Let’s talk about coding. Not every message is spelled out unambiguously. Fiction in particular tends to deeply integrate the implied, messages expressed behind the text. You may already be very familiar with a common form of this: queer coding.

Queer coding is when a character isn’t explicitly queer, but seems queer, with characteristics that suggest it through cultural association. A typical form of queer coding is for a character to have no sexual or romantic relationships on screen but to be gender non-conforming. Queer identity is largely predicated on variation from sexual and gender norms, or at least the perception of them. It may not be fair to always assume a man with a lisp is gay, but a good number of people are going to make the connection.

The ways queer coding can be harmful are discussed often online and in fan reactions to popular content, but not all forms of queer coding are made equal. Some are less well recognized than others, especially in their most subtle or frequent forms.

In an earlier post I talked about how in fiction, what we don’t say is as important as what we do. Similarly, what a work implies is as important as what it makes explicit, and we aren’t always aware of what we’re implying (which is a good argument for the value of sensitivity editing).

Transfem coding is the queer coding of characters as being trans woman or being like trans women.

(As a side note, this phenomenon relates most to both trans women and non-binary people on the transfeminine spectrum; for the remainder of this post, I’ll use the term transfem to refer to both groups).

The Double Bind

Queer coding creates a double bind. It usually loads the story with anti-queer subtext, but subtext surrounded by plausible deniability. Someone can point out that it’s not necessarily true that the negatively portrayed character really is queer, so how can the narrative truly be homophobic? You know it’s there, but it’s hard to prove the problem against an opponent arguing “But I never intended for her to be a lesbian!”

Transfem coding creates this double bind with disturbing fidelity to real life. This is no mere bad fiction trope but a larger problem in society that I call the effeminacy double bind.

The word “effeminate” to most people suggests a feminine man, so we might wonder what this has to do with transfems. Isn’t it true that trans women are not men? Of course, so then how can anything to do with male femininity come back to trans women?

That’s the whole trick of the double bind. Etymologically, effeminacy suggests “being like a woman on the inside,” and in practice is defined by deviation from manhood.

There are two forms of effeminacy. One is unmanliness: to lack masculinity. The second is a bigger thing altogether, which I call unmanhood: to be someone that the rules of society say should be a man, but you’re not only unmasculine, you’re not even a man at all.

It’s a familiar contradiction. The way to insult an effeminate man is to say he’s basically a woman. And yet aggression against transfems comes laden with the insistence that we’re really men. It’s like they can’t make up their minds! But that’s the entire fulcrum of the double bind. They can always say they weren’t attacking what you’re defending. They were always trying to double bind us from the start.

A more advanced form of this double bind takes place with anti-trans moral panic. The argument is made that if we allow trans women to use women’s rooms and changing spaces, this opens the door for cis men to claim they’re transfems and walk on in. Thus, the moral panic claim goes, this isn’t about trans women at all, it’s about men adopting womanly attributions to invade women’s privacy. The effect is nevertheless to increase the stigma against any interests and characteristics associated with transfems.

This is the effeminacy double bind in action. It works by embedding the real intent under code, so the message will be received but have a degree of plausible deniability.

The Specter of Buffalo Bill

How does this come back to fiction?

One example stands out as particularly instructive, because you can find it easily. Buffalo Bill, the serial killer villain from The Silence of the Lambs, targets women with designs to build himself a flawless female appearance. He combines the concepts of sexual assault, serial murder, and cannibalism under the thematic picture of a man wanting desperately to become a woman. The text of the film itself asserts that Bill isn’t really trans. So, many argue, it’s not actually demonizing trans women, it’s just constructing a cis male villain who performs unspeakable violence in a way that caricatures trans female desire. So that makes it okay, right?

Wrong. It can’t. Because even if every character in the film were to look directly into the camera and say “Buffalo Bill is not supposed to represent a trans woman,” the narrative is nevertheless shaped around emotionally signaling trans female self-image as the impetus of male violence. It is unambiguous transfem coding with pernicious effect.

An effect that is easy to prove. Anti-trans activists still invoke the specter of Buffalo Bill to reinforce the image of transfems as carnivorous, monstrous, and predatory. No one needs to actually think the author of The Silence of the Lambs intended Bill to be a real trans woman. The signal is there, loud and clear, and it harmonizes effortlessly with the mythology about transfems that already saturates day-to-day life.

A Signal Is a Wave

Fiction is great at reflecting and reinforcing the underlying worldview of the place and period in which it is consumed. It can also be great at transforming that worldview, but it’s impossible to do so while being complicit with the unspoken mythologies that inform how we think.

Transfem coding, like queer coding in general, works because of an audience that is already primed to believe whatever negative message the coder has to transmit. That media line our imaginations with murderous trans female predators while there’s also an entire political movement dedicated to this stereotype is not an accident, it’s a wave. This is how oppression works—by hitting you from all sides.

So what are the ripples of this wave? I thought for a long time when planning this post about fictional examples of transfem coding. The problem with that is that it would mean having to spend time brooding over all those painful transmissions, and asking my readers to do the same. I would rather be sparing with direct examples and talk about the common forms it takes, to help writers avoid unintentional coding.

Until now I’ve talked about transfem coding as something done with malice, but unintentional coding is also common. It’s better to consider whether you might be transmitting a code you don’t actually want to support than include it in a story and risk it harming someone before you learn the lesson. Consider the following:

• A male villain who disguises himself as a woman to carry out his evil ends.
• A male crossdresser depicted as predatory, violent, pathetic, or in an anti-effeminate way.
• Dehumanizing hyper-sexualization of characters who may seem to be boys or men wearing female clothing or presenting as girls.

In all of these cases, the character need not be intended as a trans woman or even be read as a trans woman by the audience. They still build resonance with the ideas that unmanhood (being like “a woman on the inside”) is representative of depravity. The way we think about men has a great deal to do with the way we think about women, and this is especially the case with trans women who are caught in the effeminacy double bind. In truth transfems are no more similar to effeminate men than we are to cis women, but the goal of the double bind is to selectively push us into whichever category suits the agenda.

These aren’t the only way harmful transfem coding can occur. Overtly female characters may also be depicted as having masculine-coded negative traits, including physical ones. Deep voices, broad shoulders, narrow hips, or “male aggression,” a common transmisogynistic accusation. Just as transfem coding can ripple out and impact feminine queer men, it can do the same for large, butch, or otherwise androgynous women. Consider how often we see this outside the fictional page—a woman being demeaned as shrewish or ugly with the implication that she’s really a crossdresser or a drag queen.

Using gender variance to communicate wrongness is an old trick. When a character is depicted this way, the plausible deniability kicks in with the argument that it can’t be transphobic if the character isn’t actually trans. But stigmatized gender signals invariably ripple back to transphobia, regardless of the intent. And there are very few people who won’t ultimately be hurt.

Robbing of Representation

Coding can do more than spread stigma. It can also stifle the natural resonance readers want with characters. A coded gay couple that is never explicitly represented can feel hollow and depressing to queer readers that want to see people like them on the page. In a society where sometimes the best mainstream rep you can find is coded, it’s fair to say this isn’t representation at all.

It’s similarly demeaning that there are more popular stories with transfem coding than with fully realized, openly depicted transfem characters. Even if that transfem coding isn’t villifying.

There’s an old observation that trans women in fiction are either villains or dead (or instructively miserable to inspire cis characters). This is a slight exaggeration, but only slight. And it’s difficult to count the blessings against a background noise of poisonously negative representation.

Changing the Signal

Unintentional coding occurs in part because some tropes are so commonplace as to become embedded in our psyches. We may not mean to do harm, but we use on the symbolic language of the world around us, and the everyday context of that language may be so rife with harm that we barely notice.

You can’t fight harmful signals if you don’t know how to identify them, or if you don’t know what signal you’re sending. It’s always essential to making art that we consider not just what we mean, but how we will be received.

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May is an author, editor, sensitivity consultant, and an absolute paragon of unmanhood. She is currently taking new clients.