BBC series I Kissed a Boy decision "homophobic in the extreme" - LGB Alliance

[IwantToRetire]

We have written to Tim Davie, Director-General of the BBC, about the homophobia displayed in the casting of a trans identified female in their upcoming series of ‘I Kissed A Boy’.

By doing this they are telling young gay men watching the show that they must be attracted to women who are pretending to be male. This is regressive, insulting and ‘homophobic in the extreme.’

Read our letter here:

https://lgballiance.org.uk/bbc-series-homophobic-in-the-extreme/

(Sorry cant find a version of the letter that isn't text via a graphic.)

@SnoopyPajamas Absolutely, there's a lot to unpack there. I suspect that a lot of the difference between the sexes is boys being visual versus girls being verbal.

I've delved into AO3 a bit, but I'm not massively familiar with it, and I'm not familiar with a lot of the fandoms. Sometimes I wonder about particular fandoms and why they strike a chord with girls. Daria fandom is quite niche these days, and it's never going to compete with Harry Potter, but I do remember fanfic from 25 years ago shipping Daria and Jane, which I suppose is natural for a show about two straight girls with a very close platonic relationship. I wonder if that kind of lesbian fanfic has disappeared.

I think trends are going to go very differently with boys. We're used to Pornhub introducing them to all sorts of exotic fetishes that boys a generation ago might never have thought of. Probably the coming thing is going to be AI art, and the ability to create any erotic scenario you can imagine.

This transman who writes m/m fanfiction is obviously very interested in the latest turn the discussion has taken 😛I don't necessarily agree with everything, but more importantly, I'm surprised nobody's brought up one of the main problems with m/m fanfic: its very heavy heteronormativity.

I'm in a dead fandom, so basically I can do whatever I want, nobody's going to tell me off. But I have a friend who is in a slash sub-fandom of Harry Potter, and she regularly wails in private to me about how so many supposedly male/male fics are in fact male/female fics with the bottom guy written almost exactly like an uber-stereotypical girl: loving, empathetic, compassionate, listening, self-sacrificing, and of course, always giving in bed. In the meantime, the top character gets to be mean, violent, self-centered, manipulative, and always taking and taking, and the relationship is seen as romantic because the bottom "saves" and 'loves the top so much!"

So I would argue that yes, on the one hand, gay fanfic may wrongly encourage some girls to think of themselves as gay guys, but on the other hand, it also very much reinforces the worst stereotypes of straight relationships.

Even when it doesn't, I'd argue that most of the girls and women who write gay fanfic definitely don't think like gay guys and don't care one bit about actual gay sexuality; they are just exploring heterosexuality from a more remote, more detached point of view.

And then there's the omegaverse...

@Seethlaw I've dabbled a little in fanfic, in some niche fandoms, but overwhelmingly m/f and less commonly f/f. I know enough gay men to know that gay male sexuality is a very weird thing that women and girls probably can't understand. My fear is that any woman doing that will end up reproducing the "lesbian" porn that men make for men that bears no resemblance to lesbian sex.

I'll make an exception for when a straight man finds himself in an unexpected m/m situation with a particular individual, and says "I wouldn't normally do this, but it's different if it's you" - but I suspect that IRL this is much more common with women.

@SionnachRuadh

"My fear is that any woman doing that will end up reproducing the "lesbian" porn that men make for men that bears no resemblance to lesbian sex."

Yeah. I suspect that's very much what's happening.

Which wouldn't bother me if it was clear to everyone involved that it's just fiction, that it's just fans playing around with characters to have fun and/or explore sexuality from a "safe", if completely unrealistic, point of view. But that's pretty much never the case...

Though to be fair, I'm much more worried about the toxic ideas about straight romantic and sexual interactions that those fics indirectly describe and support. When you start with two supposedly equal characters and you still end up with a massive power differential, it poses a whole lot of scary questions.

Gender: A Wider Lens had a very interesting episode with a de-transitioned FtM 'Gay Boy' about this. I definitely recommend listening, as it covers a lot of what we're currently discussing.

Stella says something quite penetrative towards the end during a topic about mood boards. A lot of these young girls who present themselves gay boys don't actually behave like boys, and it's quite obvious to anyone but them. Their interests and how they express themselves through these hobbies are incredibly girlish. It's a total lack of self-awareness that I would normally think of as harmless, but with the medicalisation of these identities in addition to situations like the Lars one, it's become increasingly worrisome how all of this is manifesting amongst young teenage girls; the warped sense of entitlement it breeds, and the appropriation of identities. (There's no such thing as a lesbian with a penis!)

M/M is predominately written by women, for women. There's a lot of romanticisation and idealisation that seeps heavily into the narrative and character dynamics of these stories. It's projection, so it's no surprise that these characters often don't accurately depict gay men and actual gay relationships between men. It's very much like the impression women might get upon reading lesbian love stories/smut written by men. In M/M, it's a lot of woman psyche expressed on a male form.

Anyway, I wholly recommend giving this episode a listen if you ever have the time, @SionnachRuadh @SnoopyPajamas @Seethlaw

Yes. I think this verbal vs visual aspect of it is a big part of why people discount the impact fanfiction has on the developing sexualities of so many teen girls. It doesn't seem as 'hardcore' as the porn the boys are watching, and it doesn't involve real people, so it gets dismissed as something a bit silly and not worth looking into. Just the fevered imaginings of young girls.

The problem is that those of us who grew up in those spaces can see the impact it's actually having. We see the rise in 'gay trans boys', who are clearly girls trying to full time larp their fantasy world. We see the way all these reskinned, published fanfics are bringing fanfiction elements like BDSM into the mainstream. Just look at all the shock Fifty Shades of Grey generated. All the discourse around it. But in the fanfiction world, that would have been considered an unremarkable work - tame compared to what's out there - and would have inspired no feminist discourse at all. Most readers would have absorbed it uncritically, and judged the work solely on how hot the sex scenes between Bella and Edward from Twilight (as they were originally) were.

It's the wild west. And that's fine until you realise many young women spend more time reading fanfiction than actual books. But there is a culture of no critique around these fics, that is vastly different to engaging with mainstream pop culture. Just look at the Twilight books, and how much debate was generated over Edward's stalking of Bella. Teen girls still loved the books, but even friends I speak to today, who look back on them fondly, do so with their eyes wide open. They can acknowledge his behaviour was creepy and controlling, and that they're choosing to look past it to enjoy a work of fiction. None of them would want a partner who replicated that behaviour in real life.

Compare that to something like, say, choking during sex. The teens who are exposed to this in fanfiction don't know if this is supposed to be normal or not. Anyone who tries to have that conversation with the creator will be shut down and told to leave the fandom space, because they're being disrespectful. Treated like a troll and a prude, who is 'shaming' others. So what does the thirteen year old girl reading these fics come away thinking? Without the life experience and discernment of an adult, she probably accepts what she's being told - that sometimes a loving partner puts his hands on your throat and chokes you during sex. And this is a normal and desirable thing to happen, that makes sex hotter, actually. Unlike the girls who read Twilight, and had the benefit of a cultural conversation to teach them that discernment, these girls come away thinking they should want a boyfriend who acts like this in real life. Should expect it, even.

Then they meet the boys raised on Pornhub and get a taste of the reality of how frightening and degrading it feels to be assaulted by a partner during sex. But they don't realise they can say no. They think there's something wrong with them, actually, and they need to learn to like it. Never realising none of this stuff ever belonged in reality.

If fandoms want to take the "100% freedom of expression" route, that's a valid stance. But I do think the current efforts to shield young readers from inappropriate content are half-assed at best and non-existent at worst. We need to either put some guardrails on the whole thing and segregate content like we used to. Or else the adults in fandom need to stop being so selfish, and start moderating their own content. If the space has to be a free-for-all (I'm not convinced it does) then do the decent thing and tone it down a bit. The wildest and most depraved recesses of your imagination don't always have to be put on the internet for public consumption. Some things can be kept just for you! Shocker, I know. But it's true.

I've delved into AO3 a bit, but I'm not massively familiar with it, and I'm not familiar with a lot of the fandoms. Sometimes I wonder about particular fandoms and why they strike a chord with girls. Daria fandom is quite niche these days, and it's never going to compete with Harry Potter, but I do remember fanfic from 25 years ago shipping Daria and Jane, which I suppose is natural for a show about two straight girls with a very close platonic relationship. I wonder if that kind of lesbian fanfic has disappeared.

I've seen some data analysis on this, @SionnachRuadh and I think lesbian fic in general is a tiny minority of fanworks on the site. Which is sad but perhaps not surprising. It reflects what a female-dominated environment we're dealing with. Despite it being the trend for everyone to deck themselves in rainbows since about 2015, I think these figures represent the truth - that gay people are a minority. I can't imagine how head-shredding it must be to be a young lesbian in fandom now, and be surrounded by more self-identified 'queer' girls than you can shake a stick at, who blatantly don't experience same sex attraction. It must be so alienating.

I've seen the argument that femslash is so under-represented because lesbians prefer writing male fic. And I've known a few that did. I'm not saying it doesn't happen. But I also think that before it became cool to identify as gay, back when I was a teenager in the 00s, that's not what the young lesbians were doing. They were writing femslash. If there was a scarcity of source material to draw from, they were doing what you describe - taking something that had strong female relationships in it and making it romantic in their fiction. Even the ones that wrote slash ships tended to baulk a bit when penis entered the picture, and avoid getting into too much detail. Nothing like you see today.

There comes a point where if somebody has written fifty sex scenes reverently describing the joys of penis, and is claiming to be a lesbian, you really do have to wonder. What usually happens is they do a slow morph into non-binarism, then pansexualism, then come full circle and start identifying as gay men. (So, the straight women they probably were all along.) It's a bit strange. I tend to think of these as the "captured by Tumblr" types. They came out as gay back when it got them clout on Tumblr, and are terrified to admit they were appropriating the identity, even to themselves. They've got caught in a lie and now it's bigger than them. Now a convoluted process of cope is required to get them back to square one.

I think this social dynamic of "I declared myself something online and now I don't know how to walk it back" is responsible for a proportion of the 'gay trans men'. I haven't been involved in fandom for a few years now, and wasn't heavily involved even at my peak. But I was seeing the above trajectory so often, for a while there, that it became a kind of joke. It must be a factor.

This is very true, and was always a problem in fanfiction. It's a fascinating subject, because it's very much a window into how women try to 'process' male sexuality.

In some cases, they write men as they want them to be. Essentially, male bodies, female minds. It's wish fulfillment.

In others, they're writing what they have absorbed heterosexual relationships to be. One brutish, dominant partner, and one sweet submissive one, as you describe. They've made them gay men in an attempt to escape that, but it comes through anyway. You can really tell that this is how they see the world. Fundamentally. It's very uncomfortable.

The apex (or the nadir) of this is the omegaverse. It's this flat-out animalistic depiction of male sexuality, where he will go into heat and forcefully take his partner because he can't control himself, he can't fight the biological urge! Often this ends up paired with mpreg. If you wrote this as a piece of fiction with straight characters, it would be appalling and no reader would encourage the woman to stay with the man. But it's usually written with gay men instead, so it gets a pass. I won't comment on the homophobia inherent in that, but it really does show how many women have internalised the idea that male arousal = love, and being forcibly taken by a man = passion, and the female role in a relationship is to be submissive and breedable.

It's one of those tropes I just don't understand, and consider a bit of a red flag. It suggests a very warped view of gender and relationships. Especially given these are overwhelmingly presented as love stories. Not some sort of alternate horrorverse everyone is desperately trying to break free from 😂

I can't remember if I've watched that before or not. I may have done! I've definitely seen something with Helena, I do remember her.

Your point about the mood boards is very true, and another example of where I think people outside the fan sphere, like therapists, would benefit from keeping tabs on the goings-on within that space. Because that "moodboard of my gender" behaviour is rooted in fandom. It's evolved from making a moodboard of your favourite character, which used to be a popular activity in fandom. If you knew that, you'd be equipped to recognise the red flag of a young person self-inserting into fandom as a means of escaping their reality.

The same with certain male names that become popular among these girls. They might mean nothing to a therapist and be overlooked, but if you know what you're looking at, they could tell you a certain boybander / fictional character is the source of the patient's fixation.

That's important, because if you're a fifteen year old 'trans boy' telling your therapist "there's always been a boy inside me called Steve", it would probably help them to know you've been fixated on Stranger Things since you were 13, and that just so happens to be the name of the character you have pinned all over your bedroom walls. They might look at the whole thing very differently, if they knew that. Especially if they also knew you're reading a lot of fanfiction that pairs Steve with a boy, because actually it's a big no-no to write this straight character with a girl, in fan circles. It's just not allowed for some reason, and you'd be a bad person for doing it.

If a therapist knew that, and knew they were dealing with a teenager very susceptible to being influenced, I imagine they'd change their approach quite drastically. The conversation might then shift towards unhealthy attachments to fictional characters, or helping them stand up against peer pressure.

The therapist who doesn't know all that, on the other hand, is going to an attempt an in-depth conversation about gender and might even wonder if they're dealing with a closeted lesbian. And will end up wildly off-course.

You make some great points with the fanfiction analysis Snoopy. It’s made me think of Red, White and Royal Blue which was on Amazon in the last couple of years. It’s about two gay male characters falling in love but it’s very much a film for women. It was originally a book, written by a woman who identifies as queer and non-binary, natch.

Yes. I think this verbal vs visual aspect of it is a big part of why people discount the impact fanfiction has on the developing sexualities of so many teen girls. It doesn't seem as 'hardcore' as the porn the boys are watching, and it doesn't involve real people, so it gets dismissed as something a bit silly and not worth looking into. Just the fevered imaginings of young girls.

Honestly, I think part of the reason this is overlooked is because a lot of women interested in feminism like to think there is a kind of female moral superiority over men with regards to pornography.

I don't think there is, I think "romance" novels in the past, and fanfiction now, play an almost identical role for women and traditional pornography does for men. It doesn't have the issues that the film industry does with exploitation of actors and such, but it has most or all of the same negative psychological effects on consumers.

Yes this this has been a long reported (and much discussed) phenomena in the gay community, especially gay men. mumsnet objected to a previous post that included some links to articles, but you can easily find them by googling "straight men are going on Grindr looking for trans men"

It's actually resulted in gay men facing hostility on an app ostensibly made for them, since the above mentioned straight men are often not shy about objecting strongly to being solicited for sex by other biological men.

Couple of things that might be a little disjointed but have been worrying away at the back of my mind. It has to do with how girls, or some girls at least, relate to fiction or art generally.

One thing is fandoms picked up in one's teens. I think boys develop attachments that have longevity - show me a 50yo man who's really into Iron Maiden, and I guarantee he got into Iron Maiden when he was about 13. There are whole musical acts still touring on the basis of ticket sales to men who got into those acts 30, 40, 50 years ago.

There's a contrast there with the stereotype of the girl who forms a really intense attachment to a boyband, and then has probably forgotten about them a year later. I'd speculate that while the teen boy is acquiring a lifelong hobby, the teen girl is preparing herself for romance. It helps that boybanders are not hyper masculine, they're pretty boys, unthreatening, twinkish, maybe a little effeminate.

I also remember a passage from early in Frances Donaldson's old biography of PG Wodehouse - Donaldson is explaining that though she'd known Wodehouse since she was young, being a friend of his late stepdaughter, it wasn't until relatively late in life that she got into his books.

So she speculates on why at least 90% of Wodehouse fans are men, and her theory has to do with the superior female imagination. That while the male reader will read with detachment, the female reader will place herself in the action, and maybe identify very vividly with a particular character. Donaldson speculates that Wodehouse's plots relying very heavily on things like impostors and mistaken identity and the protagonist suffering from avalanches of mishaps, are more likely to alarm a female reader than amuse her. And the romance is usually a bit sketchy and mostly functions to set up the comic business of impostors, pratfalls, theft of jewels etc, so you're not drawing in the female reader who's more interested in what Hamish Beamish and Jane Cholmondley feel about each other.

It's quite speculative, and I don't believe these are hard and fast sex differences, but I do think that on average there are real differences between how girls and boys consume things like fiction. And maybe while we're concerned about the porn-addled boy we're missing the fanfic-obsessed girl.

It's interesting, thinking back, when I was young most of the stuff like nerd culture and comic cons was very male dominated, and I would agree it was more like a hobby thing.

It seems far more "fandom" dominated, and female dominated now, and I would also say many of the people involved seem to think of it as an identity. At least the girls do, and there is an element of creepy men who I suspect prey on that. I am not sure if these guys were as involved in the past, it wouldn't have given them much opportunity to creep on women, anyway.

Yeah, if a woman tells me she's passionate about reading, there's at least a 50% chance that what she's reading is smut. This rises to 100% if she's on BookTok.

Not that I object to a well done romance (or even well done smut!), and there are certain romance novels or movies that are comfort food to me. But the dating coach Hayley Quinn often says that young women have had their views of the dating market completely skewed by consuming too many romcoms, and I think she's right.

I haven't watched it, but this definitely came up in my periphery at the time, and was one of those I immediately suspected was a reskinned fanfiction. I don't know if it is or not, but it has all the hallmarks of one. I thought the same about that movie where Anne Hathaway falls in love with a knock-off Harry Styles.

Some of these, I don't know if they're actually fanfiction converted to "original fiction", but if they're not, they're a good example of the tropes of the genre (I do consider fanfiction its own genre these days) seeping through. See also: Heartstopper.

Ha! At the library I work at, about half the "youth" fiction is smut. So your guess about the reading habits of young women may be spot on...

It's possible. I'm still trying to pin down my thoughts on this one. It's only in the last year or so that I've given any thought at all to the wider influence of fanfiction on young women. I'm still formulating my views 😂

I suppose my thought here would be that I do see where you're coming from, and the current state of AO3 would seem to indicate that the kind of written pornography produced by women, can go to an extreme that is as harmful in its own way as traditional porn produced by men. But I think generally speaking, romance and even smut is such a broad tent. Some of it is genuinely just harmless escapism. Some of it is genuinely well-crafted. And some of it can actually help model healthy relationships for women and girls, and model how to leave unhealthy ones. The same absolutely cannot be said for male-made pornography.

I also think women tend to adapt themselves to the reality of men, in relationships, while men can be more forceful about pushing their porn-influenced ideals onto women. The woman's fantasies mostly hurt her. The man's fantasies mostly degrade the woman.

Shows like "I Kissed A Boy" are a rare example of a woman's fetish pushing the men around her to warp themselves in her image. "Lars" wants to believe she's a gay man, and they all have to pretend she is, or face social sanction and loss of opportunity. It's got a lot of attention precisely because it is so rare.

Hmm. I don't see any reason male pornography couldn't be artistically crafted.

I don't actually think learning about sex from fictional stories or images is particularly necessary for humans to have successful sex lives. I don't think it makes people happier or healthier. But if it could have a worthwhile "educational" element, I don't see why male pornography produced with something like AI images couldn't as well.

But fundamentally, it's sexual wank material divorced from real persons, and I think that's always dangerous.

I think when it's fanfiction about boybanders, it arises out of a young girl's crush on an unattainable idol. She can't meet the One Direction boys or the K-pop band in real life, but she's still experiencing an emotional journey, in her crush on them. That needs to play itself out in some kind of trajectory. For some girls, that's hating their real life girlfriends or going into meltdown when the band breaks up. For others it might be finding a boy who looks a bit like their crush and playing out a real relationship with him. For others, it seems to involve constructing a personality for the love interest inside their head, and reenacting the beats of a relationship through fiction.

With fiction based on an actual fictional property, I think it's coming from a slightly different place, and is more strongly tied to escapism. Sometimes it comes from over-identifying with a character. It's not necessarily even that they have a crush on this character. The character could be female, and they're straight, or male, and the girl is gay. But there is some element of this character the girl finds so relatable she sort of 'locks on'. And the character consumes her for a while.

This is very hard to explain from the outside. People often attribute it as a neurodivergent thing, but I think any lost, lonely person trying to figure themselves out can be vulnerable to this. Teenagers especially. I actually think most teenagers interested enough to enter a fandom are like this. Most of them, their brains are still cooking and they're predisposed to filter the world through a bit of a narcissistic lens. You know. "This character is just like me!" It's a natural life stage.

I've always been an outlier in fandom spaces. I tend to enjoy fiction for its own sake, and don't have that personal projected attachment to the characters. A character can be 'my favourite' and be someone completely appalling who has very little in common with me. I'm just fascinated by how they tick. Growing up in fandom spaces, I was the girl who wanted to dig into the flaws of my favourite character. Explore their feelings and sense of self. If we had had the tagging system we have today when I was a teenager, I would have been gunning straight for all the stories tagged "character study". But I soon learned that was rare. Most of my fandom friends were more interested in pretending the character didn't have any flaws, and getting defensive on their behalf. It was very important to them that everyone know their favourite did nothing wrong, actually, and every bad thing they'd ever done was some other character's fault. There tended to be a lot of arguments about that sort of thing.

It seems to have died down a bit these days, but now the need to project onto favourite characters has become more overt. I'm seeing a lot of self insert fanfiction, where you're supposed to simply swap out "Y / N" for your own name, and pretend it's about you. There seems to have been a rise in role play (people texting back and forth pretending to be the characters) and of course, there has been an absolute explosion of "trans headcanons". It's no longer at all unusual to look for art of a male character you know is not trans, and find him depicted with mastectomy scars in almost every picture.

Like I said, I've always been wired a little differently, so I'm a bit hamstrung in my understanding here. I can observe the behaviour of most teen girls in fandom and see the consistencies, but I don't fully 'get it'. I'm lacking that true inside perspective, of how it feels and what they're really thinking inside it all. I've never had that kind of illogical heightened attachment. Someone else might be able to explain that aspect better than me

I think sex is a part of the human experience and reflecting that in fiction is different to pornography. I just don't think you can meaningfully compare the two.

The cheap, "porn without plot" stuff that is just an excuse to make fetish content? I agree, that's mindless wank material and not great for women. There's an element of sexual self-programming there women are not immune to.

But a lot of writing in the romance genre does have fully fleshed-out characters and plot, and is trying to say something meaningful. Sometimes a sex scene in fiction has a purpose. Personally, I think it's too extreme to write off all written depictions of sex as harmful, or as pornography. I think we need to get back to a healthy balance.

@SnoopyPajamas

"Growing up in fandom spaces, I was the girl who wanted to dig into the flaws of my favourite character. Explore their feelings and sense of self. If we had had the tagging system we have today when I was a teenager, I would have been gunning straight for all the stories tagged "character study"."

Oooh, you're speaking my language here!

"I can observe the behaviour of most teen girls in fandom and see the consistencies, but I don't fully 'get it'. "

Same. I can gather observations, but I don't know. I still feel like a stranger in fandom even though I've been in there for longer than the new generation has been alive 😂

I don't disagree, but I don't think that what most kids are reading rises to the level of literature or even erotica. Nor are most traditional romance novels for that matter. What male porn does around sex, romance novels do around romance. It's not totally divorced from the real thing or it wouldn't be compelling at all, but it's a shadow of a shadow.

So something like Wuthering Heights might be romance literature, but how many kids are reading that? They are reading Twilight, or 50 Shades, or a knock off of 50 Shades.

There seems to have been a rise in role play (people texting back and forth pretending to be the characters)

One of the weirder things I've seen is that you can pay someone on a site like Etsy to write you a love letter in the voice of a fandom character, and send it to your house through the mail.

Trying to dig into where the satisfaction is in something like that is a bit scary. It reminds me of the idea some people have that VR sex or sex with robots might replace real relationships for men.

The narcissistic identification is really interesting, and I think that could be one of those sexed differences. "Becky Bloomwood is just like me!" is something I can easily imagine hearing from friends who read Sophie Kinsella, even if they're not all that similar to Becky. They see some quality in her that they identify in themselves.

A character resonating with the reader seems to happen a bit differently with boys. I think of it as aspirational identification - like the stereotype of the nerdy, maybe lonely, boy who gets heavily into male power fantasies like James Bond or Conan or superhero comics. He's not saying "James Bond is just like me", he's identifying with some quality Bond has that he admires and maybe lacks, like his confidence.

I do love to go deep into character flaws. I mentioned Daria, and if that had been on TV when I was a teenager, there's no question I would have identified strongly with the clever, arty girl trying to keep her head above water in a world full of idiots. Watching it as an adult, there are still some elements of the character that resonate with me, but I actually find the writing more interesting because I can see that Daria is quite hypocritical and passive-aggressive and often treats people around her badly.

Where fanfiction fits into that, I'm not quite sure. I assume there's an awful lot of self-insert.