Where Trans Meets Werewolves
The fanfic girls who just want to be an Alpha male's beautiful boyfriend
Melissa N. is a writing professor at a small college in the Philadelphia area. A speaker at the recent Women’s Declaration International conference, she’s an expert on young women writers and the fictional worlds that spark their passion. DIAG spoke with her about werewolf fanfiction, Alphas and Omegas, and the hyperfeminine trans-identified girls who dream of being a pregnant gay man. Fasten your seatbelt … this one’s a wild ride!
Jocelyn Davis for DIAG: You're a longtime teacher of writing. What advice would you give someone teaching their first college creative-writing class?
Melissa: The most important thing is to meet your students where they are: understand who they are, what interests them, what they like to read and write.
I’ve found that male and female students, generally speaking, take different approaches. Male students tend to be interested in realistic fiction, narrative nonfiction, and journalism in the mode of Hunter Thompson. They love the rebellion. If they write fantasy, they are all about the sword-and-sorcery, battles, weapons—the military side. Female students writing fantasy will often be interested in the romance, but they are also into the sociopolitical aspects of a fantasy world: the different races, the customs, the power dynamics.
I stay focused on what is inspiring them to write. At the college level, most writing professors are male, and most students are female; I try to bring a female perspective while still respecting the men and their interests.
DIAG: Why is a female perspective important?
Melissa: We haven’t explored the female imagination enough. I think we’re a little frightened by it; women tend to write romantic and romanticized stories, and we’re afraid of critics judging our work as frivolous. There’s a long tradition of fanfiction by girls and women being dismissed as unserious. A 16-year-old girl rewrites Twilight: she’s just an idiot! A young man rewrites Batman and sells the story to Hollywood: he’s a genius!
DIAG: Tell me about the evolution of your female students' fantasy writing. What thematic changes have you seen over the decades?
Melissa: Looking at popular culture, we can see that monsters have their eras, and fantasy stories are related to what’s happening in the real world. In the 1980s and 90s, vampires were huge, and scholars have related that trend to the AIDs crisis: fear of blood, fear of sex, love without consummation. In the 2000s, zombies came along. The zombie stories weren’t terribly romantic; they were about death, destruction, and societal decay, themes linked to 9/11 and the crash of 2008. Then sometime around 2014, and coinciding with the rise of transgenderism in schools, werewolves became the big thing. Which isn’t surprising, because what are werewolves about? Transition.
Monsters have their eras.
Girls write fairly explicit stories online then bring them into the classroom sanitized, the spicy parts stripped out. Some of what they write is pretty problematic—the violence, the body hatred, the veiled or overt misogyny—but I try to let them go with their interests. Women are too often told, “You’re stupid for liking that.” I don’t ever want to imply that. Instead I’ll ask, “Why do you like it? What might be troublesome about it? How might you change it?”
And yet, the self-hatred I see in their stories—particularly the ones set in the Omegaverse—does alarm me.
DIAG: What is the Omegaverse? Give us an overview.
Melissa: The Omegaverse is a subgenre of erotic werewolf fiction hugely popular with young women. In the Omegaverse, there are males, females, and three subgenders of each: Alphas, Betas, Omegas. The stories almost always focus on an Alpha male and Omega male falling in love.
The Betas, male and female, are like cis people: they’re uninteresting, and the stories never revolve around them. The Alpha males are big, strong, high-status men with huge penises—giant werewolf dicks. And the Omega males are the central characters: normal little boys until, in adolescence, they present as Omegas.
The Omega males don’t menstruate, but they can be impregnated via anal sex (their anus lubes up and smells wonderful to Alpha males) and carry babies (they have a uterus at the end of their rectum). They give birth without pain. They are the best people, the most sensitive, the most beautiful, and—this is important—the most desired by the Alpha males. But they are also victims, oppressed by the Beta females, who are the stuck-up, popular girls. The villains in the stories are always Beta females.
In my students’ fanfiction, the Omega males are often real men from pop culture: youthful pretty-boy celebrities like Harry Styles. The Alpha males are also celebrities: they are the very handsome, manly men that girls would have crushes on, but in the Omegaverse, they are secretly gay.
DIAG: I can’t help observing that this all sounds insane.
Melissa: Right? But it also makes a twisted kind of sense. The Omega males are a stand-in for the girls, the authors, who imagine they are trans men. The logic is, “All those high-status boys act like they want the stupid, boring Beta females, but really they want me, the Omega male—the beautiful, sensitive, oppressed trans man.”
It also makes sense in terms of their internalized misogyny: “I’m not a dumb, gross girl. I’m a smart, attractive gay man. I’m going to have anal sex that is clean and nice. I’m not ever going to get a period. I will give birth, but it will be easy. And I want that handsome man to fall in love with me.”
DIAG: It seems as if they’re taking heteronormative tropes and mixing them up with gay ones.
Melissa: Yes. It’s a weird projection of a gay narrative onto a het narrative. The writer imagines herself as an Omega male and, at the same time, a tradwife: “I love baking for my Alpha, I want to have his babies, he protects me.”
And the stories are often kinky, but it’s kink from the female imagination. When I tell gay men the kind of “gay sex” these girls are envisioning, they laugh. There is no way these girls would really want to go to a gay sex club and engage in actual male kink. Then again, sometimes they do go to gay male spaces, thinking they can pick up men, which is quite frankly dangerous.
DIAG: You’ve pointed out that many lesbians are into the Omegaverse. That seems odd, given the genre’s anti-female themes.
Melissa: It is odd. But one of the earliest movements in fanfiction was Kirk/Spock, which envisioned Star Trek’s Kirk and Spock as gay lovers. Those stories were written by lesbians who wanted something homoerotic. Until recently, there were so few masculine or butch female characters in popular media—nearly all female characters were drawn for the male gaze—so lesbians fastened onto male characters they could relate to.
DIAG: How would you characterize the girls who like to write this type of fanfiction?
Melissa: It’s interesting: they are hyperfeminine. They may cut their hair short and wear boyish clothes, but they are much gigglier and more girly in personality than the sorority girls. The sorority girls go to social events, they have male friends, they have boyfriends; they’ve had to deal with straight men, so they’ve learned to be a little tough. The fanfic girls might have girlfriends (or boyfriends—the pronouns tend to shift from week to week) but they don’t have male friends. They act like twelve-year-old girls: terminally online, very immature.
It’s sad, because some of them can’t take even the mildest criticism of their writing; they break down and sob. And they’re quick to run to the administration and claim oppression. It makes me wonder, how are they going to hold a job?
The administrators aren’t helping. One time I was talking with the head of our LGBTQ center, and I said, jokingly, “We used to have Love Your Body Day, now we have Chop Your Titties Off Day.” She didn’t know what to say; she just sputtered. Now she’s afraid of me. I really don’t care!
DIAG: How can teachers and parents help young women see the problems with the trans narrative?
Melissa: I see three things we can do. First, we need to teach young women that you can live things in your imagination that you cannot live in real life. For a young girl to crush on an effeminate man is perfectly normal—it feels safe—but the thing is, nothing in the imagination is nonconsensual, and the real world is a whole different story. We need to teach these girls the difference between fantasy and reality.
Nothing in the imagination is nonconsensual.
Second, we should realize that a lot of the trans stuff is a reaction to the idea that girly girls are stupid: that you can’t be female and do serious things. I try to role-model that I am a serious, tough, intellectual person who works with men—and I wear dresses, I love romance novels, I have long hair. I’ll say, “Don’t judge me for my shoes! I love girly stuff!” We need to be clear that males can be feminine, females can be masculine, and it’s all fine.
Third, we should take the female imagination as seriously as we take the male imagination. Have you noticed that men are allowed to keep their teen interests—sports, comics, gaming—their whole life, whereas women are told to get rid of all that “girl stuff” or no one will take them seriously?
DIAG: Any final words of wisdom?
Melissa: I want to teach girls to be happy to be in a female body, liking what they like, having their imaginative worlds. There are certain things teen girls do: they enjoy romantic stories and songs, crush on celebrities, scream and faint at boy bands. This isn’t something men are inflicting on us; it’s female adolescence, and it is natural. We need to shepherd it, not try to stamp it out.
Solid blue takes on sex, lies, and gender-woo is an interview series sponsored by Democrats for an Informed Approach to Gender. If you like what you’ve read, please subscribe—and join our growing community of supporters at di-ag.org.
 | A guest post by
|
 | A guest post by
|
[a comment from Radegunde that got mistakenly deleted]: Just a comment— she’s not correct about Kirk/Spock being written by lesbians, or even largely by lesbians. Not at all. It was written by straight women, the same way any kind of slash fiction is today: it is overwhelmingly a straight woman’s genre, love stories with the female body— with all its attached anguish—removed. The feminine man in the story stands in for the girl (Joanna Russ wrote very well about this in her essay on K/S, examining why Spock was the female stand-in paired with the masculine Kirk). Straight women write gay slash in order to revel in male sexuality without necessarily having to deal with men, and to imagine a space where they can be human beings loving men without the prison of heterosexual power dynamics. I don’t know much about the Omegaverse, but it seems an attempt to address deeply internalized misogyny, the same way young white women claim “non-binary” identities as a way to separate themselves from the ordinary order of girls and women. Anyway, despite my “no, actually” moment here, I’m very glad to see the imagination of girls being taken seriously, which it deserves to be. I’m guessing that the misogyny embraced by young women has everything to do with modern artificial beauty standards and the resentment that arises at being held to them. At least when I was growing up, in the 70s, we had counter movements that were critical of beauty culture and made that a plank of resistance. Girls today are given far fewer ways to opt out and still be girls. As a hippie who rejected makeup as unnatural, or a punk who used it for garishness, I could move in relation to beauty without being crushed by hundreds of images of perfection at my fingertips. Anyway, thank you for this interview!
The teenage girl's fascination with gay men can have tragic ends. Sometimes these girls transition thinking they're going to look like they're in a boy band, but instead they go bald, develop heart disease, and break a hip in their twenties. It is a huge trend, though, and a huge market. I guarantee the audience for "Heartstopper" is mostly teenage girls.