Continued Exposure?
Acceptance?
I am a puffer fish!
I ain’t gotta accept shit. 
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This thread’s meant to be about discussing marginalised identities and how to write good characters. So, I’m going to ask if we can steer off of the cis-het discussion for now. I think both sides of the argument have been stated.
I think another good way to write good characters with marginalized identities, is to expose yourself to stories with good characters. Read books, watch tv shows, identify what’s good and what’s bad, take inspiration from it. I read a fair amount of webcomics, since they tend to be written by, and have more diverse people.
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Another suggestion - one which has helped me is to take an older work and compare its characters to a newer work. A Robert Heinlein progressive character of the 1960’s may not seem so today but when you compare his character Friday with a character more modern you can see how feminism has changed in the past 50 years and how terms have evolved.
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Good call @fairygodfeather. What are some favorite characters of everyone’s that are well-written and from some kind of minority group? If you know whether the author is from that group or not, that’d be helpful to mention, but either would be useful.
A genderqueer/trans friend of mine was raving about Liz Taylor from Season 5 of American Horror Story while we watched, and I agreed she was great. Liz Taylor is at times campy and fabulous, a la drag queen style, but as they get into her character she’s a complicated, interesting, kick ass trans woman. She hasn’t had any surgery and doesn’t care much about passing (which is against general trans TV tropes), she has a troubled life that makes her very human, she pursues relationships intelligently and maturely, and the scene where she reunites with her son is handled sensitively and with style. There’s also a few hugely funny scenes where she talks with a well-meaning but bafflingly clueless ghost from 1890.
Agent Diana Barrigan from White Collar - as I was rewatching this show, I was noticing how well diverse characters were handled there. She’s a lesbian, she has a partner. Whenever a joke is made involving her, the punchline is on the protagonist, a white cis male con man - “Haha, here’s a woman who will never care how handsome you are, do you even have another way of relating to females?” Her sexuality is never fetishized; when you finally meet her partner, it’s a hand squeeze and a chaste kiss. And the issues she brings up are interesting - the episode where her partner proposes, and Diana seems troubled, she eventually says (paraphrasing), “It’s not that I don’t want to get married. I just never imagined this happening.”
(May add more as I think of them.)
Some people find that helpful, some find it depressing. Shakespeare wrote about a Jew who was basically a flesh-stealing demon - but “If you cut us, do we not bleed?” was a thought-provoking humanization, for the time. Old-timey discrimination can either be staggeringly worse, or exactly as bad (which is depressing for its own reasons.)
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I don’t watch much TV, but in the last year Sense8, Black Sails, Jessica Jones, and Legend of Korra, are all shows I’ve really enjoyed, that have diverse casts. I’ll add in Torchwood there, although that’s an old favourite.
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I’ve been writing this in my head for a few days, while I’ve been between houses and without internet. When you are writing people, there are at least three different levels.
-
The personal
What does this person think, feel, and experience on a daily basis, and why?
This is the part that’s almost impossible to get right, unless you ask someone who’s lived it. Research helps, but you might not notice that although you’re experienced with mental illness, only some get their own nouns (schizophrenics, psychotics - there are no anxioids or PTSDiacs.) Or that even if someone’s in a hurry, one non-binary pronoun set is not equivalent to another, because that’s the careless way your identity is treated all the time. (Sorry, @RedRoses, and thank you for pointing that out.) Unless you’re writing a new culture or species, in which case research the closest equivalents, intelligently brainstorm, and see #3. -
The cultural
When and where do people live, and how does that manifest?
This is where research can help a LOT. When someone says “_____ people act (dress/talk/etc.) like this”, if it’s at all based in reality, they’re usually talking about culture. There are blogs, personal accounts, biographies, case studies, sociology studies. One important thing to realize is that whatever you’ve observed is almost certainly based in a time and a place, not an innate characteristic. The drag scene is a specific subculture of artistic and cultural expression, as well as shared identity; a person who is gay, trans, genderqueer, or queer is only going to have the most basic practical things in common with these people, unless they also share the same subculture. -
The literary
What have your characters come to symbolize, and/or how has culture changed, and why?
This is where you get into translating people into stories, and is what I was criticizing in the parent thread (maybe badly, or crossing a line by doing so, but genuinely troubled.) You are writing characters, not real people. Has the character turned into some kind of metaphor? If so, is it one that is valid and necessary, or based in stereotypes? If you are creating something new (culture, species, time period, etc.) is it a projection of authentic sociobiological principles, or flawed logic?
I’m not sure exactly how to explain what I mean by my next thought, but this is the closest I’ve been able to come: you can’t just wish something out of society, while keeping everything else the same. If your society has moved beyond racism, you don’t necessarily have to explain why and how, but you have to remove everything that causes and is dependent upon that institution. When you remove the problem, you have to replace it with some better structure.
I grew up in a Polish immigrant neighborhood. Culture thrived there; the language evolved new slang, Polish art had a new heyday in Chicago, we created activists and role models and it was a good thing all around. But it was also an enclave. It existed because a lot of people, due to substandard language skills, cultural understanding, or legal status, needed to be sheltered by those who were more confident, experienced with outsiders, and able to protect them from people like the police who wouldn’t care if they showed up dead somewhere. Now that there are fewer first-generation immigrants who are desperate for support, the culture and the people have not disappeared, but the enclave has.
San Francisco is a shining city built by outcasts and the oppressed; that will no more be forgotten than the influence of the Creole on New Orleans. But the thriving art scene and the optimistic social activism and the celebration of identities aside, it also functions as an enclave. It hides and protects those refugees who were unsafe where they lived, or who could not rent a room, or who need to be taken in by understanding people because those have been in short supply.
In a hundred years, I would expect it to be a historic mecca and center of culture. If it were still a haven for sexual and gender minorities, that would posit a society that has not much changed its way of relating to those groups.
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There are literary critics who focus on science fiction. One name I hear a lot is Octavia Butler, whose novels and short fiction were partly a response to the genre’s shortcomings in its portrayals of ethnicities and cultures outside the white, middle-to-upper-class straight male demographic that dominated the field. Butler’s work is known for themes of marginalization and injustice, which tend to figure prominently in the histories of her protagonists.
That’s my understanding, anyway. I haven’t read her work yet, but she’s on my list. With a couple of Nebula awards, two Hugos, a MacArthur fellowship, and her induction into the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame a few years back, I’m guessing she was pretty good at writing marginalized characters.
A lot of folks here are probably aware of this game already, but I think Read Only Memories presents a wonderfully convincing vision of a twenty-first-century cyberpunk world in which the need for enclaves is nearly extinct. There were things I did not like about this game, and I never got around to finishing it, but I loved interacting with the characters.
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So much to read, and a lot to research. I feel like I don’t have a sufficient answer for several points raised on terminology and so am reading a book called ‘The Social Art’, with a few other language-related books on the stack.
I didn’t add my bit and abandon the thread, I just don’t have anything further to add besides detail arguments.