My initial inspiration for writing Incandescent Girl came from a piece of writing I did as part of my master’s degree. I chose to write on the subject “Gender Variance in Contemporary Fantasy Young Adult Literature,” using work by three authors from Melbourne as my case studies.

I was extremely lucky, in that these authors all proved accessible to me via social media and email — as you may have seen on the front page of this site, Lisa Tirreno and CS Pacat have both been kind enough to give me blurbs for my own writing, and Lili Wilkinson was enthusiastic about the idea of academia on the subject of her characters’ genders.

The first book I looked at, Prince of Fortune by Lisa Tirreno, presents a queer-normative fantasy world, with my essay explaining:

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In Prince of Fortune, Tirreno establishes early that there is no homophobia in her Regency-like fantasy kingdom: before the first chapter is over it is made clear that gender will not be a factor in who might court the teenage Prince Edmund: “There was a titter about thighs, but Aubrey missed the joke because he was so busy being horrified at the thought of that handsome, anxious prince marrying some stranger with his knees on display or a woman in a bright dress.”

A third of the way through the novel, the narrative offers evidence that transphobia is likewise absent, with one of the queen’s attendants-in-waiting preferring not to go by a gendered title but rather by “Noble Florian” and dressing in whatever combination of gendered fashions they choose on a given day.

No male or female characters are specified as being either cis or trans; and Noble Florian’s acceptance in the highest echelons of society makes it clear that this is not because there are no trans people, but rather that their existence is a total non-issue.

As Tirreno put it when asked over email if this was the case, “People present in that culture as their gender and that is that; questions about what people have in their pants would have been considered the absolute height of rudeness.” (Borsellino, 2025)

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While I have a great appreciation for queer-normative books — who doesn’t want to escape to a world without homophobia and transphobia for a while? — I wasn’t interested in writing one myself. For me, the pressures of public expectation and the miserable safety of the closet were too intrinsic to my experience of queerness.

This is why Incandescent Girl plays out the way it does; I wanted to create a story for the young adults who’ve had to fight hard, and continue to fight, for recognition and acceptance of their identity.

Unhallowed Halls by Lili Wilkinson, the second novel I looked at, uses a contemporary context to explore contemporary ideas about being comfortable in a queer body:

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We are informed that a character is trans when he’s introduced, as his girlfriend’s first lines are fury that a teacher has misgendered him again. The fact that this character, Gideon, is a binary trans boy, once established, comes up in passing in first half of the narrative – he commiserates with the protagonist, who has endometriosis, about how wretched periods can be.

At the middle point in the book, several characters swap bodies with the malevolent teachers running the school. Gideon, now in a male teacher’s body, comments that he’d like to return to his own body, as it is “weird being cis.”

This line aligns with modern activism around trans youth, with UK charity Mermaids explaining that “One particular phrase, which has been used for a long time by people, is ‘I was born in the wrong body’. We recently posted that ‘no child is born in the wrong body’, which is our broad position as a charity. Why? Because we believe that transgender people shouldn’t be expected or encouraged to reject their entire amazing, intelligent, beautiful, creative bodies, simply because of gender incongruity.”

Gideon was not “born in the wrong body” – Gideon’s body is the right body for Gideon, exactly as it is.

(Borsellino, 2025)

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I wanted to capture a similar body attitude in Incandescent Girl, especially since my second-world fantasy setting made interventions such a HRT and surgery implausible (though there is magic, so never say never!) — Robin has no especial dysphoria around her physical body, beyond a wish to be perceived correctly by those around her.

The third book I looked at, Dark Heir by CS Pacat, had a strong influence on the how of Robin’s trans identity, as it too deals with gender variance via magic:

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In the first novel of the series, a teenage girl named Katherine is killed in the final battle. Her body is reanimated as Dark Heir begins, now inhabited by the male soldier Visander.

Visander experiences severe dysphoria in Katherine’s body. It is not specifically stated that this is because of the body’s sex, but the experience is described in those terms: “He could see himself in the moonlight – these torn, muddy hands were not his own, these breasts, these tendrils of long blonde hair.”

He has “the sudden urge to tear [this body] off and find himself underneath.”

(Borsellino, 2025)

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I chose to follow Pacat in having a fantastical basis for my trans character’s identity in order to make the story work as a fairy tale or allegory, as well as a direct representation of a trans character.

I am very grateful to live in a city with such a wealth of queer fantasy YA to draw inspiration from in the writing of Incandescent Girl.

 

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