Upside Down: Inverted Tropes in Storytelling

Upside Down: Inverted Tropes in Storytelling is an anthology of short stories, poetry, and essays where writers pick a tired trope and are challenged to turn that trope upside down. Edited by Jaym Gates and Monica Valentinelli.

Read stories inspired by tropes such as the Chainmaille Bikini, Love at First Sight, Damsels in Distress, Yellow Peril, The Black Man Dies First, The Villain Had a Crappy Childhood, The Singularity Will Cause the Apocalypse, and many more...then discover what these tropes mean to each author to find out what inspired them.

Join Maurice Broaddus, Adam Troy-Castro, Delilah S. Dawson, Shanna Germain, Sara M. Harvey, John Hornor Jacobs, Rahul Kanakia, Alethea Kontis, Valya Dudycz Lupescu, Haralmbi Markov, Sunil Patel, Kat Richardson, Nisi Shawl, Ferrett Steinmetz, Anton Strout, Michael Underwood, Alyssa Wong, and many other authors as they take well-worn tropes and cliches and flip them upside down.

Table of Contents

SECTION I: INVERTING THE TROPES

On Loving Bad Boys: A Villanelle — Valya Dudycz Lupescu
Single, Singularity — John Hornor Jacobs
Lazzrus — Nisi Shawl
Seeking Truth — Elsa Sjunneson-Henry
Thwock — Michelle Muenzler
Can You Tell Me How to Get to Paprika Place? — Michael R. Underwood
Chosen — Anton Strout
The White Dragon — Alyssa Wong
Her Curse, How Gently It Comes Undone — Haralambi Markov
Burning Bright — Shanna Germain
Santa CIS (Episode 1: No Saint) — Alethea Kontis
Requiem for a Manic Pixie Dream — Katy Harrad & Greg Stolze
The Refrigerator in the Girlfriend — Adam-Troy Castro
The First Blood of Poppy Dupree — Delilah S. Dawson
Red Light — Sara M. Harvey
Until There Is Only Hunger — Michael Matheson
Super Duper Fly — Maurice Broaddus
Drafty as a Chain Mail Bikini — Kat Richardson
Swan Song — Michelle Lyons-McFarland
Those Who Leave — Michael Choi
Nouns of Nouns: A Mini Epic — Alex Shvartsman
Excess Light — Rahul Kanakia
The Origin of Terror — Sunil Patel
The Tangled Web -—Ferrett Steinmetz
Hamsa, Hamsa, Hamsa, Tfu, Tfu, Tfu. — Alisa Schreibman
Real Women Are Dangerous — Rati Mehrotra

SECTION II: DISCUSSING THE TROPES
I'm Pretty Sure I've Read This Before ... — Patrick Hester
Fractured Souls — Lucy A. Snyder
Into the Labyrinth: The Heroine's Journey — A.C. Wise
Escaping the Hall of Mirrors — Victor Raymond
Tropes as Erasers: A Transgender Perspective — Keffy R.M. Kehrli

SECTION III: DEFINING THE TROPES
Afterword — Monica Valentinelli & Jaym Gates
Trope Definitions/Index of Tropes

SECTION IV: ACKNOWLEDGMENTS AND ADDITIONAL BIOS

Excerpt

From the essay "Tropes As Erases: A Transgender Perspective" by Keffy R.M. Kehrli

TW: This essay includes frank discussion of anti-trans tropes, rapes, murders, and hate crimes. Additionally, if you Google “Tropes about Transgender people,” you are likely to end up on a WordPress site named “TransgenderTropes101.” This is a hate site and is best avoided.

I grew up without any transgender representation of any depth or value. To be fair, I also grew up with very little cisgender queer representation of any depth or value, either. There were oblique references, but typically not in the media that I was given to consume as a child. The references in adult media were filtered through daytime talk shows or the Rush Limbaugh-listening parents of friends. Or jokes. Or that one extremely pitiful-to-my-memory gay guy in As Good As It Gets. (My own parents are considerably more liberal, but left LGBTQ discussions for, “well, that’s a thing that happens to other people’s children.”)

Until I was 20 and wandered away from my college campus to meet the locals who practically lived in an independent coffee shop a mile or so away, my experiences of trans people were limited to:

Jokes and/or whispers I overheard about how so-and-so got a sex change. (Always trans women.)

Maury Povich episodes. (Also always trans women.)

“But, Keffy,” I can hear some of you say, having correctly done the math and knowing I’m not that old, “what about Boys Don’t Cry? Wasn’t that about a trans man?”

Well, yes. I didn’t watch that because the film didn’t sound interesting to me, just depressing. I had no idea that it was about a trans man because it was described to me as, “A movie about a girl who pretends to be a boy and gets murdered.” Since Brandon Teena was played by Hilary Swank, that seemed like a likely description. I didn’t know that Boys Don’t Cry was about a trans man until after I had come out.

In any case, it had not even occurred to me that it was possible to be trans male—transgender people were exclusively trans feminine in my experience—until I was in a group of comic artists discussing gender, and one of them said, “Yeah, but you identify as female, right?”

Two things happened. First, I stammered out some “well, I don’t know” answer because I had honestly never considered that I got a say in the matter of my own gender up until that point. And, second, after it sank in over a few days, I felt like I had crawled out of bed one morning to discover that I had no face. You see, I knew how to function as a gender defying young woman. I’d carved out an existence within the versions of womanhood opened up by feminism in which I felt it my duty to fight for any masculinity I wanted. I had models, though sometimes flawed, of women who had gone before me. Women who flipped the finger to the universe, picked up their beakers or strapped on their flight goggles and did what they needed to do.

I had no models for what a trans man was, except the vague unease that in order to be myself, I was going to have to betray feminism.

Thankfully, I found friends who were trans male, and in the grand tradition of being queer in a hostile world, they were my role models, flawed as they were. I’ve been continuously surprised since the mid oughts, however, that the stereotype common within LGBTQ circles is that all trans men transitioned as children and are the most beloved in university campus queer communities. This was not my experience. When I visited the LGBTQ group at my university, I sat and talked to a couple of lesbians who could not wait to get rid of me. I didn’t go back.

Feeling newly lost as I grew into my 20s had made representation of trans people outside the typical expectations a major issue to me. I was late in understanding myself because there was no room for me in the world. Trans people seemed to exist entirely within stereotypes and tropes: only trans women exist, trans women are jokes, trans women are liars, trans men aren’t real, trans men all pass as cisgender men and have since they were children.

Tropes about groups of people (trans people, women, people of color, etc) can affect the way others see us. They can also affect the way we see ourselves. Or, in my case, if we see ourselves. If the only models we have for the world are these tropes and stereotypes and we don’t fit those, then what are we?

Transition isn’t magic: simple, one-step transition as a trope.

I was partly disappointed and partly relieved when I started to research transition and found out that it’s an open-ended process rather than an event. Among the uneducated, transition is often discussed as a “sex change surgery.” Transition can seem sudden if you’re a cisgender person who isn’t within the circle of trusted friends and family who hear about the impending transition ahead of time. There have been moments when I wished it was that simple, that it was a single surgery and you were just done, forever. Never needing to give myself another testosterone injection would be awesome.

The reality of transition is that it’s a process that has different goals, outcomes, and time-frames depending on the person undergoing it. Physical transition of one’s body is not an overnight event and is not desired by every trans person. When physical transition is required, the medical procedures chosen depend on the goals of the trans person and, unfortunately, their financial or medical means.

In fiction, however, the nuance is often lost. Gender Swap, Magical Sex Changes, replacement bodies, and the like have been a part of modern science fiction for decades. The magical Gender Swap frequently plays out in which someone magically wakes up in the “wrong” body. Magical Sex Changes involve a trans character being gifted the “right” body (meaning, indistinguishable from a cisgender body). Science fiction takes on these tropes usually by postulate replacement bodies, virtual reality existences, or “perfected” gender confirmation surgeries. There are similar tropes (although broken down differently than I do here) listed on the website TV Tropes as Easy Sex Change and Gender Bender.

Although the magical transition can be used to examine gender dysphoria, these are often stories written by and for cisgender people. The Gender Swap story is also typically about a cisgender character who has suddenly been shoved into a body with secondary sex characteristics of the “opposite” gender. The ensuing story is typically extremely binary and gender essentialist, with that little dash of fantasy or science fiction to make it interesting. Genitalia are typically obsessed over, almost to the exclusion of anything else.

This is also a trope that is often played for humorous purposes. For some reason, people don’t seem to be able to get over the apparent hilarity of gender play, much as they still laugh at fart jokes. The joke here, of course, is something along the lines of cis men joking that if they suddenly woke up in a female body, they’d never stop playing with their breasts! Or cis women joking that if they woke up with a dick for a day, they’d write their names in the snow and jerk off for ten hours straight. Or, whatever.

This trope generally bears little resemblance to reality for most trans people and erases the real difficulties and decisions that we end up facing when we decide to transition, to whichever degree we decide to do so. Very few of us are able to pull off a rapid, let alone instantaneous, transition from one gender to another without a stage in which we don’t “pass” as cis. Some of us never “pass” as cisgender no matter what we do. Not all of us want to. The instant shift from male to female (or female to male) in which nobody ever questions the gender of the person in question on either side of the magical transition feels extremely unlike the reality that myself and many of my trans or non-binary friends face. I’m not arguing here that every story featuring a transgender character needs to discuss that character’s transition in detail. It’s the trope in which these problems are actively waved away by the author that bothers me.

The magical/instant transition trope turns transgender people into a rhetorical device to examine the gender hang-ups of the cisgender author or readers. In this way, it takes our lived experiences, erases them from the most elementary framework of our lives (transition), and replaces those experiences with an exclusionary thought experiment or joke.

As a side-note, there are some pieces of science fiction and fantasy that deal with “hermaphrodite” characters, but those characters are usually aliens or other magical races. Regardless of whether the hermaphroditic characters are human or not, their lives and experiences seem to bear little to no resemblance to the lives of actual intersex people. The depiction of this character often focuses in lurid detail on their genitalia, typically with an overly simplified elementary school health class understanding of the biology involved in sex and gender. Although these characters are often non-human races, I have run across occasional depictions of human hermaphrodites, and these often postulate a being with Perfectly Functional Cis-Normative versions of “both” sets of genitalia. In reality, “hermaphrodites” are fictional as the term is no longer accepted for use when describing people with these conditions (ISNA). I’ve read a few depictions of intersex characters that I thought were interesting, for example, the protagonists in Kim Stanley Robinson’s 2312 are well-written otherwise, and their lives don’t revolve around their genders.

That said, I get extremely uncomfortable when I read about characters described as “hermaphrodites,” especially if they’re intended to be humans because I expect the depiction to be less than ideal.

Trans People Don’t Need Your Incorrect, Fictional Warnings. Seriously.

When not imagining a world in which transition is painless and instant, tropes about transition focus on warning people away. Often the focus of these warnings is on transition’s permanence, which is not always true depending on how one decides to transition. In the case of transgender children, the effects of transition are typically not permanent at all. Pre-pubescent transgender children, for example, will typically transition by telling others of their new name and pronouns and possibly changing their physical appearance via their chosen clothing and perhaps a haircut. That’s hardly permanent. Older children are sometimes placed on puberty blockers so that when they begin to take hormones (typically starting between the ages of 16 and 18), they will only have to endure one puberty. The blockers are reversible. Nobody is rushing out and giving permanent surgery to young children.

While it is true that some of the effects of transition are permanent, trans people are not jumping into medical interventions without consideration of the effects. Trans people are typically well educated regarding our options, so much so that attending new doctors is disappointing because we often end up educating our doctors rather than vice versa. In the United States, the coverage for transgender treatments, especially surgeries, is often dependent on individual insurance companies. Worse, as I discovered a few years ago when researching options for top surgery, coverage is often dependent on the particular plan that your employer is offering. I was in the interesting position of working for a trans-friendly employer, with a plan from a company that covered transgender treatments in general, but the particular plan that I was offered through my employer did not have coverage. That has since changed, but unfortunately only did so a month before I got laid off.

Very recently—as in, while I was writing this essay—an episode of the Power Puff Girls reboot was released in which the tropes of instant, permanent, ignorant transition are played for body horror and an intensely ill-considered statement regarding trans issues.

The episode features a pony named Donny who wants to be a unicorn. Of course, The Professor has been working on a transmogrification ray that will do just that thing. The show depicts Donny ignoring a massive pile of potential side effects, and, of course, being punished for his desire to change his body by experiencing every horrible side effect that he blithely ignored (Jitterbug Jive).

The trope that transition will happen immediately and be completely permanent in every way was one of the things used to try and scare me away from making any changes to my body. My initial discussions with medical professionals about taking hormones essentially involved those professionals trying to talk me out of taking them. This will be permanent. You might not like all the changes. There are side effects when testosterone is taken by women. Etc. You will regret it. What if you regret it? Letting someone know the effects of the treatment is one thing, but trying to pressure us into not transitioning is something else entirely.

I still remember being told that when I started taking testosterone, it would turn me into a hulking, hairy, masculine rage monster. I did grow more body hair, that’s normal. And I did have moments when my emotions were overwhelming. But … as a transgender person who also suffers from depression and who has dealt with his share of PMS prior to taking testosterone, it wasn’t anything that unusual.

The trope, however, is that testosterone is a horrific poison that is singularly responsible for all the evils in the world. Bullshit. Men don’t act badly because of testosterone alone. Hormones aren’t the only thing that controls our behavior. Testosterone is not the cause of toxic masculinity. Trans men don’t take a shot of testosterone and then immediately go out to punch women in the street.

The irony, of course, is the number of people who would rail against gender essentialism in almost any other case who immediately became concerned that testosterone would send me into a massive “‘roid rage.” Starting hormone treatments can be a time of massive emotional upheaval for trans people, but the scaremongering is vastly overstated. I’m no angrier now than I was before I started testosterone.

This trope also showed up in a book I read a few years ago. White Horse by Alex Adams is about a magical plague wiping out most of humanity. The book takes place in the post-apocalyptic wasteland left behind. Besides the frustration that I felt in being served up yet another apocalypse story in which women are constantly dealing with rape and rape threats, the book had one of the most transphobic character depictions that I have read in a book. The villain, a terrible, violent man who had captured and wanted to rape the protagonist, was revealed to have been a woman before the magical transformation. The shift to a body that contained testosterone turned her (now him) into a horrifying monster who was willing to rape and murder everyone in revenge for having lost her (his) female body. The book somehow managed to hit both the anti-trans masculine trans trope of testosterone rage and the anti-trans feminine trope of the evil trans woman who is planning to rape and murder cis women to make up for her lack of a female body. Nice trick, that.

In retrospect, whether it was intentional or not, I’m rather impressed that the author managed to turn the “testosterone makes people violent” and “trans people are dangerous” tropes into a book that is wildly offensive against both trans men and trans women at the same time.

The Scary Trans Person Trope: We’re Not Monsters, Seriously.

What’s truly pernicious about anti-trans tropes is that they are often reiterated and kept alive by people who ought to know better. Several years ago, I was sitting in a room with a very good friend of mine when their boyfriend came into the room. “Hey, have you heard about the Black Widow?”

What followed was the regurgitation of an urban legend in which a large, black trans woman seeks out cisgender men to lure in with her femininity, and then rapes, kills, and/or otherwise assaults them. We let him finish, listening with a sense of growing horror, and then explained in no uncertain terms that he needed to never, ever, ever repeat that story again.

Ever.

The “scary trans woman” tends to be more of a societal trope rather than one in science fiction or fantasy (although, as I write this, I’m certain that someone, somewhere, is writing this trope into a story right now). This imaginary monster of a trans woman is overlaid on real trans women and creates a boogeyman that erases the very real dangers that trans women face. Worse, this imaginary threat puts trans women in even more danger.

Trans women, especially trans women of color, are the LGBTQ people most likely to be targeted in a hate crime. When we discuss people who have been murdered for being queer, most of these are trans women of color. Yet, because of the societal notion that the fragile masculinity of cis men must be protected at all costs from these women, the danger that trans women are in is upheld, protected, and justified.

We see this in the use (and success) of the “trans panic defense” when trans women are murdered. In this case, the murder of a woman whose transgender existence was a figurative assault on her murderer’s masculinity. This was recently used in the defense of Jessica Laude’s murderer, a U.S. Marine who killed her after discovering that she was a trans woman (Brydum).

Islan Nettles, a young black trans woman, was murdered in 2013 by a man who beat her to death in the street because he felt that his masculinity had been threatened by Islan’s gender. The prevalence of the “trans panic” defense with respect to murdered trans women is so common that feelings tended toward relief when Nettles’s murderer was charged with manslaughter (instead of murder) because at least he wouldn’t be set free. (McKinley).

We also see this complete disregard given to the reasons why a trans woman being assaulted in the street would fight to defend herself. Look at the story of CeCe McDonald, who was sent to prison for two years because she killed a man in self-defense after he and his friends attacked her in the street (Erdely). The stats, the stories, these all led to the conclusion that a trans woman attacked by a man can expect to be a “Transgender woman murdered” headline (National LGBTQ Task Force). As of 2015, the number of trans women murdered seems to be increasing yearly (Michaels).

The trope is that trans women are dangerous predators. The reality is that trans women are simply women trying to get by in a world that is determined to hate them.

As an aside, I felt torn writing this section of the essay. As a white, financially surviving trans man, the pain of trans women of color is decidedly not mine to write about. On the other hand, ignoring the very real harm done to trans women of color would be just another erasure. Please seek out the voices of trans women of color. Monica Roberts at Transgriot (Roberts) writes about these issues often.

About the Editors

Monica Valentinelli is an editor, writer, and game developer who lurks in the dark. Her work includes stories, games, and comics for her original settings as well as media/tie-in properties such as the Firefly TV show, Brandon Sanderson’s Mistborn, and Vampire: The Masquerade. Her nonfiction includes reference materials such as Firefly: The Gorramn Shiniest Language Guide and Dictionary in the ‘Verse, and essays in books like For Exposure: The Life and Times of a Small Press Publisher.

Jaym Gates is an editor, author, and communications manager. She’s the editor of the Rigor Amortis, War Stories, Exalted, and Genius Loci anthologies, as well as a published author in fiction, academic nonfiction, and RPG