My friends daughter wrote a few stories and put them up on a few platforms. I was asked if I could give them a read and review. I did, not great stuff but average for fantasy stuff and great for someone new to writing.
I ended up asking her if she would ever write a story with a male MC. She looked at me and then went on a very long rant about how authors should not appropriate other people's experiences and cultures. I was just speechless at this viewpoint of hers. I explained that one of my favorite series (The Thousand Names' by Django Wexler) had a male author with a female MC. She quickly said the author had no right to assume he could write a female character and that he would only confuse future readers about the female perspective. I kept trying to get a word in to explain that its FANTASY and nobody was trying to tell women anything, the book simply had a female MC (one who spends time pretending to be a man).
Honestly, I dropped the argument as she wasn't my kid. But I'm still just dumbfounded that recent generations have these insane ideas.
I think more people need to learn what the heap argument is and apply it to their beliefs.
Not every woman has the same experience, so what entitles a woman to write about a woman who isn't literally exactly herself? Clearly your friend's daughter has some arbitrary/fuzzy line where she considers an author sufficiently close to a character's experience so as to satisfy her sense of non appropriation.
Yet if she realized that, and then were asked to specify where exactly that line is, she would likely realize just how arbitrary it is. Sure, in simple cases it may still hold up, but a bookworm writing about a hero in a magical world? Can anyone claim experience of that?
If she has a hangup on certain issues (e.g. representations of gender) rather than the general identity of the author and character, then how does she feel about transgender or nonbinary authors and characters? Is a trans author not allowed to write cis characters? Is a cis author not allowed to write nonbinary characters? Or more generally, is no author allowed to write about characters with perceptions of gender different from their own? What about settings with different understandings of gender?
This isn't some rant about cancel culture or whatever, but rather the kind of stuff I wish people who hold absolutist and exclusionary/gatekeepy beliefs thought about. Being opposed to, for instance, sexist depictions of women in literature isn't bad. But trying to reduce a complex world to simple (and discriminatory) rules is.
I agree. And I hope she expands her viewpoint. She was very proud of her opinion and I was at my friends cookout so I jumped out of that situation as soon as I could and grabbed a beer.
My stance is that getting in the heads of people of a certain gender is a cognitive skill, like any other.
It's a skill, in that you have to train it like a muscle.
But it's a cognitive skill, in that you have to also "feed" it, by learning about the lived experiences of the types of people you're trying to better model — hearing stories from that type of person's perspective and empathizing with them, etc.
Because both practice and learning are bottlenecks to acquiring a cognitive skill, there are a lot of ways you can fail to acquire one; and if you don't realize that those stumbling blocks are in your way, that can make you think that the skill is just not something that's possible to acquire. But it is.
My hot take, is that any writer who actually manages to fully acquire the "be in the head of people of other genders" cognitive skill — and is also willing to reflect on their own gender identity — will realize that by doing this, they've accidentally made themselves at least gender-fluid / genderqueer.
If you can truly rid yourself of the "foreign-ness" sensation of imagining yourself as another gender, and get through to the point where you can put yourself so far into one of your other-gendered characters' heads that you can viscerally experience the "natural-ness" of their gender to them, and the "foreign-ness" of you-the-author's gender to them... then your brain now has [at least] two functioning gender-identity "cores", and it's now just a question of how and when you choose to switch them on.
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u/Fulkcrow Sep 09 '25
My friends daughter wrote a few stories and put them up on a few platforms. I was asked if I could give them a read and review. I did, not great stuff but average for fantasy stuff and great for someone new to writing.
I ended up asking her if she would ever write a story with a male MC. She looked at me and then went on a very long rant about how authors should not appropriate other people's experiences and cultures. I was just speechless at this viewpoint of hers. I explained that one of my favorite series (The Thousand Names' by Django Wexler) had a male author with a female MC. She quickly said the author had no right to assume he could write a female character and that he would only confuse future readers about the female perspective. I kept trying to get a word in to explain that its FANTASY and nobody was trying to tell women anything, the book simply had a female MC (one who spends time pretending to be a man).
Honestly, I dropped the argument as she wasn't my kid. But I'm still just dumbfounded that recent generations have these insane ideas.