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gryphonseggI think I'm going to have to put aside all my Telepathic Animal Companions + Gender Critique fic-scraps for a good, long while-- or maybe cut them into smaller pieces and recycle characters and scenes from disparate projects into something new that ties together the themes I was using them to approach from different angles. Today I had an inspiration that fits it all together.
The working title is Little Sisters. The world has a patriarchal history, and the general public in the focus culture at least thinks it's More Enlightened Now. People end up with Telepathic Animal Companions (still working out how that happens and how common it is) that give them special abilities and social permission to do Exciting Stuff. In the majority of cases, the human and the TAC have the same anatomical sex, but not in every case.
Part of what's going on there is that people who are very strongly binary-gendered get a TAC whose perceived sex matches the human's internal sense of his or her gender identity, regardless of the humans perceived or assigned sex. So a person who has a very strong sense of being a man gets a male-appearing TAC whether he's cisgender or transgender, and a person who has a very strong sense of being a woman gets a female-appearing TAC whether she's cisgender or transgender. A person whose sense of gender is less clear-cut, though, can get anything. The in-world rules for this are murky. Even after I work out the details, I plan to write around them in such a way that the characters in the story never figure out exactly how it's determined and what it means.
Now, remember that patriarchal history? Even though the rights of female-assigned-at-birth humans are less limited than they used to be, the cultural norm still starts from the assumption that cis male is the default and everyone else is Other and lesser. This interacts with the TAC situation in that male-assigned-at-birth humans who have male-appearing TACs (some of whom are more comfortable with that assignment than others)are treated as more powerful, serious, and worthy than other humans with TACs. MAAB people with female-appearing TACs (some of whom are trans women and some of whom are not) are treated with much less respect because they're presumed to be unmanly and therefore lacking in the virtues that are attributed to those with male-appearing Animals. Female-assigned-at-birth humans with male-appearing TACs (some of whom are trans men and some of whom are not, as above) get shoved into this weird social space where they're allowed escapes from some of the sexist stuff that happens to FAAB people who don't have male Animal Companions to vouch for them-- but that can vanish at a moment's notice as soon as some MAAB person with a male TAC of his own (or with no Animal around to raise questions about whether he's a "real man") decides that the cross-bonded character is acting too girly or too emotional or too man-hating or too crazy or too How To Suppress Women's Writing, etc. FAAB people with female-appearing TACs are assumed to be walking stereotypes of girly-girl girlishness, even if they don't behave or dress in accordance with their culture's feminine stereotypes. So if one of them is genderqueer or androgynous or tomboyish or just not interested in whatever her generation's preferred marker of feminine frivolity happens to be, well, then she's obviously just suppressing her true nature! I mean, there's a deer with no antlers right there to prove that she secretly loves corsets and false eyelashes! Just like female animals love corsets and false eyelashes . . . um . . . SHE'S TRYING TO CENSOR ME!
So, yeah, given that I'm me, I envision a story in which various sorts of humans and their female-appearing Telepathic Animal Companions and FAAB humans who have male TACs but somehow got demoted to Really Just Another Girl After All call bullshit on the system described above.
The working title is Little Sisters. The world has a patriarchal history, and the general public in the focus culture at least thinks it's More Enlightened Now. People end up with Telepathic Animal Companions (still working out how that happens and how common it is) that give them special abilities and social permission to do Exciting Stuff. In the majority of cases, the human and the TAC have the same anatomical sex, but not in every case.
Part of what's going on there is that people who are very strongly binary-gendered get a TAC whose perceived sex matches the human's internal sense of his or her gender identity, regardless of the humans perceived or assigned sex. So a person who has a very strong sense of being a man gets a male-appearing TAC whether he's cisgender or transgender, and a person who has a very strong sense of being a woman gets a female-appearing TAC whether she's cisgender or transgender. A person whose sense of gender is less clear-cut, though, can get anything. The in-world rules for this are murky. Even after I work out the details, I plan to write around them in such a way that the characters in the story never figure out exactly how it's determined and what it means.
Now, remember that patriarchal history? Even though the rights of female-assigned-at-birth humans are less limited than they used to be, the cultural norm still starts from the assumption that cis male is the default and everyone else is Other and lesser. This interacts with the TAC situation in that male-assigned-at-birth humans who have male-appearing TACs (some of whom are more comfortable with that assignment than others)are treated as more powerful, serious, and worthy than other humans with TACs. MAAB people with female-appearing TACs (some of whom are trans women and some of whom are not) are treated with much less respect because they're presumed to be unmanly and therefore lacking in the virtues that are attributed to those with male-appearing Animals. Female-assigned-at-birth humans with male-appearing TACs (some of whom are trans men and some of whom are not, as above) get shoved into this weird social space where they're allowed escapes from some of the sexist stuff that happens to FAAB people who don't have male Animal Companions to vouch for them-- but that can vanish at a moment's notice as soon as some MAAB person with a male TAC of his own (or with no Animal around to raise questions about whether he's a "real man") decides that the cross-bonded character is acting too girly or too emotional or too man-hating or too crazy or too How To Suppress Women's Writing, etc. FAAB people with female-appearing TACs are assumed to be walking stereotypes of girly-girl girlishness, even if they don't behave or dress in accordance with their culture's feminine stereotypes. So if one of them is genderqueer or androgynous or tomboyish or just not interested in whatever her generation's preferred marker of feminine frivolity happens to be, well, then she's obviously just suppressing her true nature! I mean, there's a deer with no antlers right there to prove that she secretly loves corsets and false eyelashes! Just like female animals love corsets and false eyelashes . . . um . . . SHE'S TRYING TO CENSOR ME!
So, yeah, given that I'm me, I envision a story in which various sorts of humans and their female-appearing Telepathic Animal Companions and FAAB humans who have male TACs but somehow got demoted to Really Just Another Girl After All call bullshit on the system described above.
