It took me a few years, but I finally got around to giving a certain idea of mine life... And what better time than Pride Month to reveal them?

Meet Ash, a female-to-male transgender character I've been thinking about/planning out/hinting at the existence of for several years, but I was worried about accidentally turning them into some sort of caricature or stereotype (and the laziness of resorting to a species whose sex/gender is so blatantly visually broadcast via horns/antlers, and the laziness of choosing a unisex dead-name that can also conveniently be shortened into a masculine name) so I held off until I felt confident I could portray him properly. After talking to a few of my FtM online friends about the subject, and receiving their feedback and blessing, I decided it was finally time.

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FurAffinity ◈ Weasyl ◈ Ko-Fi

Ash is new in town, moving to Hartford (my universe's center of activity for a lot of my "slice of life" terrestrial characters) a few years after graduating high school. He's had top surgery (but is shy about it currently, all of the inevitable underwear art of Ash will feature boxers and a tank-top) and is taking hormones, and is growing his antlers as a result.
He's currently in "stealth mode" so to speak, not really mentioning that he's a trans guy unless asked, and generally fairly shy and reserved for the most part but working on being more outgoing and social. He'd definitely be friends with Buck Donner, and possibly the dopey underdeveloped redneck deer character Herschel, and will be making more friends and connections as time goes on and I decide more about him and his interests.

I am thinking that a big part of Ash's journey/character growth will be about making friends and becoming more comfortable being social in general--while it's a VERY important part of who he is, I don't want Ash's personality/character to boil down to "trans", I want there to be other interesting things going on there too. Trans people are people too, and have a lot more going on than "gender identity", and I think that might be what's most important to remember to avoiding creating a character that's a caricature, stereotype, or one-dimensional "token" or "diversity quota" character.

All the thought I put into Ash over the years actually brought up a lot of interesting questions about world-building in general, such as "would characters whose species typically have horns make use of prosthetics to replace horns or antlers that were missing or damaged" (and in addition to this, I have a habit of depicting deer characters with the same set of antlers year-round like they're permanent, not shed like real deer do, I need to decide if they just have permanent antlers and it's a small difference between my world and the real one, or just a stylistic thing for art and antlers ARE shed, in which case I could have a cool character moment where Buck offers Ash a pair of his sheds to use, and Ash probably really appreciating the gesture but declining because he views growing his own as an important rite of passage) and "how important would scent and pheromones be to the anthropomorphic animal population", would some of the importance of that stuff be lost as the animals "evolved" or would Ash need to look into some way of smelling more masculine (outside of what hormone replacement might do for him, of course) or just douse himself in cologne or body spray. I have yet to decide on the answers to these questions, however...

A bit more random behind-the-scenes stuff: I had originally wanted the representation of the transgender pride flag colors to be a bit more subtle, perhaps limited to the flowers on his shirt or just the sky being a gradient, but once I started working with the colors, I really liked them! As a result, I decided part of Ash's fashion/taste would likely include retro 1980s and "vaporwave" aesthetics and that would hopefully be reflected more in future art of him. 

I am actually super happy with how organic and spontaneous Ash's character growth has been thus far, I usually prefer to just design a character with some general role/place in mind (or just one-off visual design) and let the character develop naturally and spontaneously as I draw and write about them, rather than trying to force or plan out a character fully right away.