I've been working on a new story for months. I've pushed and shoved the plot and characters through several massive rewrites. Nothing seems to work. I know it will find its way out of me at some point and the effort is the joy/
Along the line I started to think about forced feminization stories. Is it possible those of us who have struggled with being transgender have tried to put a face on our compulsion through these stories? I know that my feminine compulsion has been the single most consistent driving force in my life. Nothing else comes close to matching it.
Perhaps in reading and writing these dark and troubling stories we're simply trying to find the key to our own itch.
Thoughts?
Comments
Forced fem is a guilt release
In my earlier writing forced fem was quite prominent. I've realized it was because I couldn't escape my TG desires. By being forced to be fem the control was removed from my choice rendering guilt to the person doing the forced fem.
Boys will be girls... if they're lucky!
Jennifer Sue
External cause
The other trope I tend to use to free the character from personal responsibility is the "accidental change."
I quite agree with Jennifer Sue.
Not accepting oneself and projecting the blame somewhere else.
Also fear. Making or having someone else do something for us that we cannot out of fear do on our own.
odd one out
i guess i'm different from others in that i never experienced that guilt. Then again i was allowed to be as girlish as I wanted to be growing up (don't read that as accepting parents, they were simply too busy to notice) and so when i fell into TG fiction, i never felt the need to use forced fem. So the idea of it is a bit curious to me.
I understand it as a plot device for creating diversity and drama but as a guilt escape or transfer my knowledge is purely academic. I have no real experience with it like that.
To me, forced femme serves as a way to tell a different kind of story, but i don't really get the fetishistic part of it. Hey, no judging...but no clue from me either.
Don't know if that helps but i think from, at least, an academic standpoint, you're bang on.
Forced fem
My first two stories were definitely forced fem, though oddly not guilt release. In the late 1990's and early 2000's, I could feel myself sliding toward my true nature, though I was trying to fight it with pure hubris and denial. I think it frightened me so much because I knew; had been told, that if I became a woman, the family would be gone. I don't actually know if other T folk fight it as hard as I did.
So, in an effort to make some sense out of what was happening to me I penned "MS Frankenstein" and later "Desert Princess". I think those were my best work. At the time I wrote those stories I had no idea that I would actually become a woman.
Gwen
An Old Quote:
"Being a girl is wonderful and to torture someone into that would be like the exact opposite of what it's like. I don’t know how anyone could act that way." College Girl - poetheather
Hugs and Bright Blessings,
Renee
Forced or lovingly pushed?
Is the change being forced because the enforcer hates men, or does the person directing the change see the desire/need that the person being changed does not? ie. Is the driving force love or hate?
They Made Me Do It
"It wasn't my fault. I didn't want to become a girl."
So, yes, being "forced" is definitely a guilt reliever, but note that the "victim" seldom chooses to revert to being male. They accept or embrace their new condition. There is often an element of personality change or identity loss involved, which is indicative that the feminine side of the former male was there waiting to be released.
Then there are different degrees of force and different motives on the part of the "enforcer". Love may be the motivator, because the enforcer sees the girl inside but knows she will never be voluntarily freed so assists or encourages that girl to come to the fore. On the other hand the motive may be revenge for a male transgression, the object being to force the man to experience what he has done to his victim.
Between those extremes of love and hate there can be many variations...profit, for instance, or power.
I hope you find which of the fifty shades is the one for your story Jill and look forward to a future Angela Rasch story.
At first yes, now most certainly no
When I got into TG fiction I read and I have to admit, I enjoyed a lot of stores where there was forced fem. Then one day, I realised that the majority of the stores were either totally silly or just a rehash of another earlier work.
The first few tales it wrote (on Crystal's site) were in that genre I'm slighlty ashamed to say.
Now when I read something that use forced fem as a major plot thread I just stop there an then. I really have better things to do with my time. The word Boring comes to mind.
I do wonder why people write it. Have they read much (if any) of the countless other stories that are available that cover the topic pretty well. Are they saying anything new? Sometimes, I seriously doubt it.
however those are my thoughts and opinion. One of the reasons I came to this site was the relative lack of stories in this genre. Long may it continue.
Boring?
Did you ever read my story about corporate greed on steroids?
http://bigclosetr.us/topshelf/fiction/572/exitus-acta-probat...
I don't think you would find it "boring."
Angela Rasch (Jill M I)
Hm... Forced Femme. I kinda
Hm... Forced Femme. I kinda dislike it when it happens to a manly man and he just ends up accepting being a girl. I think it's a cool thing in a story where it helps a TG person to find their true self. Or as a horror story, I guess.
The way it's usually played isn't really my thing. Too fetishized.
Often forced fem stuff seems utterly cruel
and I don't like reading that.
I like more innocent stories, where it's accidental or a subterfuge that takes a life of it's own, or something medical.
There is something else
The category "forced fem" isn't all one thing. I can think of several different types and motivations:
(1) removing choice removes guilt (as others have noted)
(2) forced fem as sadistic punishment/humiliation/castration
(3) dressing a male as a girl to civilize him
(4) as an external recognition of the femininity of a character
This last is the most interesting to me. I remember reading a science-fiction novel whose name I've forgotten... it was "Girl 9" or some other number. This story is the best example of what I mean.
The situation was an ark-like spaceship full of people in suspended animation, heading to populate some far-off planet. The children were woken first, to give them time to grow, so they'd be closer to adulthood when the ship arrived. So all the adults were asleep, and an artificial intelligence was in charge. This computer perceived that one of the boys was the most feminine of all the teens, so it began to alter him. It gave him girl's clothes to wear, and began "correcting" his physiology. He was of course conflicted, accepting at times, fighting it at others.
The point is, he was really a girl inside, though he didn't know it. But the computer, being more objective, saw what he really was and compelled him to be that.