Why Trans Stories Matter
Charlie Jane Anders explains how stories are vital to understanding our community.
by Charlie Jane Anders
Trans lives are made of stories. We tell the tales of how we found ourselves, and how we found our community — and often, those are the same story. You can't transition without constructing a narrative of becoming and blossoming, finding a way to make sense of who you used to be and who you are now. And hopefully, who you will be in the future. Change is a story, and trans people depend upon change.
And yet, in recent years, we've increasingly seen stories used to destroy us as well — fear-mongering about unfair competition in sports, about predators in bathrooms, about rapid onset gender dysphoria and social contagion. We've found out the hard way that it's difficult to defeat a story with facts: facts can be either absorbed or rejected, as the narrative demands. Sometimes you have to meet stories with stories, humanizing trans people and telling our truths to dispel the lies.
I know how hard it is to speak up and tell trans stories during a time when we are under so much scrutiny and pressure. It can feel as though you have to speak for all trans people, or represent your entire community — and that pressure can feel overwhelming. People expect you to have answers to all sorts of questions that you honestly have no expertise in. And it's easy to feel called upon to present the exact image of trans people that you want the world to hold in its mind. The only cure for this is to know there are many other trans people out there also speaking and crafting stories.
And here's the thing: I've never been more fired up than I am right now. I've never felt more joyful about writing trans characters and hopeful trans futures. Don't ask me how I'm feeling about politics right now — but I'm having the time of my life writing strange, complicated tales of trans community and resilience.
I wrote a whole book about this, but I am discovering firsthand, as I have before, that when I'm anxious and stressed and spiraling, I feel better when I allow myself to get lost in creating a story. The fact that I'm writing stories in which communities of trans people face up to the darkness and help each other through it is a bonus — and maybe those stories will help other people one day — but the process of creating fictional people and populating on entire made-up world is a great use of my brain that takes me away from catastrophizing.
We need to see ourselves represented in fiction, so we can imagine ourselves having a place in the world. And if some cis people come across our stories and learn to see us as the heroes of our own stories, so much the better. Maybe our work will have the same impact, over time, that Will & Grace had for gay men, or make as much of an impact as Wonder Woman did for feminism. (But you don't need to just create "positive," sanitized representations of trans people — please go ahead and write about trans people in all our messiness and splendor.)
So even though I understand everybody is very tired right now, I can testify that writing weird, colorful fiction about trans lives is a positive way to channel all that mental energy that would otherwise go into freaking out. Even if you don't aspire to be a professional fiction writer or journalist, telling outrageous, personal stories online or at your local open mic can help other people to open their minds — and help you to feel like your stories matter. Because they fucking do.
We're going to need so many stories, of so many kinds, to help us out of this mess — I'm excited to be part of it, and I'm so glad I'm not the only one.
Charlie Jane Anders is the author of Lessons in Magic and Disaster (Aug 2025), about a young trans witch who teaches her heartbroken mother how to do magic, and uncovers the secrets of a mysterious novel from 1749. Her other novels include All the Birds in the Sky, The City in the Middle of the Night and the young-adult Unstoppable trilogy. She's also the author of the short story collection Even Greater Mistakes, and Never Say You Can't Survive, a book about how to use creative writing to get through hard times. She co-created Escapade, a transgender superhero, for Marvel Comics and wrote her into the long-running New Mutants comic. And she's currently the science fiction and fantasy book reviewer for the Washington Post. With Annalee Newitz, she co-hosts the podcast Our Opinions Are Correct.