I am writing a fantasy story that includes a feminine teenage transwoman character. However she is forcibly and permanently changed without consent into a 8 ft tall 500 pound  square jawed, heavy browed, hulk with extreme muscle. Every physically hypermasculine trait, but her mind remained the same as before.  Essentially the spell recognized XY chromosomes in the individual and proceeded with the male branch of the transformation. Regardless of gender identity or anything else.

She can't die of old age and resurrects if killed. 

This is a tragic character and I suppose I'm asking if anyone has any advice for a more nuanced portrayal.

You have a clever conclusion awaiting your transgender Sisyphus, but gender dysphoria alone is not story, just like Sisyphus rolling a boulder up a hill is not story. Writing a tragedy is like writing any story, your character needs motives and obstacles, but the difference is your character does not achieve her goals, because of her fatal flaw, which traditionally is an encapsulation of the story's main theme.

IMHO, the problem with your set-up is that the course of the story and the outcome is pretty much specified in advance.  There's nowhere for your character or the story to go.

It's not knowing what's going to happen (or how) that makes stories worth reading and life worth living.

That doesn't mean you can't forshadow where the story is going to end up.  (After all, we all know more or less how our own stories are going to end.)  But if you do, you need to have the journey make that endpoint look different when you get there from the way it looked like when you saw the forshadowing.  Cf. Love Story.

 
The main story is depicting how and why the remaining government transformed the whole  population of one of their last cities out of desperation to turn the tide of a war that threatens to make them all extinct. When it's all over, these transformed people remain, want their rights, and there's a larger question about should people be allowed to change, should they be allowed to change others,  the power imbalance and threatened future of unchanged people who are on average alot weaker.

This character is crushed to learn of the permanence of this change and tearfully makes clear on what her fate will likely be. Increasing the main character's paranoia and hatred against the transformation, the transformed (who can change others easily), and it's far reaching implications.

I am unclear on what that fate for the transgender is beyond a profoundly miserable life. I don't suppose she would ever get used to it, and I'm thinking she would abandon the idea of the most basic of self care. No longer bothering about eating, bathing, working, or doing anything. Essentially forever. But I wonder if that would be over doing it. I am treading on sensitive ground for transgenders and it's an open question on how far I should go with portraying that reaction.   

Asche's last paragraph touched on something that may be valuable to you, which is story structure. The most condensed way I can describe story structure is;

1) The Main Character enacts a plan to achieve a goal.
2) The Main Character's plan fails.
3) The Main Character learns (or doesn't learn in tragedies) from their failure and enacts a new plan to achieve a new goal, which succeeds (or fails in tragedies).

(What the Main Character learns, or doesn't learn from their failure is an encapsulation of the story's main theme.)

Since you want your Main Character to be unmotivated, in order for her to enact a plan, decisive actions must occur outside of her. In the beginning of "The Stranger," unmotivated Meursault's plan is to have sex with Marie, but his plan fails because a friend causes trouble and bright sunlight bothers him.

What is your Main Character's initial plan? Is your allegory of the struggle for transgender rights connected to your main theme, or to a secondary theme? Is your story a tragedy, or do you just want to depict your character in a miserable situation?

You could look up the persistence of tropes in fiction that involve/ end in tragedy for LGBTQAI characters...

The nuanced tragedy could be that in every choice the character makes, she goes the wrong direction, becoming more masculine. These decisions would ultimately result in the protagonist not wanting life. I would expect a tragic ending of some sort. The "I can't die" ending is a very difficult one to pull off and I rarely see it done well. The problem that I have with super hero/vampire/zombie/mutant/whatever stories is that if you can reform the basic principles of a living being to become something else, then one must assume that change is possible to come back or in any other direction... because you have made change possible in your defined world. So, you prevent the character from making those changes not because you said so but because of a personal weakness or flaw.

I like to write a character sketch of several pages. I tell my character's story from his or her point of view. This is purely an exercise to do two things: 1) Give me a character that is unique. 2) Make sure that other than giving me perspective on the character, nothing of that first piece ends up in the story. The reason I do this is my characters are very shallow in my first representation. That is my flaw to fix when I write and I've found my best fix is not to edit but to start over.

You could actually use the ~becomes more masculine~ idea as a way to subvert what is 'male' and what is 'female' in the first place. Maybe she manages to see her ~masculine body or herself as female in the end despite it appearing binary male. Then you might avoid the miserable-trans/ trans suicide/ bury your gays cliche ending

Quote from: Peep on April 09, 2016, 10:58:27 AM
You could actually use the ~becomes more masculine~ idea as a way to subvert what is 'male' and what is 'female' in the first place. Maybe she manages to see her ~masculine body or herself as female in the end despite it appearing binary male. Then you might avoid the miserable-trans/ trans suicide/ bury your gays cliche ending

I agree with that. Was thinking the same thing. Otherwise the story would be saying that the character lives or dies by their appearance. Metaphorically speaking.     

Quote from: JMJW on April 09, 2016, 11:55:00 AM
I agree with that. Was thinking the same thing. Otherwise the story would be saying that the character lives or dies by their appearance. Metaphorically speaking.   

Yup! There are trans women out there who were body builders, soldiers, blacksmiths... and still are after transition, muscles or no.

It's not a bad idea as a story necessarily, it would just be interesting to see a story that shows that a woman that appears feminine may not be incapable of maintaining her identity as a woman without a traditionally feminine appearance. Rather than making the play that this would be impossible to get over, that femmes are always reliant on looking like femmes to other people