I occasionally read book in the M/M genre, and I follow the review site Reviews by Jessewave. Wave is good people, and is a black woman from Canada. Her tastes are very similar to mine and I rely on her for guidance in this genre that I haven’t been reading long enough to really develop any fave authors. (However, I don’t post there because frankly that community is even more drama filled than Romancelandia and I don’t need the crazy.) Last week I popped in to find even more crazy than normal. Apparently Wave posted on another blog that she doesn’t review books that feature sex with trans men. That set off a veritable crapstorm about her head from authors of trans books who took issue with this, especially as they are of the opinion that trans men ARE men. They insisted that Wave take down her rainbow banner and specify that she only reviewed books featuring cis-men.
Now, my first reaction to this was outrage on Wave’s behalf. How dare they tell her what to do with her site and what she has to specify? Then I got to thinking about how angry we authors of multicultural books are at the sites that won’t review our books despite calling themselves romance review sites. So I had to ask myself, am I a hypocrite? Since I have no interest in reading books about trans men and I like Wave and the authors were being so obnoxious my first reaction was to side with Wave. Doesn’t she have the right to read/review what she wants without being called transphobic? Then I have to ask about all those people who have no interest in reading/reviewing multicultural books. Don’t they have the same right? The authors said that if Wave only reads cis-gendered books the header shouldn’t say M/M because trans-men are men. Of course, that begs the question, if trans-men are men, then why the hell is there a T on GLBQ? But I suppose that’s a question for another day.
I, of course, want more than anything to see fans of multicultural romance develop review blogs and sites. As far as I know there are only a couple and they aren’t widely supported yet. I don’t believe you can force people to read/review books they don’t want to read/review. This more than anything points up the need for us to develop our own. Have any of you ever considered starting such a site?
http://chocoliciousreviews.com/
Hmmm, very interesting take on the authors’ reactions. I guess I can see both sides of it but it does annoy me that they are trying to tell Wave what she has to do.
Yeah, that griped my butt too, Kristin. And the fact that they were so obnoxious about it made it easy for me to side with Wave.
I hope you won’t mind this trans stranger popping in to answer that question you asked:
if trans-men are men, then why the hell is there a T on GLBQ
Simply because trans men are a different type of men to the majority of men, and they are being discriminated against because of that difference. Just like Black men are the same as white men except in one aspect, so are trans men the same as cis men except in one aspect. And just like it’s still relevant to fight for interracial romances because racism is still very much alive, so it is still relevant to fight for the recognition of trans men as men because transphobia still exists.
Also a small detail if you don’t mind: I’ve gone over that whole debacle, and nobody ever called on Wave to start reviewing trans books. Quite the opposite in fact: it was pointed out that it’s her right to choose to review only gay romances featuring exclusively cis men – but then she should adequately reflect this in her banner. And she shouldn’t use transphobic language when expliciting her policy. Trans-male/cis-male IS male/male, fully so; saying otherwise is flat-out transphobia.
I hope you won’t feel attacked or anything by this comment. It really isn’t my intention. I just saw a question I figured I could answer, is all.