From the archives: Fic and trans identities

The fan fiction girls and young women write and read is part of the social contagion

To boldly go...

This post is an edited version of one originally posted in March 2024, which I decided to republish after reading an article in the New York Times about how “Dramione” — Harry Potter fan-fiction in which Draco and Hermione get together — is breaking through into mainstream publishing. (Of course the authors interviewed performatively denounce J.K. Rowling, and one is even non-binary…)

Around the same time as my original article was published, I discussed some of these ideas with Louise Perry on her podcast “Maiden, Mother, Matriarch”.

I have been fascinated by fanfic since first writing about slash fiction – fan fiction about romantic and/or sexual relationships between two men, both heterosexual in the source material – in 2016. I had never even heard of fanfic, let alone slash, until earlier that year, when I was drafted in by The Economist’s editor to write a companion piece and an editorial about the impact of porn on young people’s ideas about sex, to go along with a piece two business journos had already written about the business model of “free to view” porn. In the course of researching that I stumbled across the concept of slash and thought it was the maddest thing I had ever heard – my jaw literally dropped.