nerdflighter | cw: cissexism and inbuilt transphobia

hellofriendsiminthedark and I have been riffing back and forth about twilight for a while now, but something they said reminded me of a fictional universe that I spitballed @ another friend a while back.

A lot of the time, when trans people worldbuild, we tend to work our transness into the fabric of the world; make places that accept us at their core. I don't think I've ever seen someone do that with nonbinary people though, and I find angst and the whole 'fighting against the world itself' shtick much more compelling, so here goes (this was written directly in my friend's DMs and I am not actually correcting anything)

so a long time back magic as the people of this world know it was set up by some dude. this dude was a complete and utter shithead. he was just bad, but because he Made Magic and wrote all the histories he's treated as this godlike messiah wonderman.

the magic system divides strongly on gender lines. there's women's magic, which is to do with the internal body and the 'softer' arts and men's magic, which is to do with the external world the 'hard' sciences.

and everyone just goes with it...cause what can u do ? fight god?

our protags are a trans guy and a nonbinary who have to deal with this incredibly cissexist magic system that everyone holds up as proof from the heavens that trans and nbs aren't real but the truth is that the creator was just a transphobic shithead.

i don't know what happens in the middle but the evil magic dude lowkey imprisoned a god to fuel the magic and they have to set the god free and the god falls in love with them and the god is queer also.

but in the middle you get a whole lotta angst about our trans guy who actually does the softest possible magic, and our resident nonbinary who rolls their eyes a lot and carries endless rage @ the world for being the way it is. maybe we can even have a token cis girl (she's brown and bisexual don't @ me) who doesn't do magic but she's very butch and very proficient with a sword. I would almost write this out of sheer spite at the amount of people on tumblr who think only lesbians are allowed to be butch / call themselves butch - here's a butch woman who is attracted to women!! she has a sword! oh, and she's bisexual. and she ends up with a girl but she never lets you forget just how fucking bisexual she is.

eat that.

anyway I like writing gender trauma and associated fuckery. What about you.