Diversity In Fiction

As a transgender woman who started writing her series (#thepaxseries) in 2005, well before I even knew that there was a word for myself, I can't say that my first piece of work, PaxCorpus, is totally clear of problematic social issues that I may have injected into the beginning of the series. This is something that is totally due to my lack of social awareness at the time, and the many, many ingrained and problematic things that the people around me had me believing.

Now, it's no MRA manifesto or anything (god no, holy shit), but there is, unfortunately, a little bit of passive misogyny that I wish I could have avoided at the time. But what's done is done, and it's part of the series. Overall, a really big accomplishment in my life.

With my second book, Escape Velocity, I was just barely started with my transition, and not very up-to-date on my social awareness, or what most would call "social justice" or intersectional feminism, so although I did reveal one of the characters to be transgender, I was later not very happy with the way I had originally handled things. Especially with the fact that I killed that character off. But then, things happen in my stories that sometimes just happen, they're out of my control and the characters take on a life of their own.

I am changing that with the re-imagining of my third novel, NETHERBOUND. I've already decided that the main character, Morgan Karga, is pansexual, a woman and I haven't yet decided how I would make her transgender if I should choose to, or how I would do it in a way that would make sense 223 years after the fall of humanity (in 2013). Although I'm sure lots of you can think of ways that it'd be easily possible, there are circumstances revolving around

this character that kind of restrict her and her existence to solely happening on the described space vessel (and nowhere else).

Strange predicaments that I've written myself into aside, there are many other characters who will crop up throughout the next few chapters that I write, all from diverse backgrounds. With my fiction I am trying to move as far as I can from entertainment standards, even if the plot mechanism is something that's been used before. Even if my previous books (of which span the last nine years of my life) were not totally perfect and well-versed in social justice standards and feminism.

And that's just one more reason that Dante needs to change, for good.