You Don’t Have to Return to Womanhood
When there is a story we’ve heard a million times, so much that we know the beats before they happen–it becomes an archetype. While with any story the readers and listeners will interpret it differently, with an archetype there is an almost universal understanding of what is being said or explored or shown to us. If I were to tell you a story, and say it is a Mulan story, you would know exactly what I mean, and exactly what plot beats to expect. The character of Fa Mulan is not the origin of this trope, but she is arguably one of the most famous examples. In almost every mainstream example of this kind of story, we have a girl or a woman facing some barrier that she must pretend to be a man to pass. These stories typically explore identity, sexism and sexuality, they are often ways of exploring queerness with plausible deniability. These stories also blatantly pull from transmasculine people’s experiences, but in such a way to erase the fact that they are doing so. The maleness is a ph...
