd had friends since the 90s who were nonbinary, a fact I had long ago accepted. But I'd never put nonbinary characters into my work. Dragons and magical healing and prophecy: sure, those were reasonable elements to expect a reader to accept. But a nonbinary person? A BRIDGE TOO FAR.

...

Me to me: "seriously WHAT. What is up with that. Why are you writing books that don't include this normal component of your own life."

I decided, at that point, that I would never again write a setting that didn't include nonbinary people. Not necessarily as major or even minor characters, but: nonbinary people had to, at a minimum, exist in the world. Even if it was just as a throwaway mention somewhere. In two of my settings -- the Demon books and the Etherium novels -- I use it/its for some nonbinary characters and they/them for others. Because I had two friends who'd wanted to use it/its and never felt like they could in the real world, and I couldn't change that but what the heck, I could at least make a space for them in my fictional ones. In the Demon books, it was particularly important to me to use "it" for some nonbinary humans because the demons in the setting don't have sexual reproduction and the pronoun for all of them was "it". I did not want the book to come across as 'agender = evil'. x_x

The first trans woman I met wasn't someone I knew well or stayed in touch with. But the people who later came out to me as trans have been good friends for most of my life, at this point. Sometimes I think about all the other people I met on FurryMUCK who used nonbinary or genderfluid forms, but who didn't become lifelong friends. How many of them weren't cis, either? How many of them thought they were cis for years and only much later realized they didn't have to be?

Do I really know more trans people now, or do I just know more people who are comfortable being open about being trans?

Furry fandom was open to a variety of forms in a way that other online spaces weren't. I don't know if this is because there's something innately queer about liking anthropomorphic animals as "when your setting is all about nonhuman characters like dragons and bipedal cats and such, characters who aren't male or female seem pretty reasonable." But "AMAB people presenting as female online and male iRL" was commonplace throughout the internet, in every online space I saw. And I knew some women who preferred to play male characters for the exact reason I preferred female: they got less attention as male and they liked that. Having a medium where no one could see what you look like or hear what you sounded like made it easy to be whatever you wanted. To experiment.

And in an environment where it's easy to experiment, of course people will learn things that they didn't when it was almost impossible to do so.