Doing Gender on Purpose:
Diversity, Depth, and Character in Romance
(This article was originally published in the August 2023 issue of the RWA's Romance Writers Report.)
Romance is obsessed with gender. Just think about the genre’s ever-changing ideas about what a hero and a heroine can and should be, its longstanding self perception as by and for women, or its debates about who exactly is eligible for a happily-ever-after, from “unlikeable heroines” to queer romance and trans inclusion. Romance writers and readers care about character, identity, emotions, and the intricacies of how intimate relationships play out within broader social contexts—all areas that are profoundly affected by ideas about gender. Gender is all around us, so why not dive in with purpose and pleasure?
If we do, we’ll find that a skillful approach to gender is a powerful tool for character development, as well as a kindness to many readers.
Welcoming Diverse Readers
Many of us have read (and been annoyed by) novels where nearly every character is a man, where men appear to be the default kind of person in the authors’ heads. We also know all too well that a writer can include women characters yet maintain that sexist and exclusionary feel: perhaps the women are just hot prizes for the hero, men’s mothers or sisters, or sacrifices to move the plot along.
In contrast, gender-inclusive storytelling strives to include, welcome, and respect people of all gender experiences. That includes women (both cisgender and transgender), men (again, both cis and trans), and people with identities outside those two binary genders. It also embraces variation within those categories, each of which is hugely diverse in terms of age, race, ethnicity, body size and shape, health and disability, socioeconomic status, religion, sexual orientation, and more—right down to individual histories and personalities.
Unfortunately, just as a novel populated with women can be sexist and alienate women readers, a story including trans and nonbinary characters can still dehumanize, belittle, or otherwise harm readers with those lived experiences. Actual inclusion takes a story world where people of all genders have their own feelings, motivations, and agency.
In happy news, though, any kind of story, about anyone, can be gender-inclusive. When a writer engages with gender deliberately, thoughtfully, and with a big open heart, here’s what readers might see:
Assigning Character Gender on Purpose
Imagine that you are developing a secondary character—or perhaps you’re drafting a scene and just need to sketch in somebody to sell the main characters a snack. It can be helpful to stop and ask: Is there some pressing reason to make this character the first gender that popped into my head?
The point of this thought experiment is not to change the character’s gender—though that might happen—but to make unconscious habits and internalized stereotypes visible so that the writer can do things on purpose. This is also a useful exercise to apply to major characters, including romantic leads. Even if you’re definitely not changing their genders, reflecting on that why can be valuable and productive.
Similarly, when a character’s gender is not central to the point of the story, what would it be like to choose and develop a gender identity (and then gender presentation, roles, and so on) later in the character development process? What might happen if you figured out the character’s role, emotional style, job, age, or other key factors and then decided what gender would best serve the story?
Even simply practicing awareness of when and how gender appears in your character development process may help you create a more diverse story world. By shifting that piece of character development from unexamined habit to usable tool, this can also lead to more emotionally effective, surprising, or authentic characters.
Gender Is in the Specifics
Although it’s vital to acknowledge that people of various genders exist, the fun part is the next step: thinking about what it feels like for a specific character at a specific time and place engaging in specific relationships to be, say, a man. What does that mean to him? What does he do with it? Does it ever get in his way? Do these answers change over the course of the story?
Our culture often leans into generalizations. Men are this way, women want these things, agender people look like this. If we look with a storyteller’s eye, though, we find a huge diversity of identities and experiences within any gender category we could possibly name.
On the whole, romance embraces the idea that every woman is a complicated person with interiority, and that women are not a monolith. We know there’s huge diversity within that enormous chunk of the population, diversity that many readers want to see on the page. The same lessons apply for people of other gender identities. There are nonbinary people with all sorts of bodies, from all sorts of backgrounds, dressing in all sorts of clothes, experiencing gender in myriad ways. Trans men have just as many ways of being masculine as cis men; trans women have just as many ways of being feminine as cis women. Like women, men experience all manner of relationships with their own bodies, emotions, and desires. People—and therefore characters—are complicated, individual, storied beings who exist in and are shaped by lots of different contexts!
This is, of course, the opposite of writing with stereotypes. Sometimes harmful stereotypes and clichés are employed in order to be undermined and torn down, which can be wonderfully effective storytelling. Sometimes a beautifully crafted character aligns with stereotypes of their gender identity, often with those stereotypical characteristics existing in a broader or deeper context: perhaps the character is stereotypical in some ways and surprising in others, or we begin to understand why they’re this way, or we’re grounded in what all this feels like for and means to the character. But problems arise when a writer relies on stereotypes without noticing, or without caring. The farther outside our own experiences we write, the more we need research, deep listening, and careful thought to help us avoid such pitfalls.
Especially with trans and nonbinary characters, the specificity of gender allows for all kinds of useful nuances. For example, many people use different pronoun sets or names in different spaces or with different people. In fiction, pronouns, names, nicknames, and other words related to gender identity can be used to suggest levels of intimacy and trust, develop particular relationships, and flesh out characters as they move around in their social worlds. If a character uses—or grudgingly accepts—different pronouns in different contexts, what’s their reasoning? How does it feel? As a relationship deepens and trust grows, does the available language change?
Being free and real in one’s gender, finding a relationship with gender (and a relationship with a lover) where you can play and shine instead of performing a compulsory role, can feel pretty great! That’s why trans people talk about gender euphoria, not just gender dysphoria, and celebrate trans joy. Of course, gender euphoria is not just for trans people: any character of any gender identity and gender history can feel joy, bliss, comfort, coziness, and peace in moments of gender expression, self-knowledge, or social interaction and community. Think back on your own life: when have you felt that spark of rightness? How might that rightness light up a moment of feeling deeply seen and loved—or of sexual bliss—in a character’s story?
Gender can be pleasurable, painful, interesting, complicated, and deeply personal. Digging into its nuances helps writers honor and reflect far more cis women’s and men’s real experiences, while also making space for lives outside those two categories.
Imperfect Characters in an Imperfect World
Like the rest of us, characters are messy people living in flawed worlds. They don’t have everything sorted out: that’s why there’s a story. So it would be pretty weird for every character to have a deep and fully actualized understanding of gender and gender diversity—whatever that would even look like!
But what happens when characters have limited or harmful understandings of gender? What if they buy into stereotypes, harshly police their own or others’ gender expression, or have no idea there’s anything to think about here at all?
That can be a very effective part of character arc: someone comes to understand gender, gender discrimination, the patriarchy, trans experiences, or their own gender identity in a bigger and better way over the course of the story. A limited or problematic understanding of gender might even be part of the barrier standing between a character and their goal. Many a hero must get past unexamined sexism in order to become a compelling match for the heroine. A cis protagonist might need to change their understanding of gender to reach a happily-ever-after with a genderqueer love interest. The possibilities are endless!
In situations where the character’s harmful take on gender is not really part of the story, though, here are two sets of questions worth pondering:
Questions for Character Development
Gender representation is about productive questions encountered with curiosity and kindness, not about universals. In that spirit, here’s a list of questions that a writer interested in such work might consider:
Delving into characters’ particular experiences of gender opens doors onto their embodied experiences, cultural contexts, and ways of being in the world. May we all continue reveling in this good stuff at the heart of our genre as we invite ever more readers in.
If we do, we’ll find that a skillful approach to gender is a powerful tool for character development, as well as a kindness to many readers.
Welcoming Diverse Readers
Many of us have read (and been annoyed by) novels where nearly every character is a man, where men appear to be the default kind of person in the authors’ heads. We also know all too well that a writer can include women characters yet maintain that sexist and exclusionary feel: perhaps the women are just hot prizes for the hero, men’s mothers or sisters, or sacrifices to move the plot along.
In contrast, gender-inclusive storytelling strives to include, welcome, and respect people of all gender experiences. That includes women (both cisgender and transgender), men (again, both cis and trans), and people with identities outside those two binary genders. It also embraces variation within those categories, each of which is hugely diverse in terms of age, race, ethnicity, body size and shape, health and disability, socioeconomic status, religion, sexual orientation, and more—right down to individual histories and personalities.
Unfortunately, just as a novel populated with women can be sexist and alienate women readers, a story including trans and nonbinary characters can still dehumanize, belittle, or otherwise harm readers with those lived experiences. Actual inclusion takes a story world where people of all genders have their own feelings, motivations, and agency.
In happy news, though, any kind of story, about anyone, can be gender-inclusive. When a writer engages with gender deliberately, thoughtfully, and with a big open heart, here’s what readers might see:
- Characters who are people with gender identities, roles, and presentations, not walking gender norms: Characterization doesn’t rely on gendered universals. Neither do other elements such as plot. If there’s a heroine, her experience of femininity is anchored in her personhood, community, culture, and life experiences, and it’s different from the experiences of other women characters because it’s hers. If there’s a hero, he’s not just A Hero, a standard-issue manly man: he too is a whole person with a specific experience of being a man and of masculine-coded roles.
- A story world that includes gender diversity: Instead of implying two homogeneous “opposite” sexes, the text makes space for lots of kinds of people (and therefore lots of kinds of readers) to exist and matter. Sometimes that happens very simply in the background, perhaps with a diverse cast of minor characters or through mentions of relevant experiences, issues, or symbols. Sometimes it’s far more central to the story. Either way works for historicals as well as contemporaries, since—although our language in this area changes constantly—gender diversity, gender nonconformity, and LGBTQIA+ people have always existed.
Assigning Character Gender on Purpose
Imagine that you are developing a secondary character—or perhaps you’re drafting a scene and just need to sketch in somebody to sell the main characters a snack. It can be helpful to stop and ask: Is there some pressing reason to make this character the first gender that popped into my head?
The point of this thought experiment is not to change the character’s gender—though that might happen—but to make unconscious habits and internalized stereotypes visible so that the writer can do things on purpose. This is also a useful exercise to apply to major characters, including romantic leads. Even if you’re definitely not changing their genders, reflecting on that why can be valuable and productive.
Similarly, when a character’s gender is not central to the point of the story, what would it be like to choose and develop a gender identity (and then gender presentation, roles, and so on) later in the character development process? What might happen if you figured out the character’s role, emotional style, job, age, or other key factors and then decided what gender would best serve the story?
Even simply practicing awareness of when and how gender appears in your character development process may help you create a more diverse story world. By shifting that piece of character development from unexamined habit to usable tool, this can also lead to more emotionally effective, surprising, or authentic characters.
Gender Is in the Specifics
Although it’s vital to acknowledge that people of various genders exist, the fun part is the next step: thinking about what it feels like for a specific character at a specific time and place engaging in specific relationships to be, say, a man. What does that mean to him? What does he do with it? Does it ever get in his way? Do these answers change over the course of the story?
Our culture often leans into generalizations. Men are this way, women want these things, agender people look like this. If we look with a storyteller’s eye, though, we find a huge diversity of identities and experiences within any gender category we could possibly name.
On the whole, romance embraces the idea that every woman is a complicated person with interiority, and that women are not a monolith. We know there’s huge diversity within that enormous chunk of the population, diversity that many readers want to see on the page. The same lessons apply for people of other gender identities. There are nonbinary people with all sorts of bodies, from all sorts of backgrounds, dressing in all sorts of clothes, experiencing gender in myriad ways. Trans men have just as many ways of being masculine as cis men; trans women have just as many ways of being feminine as cis women. Like women, men experience all manner of relationships with their own bodies, emotions, and desires. People—and therefore characters—are complicated, individual, storied beings who exist in and are shaped by lots of different contexts!
This is, of course, the opposite of writing with stereotypes. Sometimes harmful stereotypes and clichés are employed in order to be undermined and torn down, which can be wonderfully effective storytelling. Sometimes a beautifully crafted character aligns with stereotypes of their gender identity, often with those stereotypical characteristics existing in a broader or deeper context: perhaps the character is stereotypical in some ways and surprising in others, or we begin to understand why they’re this way, or we’re grounded in what all this feels like for and means to the character. But problems arise when a writer relies on stereotypes without noticing, or without caring. The farther outside our own experiences we write, the more we need research, deep listening, and careful thought to help us avoid such pitfalls.
Especially with trans and nonbinary characters, the specificity of gender allows for all kinds of useful nuances. For example, many people use different pronoun sets or names in different spaces or with different people. In fiction, pronouns, names, nicknames, and other words related to gender identity can be used to suggest levels of intimacy and trust, develop particular relationships, and flesh out characters as they move around in their social worlds. If a character uses—or grudgingly accepts—different pronouns in different contexts, what’s their reasoning? How does it feel? As a relationship deepens and trust grows, does the available language change?
Being free and real in one’s gender, finding a relationship with gender (and a relationship with a lover) where you can play and shine instead of performing a compulsory role, can feel pretty great! That’s why trans people talk about gender euphoria, not just gender dysphoria, and celebrate trans joy. Of course, gender euphoria is not just for trans people: any character of any gender identity and gender history can feel joy, bliss, comfort, coziness, and peace in moments of gender expression, self-knowledge, or social interaction and community. Think back on your own life: when have you felt that spark of rightness? How might that rightness light up a moment of feeling deeply seen and loved—or of sexual bliss—in a character’s story?
Gender can be pleasurable, painful, interesting, complicated, and deeply personal. Digging into its nuances helps writers honor and reflect far more cis women’s and men’s real experiences, while also making space for lives outside those two categories.
Imperfect Characters in an Imperfect World
Like the rest of us, characters are messy people living in flawed worlds. They don’t have everything sorted out: that’s why there’s a story. So it would be pretty weird for every character to have a deep and fully actualized understanding of gender and gender diversity—whatever that would even look like!
But what happens when characters have limited or harmful understandings of gender? What if they buy into stereotypes, harshly police their own or others’ gender expression, or have no idea there’s anything to think about here at all?
That can be a very effective part of character arc: someone comes to understand gender, gender discrimination, the patriarchy, trans experiences, or their own gender identity in a bigger and better way over the course of the story. A limited or problematic understanding of gender might even be part of the barrier standing between a character and their goal. Many a hero must get past unexamined sexism in order to become a compelling match for the heroine. A cis protagonist might need to change their understanding of gender to reach a happily-ever-after with a genderqueer love interest. The possibilities are endless!
In situations where the character’s harmful take on gender is not really part of the story, though, here are two sets of questions worth pondering:
- How might marginalized readers experience this character and however their ideas make it onto the page? If readers are likely to experience pain, are there ways to lessen it? Is the cost/benefit good? In other words, are the character’s misapprehensions important to the story and doing useful work in your vision? Is an easy-to-come-across content warning, at least, in order?
- What does the story as a whole express about gender identity and diversity? Can readers clearly see the values and messages you mean them to see—and the distance between the story’s values and that character’s values, understanding, knowledge—or does that need to be brought out more robustly on page?
Questions for Character Development
Gender representation is about productive questions encountered with curiosity and kindness, not about universals. In that spirit, here’s a list of questions that a writer interested in such work might consider:
- How is this character experiencing gender along lines of identity, expression, presentation, roles, pain, pleasure, limitations, expectations, and freedom in this moment?
- How about in the past?
- What was growing up like for them, gender-wise? What cultures of gender is this person participating in or affected by?
- Is any of that part of the character’s arc, affected by or affecting the experiences that unfold?
- No one fulfills normative gender roles, presentation, appearance, and other expectations completely. What does that tension feel like for this character? (Inadequacy? Danger? Individuality? Play?) And how is that experience related to their privilege and marginalization in other identity categories?
- How do they express or hide their gender identity? How do they engage with the aesthetics of gender, with the socially approved gender presentation options in their community or communities?
- How strongly connected do they feel to their gender identity and gender roles?
- Do they feel in community with other people of their gender—or only with some subset of them, or alienated from them as a group?
- How do they regard people of other genders?
- How do they experience sexism, misogyny, transphobia, and other gender-related systems of discrimination and marginalization?
- How invisible—or unavoidably visible—is the system of gender to them?
Delving into characters’ particular experiences of gender opens doors onto their embodied experiences, cultural contexts, and ways of being in the world. May we all continue reveling in this good stuff at the heart of our genre as we invite ever more readers in.
