Transfic

Transfics do not ignore, negate, or push these transgender materialities to the margins; they explicitly foreground them as narratives and, in doing so, highlight the complexities of living as transgender in a cisgender-biased world.

In this chapter, I’ve proposed three broad sub-genres to the genderbending genre – trans fics, transformation fics, and cisgender fics – in addition to questioning some of the key assumptions built into the very lexicon that dominates the genre.

In other words, trans characters in Sherlock transfics tend to portray non-normative but unchanged genders in that the characters continue to be read (and identify) as their canonical gender (or something close to it).

Transfic is a relatively new genre: the first known story to use the transfic label was Changes, a Star Wars fan fiction published online by Jane Sehrn-Ta in 2004.

Examples of transfic include such popular cultural fixtures as Marvel's Avengers and Peter Parker/Spider-Man envisioned as transgender characters.

Most Sherlock transfic is not genderswap in the sense that characters do not change their canonical gender. For instance, canonically male Sherlock Holmes is portrayed much more frequently as (trans)male, i.e. a female-to-male trans person, than as a male-to-female trans person.