So I'm late as hell to the punch line, but speaking as a trans woman who has always been interested in reading and writing gender-bending fiction, I thought I'd pitch in my two cents. Beware of generalities.
In short, no, gender-bending fiction is not harder to write because of the proliferation of trans awareness.
The longer answer is that as a genre, gender-bending fiction doesn't exist for its own sake! As a culture, we write gender-bending fiction because we already have gender-transgressive impulses, but we don't know how to engage with them. Our lack of competence and comfort with gender-transgression is a
systemic issue that can't be solved by individual authors going out of their way to write unproblematic gender-bending fiction. Or at least, it's unfair to place the burden of fixing this issue on the authors in question.
To break that down a little more, let's go back to Ranma 1/2, because it's a classic, and I was just talking about it the other day. Ranma 1/2 spoilers ahead, obviously, but I imagine that's probably not much surprise or concern to everyone in this thread.
Going back to Ranma, I began reading Fanfiction. One trope or cliche of Ranma Fanfiction that interested me the title character being mode locked, I.E being temporary or permanently trapped in the main characters female form. To me, this trope had some ripe potential for some drama involving loss of identity as well as exploration. I also thought it would be deeply ironic that a chauvinistic character like Ranma would end up trapped in a female body.
So how does this all tie into gender-bending? Well you have the replication of the feeling of a trans person (a mind that possesses a gender identity being shoved into a body of the other gender), and overall you need to appropriately capture how somebody would react to that and deal with it. These are things that can be very hard to do, because what you're writing about is something that is messy and complex and complicated, and if you haven't experienced it there's aspects that can simply be difficult to really understand. In plenty of gender bending or pseudo-gender bending stories (Tanya the Evil came up in the Pet Peeves thread when we were discussing something similar) the sense of dysphoria that the character would get is simply... ignored. I don't think this is even necessarily intellectual laziness, I think the writer simply didn't understand the sort of experience that is endured in these cases. And they shouldn't be shamed for that, but it's a danger of writing this kind of story.
Just for the sake of argument, I want you to imagine an anime where the main character is a sexually attractive woman persistently forced by circumstances to flash the audience and show off her body. Maybe she has to go naked in order to use her incredible superpowers for some convoluted reason, or maybe she's cursed to destroy her clothes every time she's dunked in cold water. Whatever.
This is a completely hypothetical exercise, of course; no naming names!
I think we would all agree that this anime is pretty damn horny; more than that, I think we would all agree that the anime is persistently horny
on purpose. If it's not written to appeal to the author's own sexual desires, then it's written to appeal to an audience with sexual desires.
And although the urge to gender-transgression isn't an intrinsically sexual urge, I would argue that it's equally basal, rooted in id and embodiment on a similar level. When a work of fiction persistently goes out of its way to portray gender-bent characters, that gender-bending is ultimately there to appeal to gender-transgressive desires. Watching Ranma 1/2 doesn't mean that you're transgender, but being transgender makes you a kind of person who is likely to be compelled by Ranma 1/2.
See, Ranma 1/2 is nominally a story about a cisgender boy with a gender-bending curse that activates every time he's splashed with cold water; Ranma 1/2 is nominally a story about a "boy trapped in a girl's body", to borrow a particularly cisgender turn of phrase. And yet, despite all that, Ranma 1/2 is a
transfeminine allegory.
Ranma's potential womanhood -- as someone with access to a body that can pass as female, of course, but also as a human being who can choose to live as a woman -- is persistently invalidated and disqualified by the people closest to him. His love interests need him to be the man that they're interested in, and his family needs him to fulfill the social contract of filial obligation. For a time, Ranma's mother, Nodoka, wants him to
commit ritual suicide for failing to live up to her standards of masculinity; she wants to commit a
hate crime against him. This is all played for slapstick, but this is ultimately a transfeminine experience, or at least a queer AMAB experience.
Ranma Saotome ostensibly experiences the same type of dysphoria that trans men do, but his life hits all of the beats of a trans woman's life. His relationships with other people are shaped by his gender in the same way that a trans woman's relationships are. Ranma's gender issues come from a magical cold-water curse, but that is, at the very least,
blatant wish fulfillment for trans woman. I would even go so far as to say that Ranma's cold-water curse is yet another transfeminine allegory. It comes from without, and it changes his body, but it has the same effect on his life as "realistic" transgender feelings and desires, which come from within. Ranma tries to find a cure for his curse, but how many trans women have tried to "cure" themselves of their queerness and their desire to transition? Ranma didn't choose his curse, but how many trans women choose to feel gender dysphoria?
Towards the end of the manga, Ranma becomes more comfortable with his femininity in various asides. In the final chapters, Ranma even goes so far as to accept his curse! In canon! He doesn't just decide to give up his chance at a cure for the sake of something more important; he outright says that he stopped caring so much about his curse, that his girl side was always a part of him in some sense, and that his cold-water curse might not have ever been a curse.
If you read Ranma 1/2 as a story about a boy, this
is problematic. It makes makes Ranma 1/2 (and every cliche "Ranma gets stuck as a girl" fanfic) a story where dysphoria is just ignored and handwaved away. It makes Ranma 1/2 a story about a boy who learns to just up and accept living in a body he hates. But emotionally, I don't think that's what the story of Ranma 1/2 is really about. Emotionally and allegorically, Ranma 1/2 is a story about a closeted trans woman who comes to terms with her gender.
With a lot of other garbage thrown in, to be fair, but really, that is the core of Ranma 1/2 that made it more than a martial arts harem manga. And this is what most all gender-bending fiction is, too.
Gender-bending fiction is nominally a genre about people who get trapped in incorrectly gendered bodies and then inexplicably end up not suffering gender dysphoria... but it's broadly an allegory for people who transition, learn to accept themselves, and find themselves in correctly-gendered bodies.
When people want to explore gender-transgression, they read and write gender-bender fiction instead of explicit trans fiction for a few reasons, some of which are social and contingent. Gender-bending is more effective than gender transition (the wish fulfillment factor), but it also manages to be massively more plausible and intuitive (because the vast majority of people don't know that gender transition really exists, and they don't know what it entails).
Gender-bending is emotionally safer than gender transition, because people at large are transphobes, and more willing to put up with the gender of a gender-bent character. Gender-bending is seen as "real", despite the fact that it only exists in fiction, while gender transition is seen as "fake", because our culture is gender-essentialist. We think of gender as what we
are, instead of something we can do, or something we can perform, or something we can choose from moment to moment, and us trans people generally go along with this, because if we tell cis people that we're choosing to live a certain way, they'll force us to "choose" to live in the way that they want us to live.
Gender-bending is emotionally safer than gender transition, because gender-bending is something that Just Happens to fictional characters, without any responsibility or moral culpability on their part, while gender transition is a choice you have to personally make. Gender-bending has some plausible deniability, because it's hilarious comedy gold that no-one expects to have anything to do with real people. Gender-bending has some plausible deniability because cis people don't exactly watch Ranma and think "wow, this is incredibly trans-coded!".
But most importantly -- and intrinsically -- gender-bending is an emotionally safe way to explore gender transgression because it's ambiguous. Explicit transness is terrifying to somebody in the closet, but cisness is a choking stranglehold of identity. In trans communities, I see older trans people telling unsure young adults that they can try reversible transition steps to see if transition is right for them, without feeling bound or obligated in advance to make a choice either way.
And that's what gender-bending is: a kind of hypothetical transition, reserved for thought experiments, which doesn't obligate anyone to identify as anything, or feel anything, or do anything. And without obligations, people are free to feel themselves.
Once, Aevee Bee wrote of cosplay and gender exploration: "...I think people should not have to feel like they are committing to something just by the way they dress. If it felt unsafe for people dipping their toes in gender feelings to cosplay a canonical closeted trans woman, the irony is almost too painful for me to imagine? ...the idea that there might be a closeted trans woman being either told by others or telling herself she can't cosplay a closeted trans woman because she doesn't think she's trans enough or thinks she's too cis is so horrifying a thought I haven't been able to stop thinking about it. A truth can be ambiguous; protecting that liminal space protects people."
And similarly, I think gender-bending fiction is a necessary liminal space for a lot of people. It's often problematic and terribly confused, and it usually manages to perpetuate dumb ideas about gender and sex and transness, but in that respect it's a symptom of
people who are terribly confused, and reading and writing these stories for a reason, and trying to process everything their cultures have said about gender and sex and transness.
When cishet people want to throw gender-bending into their work for titilation, or to make an audience out of the people who are drawn to gender-bending, that's one thing. But the people in this liminal space are the most dedicated to consuming and producing gender-bending fiction, and I fundamentally can't and won't expect them to be be fully unambigous, thought-out, or un-problematic in the process. Not while they're still unfucking their shit.
