lierdumoa | Genderbending Meta

Meta and navel gazing.

I'll go briefly into my short history of my experience with genderbending fic. I encountered it in a number of fandoms, but the fic that really made me like the idea of genderbending and made me want to play with the idea myself was Saiyuki fic. In a nutshell, we have the character Gojyo, who is kind of a ho, good looking, and has issues that he drowns them in sex, and as a girl he'd, well, he'd be Shane from L Word. We also have the character Sanzo, who's so beautiful he spent his whole life being mistaken for female and looked at like a piece of meat and raging at the world because why should he have to go through this? Other guys don't have to go through this. Sanzo is actually less fucked up as a girl than he is as a boy.

He'd be less fucked up, and he'd probaby have more sex.

Conclusion: genderbending = shiny happy place of joy and non-fucked-up-ness and porn, and then more porn.

Which brings me to my SGA fic. There are a number of reasons I chose Rodney to turn into a woman for my fic, but mainly they all boil down to him being the candidate who could provide the largest amount of porn with the smallest amount of angst. Rodney is forced into extremely uncomfortable/outrageous/surreal/terrifying situations on a nearly constant basis, and while he may get extremely (hilariously) vocally upset, he's not likely to have a breakdown. And he doesn't get laid too often, so given the opportunity, he's not likely to say no.

What terrifies Rodney most is a loss of control and a female body, while unfamiliar, is still relatively under his control. Rodney is apparently hypoglycemic, or at least enough of a hypochondriac that he thinks he is, so it's not like fluctuating body chemistry is a new and horrible thing to him. The period would not be that big of a deal. Additionally, Rodney is far too convinced of his own genius to doubt for more than a minute that he'd be able to turn himself back the way he was, assuming he had access to the technology that switched his gender in the first place.

When I wrote about Rodney looking at himself in the mirror, I wrote it keeping in mind that as far as Rodney was concerned, this was not his body. He was not looking at it as if it were his body. He was looking at it like, "Hey, there's a naked woman in the mirror. I would totally do her." Because Rodney as a girl is hot and even if she weren't, Rodney (as previously mentioned) doesn't get laid too often. His standards are not that high. And, really Rodney's appearance just is not a big deal to him. All of his self-confidence is buried in his intelligence. He's certainly not going to worry about his looks in a body that isn't even his.

Of course, certain things would freak him out, and he would throw random tantrums, as he does, and he would get over them pretty quickly, as he does, and that's why we love Rodney. He never ceases to entertain. He doesn't take shit from anyone on anything ever, so he's not likely to curl in on himself if people say not nice things about him. He's more likely to extremely (hilariously) vocally bitch them out.

I had a few people give me feedback for the first part of my fic saying they loved how my Rodney was still the same after he changed genders, which confused me until I twigged to the fact that people think of the term girl!Rodney in this fandom much the same way people think of the term sexgod!Draco in HP. Which is to say, girl!Rodney is thought of as a persona with Rodney's face, rather than an actual experiment in how Rodney McKay would act if he were turned into a woman under a particular set of circumstances.

I did not choose to turn John into a woman because I know if I tried to write John as a woman, the fic would end up focusing on angst, rather than porn, and a type of angst I am not particularly good with.

There are a lot of aspects of John's personality that strike me as stereotypically female. When he is having an argument he is more likely to use passive aggression than active aggression. He often relies on his charm and his looks to get people's attention with overt flirting. He argues by appealing to people's emotions rather than to their logic. He has maternal instincts like whoa. This is interesting to me because at the same time, John Sheppard does not come across as feminine at all. He is all of these things and he is still very much a guy. He defies stereotypes without requiring some sort of justification for doing so -- we simply accept him for who he is.

The fact that he's scorchingly hot doesn't hurt.

But take, for example, the way he shows his intelligence, or rather, doesn't show it. He's incredibly smart, but he hides behind a dumb jock facade. He acts this way (I assume) because he is military and his motivation is to fit in with the rest of the military. If a woman introduced herself by saying, "I like football and ferris wheels" we'd be calling her a ditz. If a woman were hiding her intelligence, we would assume her motivation was not to fit in with the jocks, but rather to avoid intimidating them.

If John were a woman, fandom would make assumptions about him that we don't make because he is not a woman. Or rather, the fandom would conclude that the writers were making assumptions about "women in general" in writing John. Offensive assumptions. The fact that John is a man is, well, interesting. I honestly believe John is the product of a bunch of male geeks getting in a room and trying to envision the perfect man and, being heterosexual, instead envisioning the perfect woman and then giving her a cock. I'd call it subversive if I weren't so sure the writers were doing it completely on accident.

I mean, think about it. If it were on purpose? So subversive.

Really, I don't care why John is the way he is. I don't think about that when I'm writing fic about him. I just enjoy him for being an interesting, three dimensional character with his own set of issues, etc.

However, if I were to turn John into a woman in a fic, I would inevitably reach the point where he tried to go on an offworld mission and use his usual negotiating methods and whomever he was negotiating with would most likely not take him seriously at all because he'd be the "hot ditzy chick carrying an incongruously big gun" and that's just really depressing. That's why Kristen Kreuk hates playing Lana Lang on Smallville. Whatever depth her character might have goes unexplored on the show, and she ends up being nothing more than a pin-up. If John got turned into a woman, it really would be kind of traumatizing for him because at some point he'd have an epiphany.

He'd have an epiphany about who he is, about the way the the military and men in power treat women, about his personality in a woman's body, and that epiphany would hurt. It would be the equivalent of the teenaged boy standing in the gym showers in his midwestern school thinking, "Crap, I'm a fag" (which, as we all know, John also had to go through) and I ... I can't hurt him like that. It breaks my brain a little.

And it completely messes with my whole concept of genderbending as a shiny happy place of joy and non-fucked-up-ness and porn, and then more porn.

Reading genderbending fic in this fandom, for me, anyway, is kind of like that one beer commercial. I think it was Millers. You know, the one that goes like:

Guy 1: I love this beer!
Guy 2: Hey, me too!
Guy 1: Yes, the taste is great.
Guy 2: I like the smoothness.
Guy 1: ... but, the taste.
Guy 2: ... no, the smoothness.
Guy 1: ... ?
Guy 2: ... ???

In other news, still have 500 wds to go on pt. 2 of the fic. Should get back to that.