Okay so you know that phan book called Transgender that has a sentence a chapter? I fucking hate it.
okay first of all, the sentence per chapter bullshit's fucking annoying as hell. like you're obviously just trying to make your book look longer while in reality three chapters of my books are nearly longer than your entire book put together. what the fuck dude?
second of all, why I actually hate it, is because it's inaccurate on two huge accounts that piss me off a lot. first, it makes it seem like there's nothing to a a trans person than being trans. like Dan's gender identity was all he was, there was literally nothing else to him in the book (I read the whole thing and the second book so I wouldn't be spewing inaccurate shit okay). that pissed me off. know why? because trans people are PEOPLE. We are more than our gender and whatever's in our pants. honestly that pisses me off.
also why it's inaccurate, it doesn't even show what it's really like to be transgender. it only shows Dan for his gender identity and it doesn't even do so correctly. it doesn't show you how much it can kill whatever self esteem you have, or how horrid dysphoria is. it doesn't show how dysphoria can eat you from the inside out so all you feel is emptiness and that sense that everything about you is wrong and you know you can never truly fix it, you know that this is your life forever. it doesn't fucking show how bad it is.
when you write about something you don't deal with, like being trans or a mental illness, you fucking learn what it's like. I'm currently writing about a schizophrenic character. know what? I did my god damned research. I sat and read the causes of it, the effects, every little symptom. I read so many different stories about what it's like to have the certain type of schizophrenia I gave Tony. I found something that gave you a look into what it's like to have it, and I did so much more. I understood it, and I understood what it was like to have it as much as someone who doesn't have it can. the author clearly couldn't be fucking bothered to do half that and it pisses me off more than it probably should because it's just incorrect.
ALSO- it's copied. it's not original. a few days before reading it for the first time, I came across this short film called "Boy." it was really good. then I read Transgender, and every fucking thing Dan dealt with was the exact same. the author put "inspired by the short film 'Boy'" in the description, but that's not inspiration, that's the same fucking thing but written out.
so yeah I don't know if you can tell but I'm not very happy this book exists.
