#since we're mostly addressing male characters/personas in fandom here

[skadren]

hi! as you are a nonbinary chinese american writer, can i ask you your thoughts on writing nonbinary chinese and chinese american characters? a few chinese ppl have said its offensive but nonbinary chinese / chniese american ppl exist irl so it makes sense to represent them... how would you do it + tips?

hi anon! this is a complicated topic and i’m really only one random person on the internet, so i think it's important to ask yourself: do you trust the people who are saying this is offensive? are they raising points you think make sense? are they nonbinary themselves or just white knighting? and so on

since i primarily write and read fanfic, i've really only felt particularly offended by the portrayal of chinese characters before in that context. i'm sure the world of Real Publishing(tm) has its own mess but idk any specifics about that so i'll be just giving my thoughts on what i've seen in fandom + some tips under the cut

from what i've noticed in fandom, nonbinary (and transmasc and intersex, but i digress) usually ends up being shorthand in fandom for making a canonically male character "boy lite" (canonically female characters are a bit of a scarce supply already, much less nonbinary headcanons for them). this is already really uncomfortable on its own, and there are far better posts out there that talk about soft uwu androgynous nonbinary stereotypes and why those are harmful

this compounds quite unfortunately with the fact that english-speaking fandom already has a habit of feminizing and infantilizing characters in east asian media with majority-male casts like kpop and cdramas while ignoring the existence of actual queer asian people. the kpop industry has embraced this habit of fandom and is actively leaning into it because it sells; china has tried to crack down on this by limiting media that portrays men as too effeminate for their standards.

so yeah actually i can see why people are saying nonbinary chinese characters would be offensive, because they assume it would just be more of the same, and i do think we should be questioning why fandom tends to treat east asian men as inherently less masculine. but the problem isn't that representation in and of itself is inherently offensive but that what we have is all the same, sanitized and packaged and exported to a global audience in a way that is actually quite degrading and is never even actually real representation. hypercapitalism, hooray

anyways. some tips:

being nonbinary covers so much more than just being boy lite(tm)

BEING NONBINARY COVERS MORE THAN JUST BEING BOY LITE

your character is a character first before their group identity. one informs the other but there are plenty of things that exist outside of gender or ethnicity. generally, approaching character writing primarily from the angle of "i want to represent x group" doesn't turn out too well bc it starts to feel like tokenism

on the other hand, if you could strip the character of said group identity and change them to being white and cishet and their character would work exactly the same, that's also a sign that something is wrong

different cultures construct gender differently. my gender is informed by american norms and queer history so it isn’t going to representative of someone who grew up on the mainland; on the other hand, it will never match the mainstream white american nonbinary experience, either. take the time to understand how a specific society might construct categorical gender and its norms before asking how your character would navigate it

china is a huge country. the usa is a huge country. there are also plenty of chinese people who live outside of these countries. generation and/or time period has a huge impact as well. speak to some other nonbinary chinese people! find out what they have to say about their experience

good luck with your writing!

#skadren rambles #i think there's a lot more to be said about the hypersexualization + infantilization of east asian women #since we're mostly addressing male characters/personas in fandom here #also parallel stereotypes of being alien/perpetual foreigners #but then this would get even longer than it already is