Statistics from my brain

So for those of you that had not figured this out yet, I'm a writer.  I have been for a really long time, and I love creating and screwing around with worlds and making characters and stuff.  A little too much, apparently, because when I recently decided to make a list of all of my active characters (as in, those I actually write about/think about with some level of frequency, who have an established story and personality) I came up with 62 of them.  I have clearly deteriorated into schizophrenia.

Rather than dwell on that thought, I decided to take the opportunity to take a count of the number of characters I had that fit into different labels (race, gender/sex, and sexuality to be specific, because I didn't have the time to do this in reality, so I really don't have the time to come up with other categories).  The results are as follows.

Of my 62 characters...
41 are female, 21 are male
49 are white/ethnic majorities, 13 are nonwhite/ethnic minorities (One Spanish, three Italian-American, one African, two black, one Latina, one Japanese, two who are ethnic minorities in a fantasy world you do not need explained to you.)
51 are straight, 12 are gay or "other" (Four lesbians, two bisexual, two undecided (as in I'm unsure enough about their sexual identity to not call them straight but I'm not 100% sure what they are), one asexual for all practical purposes, two generally asexual).

There is a lot of room for confusion/variation in here, if you couldn't tell from my qualifying everything, because of the factor of talking about people who do not actually exist, many of whom live in fantasy or science fiction universes.  For example, white is qualified technically as any ethnic majority in this list because one of the characters I determined as 'white' is actually dark-skinned, but he lives in a universe where that doesn't actually qualify him as an ethnic minority due to the circumstances.  'Asexual for all practical purposes' comes from Lurline, a character of mine who may or may not be attracted to either/or sex emotionally, but cannot have sexual relations without endangering herself, and since she considers sex to be an integral part of a romantic relationship, she's given up on the possibility of having any sort of romantic relationship, even a celibate one.  One of the 'generally asexual' characters is only thus qualified because she actually has no emotions and only a limited capacity to think on her own, being basically a soulless pawn, which invalidates the idea of sexuality entirely (and to some extent race as well, though because she is matched with a male partner gender still plays into her identity).

Still, I thought this was interesting to do.  It's clear that the vast majority of my characters are white straight females, which makes some sense - writers usually put something of themselves in their characters, and even though I don't identify as 100% straight I do identify as undecided, and straight is (perhaps unfortunately) sort of a default, so if I'm making a young white woman, I probably won't project my sexuality onto her, since I don't feel very strongly about that sexuality, and she'll end up being straight.  Usually if I make a character who's gay it'll be something I think about from the first that they will be gay or bisexual or whatever, but this isn't always the case, as with Axel and Ziba, those listed above as 'undecided.'  However, I do try to have the identities of my characters correspond to a relatively accurate population sample, which I think I've done fairly well in, though I could certainly improve.  (Not counting the very heavy female balance - I'm a woman, so it's just a lot easier for me get into the mindset of a character who is also a woman, and that's not going to change.)  There isn't a lot of liminal space being occupied, though... maybe I'll try that more in the future.

Also, if the length and detail I put into describing fictional beings frightens you, uh... yeah, I don't really claim that this is a sign of sanity or health.  Feel free to back away slowly the next time you see me.

A Little (Or a Lot) on Labels

So, recently I decided to write down everything I was feeling about who and what I was, and ended up writing quite a bit more than I'd expected. Here are some snippets of a few relevant things for this class, such as: names that I've used/preferred, pronouns, orientation labels, etc...

"My biological name is Patricia Leeann McGown. I am biologically female. I was born on December 10, 1992 to a Christian background. Almost exactly two years later, my brother was born. During my life so far, all seventeen years, I’ve learned a lot about who and what I am. It’s been a long, drawn out process. I’ve done some stuff that I’m not exactly proud of, and I lie a lot to hide from the things that I’m ashamed of.

Over the years, I’ve acquired quite a set of pseudonyms and nicknames that I’ll answer to. Some of them are from the internet, some of them make sense, and some of them are from God knows where in my mind. Here’s all the ones I remember right now:

• Tricia
• Trish
• Tish-Tish
• Patty
• Pa
• Trishy
• Squishy Trishy
• Clarke Alessane
• Reppy
• Dear
• Lonnie Leeann
• Leanna Crescent
• Clarke Classified
• Drew

I was in eighth grade when I discovered the Gay Straight Alliance in my school. Up until then, I’d been a Christian, in the Club for Christ, and I was everything a mother would ask for. I was a girl, I acted like one, I played feminine sports like volleyball, and I wore my hair long when I could, otherwise I curled or flat ironed it every morning. I was a straight girl. And then I realized that I liked girls. It was actually a very sore thumb moment. I remember waking up one morning and thinking to myself, “You’re going to Hell because you don’t just like boys.” That one was a shock, and I kept it to myself all through high school. Well, from my parents at least.

I started the coming out process (as bisexual) somewhere toward the end of my eighth grade year. I came out to Caroline, Gabby, Elena, and a couple other close friends. And then, at eighth grade promotion, I decided to tell Christine B. that I had a crush on her. She said she was flattered. I also begged her not to tell anyone because my family would find out, and I was terrified of that. And then summer came, and I ignored school for a straight three months. Everything was fine. I was happy and accepting of myself. I started looking up being bisexual and educated myself about the community. I came back from summer ready for high school.

Except when I started coming to summer volleyball practices, I noticed that I was being avoided. Nobody patted me on the butt when I made a fantastic block or crushed in practice. I saw girls doing it to everyone but me. I got no high fives, no butt pats, not even good jobs. When we took water breaks, I would go to the girl’s locker room to drink my water, otherwise the girls would look at me funny and not use the water fountain after me. So I finally asked someone. The response I got was, “We know you like girls, Tricia.” I was astounded. How did everyone know? I talked to Caroline, who talked to a couple other people, and we realized that Christine B. had told Laura W. that I was bisexual, and Laura told the entire tennis team, who, over the summer, had managed to tell everyone who was an entering freshman that I liked girls.

Not the greatest way to start off freshman year. So I was alone. I ate alone. There was no Gay-Straight Alliance. I thought, if this is what it’s like to be bisexual, I hate it. I joined the water polo team freshman year. The plus side to freshman year was water polo. Nobody seemed to care who I liked.

Starting my sophomore year, I was determined not to let my sexuality be the reason I had no friends. I started to tell people when I met them that I was bisexual until the whole school knew, and I became the president of the Gay-Straight Alliance. I worked with it for three years and set it up so that I would still be involved, no matter what. Which, coincidentally, meant that I was doing a lot of research about sexuality. Sometime between my sophomore and junior year in high school, I discovered pansexuality and things started to make sense. I’d heard of trans people, and I wondered who exactly would love them. I thought that I would if I could, and I realized that I did. Pansexuality seemed to just slip into place better than bi, and I was, by the end of my junior year, calling myself a pansexual girl, but I also said that I was a gay man in a gay woman’s body. I had no idea how true that was.

Senior year came and went, and college started. At Occidental, I realized how easy it was to be me. I could discover myself without the fear of being labeled. I could cut my hair short if I wanted to, wear what I wanted, and say what I wanted about myself without being shut down. So I did. I wear my hair short, I refer to myself in sometimes feminine pronouns, and sometimes masculine. I have discovered what I am, even if it’s got a lot of labels. I am the following:

• panromantic
• demisexual (or, more correctly to the asexual community, a “grey A”)
• transgender (in that I am bi-gendered/genderqueer)
• female-bodied, androgyne-identified (aka: biologically female, but feels androgynous...most days)
• queer
• African-American
• Irish

But more importantly, I am human. I deserve the same rights that everyone should have. I want to be able to get married to whomever I fall in love with, with the pronouns that the both of us prefer (at the time, forever, whatever [it shouldn’t matter]). I should be able to get married to whomever I fall in love with.

The labels shouldn’t be important to me.

I am a part of the LGBTQQIAAPD+ community, and damn it, I’m proud of who I am. I refuse to hide me anymore. I’m out to my parents as bisexual. I did it. That’s the big one, right? I did it. I’m out to my friends. I’m out on campus.

I am Patricia/Tricia/Lonnie/Clarke/Drew/Whatever I feel like calling myself, and I’m human.

It’s taken me seventeen years, eleven months, and fifteen days to say it, write it all down, understand, and accept it."

This is what labels have done in and with my life. Now, if we were to take a moment to think about what labels are doing for all kinds of other people in the world right now, what kind of a place would this be?

PS, this is a super interesting article (10 pages long, but worth your time when you have some) on Theories of Sexual Orientation. Take a look!

"Fag Bashing & Slut Shaming"

Fag Bashing & Slut Shaming: It’s About Policing Gender Roles

"I’m not going to argue that there aren’t any general trends in gender differences, although I do think that many things that we usually consider masculine or feminine are culturally based. Even for the things that show a statistically-significant difference between men and women, there are still plenty of people who have characteristics that are less common for people of their sex. People are not bell curves.

This is why we need to make room for gender diversity. Not only isn’t gender an either/or, it’s not even on a spectrum. The spectrum model, while allowing for more possibilities, still presents it as a zero-sum experience. It makes it seem as if, the more you have of one, the less you must have of the other. That approach reifies and reinforces the idea that there’s an opposition."

This is a view of an old issue - the ever present slut/sexy double standard for women - with a new twist that includes gender identities. I've heard a lot of people arguing over the issue, or simply grumbling about it, but mostly the conversation was about sex and not gender.

Thinking of it now, the topic of gender identity has always been lurking under the surface. It's integral to the debate of how we view and label the sexuality of others based on their sex and, now that I realize it, their gender identity.

The article also has some pictures along the way which I think are books dealing with similar topics, so if you're absolutely captivated you'll know where to go.