Transcript by FlyingFanatic EFA Episode 23 – Trans-Formative Works [ph] – Indicates preceding word has been spelled phonetically [sic] – Indicates preceding word has been transcribed verbatim MUSIC : Write My Story by Olly Anna ANNOUNCER GUY : You've tuned in to the Earp Fiction Addiction , a fan podcast all about Wynonna Earp fanfiction. Join our intrepid host DarkWiccan and Delayne as they dive deep into the sometimes sweet, sometimes spicy, and always varied world of fanfiction for the Wynonna Earp fandom. MUSIC : A Proper Story by Darren Korb DARKWICCAN : And welcome everybody to another episode of the Earp Fiction Addiction , the podcast dedicated entirely to Wynonna Earp fanfiction. I am your host, DarkWiccan, and with me is my fabulous co-host - DELAYNE : Hi, it’s Delayne! DARKWICCAN : And this week we are feeling our authentic selves. DELAYNE : Well said. DARKWICCAN : Yes. This week we are extremely excited, for a couple of reasons. One, we’re tackling a subject that I don’t think gets enough attention. And two, we’re tackling it with a fantastic, and incredible educator, who lives up here near me in the Pacific North West area, and who I met a couple years ago doing a show here in Seattle, and I am so happy to have met her, she is an incredibly inspiration individual, I would love to welcome to the Trans educator Elayne Wylie. ELAYNE : Hello! Thanks for having me on the show today. DARKWICCAN : Oh, we are so happy to have you on the show. Did I intro you okay, was that an okay intro? ELAYNE : That was great. DARKWICCAN : Awesome. ELAYNE : Thank you. I sound really excited, I dunno, I don’t think I’ve ever been on a podcast before, so I just popped my podcast cherry. [laughter] DARKWICCAN : Well, I for one am honored. [laughter] ELAYNE : Yay. DARKWICCAN : So today folks, we are talking about pieces of fanfiction that discuss or focus on the topic of intersex, or transgender characters. And this is topic that is very close to me because I’ve got quite a few amazing and wonderful trans friends, and so often when I’m reading certain works of fanfiction that claim to be trans friendly, I can immediately spot that they’re not. And I worry for my friends, because it’s not fair, y'know, it’s just, it reminds me of like growing up myself as a queer, y'know, kid, and not seeing positive representation of me, so it’s like well, now that we have a little bit of agency, we need to make sure that we include everybody who hasn’t seen themselves positively represented, and get them some good material. DELAYNE : Well said. ELAYNE : Yeah. Critically important. DARKWICCAN : It is so fundamentally important, and I’m so grateful that we’re living in twenty gayteen, right now. [laughter] ELAYNE : Nice. DARKWICCAN : Because at least within our community, the subject of inclusion has become, y'know, really focused on, and it’s so important, and so as we have the dialogue, and we’re spreading the dialogue, out beyond our communities, it’s hopefully starting to take a little more hold in the larger sense, slowly, but hopefully. I mean, we can’t – ELAYNE : We’re getting there. DARKWICCAN : Yeah, we’re getting there, and y'know, it’s one of those things where we’re in Pride month right now, and Pride was started by a beautiful trans woman of color – ELAYNE : Yes. DARKWICCAN : - and we all seem to have forgotten that. Not all of us, but I mean – you know what I mean? Like we’re having to re-educate our own community on our own history, which is – ELAYNE : Yeah, no, no, I think it’s really such an important place to talk about, because it’s contextual, and often times we think about, y'know, Pride, and like oh, marriage equality, and lots of rainbows, but Pride was started, really, it was launched by a trans woman throwing bricks at cops. And y'know that was the initial thing, and it was basically saying, “Enough is enough. We have suffered abuses at the hands of so many people, for so long, that we’re just done”. And so yeah, I mean, there’s lots of rainbows, and there’s lots of beer, and celebration, and dancing, but really we have to remember that was a sense of like, “We have to come together”. And the very first Pride was an annual observance of that first brick being thrown, of that event, and it’s not like that was the first time that trans, and queer, and gay, and lesbian, and bisexual people had been attacked, this was simply kind of the last straw. It was the anniversary of the last straw, that’s why we do this in June. DARKWICCAN : Yeah, absolutely. And it’s so important that we continue to remind ourselves – ELAYNE : Yeah. DARKWICCAN : - of why. Because we’ve had to fight, and work so hard, and for so long, to be able to have these Pride celebrations, and yeah, we cannot forget our history. And that starts with remembering our trans brothers and sisters, and making sure that we include everybody in this community, and that takes many, many different forms, and today the form that’s taking is talking about positive representation in fanfic. ELAYNE : Yeah. DARKWICCAN : So when we sat down and picked these fics to focus on, the thing that I was looking for – okay, I’ll admit, I picked the fics. It was me, it was me. You don’t like the fics I picked, you can blame me. Send your angry tweets my way. But what I was looking for, was I looking for situations where, y'know, I think where representing normal life, essentially, these are individuals who just want to live a normal life, in the case – and really kind of just boring, typical, day-to-day dealings of living that still have the element of, y'know, a trans character, and that character – be intersex or trans – y'know, dealing with identity, but not in a heavy-handed way, it’s just like, “Oh yeah, and that’s part of them. Moving on”. But that also means that those elements continue to come up to the surface, but then fade back in as the character, y'know, deals with them intermittently. Yeah. So that’s really the – especially the case with the first two choices that I picked. And I should say I picked four fics, two fics each by the same author, so the first two fics are by actualtrashking, and are from the series ‘Girl on the Radio’, and the stories are ‘Little Heartbeat’, and the sequel to ‘Little Heartbeat’ called ‘Jump the Gun’. And this really is a domestic story. DELAYNE : Yes. DARKWICCAN : In the story, Nicole identifies as intersex, and that’s actually something I wanted to touch on a little bit, in that in the very chapter – well, okay. I guess I’m sort of burying the lead here a little bit. So the title should give away – the title should give something away here, and that is ‘Little Heartbeat’. Essentially, Nicole is intersex, and she is in a committed relationship with Waverly, and she accidently gets Waverly pregnant, and so that’s where the little heartbeat comes in. And so when they go to explain this, in the first chapter, to Waverly’s sisters – and Willa is a prominent character in the storyline, and she is not a bad person, I should emphasize, she is not the Willa we know from the show, she’s actually, she’s a little weird, but she’s not bad. ELAYNE : Okay. DARKWICCAN : But she goes – Waverly and Nicole go to explain the situation to Wynonna and Willa, and both Wynonna and Willa are a little confused, because as far as they know, Nicole is a woman. And she is a woman, she is a woman. DELAYNE : Exactly. DARKWICCAN : But she also has this condition that she identifies as Mosaic Klinefelter syndrome, in which case she says she’s XXY, she’s intersex. And oops, she got Waverly pregnant. So, Elayne, we talked about this a little before we started recording, as soon as I was reading, and I hit that explanation, I immediately Google; oh what’s Klinefelter syndrome. And in reading it I was like, oh, good, that’s really interesting. Unfortunately, that also should mean that her character is sterile, so later on as we’re reading through the series, it seems more that actualtrashking is putting Nicole more and more into a sort of trans identity, less intersex and more trans, which is fine, I mean, however she chooses to identify is her choice, and she is, ultimately, at the end of the day, she’s a woman, she’s Nicole. ELAYNE : Right. DARKWICCAN : So what are kind of your thoughts on how she initially chooses to explain the situation. ELAYNE : It’s interesting, ‘cause yeah, when you get into talking about Klinefelter, I mean, we live in the Google age, so when you write something, you commit something to print, you’re basically creating for the rest of the story’s existence, the sense of like this is who this character is. And I had to parse out is the character saying “I’m Klinefelter”, and this is what’s going on, or is it the author explaining that to the reader. So, one way to kind of get over that brick in the fourth wall of, so to speak, of this is the character may have been misdiagnosed in the story.