So Apparently I Have A Novel Idea?

[anarfea]

One of the most amazing parts of 221b Con this year was that I went to the "How to Scrub Your Fanfic" panel which was hosted by Carnation folks and Elinor Gray. And while I was at said panel I realized that I actually have a project that I can scrub? I had been thinking I had nothing because I was mostly looking at my novel length works published on AO3, which are with the exception of the Omegaverse one I co-wrote (which is way too dark for a conventional publisher) heavily canon compliant. However, I realize that there is a Sherlolly story which I wrote a couple years ago and took down because my sensitivity reader said it was not coming across how I intended it and that I really needed to expand the story to articulate the issues I'm trying to express. And I realized that this story, which is a TAB AU and is therefore Victorian and therefore not particularly recognizable as BBC Sherlock, might be something I could expand into an original novel.

So the backbone of this story is basically that Molly Hooper is trans, and trying to come to terms with their identity. They had a past relationship with Emilia Ricoletti, and in that relationship, Emilia saw them as a masculine woman, dressing as a man in order to get through med school. But then after Emilia dies Molly starts to feel that they are actually a man, which is how Sherlock perceives them. So Sherlock perceives Molly as male, and Sherlock is mostly gay, and Molly and Sherlock have sort of a rivals to lovers arc, and Sherlock ends up taking Molly around to the Victorian London queer scene. And Molly is really liking being seen as male and given access to this gay male space, but they don't feel like this really feel like this male identity is all of how they are either. The climax of the story is where Molly finds the photo of Irene Adler in Sherlock's possession. And they ask, "hey, did you have feelings for this woman," and Sherlock says "I found her attractive but nothing came of it," and Molly presses him about his attraction to women, and Sherlock says basically that he's spent his life in a very masculine world, with no sisters and a tutor instead of a governess, and that he doesn't really understand women and they're mysterious to him, but that he could tell with Irene that he could be with a sufficiently clever woman. So then Molly tells him that they still feel like a woman sometimes, and Sherlock decides he can be okay with that.

There's a side plot with Mycroft trying to convince Molly to marry Sherlock and have a lavender marriage and be socially acceptable, but Molly doesn't want to give up their career or male identity. So Molly and Sherlock end up living together as "bachelors" and Molly is sometimes female presenting with Sherlock in private, but continues to have this public male identity.

There was also a sideplot involving Molly and Emilia and Janine (who owns the house where Molly and Emilia were lodging) being suffragettes. I intend to keep this, but get rid of the ridiculous TAB plot with the ghosts and instead have Molly and Emilia and Janine frame Emilia's former lover for her murder (Molly actually pulls the trigger. Sherlock figures this out but decides it wasn't murder so much as assisted suicide, and that anyway the guy deserved it). So there is an actual plot to this, but it's mostly about Molly and Sherlock's relationship and Molly's identity.

Anyway, the good thing about this novel idea is that it exists. I've been wanting to write an original novel for some time, but felt like I couldn't because I didn't have any ideas. Now I have an idea! And Carnation is potentially interested in my idea.

The downside is that this story is about a trans protagonist, and I'm cis. And there are all these #ownvoices wankers who say that you should never write about any minority identity if you don't share it, or at the very least if you write diverse characters you should never write about issues of identity, and that's exactly what I'm doing. I'm writing about a genderfluid character coming to terms with their identity, and I'm cis.

However, I think there are a couple of saving graces about this. 1) Carnation does not care. So I have at least one publisher that's fine with me being cis and writing a trans character. 2) It's a Victorian setting, so while I've said that I'm headcanoning Molly as genderfluid, the reality is that that would be anachronistic and that I won't actually have them claim any sort of modern trans identity label. So it's harder to say that I'm writing it wrong if I don't say how they identify (I also won't use they/them pronouns because I think that's also anachronistic. I'm writing in first person, so Molly will refer to themself as "I" and other characters will refer to them by either "she" or "he" according to how they're presenting at the time). 3) This is not tragedy porn. There is some period typical transphobia, especially coming from Mycroft, but nothing to dire and no transphobic violence. And happy endings all round. I don't feel like I'm exploiting someone's identity for drama or feels. 4) I know lots of trans people who have already agreed to help me with questions or sensitivity read. So, yeah, I'm basically just going to bite the bullet and go for it and try to be as respectful as I can.

Also, I'm super nervous about writing a novel set in Queer Victorian London, which is a setting I know very little about. However, there are a lot of people in Sherlock fandom who do know about this topic. I talked to Redscuddery and doctornerdington at 221b Con. They are both Victorianists. They helped me narrow down my time period to the 1890s and gave me a reading list. So, I'm going to get started on my research. I've researched stuff for fic before. Maybe not on this scale, but I know I can do it. And I'm interested in the topic. So that's going to be my next phase, get as much research done as I can. Then I have to pick names for Sherlock and Molly, think about how to scrub the more Sherlock-y aspects of my story, and get writing.

So yeah guys! I'm writing an original novel!

Comments

[oulfis]

I want to second all of this! As a trans man I think you’re really right about the specific dynamics of minority groups. Trans representation in published fiction is at a stage where I think there’s still a lot of value in just having MORE STORIES by even remotely sympathetic authors. I don’t think I’ve yet read a trans representation in a published book that really rang true to my own experience but it still felt good to see them. Cis authors succeeding with sensitively-handled trans stories can even help pave the way for trans #ownvoices authors: I’ve heard of a lot of trans authors who have been told that their work simply can’t sell, and then having counterexamples is valuable.

The key is really just some level of sensitivity, preferably with a sensitivity reader or two. This is a good rundown on how NOT to do it: https://www.them.us/story/james-barry-ej-levy

But the lesson I take there isn’t “no cis people should write about trans people” but rather “pay attention to how trans people respond do your work and be ready to change if needed.”

[anarfea]

OMG what a horrible story. I had heard of James Barry but I did not know that there were biographers who were writing him as a secret woman or whatever. Gross.

I thought it was really interesting though, that idea of the "passing woman" who is using an assumed masculine identity to get ahead. I think that's what TAB Molly is *meant* to be in canon, but I thought, "wouldn't it be cooler if they were trans?" But I think that the characters who know that Molly is not a cis man think that they are a passing woman. Emilia is a lesbian (anachronistic and I won't use the label in the novel but it's easy shorthand here) and needs to see Molly as a woman because she is not attracted to men. So she basically sees them as a butch/femme type couple. She's fine with Molly's masculinity but it's important to her that Molly is still a masculine woman, not male. Mycroft I think understands that Molly's identity is tied to this masculine presentation, but still feels like they should live as a woman and marry Sherlock, and save the "male-drag" for behind closed doors. When I decided to scrub this piece, I was originally planning on making Mycroft Sherlock's father (I thought the brotherly relationship too obviously Sherlockian), but Tiltedsyllogism had the idea to make the Mycroft character a former lover of Sherlocks, an older gay man who had shown him the ropes and introduced him to queer London. So I think that would make his perspective perhaps more sympathetic and more poignant if it's coming from the place of him wanting for Molly and Sherlock to have the lavender marriage and the privilege that would come with it that wouldn't have been available to him and Sherlock as a gay couple.

Sherlock sees Molly as male and never questions that. And initially, Molly is thrilled, because they're coming out of their fraught relationship with Emilia, who saw them as female, which made them really unhappy. So for a while, living with Sherlock and doing the Victorian London gay scene is great. And I guess I could have just written Molly/Colin as a binary transman, but I wanted the internal narrative arc of the story to be a little more complicated than "transman has his identity validated and suddenly everything is roses." So the twist is that, while Molly is initially happy to express their masculine side, after time they start to miss femininity and particularly the solidarity between women that they felt at being part of the suffragette movement. So they still feel this kinship and identify with the cause of extending the rights of women even though they don't identify as a woman, which is fraught for them. And they want to express a feminine side of themselves sometimes, but are afraid of doing that because isn't Sherlock gay and doesn't he have disdain for women and won't that drive him away?

Spoiler alert: Sherlock previously assumed that he was exclusively homosexual but he's actually really a demi gray-ace that just had one meaningful relationship before Molly and that was with another man (the Mycroft character). And then he also sees Molly as male: conclusion--I'm into dudes. But it turns out that because he's already in a relationship with Molly, their gender doesn't actually matter to him that much he's just going to be in love with/attracted to them regardless of how they present. So Molly comes to realize that they can have it all, live as male most of the time to keep their medical career, and occasionally present as female in female spaces and sometimes privately with Sherlock.

I really hope this doesn't sound horrible and offensive, but I thought of Molly's genderfluidity as being sort of analogous to my own bisexuality. Like of course I'm bi all the time, but I'm married to a man so I'm sort of functionally straight or at least straight-passing most of the time, and then a few times a year I go to Cons or gay bars or whatever and I get to hang out with my queer friends and hook up with women or enbies and have that side of myself validated. That's sort of how I envision Molly/Colin. Like, Sherlock and Colin mostly live as gay men and hang out in Victorian gay spaces, but sometimes Molly needs woman time and goes and hangs out with their suffragette friends. And intimately, Molly mostly wants to be male when they're with Sherlock, but every once in a while, they want to be female when they're in that mood. And Sherlock is okay with that, and Molly is over the moon, and they live happily ever after.

I think the main reason my short story didn't work according to the trans sensitivity reader I had who read it, was that because it was so short, I just have this one scene where Molly is trying out their femininity on Sherlock, and they have vaginal intercourse for the first time (previously they mostly have intercurial intercourse or frot), and Molly's like, "oh hey it's nice that Sherlock is okay with this," and that was where the story ended. The guy who read my fic was saying that it felt like I was saying that that's who Molly was really all along, and that vaginal intercourse somehow fixed them. And I'm like "OMG no, that is the total opposite of what I want to convey." Like Colin really sees themself as male or mostly male like 90% of the time. But at certain times, with certain people who they are more comfortable with, they are female. Just because that part of them comes out when they're more vulnerable doesn't mean that that's their "true" identity. It's just that, for all intents and purposes, they live their life "rounding themselves up" to male because that's "close enough," and it's just so much less complicated to say "I'm male" with all casual acquaintances and only in very safe spaces with close friends do they even bother to try to explain that really their identity is "mostly male most of the time but occasionally female with certain people under certain circumstances" rather than "male." And even female Molly is not especially femme.

Anyway thank you for letting me rant at you about how very much my story is NOT about a "straight passing woman." It's in fact very much a rebuttal to that narrative. Because I for one cannot imagine why someone would go to all the trouble and risk of pretending to be a gender they were not 24/7 in order to gain economic advantage. It just doesn't make sense to me. I feel like people who are willing to do that are trans, and I wanted to tell a trans story.

I just happen to not be a trans person (though I have my own... gender issues? IDK. I don't like being a woman. I'm still pretty sure I'm cis, though). But I'm queer and I know and love lots of trans people and I want to tell this trans story, and I hope that my friends will help me write something that will at the very least not be offensive and will hopefully ring true to some trans readers.