My first time at Dragoncon, I was still a guy, but that didn’t stop me from dressing up. I wanted to look dressy and cool, so I wore a nice shirt, waistcoat and silk tie. After all, I was there as a Professional Science Fiction Writer, and I was going to be networking with other writers and meeting editors and stuff.
People didn’t quite know what to make of me. I wasn’t dressed up in a costume, or a recognzied uniform like HippiePaganLARPerGoth. I wasn’t wearing the designated non-costume costume, which was a pair of jeans and a T-shirt that would let everybody know exactly what species of fanboy I was.
I bopped around in my Eurofag outfit and people just sort of ignored me. I did meet one editor, of a magazine that crashed and burned after its first issue. He spent an hour telling me that Rudy Rucker’s novels were all about cheese attacking people sexually and I shouldn’t bother reading them. At one point he and I spent a really boring hour with Larry Niven, who seemed pretty narcoleptic. But mostly I was both too weird, and not weird enough, to connect with anyone.
Some years later, I went back to Dragoncon, and this time I was dressed as Wonder Woman. I spent countless hours sculpting my gold lame eagle and belt, and finding just the right red cowboy boots. That time around, people noticed me, and everything felt just that much more festive. Cosplay transcends language, social expectations — and gender norms.
Mostly, people dug it. Okay, so there was one fighter/mage-looking guy at Dragoncon who yelled at me that I needed to get me some damn boobies. At this point, I hadn’t yet hormoned up any breasts of my own. And I hardly bothered to pad my Amazon bustier. My friend, mentor and surrogate mom, the late and amazing dgk goldberg, almost took the padding out of her own bra to show him.
In between those two visits to Dragoncon, I actually quit writing science fiction. As I transitioned from a nice boy to a rude girl, I also became a serious literary writer. When I returned to writing science fiction as a girl, there were two things going on. One was that I discovered, in my literary career, that there were things I could only explore using speculative elements. Things I needed to geek out about. And the other was that I finally found my place in the nerd community, whose culture defines so much of what science fiction is about.
But it was still daunting to go back into the world of science fiction fans. I realized at some point that science fiction and fantasy defines a particular type of person. Just the way that some queer literary authors have a devout following of people who all have matching punky haircuts, tattoos and found fashion, fans of science fiction have their own ethos. I’d never quite felt culturally science fictional. I couldn’t bring myself to read Robert Heinlein or get used to some guys’ lecture-as-conversation thing.
But I found there was an intersection between science fiction nerds and a tangle of alternative communities. At least some of the people who were fascinated by thirtieth century post-humans were also open to other genders, DIY sexualities, and non-traditional families. You’d find yourself at a party with a guy named Ewok, and that would be his hacker name, and then he’d turn out to be sort of a genderqueer furry. Sometimes you would run into someone at cafe scientifique and then meet them again at some queer burlesque thing.
And I started meeting more people in the science fiction writer community too. Sometimes, I’d run into writers at conventions or readings a number of times, and they would know me enough to wave to: the tranny in the slinky dress. Sometimes they’d get my pronoun wrong and I’d have to correct them. Sometimes they’d just treat me like one of the more exotic weirdos of fandom. And sometimes they’d actually take me seriously, as a writer and as a woman.