Sunday, April 19, 2015

Idea Garage Sale: The Transgender Western

Seriously. Since we just established that I haven't written it, somebody out there should. Somebody transgender, for choice.

Female crossdressing is a standard trope in the genre and happened a lot in history, but in fiction it ends with the woman declaring her heterosexuality and returning to female garb. As it sometimes did in real life. But not always.

And this could easily be reversed, and undoubtedly was, but since women led more circumscribed lives it doesn't inspire adventure fiction. But feminine "men," masculine "women," and intersex and genderfluid people have always existed. People must have changed their effective gender by changing clothes quite a lot, during time periods when gender was so strongly coded that nobody, ever, looked for other gender clues without a reason.

You'll need some kind of plot beyond that, of course, but if you read in the western genre, you know the plots and it should, once you consider your character, be clear at once how and where and into which plot this character would fit. Let's hear the story of the schoolmarm who used to be a cowboy, the widow rancher whose high collars mask an adam's apple, the orphan whose choices include which equally-possible face to turn to the world, the escaped slave whose description in the advertisement cites the wrong sex.

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