Favorite Characters: Gender-Bending

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I’m going to go ahead and blame Tamora Pierce for my love of cross-dressing characters. I discovered the Song of the Lioness Quartet by age seven and have reread them them at least once a year every year since.

For anyone who hasn’t read them (for the love of all that is good, please READ THEM), the main character Alanna switches place with her twin brother. He goes off to study sorcery and she goes off to become a knight. And because only boys become knights, she has to figure out how to pass as male.

I guess the younger me was highly attracted to the idea that gender is a changeable, fluid thing. Alanna: The First Adventure was my first introduction to gender boundaries being flexible and permeable.

In so many ways, I am such a healthier person for those books.

This topic is on my mind since I just binged my way through the manga W Juliet (again). The two main characters in that are a girl who prefers to look and be treated as a boy, and a boy who has to pass himself off as female all through high school so his father will allow him to pursue acting.

The theatre element alone was enough to hook me. (Though I wish there’d been more theatre. As I’m currently in tech week for a show – opening Thursday with a three week run, so we’ll see how coherent my next few posts are – there are definitely many elements of stage production that the manga glossed over. Though there are other series I can turn to for that fix . . . and I’m getting totally off-topic.)

The crossdressing characters are ones I love to read, but I don’t have any stories that use that conceit. Weird, I know. I still struggle as a writer with breaking the gender binary (and some stories of this type run the risk of enforcing the harmful binary myth).

What are some of your favorite character types, either to read or write? Please share!

I come back to characters again and again, because the characters are what make me fall in love with stories. Don’t be surprised if you see more posts on my favorites!

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