Transpire Together by Mercy Zephyr

"They should get counseling for that. I can't imagine them having a happy ending until that was fixed."

I had just described my current work-in-progress to someone. Both main characters shared my orientation, drawn from my own lived experience and how I experience attraction. My characters living happily as they were had just been deemed too strange, too queer, for my listener to comprehend.

My heart heard this: "You are broken. Until pivotal parts of who you are beyond your control change, you can never be happy." It was a message I knew well; heard often from others, and sometimes myself.

When did you first see yourself reflected in a story? I saw the question posed recently, and the first reply was, "Cinderella, when I was three years old. She was a white blonde girl like me." For me, it was the Saturday Night Live series of skits "It's Pat", where an overweight, relentlessly androgynous person with a grating and whiny voice fended off horrifyingly inappropriate attempts to learn what was between their legs.

I was in high school then, and it was the first time that I saw a character, unflattering as they might be, confidently refusing to meet the expectations of the gender people tried to impose upon them. I saw the character fighting against the view wherein whatever was between their legs would magically bottle them into cultural expectations and demands. I knew I wasn't who I needed to pretend to be, and I resented it.

After that, the characters I saw myself in were all villains. For too long, characters have been framed as "against society" through defiance of gender and sexuality norms. Queer characters could be depicted only if they came to a horrific end. Queerness was literally evilness. Goodness was shown by desires I could not share. I saw myself reflected in the doomed and despised evildoers on the margins of the story, soon to be defeated by the heroes for the sake of "Good people".

Growing up, I never saw my favorite characters have a happy ending. I assumed I would be dead before the turn of the century, doomed like a character in a book or on screen. Years later, I still hadn't revised my estimate; I had no idea what to do with my life. Aimless, my peers achieved great things as I waited for death. I was starved for role models, for happy endings that would show me that it could work out, for a light at the end of the tunnel.

There are millions of readers like me out there, worthy, good people, hungry for hope—yet believing themselves too villainous, too deviant, too broken to deserve it. All are used to their own forms of being made to feel less than, broken, or monstrous.

Romance is about happy endings. A happy end to the story is mandatory, much like the solving of a mystery in a mystery story. It demands the happiness we crave.

Research shows views on issues such as racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, and aphobia being affected by whether the people report knowing someone in those groups. Excitingly, or perhaps worryingly, characters in books, movies, and television count as "people known". "Coming Out", revealing oneself to the world, could be done in abstract—for good or for ill.

In 2012, asexual and aromantic people suffered a sudden spike in bigotry and social disapproval, created by the television show "House". An episode featured an asexual couple, pathologizing them, referring to them as "algae", then finally revealing their relationship to be a medical condition. The wife was portrayed as simply lying. At least two people I have spoken to lost family support and became estranged when that episode aired.

Many books containing LGBTQIA people written neither by nor for LGBTQIA people. The Amazon category "Transgender Romance", at last check, was dominated by a mixture of fetish pieces; some involved women with a fully functional penis, others involved "forced feminization"—cisgender men forced to adopt hyperfeminine presentation. The first is biologically implausible without biohacking, the second psychologically implausible because of the very dynamics of gender dysphoria that we live with every day.

Between those two fetishes, one can construct every absurd scenario used to attack the transgender community. Unrealistic and miserable narratives of trans people, by cis people, for cis people, weaponized against trans people.

My book Transpire Together shows this strain from our side. In it, a man struggles with the fear of the political campaign against his existence as he meets his high school girlfriend after a long absence. She doesn't recognize her old high school girlfriend in him at first, and he wrestles with these thoughts alone at first, scared into secrecy.

Many of the thoughts and happenings of Transpire Together came from my own and my husband's experiences of living near, yet in the shadow of, such a public fight over our lives between people informed solely by uneducated fiction. It showed that no matter the barriers, we must present our side; some will come away newly informed, others with new hope for their own happy ending.

AUTHOR MERCY ZEPHYR

Mercy Zephyr is a romance writer, focusing on low heat contemporary stories with transgender protagonists. 

An Alaska Native, asexual transgender woman, married 11 years so far, she quarantines with the family cat, occasionally entertains her granddaughter, and pines for the days of working at coffee shops.

Transpire Together can be bought from all your favorite ebook retailers at: https://books2read.com/b/mVr5B2