It’s been a weird month, both in the world of indie publishing and in the world at large – but I’m going to be focusing on the US for the purposes of this post because I’ll be covering a lot of seemingly unrelated ground before it all comes together.
A couple weeks ago a suicidal twenty year old obsessed with guns and bombs tried to assassinate Trump even though he was a registered Republican. The FBI found out he had been researching the nearest rallies for both Trump and Biden, and Trump just happened to show up closer first. He missed Trump, but killed a firefighter who died protecting his family, and injured others. He used a semi-assault rifle his father legally purchased. Trump finally announced his weirdly delayed VP pick shortly thereafter, but more on that guy later.
Meanwhile pressure was mounting for Biden to drop out by people who were weirdly surprised the candidate they wanted four years ago when he was 78 turned 82 years old four years later. His opponents were then surprised when he dropped out and threw his support behind VP Harris, and everyone just went along with it. And here I thought it was common knowledge that when you’re voting for president, you’re voting for both people on the ticket. Plus both candidates are/were very old, even if it took an assassination attempt for one to remember one of the reasons they needed to select a vice president.
Whatever happened to his former VP Pence, anyway?
Oh yeah, he refused to break the law and some angry Trump supporters unsuccessfully invaded Congress with the intention of killing him. Awkward.
Anyway, if you vote for Harris, you’re also voting for whomever she picks as VP. If you vote for Trump, you’re also voting for Vance. He once called Harris a childless cat lady, along with AOC and Pete Buttigieg. AOC is young. Harris has stepchildren. Buttigieg is a gay man with adopted children. So he was expressing disdain for gay men, women without children, step parents, and adoptive parents – and by extension, step children and adopted children – along with the voters who chose to be represented by them. He also thinks divorce is wrong, and women should stay with their abusers – and then procreate with them.
The media fallout from these remarks old and new helped me figure out why a recent online discussion of trigger warnings in books unsettled me. I sometimes use trigger warnings on my blog when I’m going to discuss upsetting topics like rape and abuse in detail. If I had graphic content in my books, I’d use trigger warnings then. I haven’t included warnings of things inherent to the genres I’ve written in (fantasy violence, alien goo, etc.) or anything the synopsis already gives away.
This past week I saw an indie publisher show examples of their warnings, which included things like divorce offpage or pregnancy. Divorce or pregnancy as a major plot point I get, but the mere reference to the same people you routinely encounter in real life feels wrong. If seeing the word ‘divorce’ in a trigger warning isn’t triggering, then a character referencing an ex, half sibling, or stepchild shouldn’t be either. These are not dirty words, and people in blended families deserve representation the same as any other person or group a publisher wouldn’t dream of warning readers about.
Intentional or not, reducing people to triggers is dehumanizing.
My books include people of different ages, races, nationalities, genders, sexualities, familial arrangements, even religions (albeit to a lesser extent). Personally, I don’t reference representation of any particular group to market my books because a) it feels exploitative, and b) contemporary fantasy or not, if I’m writing books set in the ‘real’ world, diversity is a given. Even in the small rural town I currently live in, there’s a variety of people – perhaps not as many as the bigger cities I used to live in, but more than the media and politicians acknowledge.
It’s not ‘political’. It’s just life. That certain identities get politicized is the fault of those discriminating against them. Live and let live.
And let write for that matter.
Protecting one person’s feelings should never involve demeaning another.
