Writing fictional genders. A reflection on crafting the novel Don’t Let Chacha Die. (with spoilers)

*I recommend reading this only after you’ve read Don’t Let Chacha Die by Carrie Herthwell. This article includes spoilers.

After I graduated from university in 2021, I focused on working on my dystopian series while trying to get an agent interested in book one. I was brainstorming ideas for book five when I decided to go deeper into the character of Jupiter, so I crafted some backstory to flesh him out. I found myself writing a story about a genderqueer kid named Chacha who lives in an extremely oppressive society, and I saw that the story had a lot of potential. I enthusiastically started to develop Jupiter’s origin story.

I’ve been interested in gender for a long time, and Jupiter is not the first transgender character I’ve ever written. The protagonist of my GeneEarth novels series is nonbinary, and a lot of my characters are gender-nonconforming. When I started crafting my series, I really wanted the one good thing about my evil government to be that they were progressive in their views of queer folks. I didn’t want to experience the pain of writing about homophobia or transphobia. I simply wanted to write several badass queer heroes fighting a corrupt government, and that’s it. So, when I initially started crafting Don’t Let Chacha Die, I felt unsure if I wanted to venture into the sensitive territory of transphobia.

I have the tendency to forget about the world and exist in my own happy bubble, and at the time I really had no idea what was going on in terms of the political discourse over transgender folks. It wasn’t until I was having a conversation with someone and they spouted off some nonsensical transphobic things that I realized I was out of touch. I started to do a lot of research to catch myself up on what was happening in the world, and the mental image that formed was of numerous big kids bullying the most vulnerable kid in the playground. I see everything as interconnected under the patriarchy, and I know that once it’s considered acceptable to hate transgender folks, next is any cisgender person who isn’t doing gender ‘correctly’. It hurts when someone is denied their gender, whether they’re cisgender or transgender, so seeing this cultural shift was quite disturbing for me. I had to extricate myself from the research and go back into my bubble to focus on my writing, but it was under that context that my story developed. It was very important to me that Chacha (who changes his name to Jupiter later in the novel) got a satisfying story.

Early on I decided to make Chacha grow up in a patriarchal society made up solely of male bodies, but I struggled with how Chacha would be an outsider of the system. Chacha couldn’t be ‘feminine’ because people in Stormland would have no concept of feminine as it’s associated with women. Also, a lot of feminine roles are necessary for society to function, such as child care and housework, so I couldn’t remove stereotypical feminine roles from society. I wanted to create a gender that was considered evil, but the characteristics had to be something superfluous so it could be completely eliminated from society without repercussions. I invented “Bent” gender with attributes that could be removed from society, such as artistic passion, love of beauty and creativity. It also matched well with the type of fascist society I was crafting, which was designed to freeze culture. In the end, I created a gender system that was not translatable to ours.

Stormland has no concept of transgender because children are not assigned a gender at birth and gender is only loosely connected to a person’s body. When people are in early adolescence, they’re assigned their gender (a masculine boy, a genderless Bubba or a Bent person), but there’s a general understanding that one can be accidentally assigned the wrong gender. Chacha is technically not transgender, but Bent, albeit he has many experiences that are similar to what transgender folks endure. However, from the perspective of the New Winterland characters, Jupiter is transgender and nonbinary.

In creating a gender system, I had to toss away the idea that Stormland’s concept of men is the same as our concept of men. It’s odd to consider, but Stormland Men are technically nonbinary because they perceive gender as a spectrum of purity rather than distinct categories. Using a word like ‘nonbinary’ to describe themselves would be out of the question because the word suggests the existence of a binary. They would identify simply as men, but with a capital M. In deciding what characteristics each gender possessed I had to think about how each gender functions in society. In our culture, it’s a stereotype that men are lazy in the sphere of domestic labor. In an environment where woman are socialized to do most of the housework and men can be lazy, it makes sense that such a stereotype would exist. But in Stormland, Men can’t be lazy because they live alone and they will never have someone to do the housework for them. That’s why, in Stormland, there’s a stereotype that Men are very neat. From our perspective, all Stormland genders have some characteristics we’d consider feminine.

I struggled with how sexuality would manifest in a culture with four nonbinary genders in a society of male bodies. Because all the bodies are the same, there’s no real difference in whether people of different genders or people of the same gender have sex. It made sense that if sex were illegal, it would be illegal in all cases. I did consider people who are attracted to Bubbas as the type of people who might’ve ended up straight if they were raised in our society, so that’s why I made most people attracted to genderless Bubbas. There’s something about Bubbas being nurturing and beautiful that made me think a lot of people would be attracted to them. It also led me to think about how Bubbas might be seen as people who could satisfy emotional and sexual needs that couldn’t be met in such a rigid oppressive society. I created the sexuality ‘inverted’ for those who like masculine folks, but it’s not the same as gay. Gay means two men are attracted to each other, but inverted folks can be any gender; they only need to experience attraction to a masculine person to be considered inverted. For example, if a genderless Bubba experiences attraction to masculine people, they’re inverted. If a Man experiences attraction to masculine people, they’re also inverted.

I realized at some point that my gender system might be confusing for readers and readers might attempt to match our gender system up with Stormland’s gender system. So that’s why I wanted someone from New Winterland to show up early in the story to expose that Stormland’s concept of gender and sexuality is not translatable to ours.

When it came to creating two masculine genders, Suba and Men, I considered how men often feel like they must live up to an unrealistic masculine standard in order to be considered ‘real men’. So I thought, what if only one in four masculine people were allowed to call themselves men? That led me to create a processing school as a way to sort the Men from the Subas, the Men being the only people able to reach Stormland's high standards for masculinity. As a result, in this culture many men are denied their gender and it does affect them negatively.

I really wanted Chacha/Jupiter, Setha/LB and Lin to have characteristics that went against Stormland’s gender stereotypes. Genderless people usually end up Bubbas, caring for children and sometimes doing sex work. Setha is genderless and expects to end up a parent and a sex worker, but doesn’t. I wanted Lin to be nothing like the spoiled entitled prince stereotype, but someone more relatable. Lin is a Man yet he’s open about his thoughts; he presents as slightly genderless, and he ends up doing sex work. Jupiter is Bent in many ways, but he has some masculine characteristics such as athleticism.

Another part of Stormland I had to sort out was what sort of dictatorship I should create, and in the end, I thought including a fraud proclaiming to be a god would work with the people’s spiritual concept of gender. I really had to imagine myself in the shoes of the first God-King and consider how I would design a religion that might keep people from doubting my authority. Any tactic that keeps people believing in the God-King and that keeps the monarchy in power would be employed. In the end, I was satisfied with how complete my society felt. Don’t Let Chacha Die ended up being about a lot more than just the harm of genderqueer folks under the patriarchy.  It explores the harm of women who are often an oppressed gender and the harm of men who are denied their gender if they don’t live up to the high standards of masculinity.

It took quite a bit of reflection on the meaning of gender to craft Stormland’s society and culture. In the end, even though I had trepidation about writing on such a sensitive topic, I’m glad I did because I really believe in the message of this book: that only an individual can know who they are inside, and that people need to be able to be themselves in order to thrive. Right now, when the world seems to be slipping into hard times, my heart is with people like Chacha. Don’t Let Chacha Die.