i was wondering (and you in no way have to answer this as it's not your job to educate me - i'd just appreciate your opinion) if it's alright for me to write a non-binary main oc/reader even though i'm cis? honestly, if anything, i wouldn't touch the topic of dysphoria or anything in that sense cause i don't think it's my place to speak on or describe, so it would be more in the realm of i'll make some references to make it explicit that they're non-binary, but otherwise not bring it up in excess. is this okay, or is it not my place at all? i just want to be more inclusive in my writing but i also don't want to step on any toes.

I completely understand where you're coming from, anon.

There's a wonderful world of characters out there waiting to be discovered and written about. The number of backstories and arcs we could give a character are too numerous to count. And that is definitely part of the fun with exploring different backgrounds.

Is our character a florist? A spy? A newly discovered witch? What is their life like? What drives them, what brings them joy?

There's still a lot of back and forth if certain people should write certain characters. If white people should write POC characters, for example.

Black creators should be the main voice when it comes to writing black characters - their experience is far closer and therefore more accurate. Where it can be seen as white people just trying to be more inclusive for the sake of inclusivity by writing a POC character without really understanding the true depth and nature of that character.

Does it mean a white person shouldn't be inclusive enough to write for POC characters though? Personally, I've got stories that include readers and original characters who are explicitly stated as being not white.

And while I strive to be inclusive in a sea of pretty generic and clearly white reader inserts, and I try my best to convey the background and feelings of characters that I myself will never have to grapple with or go through as a white person, I will still never have the experience that a POC creator has.

Now we get to your question.

I think we can agree that the majority of reader inserts and OCs on this site are female. Occassionally you can find a gender neutral or male reader, but fem readers are the norm.

As someone who has dealt with gender identity and has only been coming to term with my gender in the past few years, I feel uniquely qualified to write for characters who are nonbinary or queer or trans in a way that I don't when writing for POC characters.

The same way that, as a person who has gone through pregnancy and parenting, I feel more qualified to write for pregnant readers and parenting stories. Does that mean no one but mothers can write those stories? No, of course not.

But it's not quite the same as writing characters of a specific gender, sexuality, or race, wouldn't you say?

So, here's the question. Why do you want to write a nonbinary character? Just for the sake of inclusiveness?

Do you feel like you could write this person in a way that wouldn't be offensive, a stereotype? Would you be able to weave their gender identity into the story without glossing over it entirely?

I'm not saying that, as a nonbinary person, that I spend my time reminding everyone that I am nonbinary, that every other sentence is about binders or androgynous clothes. I'm just a person who happens to be nonbinary. But it's a key part of who I am. How I present myself.

Would it be more acceptable to just write a gender neutral character? One that's gender is never explicitly stated, nor what's in their pants, or how they identify?

A gender neutral reader who just about anyone could see themselves in. This might be your best path if you feel that you wouldn't be able to write a nonbinary character with absolute care.

Obviously, I don't speak for the community at large. There are several other creators who should probably be able to put in their two cents as well. But this is my best advice for you, anon.

As a cis person, you will never fully understand the experience a nonbinary person has. If you feel confident and comfortable enough to write such a character, I'm not going to stop you - nonbinary characters are still few and far between in this fandom. But, if you feel that it would be stepping on toes to do so, maybe you would be better off writing a gender neutral reader.

Any of my nonbinary, trans, or queer followers want to add to this?

I use to be an Onision fan, but soon (sorry if my reason seems petty) I watched his video where he was insulting Catholicism (I'm Catholic) based off of Bible verses (From the Old Testament I believe, which we don't follow anymore) and I just hated how he did not do any research about them. (They were all on roadside billboards, the confederate state actually once edited the Bible to justify slavery, and again, the Old Testament)

Yeah, I’ve noticed that’s a bit of a common thread with Onision - he has a bad habit of forming very strong opinions over things that are, in his mind, totally logical, reasonable, and honest conclusions - yet the truth is that he almost never does any research, has any formal education, or has any personal experience on the subject about which he is speaking in order to lend validity to his argument. Yet despite his lack of experience, education, and research, he feels totally qualified to make judgments about these incredibly complex and multi-faceted topics. He’s a very arrogant and rigid thinker, and despite considering himself to be highly intelligent and logical, he lacks lateral creativity in his thought process, and it is very easy to identify the gaping holes in his logic just by doing a little bit of research, or even by simply considering alternative perspectives on the issue before coming down on either side of it (which he refuses to do, mostly because he can only see one perspective - his own). I do agree with some of his opinions (for example, I am also against routine infant circumcision), but for the most part I find him to be an incredibly rigid, black-and-white thinker - and as a person who thrives off of weaving through life’s grey areas, I just can’t get on board with that type of pseudo-intellectual laziness and dishonesty. There is so much nuance and complexity in this life, why would anybody want to boil it down to nothing but its barest essentials? (Especially since he’s wrong about even the bare essentials so very often - I guess this is what not having read a single book for over half your life looks like in practice.)

I’m not a very religious or spiritual person myself, but I’m sorry to hear that he maligned your religion and mangled it so badly. :/ Even if we weren’t talking about Onision, I think it’s fairly common for people to do this sort of thing, just kind of cherry-pick quotes from religious texts without fully understanding or appreciating the context in order to justify their hatred for it. I’m sure that it must get irritating and exhausting to hear people constantly maligning your religion when they don’t really understand it, to say the least. Sorry to hear that, my dude. :/

So I'm Mexican and I don't have dark skin but I'm not really pale, I'm tan. And the other day this person told my I wasn't a person of color bc I'm not as dark as my mom or my brother. And I've always considered my self as a person of color? Is that bad? I don't know. I don't know my exact race but I don't consider myself white. I probably have like a quarter or something, I don't know.

Hi Nonnie! I’m so sorry it has taken me so long to get back to you! I’ve been on kind of a hiatus due to summer and life in general. I’ll try to answer your question as best I can. (I answered a similar question on this topic here. It might help.)

So this is one of the cruxes of this thing called “race.” Race is largely assigned to us by other people. We don’t really get to choose our race because it will come down to what other people see when they look at us. (And for the sake of this post, I want to restate that race does not exist in a measurable, empirical fashion. We can’t quantify race because where does one race end and another begin?)

In the United States, race developed VERY differently. Anthropologically speaking, a person of color is anyone who is not white. But in the United States, that term has taken on a meaning that tends to be reflective of how we see and talk about race. Which is that if you’re not white, you’re black, and if you’re not black, you’re white. Therefore—in the USA—person of color has come to largely be associated and perpetuated as meaning a person who is of African descent.

[To add some more context that complicated this whole thing the US Census Bureau defines white as: “A person having origins in any of the original peoples of Europe, the Middle East, or North Africa.” Every single time I read that I cringe.]

So. How the United States articulates race is that anyone in between black and white—so tan to dark brown (and with no visual characteristics indicating African descent)—is largely left out of the race conversation. And there are all kinds of reasons for this. Some of which I think I go into in the post I linked above.

But as we’ve seen in recent years the discourse around the term “people of color” has shifted to almost explicitly suggesting any racial and ethnic social group of people who are not white. [Hooray millennials for being obsessed with labels and wanting to create space for everyone!]

So where am I going with this…

For you, as a naturally tan person, to consider yourself a person of color is in no way a bad thing. Not to me. But I could see people who don’t understand the history and nuance behind the term PoC being confused, or outright against your self-use of the term. There will always be people who think you can’t identify as a person of color, and there will always be people who think you can. [see this post for more on the nuance of what I mean here! Cuz I do think there are qualifiers to what PoC means.]

And about not knowing your race: (I’m going to try to not rant here) but the US Census bureau doesn’t afford people like you (or me) a race. [See this post for more] It was long ago decided that affording a race to anyone from south of the USA was too hard/complicated (because of the slave trade and Spain’s weird “whitening” efforts). So people like you and I (and more so you because my mom is white) get to legally pick whatever the heck race we want on forms.

Which is shitty. Shitty to know and teach that race doesn’t exist empirically. Shitty to then still try to quantify/measure race when it suits your needs. And shittier to tell an huge chunk of the world that they’re so “mixed” that they don’t get to have a race so they can pick however many and whichever ones they want.

But yeah. I hope this helped answer your question!