This summer I discovered a really great fannish resource that I have since spent quite a bit of time weeding through. The Multi-Fandom Transfic Master List is hosted on delicious.com and maintained by Kyuuketsukirui. The goal is to maintain a central clearing house for links to various works of fanfiction taking transgender identity as a central theme.

In browsing through the stories tagged ‘mtf’ on the list, I encountered several authors who were seeing the possibility of trans maleness in a number of existing stories about female warriors. The idea had crossed my mind occasionally before. Eowyn from Lord of the Rings cries out to Sauron’s army that she is no man, but it’s not hard to see where her circumstantial crossdressing and non-normative gender behavior might feel like a space amenable to a trans male narrative.

My first reaction was an unqualified love for this repurposing. It’s a very appealing idea to take a character like Final Fantasy XII’s Fran in a new direction, a direction that seeks to fill the gaping hole in a media landscape utterly bereft of trans masculinity. But I wondered too what implications this type of thinking might have for non-trans women.

Without reading them as trans per se, movies like Mulan do already have a kind of gender liberative tone. When the young warrior steels her father’s armor and horse and rides off to join the army, she’s bucking the expectations of her as a woman and being able to fight for her family and for her country without losing a sense of femininity is in itself something to be celebrated.

So it feels like there are two possible readings of Mulan’s musical number, “Be A Man,” which I must say is one of my favorites in the entire Disney animated canon. The first is celebratory, trans-affirming and operational on a level just below the surface of the text: be a man if that’s who you are, Mulan, because being a man is not limited to people born with penises. The second is more ironic: we, the army dudes, shall tell you, Mulan, to be a man because we have a fixed idea of what masculinity is, but you’ll eventually prove us wrong by embodying our own gendered values while remaining comfortably a women.

The question I want to ask of all this is, then, can we share these stories? Does the existence of one reading diminish the other? And does it take away one group’s possibility for seeing a role-model when the other group may also lay a claim to that figure?

Brandon Teena as portrayed by Hillary Swank in the Kimberly Peirce’s 1999 film, Boys Don’t Cry

This problem is very much mirrored in real life in figures like Brandon Teena a.k.a. Teena Brandon who was raped and murdered in 1993. Brandon represented himself variously as a transman and a butch lesbian at different moments in his life and following his death, he was claimed as a martyr by both groups. On the trans feminine side of things, a similar phenomenon is starting to emerge now following the recent killing of Jorge Steven Lopez Mercado, whose self-identification cannot be ascertained with full surety now that he has sadly passed.

Some people try to get at this by drawing a distinction between “being transgender” and “doing transgender.” It is this kind of discursive maneuver that allows authors like Leslie Feinberg to offer a kind of big-tent historical analysis of gender transgression that makes room not only for transsexuals like Venus Xtravaganza and crossdressers like RuPaul but also for people like Dennis Rodman and Joan of Arc, who contravene(d) the rules of gender in significant ways without specifically articulating a transgender identity per se. The drawback is, of course, that it might be seen as watering down the more specific experiences of people who want to establish themselves as explicitly trans in order to make society at large more accepting.

As an aside, I am struck by the similarities between Tolkien’s Eowyn and warrior women like Joan of Arc and Franklin Thomas, the latter of whom Feinberg discusses as being one of the nearly 400 Civil War soldiers discovered to have been assigned female at birth. In fact, I was surprised, looking back in the index of Feinberg’s Trans Gender Warriors, not to find any references made to the historical literary Hua Mulan, my other major example above. Incidentally, Feinberg and Mulan also raise the question of how all of this may play out differently in dramatically different cultural contexts, another question for another day perhaps, but a crucial one to consider in relation to what’s discussed here.

I don’t have an answer to any of these questions that I feel particularly confident about. Part of why I love fanfiction is the way it calls attention to the fact that texts can mean dramatically different things to different people and how this can be an area for pleasure and play. On the other hand, I am also keenly aware of the role media has in political mobilization and the violence enacted by the silence around some of our queer experiences.

Ultimately, perhaps the biggest thing I take away from all of this is that the tags we use to articulate ourselves as gender non-conforming people, trans people, lesbians, gay men, crossdressers, transsexuals, bisexuals, drag performers, queers, butches, femmes, and other Others are frequently no easier to sort out in our heads and among ourselves as the characters in the stories we produce. It may be cliché among some to point out the limits of identity, but it’s a lesson worth remembering especially at this crucial moment of political organizing for queer people in the United States. For me this is only more evidence that we must maintain a social movement for civil rights and freedoms of expression that embraces our multiple identities, behaviors, quirks and kinks whenever we can.