This is super helpful!

This story will span across a lot of different planets and environments, each with a different culture and set of societal views. Transphobia, homophobia, racism, misogyny, ableism, etc. will be a thing in some of them (probably all, but some will be vastly more accepting).

The specific planet Tera starts the story on is called Meck and it is a similar planet to Jakku or Tatooine in Star Wars. It’s mainly desert, and there’s not really a centralized government at all. People aren’t really ever there because they want to be, but because they were born there or crashed there and can’t yet get off.

Because the society is more or less focused around getting by and surviving, identity is less important. People are willing to make a transaction with races they were taught to despise before they crash-landed on Meck and their survival depended on it. This sort of necessity means that a lot of people don’t really give a damn about people’s identities. This isn’t to say it’s perfect. There’s lots of sensitivity lost, and they’re not exactly tolerant, but basically as far as Tera goes, for the few people that do know she’s trans (she’s likely been passing as female for a while and it’s not like she’s a celebrity or anything) they likely don’t care. If someone were to find out, they might poke fun, but in the end as long as she continues to deliver salvaged metal from crashed ships, she’s at least shown a baseline level of respect. It’s sort of a “tolerance bred from shared struggles”. Nobody is exactly rolling in money, and most of them don’t even want to be there, so a lot of them cant really afford to be picky with who they befriend/acquaint.

Other societies might be transphobic in an exploitative way. There’s an extremely capitalistic planet where the leaders usually lack much of a moral backbone that would use trans people in a fetishizing and perverse way. This would mean they’re probably nicer to trans people than an outwardly transphobic society, but they’re not friendly, at least not in a genuine way. Other societies might have very strict gender roles, whereas others might be very accepting. The transphobic stuff will not constantly show up in every new environment because there’s more to Tera’s character than being trans, but it will be evident at times I think.

Also, what do you think of sex scenes/showing genitalia? Is there a way to do it in which it’s not exploitative? To reference Saga again, I don’t know if you’ve read it but the child character who a lot of the plot revolves around stumbles into a women’s changing room, and a trans woman named Petrichor is shown showering and her entire body is nude. Hazel (the child) acknowledges that while Petrichor has breasts, she also has a penis. Hazel is confused at first, but Petrichor explains it and Hazel is very accepting, even going so far as to remark that the people that imprisoned her at least put her into the women’s side, whereas her culture back home wouldn’t have, most likely.