While Tilly Bridges and Susan Bridges, the married trans woman/cis woman writing team behind Star Trek Adventures supplements, the IDW comic book series, Voyager – HOMECOMING and more, met through a Star Trek fanfic group, they have built a creative and personal partnership that spans franchises and creator-owned work, all while spending years fighting for representation at every level of the industry, from the writers’ room to the executive suite. Their jointly-created work spans tie-in fiction, original pilots, and YA graphic novels, all united by what they call “hope-fueled sci-fi”: a deliberate, principled rejection of grimdark cynicism in favor of stories that lift people up.

Prism’s Avery Kaplan and Ollie Kaplan sat down with Tilly and Susan to talk about co-writing as a couple, the allegorical power of Species 8472, why Just Another Summer is the trans teen rom-com middle America didn’t know it needed, and the electric live performance of their queer cyberpunk pilot Robo Waitress Assassins — plus why the only real solution to trans erasure in media is embarrassingly simple: hire more trans people.

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AVERY & OLLIE KAPLAN: How do you divide the writing process as a team? How has your writing process as a couple changed from Star Trek Adventures to Voyager – HOMECOMING?

TILLY & SUSAN BRIDGES: We’ll brainstorm ideas together, bouncing things around until we find something that we’re both excited by. Tilly then usually does the first draft, and then Susan does a big revision and rewrite. Then we take turns revising it and sending it back and forth until we’re both happy with it. Homecoming didn’t change our process at all, we’ve been writing as a team for so long that it just fit right in with everything else we write.

AVERY & OLLIE: Are you still running your Star Trek Adventures games?

TILLY & SUSAN: Yes! Tilly runs two STA games, each of which has been running for something like six or seven years now. And they’re in a shared universe, so events from one game can affect the other. And every 12-18 months or so, we have a giant crossover game with the crews from both ships (which amounts to thirteen players). Susan’s the captain of one ship, and the chief medical officer on the other (playing characters who are sisters to each other).

AVERY & OLLIE: You’ve described yourselves as a married trans woman/cis woman writing team. Does your identity shape the kinds of stories you’re hired to tell, and the ones you fight to tell?

TILLY & SUSAN: It does, for good and ill. We both know what it’s like to never see ourselves in the stories our society centers, so we’re always trying to push representation forward. Especially for trans and queer people, but also people from all marginalized communities, because we know how important it is to feel seen and like you can be part of the stories you love.

But the other side of the cuts-two-ways blade is that often people think we can only write trans stories, or queer stories. We’ve been submitted for projects, staffing on TV shows, so many things, where we’ll hear back, “we don’t have any trans characters so we don’t need trans writers,” or “we already have a trans writer.”

And that’s kind of maddening because first off, why don’t you have any trans characters? But even if you don’t, we can write cis characters too! Nobody tells cishet white men they’re only allowed to write cishet white men, you know? They’re “allowed” to write every type of character and tell every type of story, but people from any marginalized community are treated as if we can only write stories about our identities.

We’re also not all the same. Queer and trans people aren’t a monolith, and having one on staff doesn’t mean you don’t need more. You should have more so that no one person (or one team) is expected to speak for an entire community, because we all have different experiences, viewpoints, and voices.

AVERY & OLLIE: Any ideas on how to combat some of the issues y’all just raised, and/or advice for up-and-coming writers on handling those moments and stressors? I’ve noticed a lot of internal debate in the queer community about our role as educators, who is responsible for educating cishet folx, and intersectionality and other representation concerns… 

TILLY & SUSAN: The only way this is ever going to change is when good cis people decide to change it. Because what it’s going to take is more trans producers, executives, editors at publishers, etc., who are the gatekeepers of which stories get made.

There are good cis people in those positions trying to push trans rep forward, but they have to then pitch the projects to their bosses, who are also likely cis, to get a greenlight. It’s an uphill battle every step of the way, because trans art is constantly running into those cis roadblocks and has to keep overcoming them throughout the entire process.

The solution truly is to just hire more trans people into those positions, because they will understand our stories and art better, and will have some ability to help things get made and released.

As for handling those moments, it’s incredibly difficult. We’ve had to basically hold “Trans 101” classes for cisgender executives who simply didn’t know anything about trans people, and we shouldn’t have to do that! But if we don’t, nothing will ever change. So we try to, when we can, but it’s really frustrating. It ends up feeling like you’re justifying your existence and why people like you should be “allowed” to be in our media, and that’s a really shitty thing to feel.

Our advice is to also make as much indie art as you can, that you can get out there without cis gatekeepers in the way. There’s just a balance with it all, because indie art will never have the reach that mass media does. Getting trans rep into a television show or in a book from a big publisher will reach so many more of the people who need it, but it also often ends up muted in its transness. Indie art can go Full Trans™ but it’ll never find as big of an audience. So try to do both, make trans and queer art on your own through smaller indie projects and companies, while you keep trying to fight the good fight to increase representation at the larger outlets.

But cis people, really, hire us. At every level.

Art can change hearts and minds, and you can help us do that.

AVERY & OLLIE: Because famous comic book couples are on our minds… What does being a married writing team add to your work that a traditional writing partnership wouldn’t?

TILLY & SUSAN: We’re better at communication than most teams are, maybe. Our relationship is built on communication and trust, so having that foundation for our relationship carries right over to the writing career.

AVERY & OLLIE: In the reverse, has co-writing ever genuinely stressed your marriage — and how do you protect both?

TILLY & SUSAN: It hasn’t! Which is not to say it’s always butterflies and rainbows; we’ve certainly had arguments about the best way to tell a story, or over a line that one of us wants to cut and one of us feels is fundamentally important.

But it’s always coming from a place of respect for each other, and with the knowledge that none of it is personal. We love each other a lot and know we’d never intentionally hurt each other, much less with our writing.

We met each other through a writing group (for Star Trek fanfic, natch), and so for us writing is inseparable from our relationship with each other. We met doing it, we’ve both always done it, and now we do it together. We protect both by just protecting it all, which is weird to say, but for us they’re kind of one and the same. They’re connected and intertwined at a foundational level.

AVERY & OLLIE: AWWW, we love that detail about how you met. Saving that in our memory banks for the panel, if y’all are open to talking about it! I definitely want to cover the role of Star Trek fanfiction as an avenue for queer joy – feel free to tease some now.

TILLY & SUSAN: Sadly, at the time, we thought we were a cishet couple, so our experiences with writing fanfic weren’t as queer or trans as they could have been.

AVERY & OLLIE: No specific question – but can we discuss Captain Painway… maybe in relationship to trans joy as an act of resistance? (Ollie loves the name and has always wished my disability didn’t keep me from roller derby.)

TILLY & SUSAN: Hell yeah (Captain Painway is Tilly’s roller derby name, Susan’s is Doc Frown). In a world that wants us to hide, to be invisible, to go back to “woodworking,” to be “stealth” so people forget that transgender is just the way some humans are, being visible and finding joy in life is one of the most foundational methods of resistance there is.

And roller derby is such a joy, and one of the most trans and queer-friendly environments we’ve ever found. It’s people of every gender, body type, race, and ability coming together to have an amazing time flinging our bodies-on-wheels at each other. And it’s so free from corporate interests and compulsory cisgender heterosexuality that it’s absolutely liberating.

Attend some derby bouts if you can, you’ll have an amazing, lovely, family-friendly, queer and trans-affirming time.

AVERY & OLLIE: Species 8472 and fluidic space are back. Why were those the right threads to pull?

TILLY & SUSAN: In the planning stages for Homecoming, we went back and forth with Paramount and IDW about who the main adversary would be. Species 8472 wasn’t our first choice, but they were absolutely the right choice once we hit upon them.

We wanted to tell a story about people who are ousted from society due to their differences, because so much of our present real world is dealing with that exact issue, on so many fronts. And Star Trek has always tackled real world problems through allegory.

When we went back and rewatched the episodes of Voyager that featured Species 8472, we were surprised there were so few. It always felt like there were more, maybe because they were such a big threat.

That gave us a lot of room to explore them, both as a culture and as a species, and add to who they are (and the overall Trek mythos). And it turned out that where Janeway and the crew last left them, at the end of “In the Flesh,” played directly into the themes we wanted to explore in the story.

It was honestly serendipitous.

AVERY & OLLIE: What does protopian sci-fi, or what y’all refer to as “hope-fueled sci-fi,” mean to you as a guiding philosophy, especially right now?

TILLY & SUSAN: Stories can be an escape for folks in tough times, but they’re not just an escape. They’re the things that can give us hope, show us a path to a better tomorrow, comment on the things going on around us that need commenting on so people know they’re not alone.

For us, it’s about rejecting the cynical grimdark approach a lot of media takes. Which is not to say that type of media is in any way bad or “lesser,” it’s just not for us. Our real world has enough of that already.

What we want to do is lift people up, and show that even if you’re in a very bad world, there’s always hope and a chance to change things for the better. 

All it takes is people who choose to try.

AVERY & OLLIE: What was the inspiration for Just Another Summer?

TILLY & SUSAN: There’s this surge happening in media right now, where people want “stories for middle America.” This seems to be code for “stuff that will make right wing bigots happy,” and almost universally means stories by, for, and about cishet white men… who have been 99% of the characters our society has allowed mass-media stories to be about.

But you know who else lives in middle America? Queer people. Trans people. Middle America isn’t a monolith.

The other side of that coin is all the misconceptions so many people seem to have about Los Angeles, specifically and how everyone who lives here is fake and awful and entitled.

L.A. is our home, and we love it here, and that’s not the L.A. we know. We both also grew up in the midwest, and we know what life in more conservative environments can be like.

Just Another Summer is about those two things colliding in multiple ways. A rich L.A. girl meets a country farm boy, and they both have preconceived notions about who they are. But that’s not because she’s cis and he’s trans, that isn’t a barrier for either of them. It shouldn’t be. We can normalize that (and trans men being romantic leads for cishet women!).

There’s also a very fun lesbian relationship running right alongside it, that’s full of joy and discovery.

It’s about learning, maybe we’re not all that different from each other, because we’re all human beings. And it’s about figuring out who you want to be, while your head’s swimming in confusing feelings. It’s all those things you might go through during a stiflingly hot summer when you’re a teenager.

AVERY & OLLIE: Does your approach to writing queer and trans representation change depending on the age group you are writing for?

TILLY & SUSAN: Some of the specifics might, but the approach doesn’t. If kids can handle cishet romances, and every Disney animated movie would lead you to believe they can, they can handle queer relationships with trans characters that are treated the same way.

AVERY & OLLIE: What can a graphic novel do for queer teen storytelling that TV or prose can’t?

TILLY & SUSAN: Comics let the reader control the pace. They can stop and just sit with a single panel for as long as they want, which isn’t a thing people really do with TV or movies. But unlike prose, where you may stop and sit with a paragraph or a sentence for a bit, in a comic you’re seeing the characters there, frozen in time in each panel. And you can just be with them, at each step along the way, for as long as you like. And if you’re a trans or queer teen trying to figure yourself out, that might give you more time to think things over than other mediums do. 

AVERY & OLLIE: What’s y’all’s dream project?

TILLY & SUSAN: To be staffed on a Star Trek show, and to sell one of our original pitches and run that show. Right now, we’d especially love to do that for our queer trans cyberpunk action dramedy pilot, Robo Waitress Assassins. We just did a full cast performance of it as part of this year’s Joy Who Lived trans theater festival here in LA, and having truly amazing actors bring it to life was the best thing. If you missed the show and the live stream, keep an eye out because we’ll hopefully have it up for everyone to see before too long.

We would really, really like to make that show.

There are other dream projects, too, but those are all in various stages of being pitched, so we’re gonna zip our lips on them for now.

AVERY & OLLIE: Can you tell us more about the Robo Waitress Assassins performance? 

TILLY & SUSAN: Robo Waitress Assassins is an original television pilot of ours, a queer trans cyberpunk action dramedy. It’s about the ways society controls our bodily autonomy, and keeps us financially insecure so we’re too exhausted to rise up and change things.

It’s the script that got us our manager, and it had some movement toward actually becoming a show for about a year, before it fell apart as these things often do. We’re still really hoping we can make it as a show someday, but the television industry is presently burning up as it free-falls through the atmosphere, so who knows. We’re not going to stop trying though!

The performance itself was magical, with nearly all trans and nonbinary cast members (Susan was the only cis cast member). We hadn’t ever done anything like this before, and we also made some changes to the script specifically for the live reading, including beefing up some roles and trimming the action lines. It ended up working so well that we went back to the original script and revised it.

AVERY & OLLIE: Is there anything else you would like to add?

TILLY & SUSAN: You can get links to all of our work, see all our credits, and sign up for our newsletter at http://birdguest.com

Also Tilly writes weekly essays on trans life (which have a companion podcast co-hosted by Susan), all of which are entirely free. There’s over two hundred essays (and 150+ podcast episodes) covering Trans 101 topics, Trans Life, Cis Allyship, and Trans Rep in Media. You can find them all at https://www.tillystranstuesdays.com

And you can find us on social media

Bluesky – @tillybridges, @susanlbridges
Instagram – @heckyeahtillybridges, @susanlbridges

Catch up with Tillly Bridges and Susan Bridges at Q Con!