Tag: LGBTQ+

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Publish and Persist

This post requires some introduction, because I originally wrote it in late March, and left it in my drafts until now. This was mostly because I was afraid of backlash, whether in the form of direct harassment on social media, or in the form of not getting the PhD funding I was then waiting for. I didn’t know if these fears were justified, but they were enough to make me hesitate, especially as AHRC funding decisions were coming up within the next month. It wasn’t that I thought it would stop me from getting funding — it was more that, if I posted it and then didn’t get the funding, I would always wonder whether these two things were related, and I couldn’t face that uncertainty.

The thing about AHRC funding is that if you get it, you’re notified in early April; if you don’t, you’re left hanging, waiting in case some additional funding becomes available later or you’re able to secure a scholarship elsewhere. If I had got funding at that stage, I would have posted this in April. But, as you can probably guess, I did not, and so I was left waiting… and waiting… and waiting, unsure whether it was a good time to post it.

Then, in May, as a result of entirely unrelated factors, I was subjected to transphobic harassment on social media, including transphobes posting my author headshots, taken from my website, and speculating about my assigned gender and, by extension, my genitalia and healthcare choices. I ended up locking down my Twitter account for a few weeks, making my YouTube videos private to deny them further ammunition, and otherwise going into hiding as far as public internet presence was concerned. It was comparatively mild compared to what other trans people have experienced online, but it still made me afraid to be publicly trans. I lost my nerve, stopped posting anything too obviously queer on social media, and developed significant anxiety about how some of my future books would be received (due to being much more explicitly queer/trans than my previously published titles) and whether I would be able to cope with that.

In other words, it destroyed any chance of this being posted. At least for a while.

But that fear is exactly what this post is about. It is about defying those who want to cow us into invisibility and silence, to push us out of the public eye and out of their publications because they make it unbearable for us to stay. It is about asserting my right to exist as myself within academia, my right to do the research I want to do, and the validity of that research.

So here’s the post. I’ve left it more or less as it was when I wrote it at the end of March, with a few tweaks, corrections, and additions to reflect the time that’s passed.

On the 24th of March, I announced the publication of a long-awaited academic article of mine. Entitled ‘”What Manner of Man is this Hound?: Gender, Humanity, and the Transgressive Figure of Cú Chulainn’, it’s colloquially known in certain corners of the internet as my ‘trans Cú Chulainn’ article, although in actual fact it’s only partly about transmasculine readings, and is significantly about monster theory.

This article begin life as part of my undergraduate dissertation, way back in 2017-18, and I’ve been talking about it on Tumblr for almost as long, which is why some people have genuinely been waiting five years to read this. It’s rare for an baby academic like me to have that kind of eager audience, and I’m afraid I’ve rather tested their patience: although I wrote it up into an article in 2019, presented a section of it a conference in 2020, and submitted the article in 2021, it’s taken until now for it to be published.

I’ve been rewarded, however, with a slew of enthusiasm on Tumblr: “I’ve been waiting literally years to read this, I’m so excited!” say bloggers eagerly in their tags, a level of enthusiasm few academics experience when publishing a new article.

(You can download and read the article for free on the Research page of this site, btw.)

Because my work on queer readings of Táin Bó Cúailnge originated as part of my undergraduate dissertation, and it’s in that final year of undergrad I first started posting meaningfully about my research online, this has become my online academic brand. This was the first area of research I worked in, so people associate me with it — especially on Tumblr, but also on Twitter, where I gained quite a lot of my followers after appearing on the Motherfoclóir podcast to talk about this.

It’s funny, because actually, academically, queer theory represents only a very small part of what I do. I’ve mostly moved on to other areas of research: my MA thesis was about Láeg mac Riangabra, and while I occasionally make shippy jokes on Tumblr about his relationship with Cú Chulainn, that wasn’t an aspect I was exploring. My PhD proposal revolves around friendship in the Ulster Cycle, the very thing that critics of queer readings think people like me are neglecting or erasing. And my other two published articles have nothing to do with queer readings — one is about Láeg in Brislech Mór Maige Muirthemni and Oidheadh Con Culainn, and one is an edition and translation of a fragmentary onomastic text about the seven Maines, the sons of Medb and Ailill.

(Although I did recently use that research to answer somebody’s questions about queer interpretations of Táin Bó Cúailnge, so I guess even that can be queered if you try hard enough.)

For the most part, I have shifted towards expressing my queer readings transformatively, e.g. through retellings, and focusing on other areas in my academic life. It’s partly because I didn’t want to be pigeonholed as somebody who exclusively worked on queer stuff. It’s partly because my interests genuinely shifted. And it’s partly just a coincidence in terms of what I’ve been working on right now, and what’s moved to the back burner.

But as far as the internet is concerned, what I do is queer readings of Irish lit.

And that’s fine. There are way, way worse reputations to have. But I have to say, not everybody is thrilled about it.

Last year, I received a serious of anonymous hate messages on Tumblr from somebody who was intensely angry about my work. As far as I could tell, they claimed to be a student in my own field, and they were furious that I, a queer trans person, might point out that medieval literature can be analysed more effectively if we free ourselves of the assumption that everybody in any given text is heterosexual and exists within a modern western gender binary. Controversial, you see.

Anon accused me of being simultaneously a nobody, whose work was of no value and whom nobody really respected, and also an unavoidable plague, whom they could not themselves escape because I had so dominated the field with my queer agenda. I wasn’t sure how I could be both a nobody and everywhere, but evidently I’d succeeded, and it was upsetting this person considerably.

An anonymous Tumblr message: "Unfortuantely you keep plaguing the internet and your 'field' that you have no business being a part of with probably the worst 'scholarship' that has come out of Cambridge I've ever seen."

They made various other accusations, some of which I couldn’t disprove — for example, they claimed I’d only won the CMCS Prize for Young Scholars due to lack of competition. This may well be true, for all I know, but since there’s no evidence either way, it still looks good on my CV, and I can only assume there’s a measure of bitterness about the award that drove Anon’s campaign. They were angry that my ‘trendy’ research was being legitimised in this way, since everybody knows that editions and translations of fragmentary onomastic texts are all the rage with the queer theory crowd these days (??).

Some of their tirades were amusing — or at least, they were either funny or upsetting, so I picked funny, because laughing at them was better than letting them get to me. Mostly, they instilled in me a sense of spite. I’d already moved on from queer theory, but it made me want to go back and publish more of it — to present at every conference, to submit to every journal. If they thought I was an unavoidable plague before, I reasoned, I would make sure that got even worse, and they’d never be able to escape me getting my grubby queer little hands all over their precious medieval literature.

The saga ended after a few days. Anon’s grievances had become increasingly specific, and I’d pointed out that if they weren’t careful, they were going to give away their own university affiliation and, by extension, their identity. Either this scared them into silence or they simply got bored, but the incident never recurred. I continued with my work, and my research, although my spite-fuelled urge to publish was slightly dampened by my life circumstances getting a lot more complicated, robbing me of the time to act on it.

The spite didn’t go away, though.

It was noticeable throughout Anon’s tirade that it was my work on queer readings, and particularly trans readings, that they were targeting. Of course it was. There are a lot of people who would like to pretend that queer and trans lives are a modern invention, and a lot of people who are viscerally uncomfortable with the idea of disrupting the assumptions we make about medieval texts’ constructions of gender and sexuality, for reasons they often won’t interrogate.

But anyone who reads my latest article will see that I’m hardly making any radical claims: it’s simply a preliminary study of why transmasculine readings of Cú Chulainn might be useful and add nuance to our understanding of masculinity in the text, before I then go off talking about monsters for the entire second half of it. In fact, I’ve been distinctly worried that the people who wanted trans readings will be disappointed that I’m not nearly as bold as they were expecting.

The thing is, it didn’t matter. This person hadn’t read my article. It wouldn’t have made a difference if they had. What they were reacting against, what they were objecting to, wasn’t really my work. It was me, as a queer, trans scholar, existing boldly in academia without hiding those facts about myself.

An anonymous message on Tumblr, reading, "Speaking from inside knowledge, you won that prize because there were extremely few submissions, exactly no one takes your work seriously except for the moronic zoomers desperate for attention and legitimisation. UCC has been steadily declining in the views of most of the academic world for some time now. Do you actually think anyone works their salt thinks Cú Chulainn is a "trans man"? When this garbage stops being trendy I hope youl'l be gone along with it. The sooner the better."

They want me gone. They made that pretty clear. Not just my queer theory work, but me as a scholar. The sooner the better.

And that’s why it didn’t make a difference to them that my other work isn’t on queer theory, and why it wouldn’t keep me ‘safe’ from this kind of bigotry if I never wrote about gender or sexuality ever again. There is no way to be the ‘good’ trans person, to be ‘acceptable’ levels of queer, to squash myself into a normative box enough that they can forget I’m different and start to accept my scholarship at face value. Because my work, to them, will always be coloured by the fact that I’m a queer trans scholar whose work is informed by my own understandings of the world, and thus is tainted by my agenda.

So if I’ll never be good enough, why try?

Once upon a time, I thought, maybe I shouldn’t provoke people. I thought, I’ll get pigeonholed. I thought, I need to do some stuff other than queer theory so that people take me seriously as a scholar. I thought, I have to prove myself, over and over again.

But it’s pointless.

They will never want me, whether I spend the rest of my academic life writing about queer readings or whether I dedicate myself to editing obscure lists of names and trying to determine chronological continuity between interrelated texts. But the latter will make it a lot easier for them to ignore me, and the former… well, the former will piss them off. And you know what? I think there are certain people in the world who deserve to be pissed off.

Why should I squash myself and my research interests into a safe conventional acceptable-to-bigots box, for the benefit of people who never wanted me there in the first place? I shouldn’t. I won’t. And the very fact that they don’t want me to be here makes me all the more determined to keep doing what I do.

So I hope Anon knows that within 48 hours of uploading my article to this website, 275 people opened or downloaded the PDF. More than 350 people visited the page where it’s hosted, and presumably looked at the abstract, and at my other work. My tweet about it got more views and engagement than anything else I’d tweeted this year (including when I announced The Hummingbird Killer… clearly my audience has priorities). These numbers may not sound exceptional to those in large academic fields, but for an independent scholar in a niche area of study, hosting an article on their own website (ruling out people accidentally stumbling on it while looking for another article)… yeah, that’s pretty good, actually. Those are some pretty good numbers.

Five months down the line, that number has doubled. As far as I can see from the stats I have access to, the PDF has been opened/downloaded at least 550 times. Some of those may be the same people coming back to check something, to re-download it; some may be bots. But even if only a fifth of those downloads are real people… that’s still a hundred people who’ve sought out my article. Downloaded it. Maybe read it, maybe cited it.

Because people want trans readings. People want my trans readings. People want my scholarship, because I deserve to be here.

A photo of Finn Longman, a white person with orange tinted glasses wearing a graduate cap and gown, pointing at an anti-litter poster in the window of a building which reads "Bin the Butt". On the windows are stripes in the colour of the progress pride flag, which says #BogaimisLeBród #ProgressWithPride @UCC.
MA Graduation, standing in front of the Boole Library at UCC with Pride decals in the windows, laughing about the word ‘butt’.

I don’t know when I’ll return to queer theory. I have a few articles in mind, a few texts where I think trans readings would do a great deal to illuminate the layers of the story. I might write them next month, or in three years’ time. And maybe there will be people who are angry about that: in my field or out of it, on the internet or in person. Maybe there will be doors that get closed in my face because of it.

But if people don’t want that work, then it’s because they don’t want me, a person who is queer, trans, and unashamed. And if they don’t want me, well, that sounds like a them problem.

Because, as I edit this post on 3rd September 2023, I can confirm that although I didn’t get AHRC funding, I did, at the very last minute, get full PhD funding via two Cambridge-specific scholarships, and I will be starting a PhD in the department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic this October. I’ll be working on friendship and interpersonal relationships between men in the late Ulster Cycle, looking at how these relationships are depicted from the medieval to the early modern period and the various influences shaping their development, such as chivalric romance. I imagine this research will show up plenty of queer possibilities, even if they’re not my primary focus, and I’m looking forward to examining intimacy and loyalty within various contexts.

Moreover, in July, I presented a paper at the International Congress of Celtic Studies, and received some great comments and made some great academic connections as a result of it — including one that might result in more queer readings in the near future. And I just had another article accepted for publication (pending revisions), my first time submitting to a journal with no caveats about age or qualifications, as if I were any scholar. The peer reviewers, despite their exacting corrections, clearly thought my work was worth something, and while some days that’s harder to remember than other days, I’m going to choose to believe them.

So I’m going to keep plaguing the internet and my field with my research, and if Anon and others like them don’t like it… I actually don’t care, except that spite is a way more effective academic motivation than any traditional ‘publish or perish’ rat race, and every time my work annoys somebody who doesn’t see me as a person, it just makes me want to do it even more. Publish and persist. Persist as a scholar and persist as a person and persist as a thorn in the side of everyone who wants us gone.

As a medievalist, I can say with confidence: trans people have always been here. And as a trans person, I will say with defiance: you won’t get rid of us.

And as a trans medievalist, I’ll say: hi, can I interest you in an article about monster theory, boundary-crossing, and trans readings of Cú Chulainn? Because it’s open access and available to read right here.

Disclaimer: I would be remiss if I didn’t note that although I face certain barriers as a queer, trans, disabled scholar, I still benefit from white privilege. While I’ve been occasionally treated as an outsider for being English without a meaningful claim to Irishness, this has primarily been from people outside academia, and I haven’t faced the automatic othering that people of colour often face in medieval studies, Celtic studies, and academia as a whole. Indeed, as a white English person I’m often assumed to belong (“So is your family Irish?”) in a way that Irish people of colour are not (“But where are you REALLY from?”).

Moreover, I’m a coward: while I preach defiance about the nature of my research, I know I’ve not done enough, in the past, to publicly call out bigotry within our field and in related areas. I could make all sorts of excuses about feeling vulnerable as a student, struggling with energy levels due to my disabilities, or not having enough information to feel confident speaking up… but others in the same position as me have done far more to stand up for the vulnerable and the marginalised, and the people most directly affected by these issues rarely have a choice about whether they’re involved or not. I want to do better on this, because the hate mail that I’ve received pales in comparison to some of the vitriol that gets thrown at others. I hope that the institutional support (and funding) of being a PhD student rather than an independent scholar will empower me to do more in this regard, and I want to at the very least acknowledge that I’m aware of these dynamics and the ways that I have failed in the past to challenge them.

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All Murder, No Sex: Why “Upper YA” ≠ “Sexy YA”

It’s still Ace Week, until Sunday, so following on from my last post about asexual representation in The Butterfly Assassin, I figured I would talk some more about sex and YA. More specifically, the clear and important difference between “upper YA” and “sexy YA”: terms with considerable overlap that are nevertheless not synonyms, and shouldn’t be considered as such.

There’s an uncomfortable habit that some people have of referring to books without sex as “clean”. This is particularly common in YA and romance — romance, because it’s a genre where distinguishing which books contain explicit sex is particularly relevant, and YA, because it’s a category where gatekeepers worry about what exactly they’re giving young people to read.

Of course, by categorising some books as “clean”, one automatically categorises others as “dirty”, whether or not that’s the intention, and implying that all explicit sex in books is somehow dangerous or inappropriate is a Whole Thing. It’s also something that’s disproportionately weaponised against marginalised creators. For decades, explicit queer content in books was considered illegally pornographic, and even now, LGBTQ+ books on Amazon get classified as “erotica” and hidden from lists and adverts when they don’t even vaguely fall into that category.

My experiences as a queer YA reader will be forever shaped by the fact that the first book with queer characters that I ever encountered — when I was twelve — had a label on the back saying “Advisory: Adult Content”. A label that wasn’t applied to the sequel, which contained substantial amounts of drug use. Only to the book with the gay characters. And I’ll always be shaped by the fact that when I was eighteen, I owned a grand total of three books containing queer characters. I can only recall two of the books, but in both of those they’re cis male secondary characters.

In other words, I never saw myself in books growing up. If I stumbled on queer characters in library books it felt like a strange kind of secret I was sharing with the author. Section 28 was repealed while I was still in primary school, but my county kept a version of it until I was halfway through secondary school, and in 2014, when I finished school, 29% of teachers still didn’t know whether or not they were allowed to teach about LGBT issues in schools.

This was a world of silence. Of not talking about it. Of “think of the children”. Of being treated like someone who was only allowed to exist after the watershed.

As an adult, it’s strange to think how recent this was, though sometimes, being trans, it can feel like little progress has been made. I remember when I first started getting queer books to review, I felt like I had to give all of them extra stars just because they bothered to include queer characters, which I’d seen so rarely. Now, there are enough of them that I don’t have to read any books featuring only straight people, if I choose not to. Now, there are enough that I’m allowed to dislike some of them.

I try not to take that for granted. I try to keep things in perspective. I remind myself that twenty years ago, most of the YA books I read now would have been illegal to display in school libraries.

It isn’t a world we should go back to.

There are constant conversations these days about sex in YA books, and the nature of upper YA, and where the line is between YA and Adult and whether it’s become too blurred, and whether YA is really written for teenagers anymore. Discourse is cyclical; the same discussions happen every few months, nothing changes, and everybody sinks into an ever-deepening pit of despair.

My take? The vast majority of YA books are written for teens. A few aren’t, but end up marketed that way because of the author’s prior readership or because publishers think they’ll do better there. Some of those that fall into this latter category happen to be really popular with older/adult YA readers, who have the purchasing power that makes publishers care about them, and therefore those books dominate the conversation because that’s what happens when money gets involved. Sometimes, I think both readers and authors would be happier if they made the jump to certain adult genres instead of squashing their books into the YA category by default. Other times, I think people are patronising teenagers and thinking them incapable of making up their own minds about anything. A lot of the time I’m feeling both of these things simultaneously.

One thing I find reductive about the conversation is how it always comes down to sex.

I think I have strong feelings about this for two reasons. One, I’m somebody who writes upper YA and adult fiction and often struggles to determine on which side of the line a book should fall. Two, I was a kid who read ‘above’ my age category from a fairly young age but who hated romance in books.

I was a teenager during the paranormal romance boom. Shaped by the Twilight era so much that I wrote one of my GCSE coursework essays about the impact Twilight had had on teen fiction as a whole. You know what I complained about in that essay? That it flooded the market with copycats and love triangles so that those of who didn’t like them had to go hang out in the adult section to find literally anything else.

I was probably being hyperbolic. I’m sure there were plenty of other YA books in the late 00s and early 10s that weren’t fixated on heterosexual white girls and their awkward supernatural love triangles. I probably read a lot of them, and loved a lot of them. But it felt, at times, like every book I read was trying to give me the same story, and it was a story that had romance at the centre, where kissing was a huge, life-changing big deal that everybody was desperate to experience.

And I… wasn’t interested.

Not only was I not interested, but throughout most of my teens I found sex not only uninteresting but actively horrifying and repellent to think about. I looked away during sex scenes in films. I skimmed them in books. I’d retreated to the adult SFF section to get away from ubiquitous YA love triangles, but I’d found the sexual violence of A Song of Ice and Fire (also gaining popularity at the time) to be a pretty poor alternative.

I wanted difficult books. Angsty books. Books with tough choices and sad endings where not everything turned out all right. I didn’t want the kind of kidlit where everybody’s safely home for tea at the end; I wanted books that would make me cry. But the older I got and the further along the YA category I got, the more the world only seemed to want to give me books about sex.

My debut, The Butterfly Assassin, is an upper YA book. It’s a book where I find myself mentally justifying its classification as YA because I don’t feel secure in it. It’s a book where my editor has periodically said, “I’m not sure if we should put that in a YA book,” or, “Should we maybe avoid this detail?” (And most of the time I’ve justified keeping whatever the detail was on the basis that I have 100% seen worse in popular MG and YA books.) It is a book I will not be letting my mum read.

It is also a sexless book. A book with no romance. A book where romance doesn’t even enter into the protagonist’s mind, and she shows absolutely no interest in sex.

It is not a ‘clean’ book.

It’s not a clean book because the protagonist kills somebody in the first chapter. (This isn’t a spoiler. It’s in the blurb.) It’s not a clean book because there’s more than enough swearing to ensure my parents will be vaguely disappointed in me no matter how well it sells. (Sorry.) It’s not a clean book because there’s violence and trauma and the messiness of trying to take control of your life when literally everybody around you thinks they know better than you how you should be living it.

But hey, there’s no sex.

That was a conscious choice, for the record. When I planned this book, way back in 2014, that was one of the first things I knew about it: that it was going to be all murder, no sex. I was eighteen and sick of sexy assassins, sick of ’emotionless’ characters being humanised by their libido, sick of romantic or sexual attraction being positioned as a redeeming feature.

I was sick of being told, implicitly, with every book that I read, that my lack of interest either made me a sociopath or a child.

It was a pattern I saw again and again. A remorseless, dark character is portrayed as emotionless and their capacity for redemption is in doubt, right up until the moment they fall in love and suddenly reveal themselves to have a heart. It didn’t seem like these protagonists were allowed to be softened by friendship. Nor did it seem that dystopian protagonists were ever allowed to motivated to save the world by platonic bonds of affection.

Because if they were, that wouldn’t be YA. That would be MG.

I wanted upper YA. I wanted books that were dark and morally complicated and that asked hard questions and that my parents would probably disapprove of. I wanted books that didn’t pull their punches (but authors seemed intent on not letting their characters actually die, which infuriated me). But it felt like I was only allowed those books with a solid helping of romance. And the ‘older’ the books got, the sexier they got.

It’s not that sex doesn’t belong in books. During the course of the pandemic, I’ve developed a taste for queer historical romance novels and I’ve read some of them three times or more. Some of them have explicit sex, and if it’s well-written, that can be a plus. Have I read a few that squicked me out? Yeah, because bad sex scenes are The Worst. But it’s not the sex that’s the problem. It’s an important reminder that I want from books as a 25-year-old is very different from what I wanted from books as a 16-year-old — something I try to bear in mind when I write YA. Some people’s tastes don’t change so dramatically, going from being utterly repulsed by sex to having a collection of favourite romance novels, but it’s still important to remember that teens and adults often want pretty different things from books.

But that doesn’t mean that sex doesn’t belong in YA, either. Even if it wasn’t to my taste, a lot of teenagers are interested in sex. A lot of teenagers are having it, too, though possibly not as many as the media would have you believe. (Most of my friendship group wasn’t. Side effect of being late-blooming queers: nobody was getting laid.) If they don’t find it in the books aimed at their age group, they’ll look for it elsewhere. In fanfic. In romance novels. In whatever they take off their parents’ shelves.

(I have friends who read wildly inappropriate books from a very young age by virtue of raiding their parents’ bookshelves. The fact that I wasn’t one of them was probably less to do with my lack of interest and more to do with the fact that my parents’ shelves contained things like Kafka in the original German, and three copies of CS Lewis’ Mere Christianity. The “Advisory: Adult Content” YA novel I read at twelve was sneaked from my sister’s shelf instead.)

Sex has been in YA books for as long as YA has existed as a category. It’s not a new trend, nor is it at odds with themes and ideas that many teenagers are looking for. And it’s not responsible for the ways that the category is pushing older and older and marketing more to adults than to teenagers. That, as far as I can tell, is about money. It’s about who buys hardbacks and subscription boxes and collects special editions versus who is waiting six months for the library to get a copy of the book. Which one do the publishers care more about? And which one of those is the teen?

But listening to the conversations about upper YA, you’d think that sex was the only thing that defined that category, just like manufactured love triangles and creepy, controlling love interests seemed to define the bestsellers in the genre when I was a teenager. And it’s not. There are — and should be — other factors at work. There are ‘sexless’ books that skew older than any of the contemporaries exploring a character’s first time; books that centre friendship aren’t automatically closer to MG than to adult.

I realise that for a lot of people, romantic and sexual firsts are a major part of the process of growing up. But often — and maybe I’d even say increasingly — that doesn’t necessarily happen in one’s teens. A lot of my friends didn’t have their first kiss until their 20s. The YA books we grew up with taught us that that was weird and unusual. It’s not. Especially not for queer people of our generation, who didn’t necessarily have the freedom to explore our sexualities as teenagers.

By reducing the YA category to the types of relationships depicted, we do it a disservice, and we do teenagers a disservice. By making conversations about appropriate age ranges focus on how much sex there is or isn’t in a book, we exclude people from the discussion. There are teens who are interested in sex, yes. And I recognise that “teens want this” is an important weapon against gatekeepers who would treat seventeen-year-olds like seven-year-olds if not for the constant pushback of authors and creators.

But. But. Conversations about sex in YA and conversations about there not being enough books for fourteen-year-olds are not the same conversation. There are fourteen-year-olds who want romance-focused books with a certain amount of steaminess. And there are eighteen-year-olds who want dark, messed-up books with no sex whatsoever.

And these books exist. There’s upper YA that pushes the boundaries of what it means for a book to be YA and they don’t do it by including graphic sex scenes. But when we make the conversation “who is YA really for” to be about how much sex is in a book, we miss the point, because those are two separate things.

I know that people say that authors need to be writing for real teens, who are reading now. Not for their own past self, who lived in a different world.

But they also say you should write the books you want to read, if you can’t find them on the shelf.

When I was seventeen, I wanted a book that was all murder, no sex. I wanted a book that was aimed at my age group, that didn’t pull punches or patronise me, and I didn’t want the cost of maturity to be romance. Because even then I was sick of an amatonormative world that treated friendship as something childish and romance as the gateway to adulthood.

And I’m willing to bet there are still some teens out there who want that too.

The Butterfly Assassin is upper YA. It contains no sex. That doesn’t make it any less upper YA and it certainly doesn’t make it any less likely to get complaints from parents and school librarians — though I’m convinced it’ll be the swearing that bothers them more than the corpses.

I started out by talking about the silence of the world I grew up in, one that only gave me heterosexual options and where anything else was shocking and rare and transgressive, because it’s been 13 years and I’m still angry that a book with a gay character got stamped with ADVISORY: ADULT CONTENT but a book with repeated drug use didn’t. Because being queer was considered more mature, more ‘inappropriate’. Because simply by virtue of containing a character who was explicitly gay, the book’s target audience was considered older.

This is why I’m wary of conversations that position sex as the defining feature of upper YA. This is why I’m wary when conversations about YA not being written for teens start and end with the amount of sex that’s in a book. It is always weaponised against marginalised groups first.

But it’s also why it bothers me that books without sex are automatically considered suitable for younger readers than those that contain it. For years, graphic violence was considered more suitable for kids that consensual queerness. Why are we more okay with letting a thirteen-year-old read about murder than letting them read about sex?

There are so many levels to this problem, and it helps nobody if we treat sex as the definitive factor in a book’s target audience. It is only one factor, one that’s tied up in cultural ideas about maturity and what it means to grow up, and one that’s dominated the conversation for way too long.

YA is about so much more than romantic and sexual relationships. But it’s easy to forget that, when that seems to be all anyone ever talks about. Maybe it’s time we moved on.

If you enjoyed this post, please consider buying me a coffee or pre-ordering The Butterfly Assassin.