kendallroy:

kendallroy:

i’m still so irritated about how after becky albertalli posted that essay about how she was essentially bullied and pressured her into coming out as bisexual before she was comfortable or ready to do so because of how people online have treated her over the content of her books, YA twitter has already shifted the goalposts from “she shouldn’t be writing queer stories bc she’s straight” to “well she’s still a bi woman so she still shouldn’t be ‘stealing m/m narratives’” (someone literally used that phrasing) and basically it all boils down to this idea that there is no respectful or acceptable way to write about marginalized characters who are different from you

and it’s just that like. even aside from the fact that it has created this genuinely toxic environment online where readers feel entitled to comb through an author’s entire life story in order to judge whether they are “allowed” to write their books, there are so many things that are just fundamentally wrong and nonsensical about that mindset that i cannot even take it seriously. but i guess my frustration really boils down to the fact that nobody making these arguments seems to really understand that there are so many reasons why people choose to write the narratives they do, and representation/relating to the characters on the basis of identity is not the be-all end-all for everyone. sometimes it’s because you’re interested in exploring specific themes or settings or character dynamics or there’s some kind of satirical/critical element to the story you’re writing… or maybe you just are not interested in writing autofiction for any reason. and if you cannot fathom why it’s insulting to suggest that the only motivation for a queer author to write a queer character who nonetheless doesn’t share their specific gender and sexual orientation is that they must have some kind of fetish… well, i’m sorry to say it, but you might just suck as a person

and let’s not even get into the idea that bi women and lesbians are somehow oppressing gay men by writing books where they are the protagonists…. like first off, that’s just fundamentally not how oppression works, so jot that down