Someone on Discord: Wait, why is there genderbend discourse?
Me, popping up like a dog that just heard the word “walk”: Let me give you an essay on how it’s a matter of conflicting needs and poor genre rep.
Okay it’s not quite an essay, but I wrote most of it when was on mobile and added a bunch just now to streamline/add examples.
The reason genderbend discourse is a thing is because the way cishet people do it is generally transphobic, but it’s also a gateway for questioning queer people to enter queer fandom a little more quietly if they’re not in a safe environment. That’s part of how it was for me, and part of why I feel so strongly about genderbends being a genre that doesn’t inherently impact trans fandom negatively: genderbends are how a lot of people got into exploring their gender in the first place. It’s a stepping stone for a lot of us.
But hey, let’s talk misogyny. Genderbending has a significant history as an entry point for female fans to project wider female presence in fandoms that have a majority male cast. Genderbending BEGAN as a subversive thing: ‘this series is almost all male, and I want to see myself in it, so I will change the main character to a woman and explore how that affects the plot and the way the character interacts with the world.’ Female fans got mocked for creating original female characters as much as they did for writing the MC as a woman. It’s a way of taking control of a story that does not have a place for you, which is one of those places where we run into ‘representation is important.’
A decent example of an official production that does this kind of genderbend is “Elementary,” where John Watson is reinterpreted as Joan Watson, a Chinese-American woman. In doing so, the narrative now has a place for women and Chinese-Americans, and anyone who finds it easier to identify with such a character without necessarily sharing the exact same background (e.g. a Korean-Canadian nonbinary person might not share such a background in specifics, but probably has an easier time relating to Joan than they would to white, British, male John of the original).
The problem comes from the fact that… well, for one thing, representation isn’t a zero sum game, but it often feels like it is. Elementary having “Joan” as a character isn’t taking away representation from trans people by providing it to women, and interpreting it as such just leads to production houses having less room for both, and hopping back over to Straight White Cis Men.
The other problem, of course, is that a lot of genderbend fics, either those by new writers OR those by bigoted writers, tend to be gender essentialist, transphobic, or enforcing a binary. This goes for both ‘born cisswap’ fics and ‘magical change in biology’ fics. Again, both plots have their place, whether for those who want to process their own experiences of misogyny, and for those exploring their own gender identity, but they are very easy to fuck up.
The way I usually describe it when it comes to fic is like using Tony Stark. In canon, he’s in STEM and went to college in the 1980s (at least in the MCU, the decade is different in the comics depending on when the story was written). He is a rich cis white man, so his barrier to entry was much lower than most people’s, including his own father (who was born to a poor family, likely Jewish immigrants).
Cis man Tony, trans woman Tony, trans man Tony, cis woman Tony, and nb Tony are ALL going to have a different experience based on the world around them and their own identity.
Tony was a public figure from birth, so “passing” isn’t a thing. Tony’s options are staying in the closet, or being loud and proud.
Meanwhile, there’s a massive bias against women in STEM, one that’s even stronger in the 80s, and while it would apply to every option except cis male Tony, it’s going to apply in different ways.
Each gender variant provides a different opportunity for exploration with regards to misogyny, transphobia, and the intersection of the two, and always in different ways.
The story written by a cis woman currently doing her STEM undergrad might be her intentionally projecting onto a character in order to express her frustrations with gender harassment she’s experiencing from male classmates. The trans woman story written by a trans teenager who’s getting the runaround from teachers on whether or not she can report the transphobic harassment from the boys on her robotics team is going to focus on different forms of oppression and microaggressions.
There’s overlap in the experiences, but both stories perform a vital function for both the writer and readers with similar experiences, and writing the first story with a cis woman Tony does not (inherently) invalidate the existence of trans women like the second author. It’s just an exploration of a different need and experience on the part of the author. It’s ‘I want to see myself in this character I love, a character that was not made with an audience like myself in mind’ for different people, and the fandom at large wants neither of them.
But as mentioned, a lot of people DON’T approach it that way, and it ends up transphobic, even if the intent was, say, exploration of gender and power dynamics in a heavily misogynistic industry. What you end up with is a lot of people whose first association with the CONCEPT of genderbending is “that transphobic/gender essentialist thing that hurt me.” In many cases, even well-done explorations of the concept by queer authors are triggering just due to the connection of terminology, and that’s… not great.
For anyone.
competing representation needs are a heck of a thing
i’d also like to play the trans card (HI IM TRANS) and chime in with: there isn’t one single, easy to find, easy to follow, applicable to all situations standard for what is and isn’t transphobic, and what is and isn’t good trans representation.
i personally figured out i was trans in my late twenties, and feel alienated by the insistence that all trans men were always men and real trans people always know. i can’t relate to characters that figured out they were trans as kids. meanwhile, the kind of trans people that spent their teen years ferociously demanding to be recognized for what they already knew they were are understandably not pleased to see a character spend their teens and twenties confused, repressed, silenced, invalidated. and while all of us are the authorities on our own lived experiences, and keenly want to be heard and respected, we are also likely to misunderstand, overlook, and maybe even get really pissed off at, other people with diametrically opposite experiences, identities, and needs.
“internalized transphobia” is a tidy little phrase, but an enormous and unending clusterfuck of a situation. even when we mean well, we have to be engaged in constant listening and learning, and most of us are doing it while stressed the fuck out due to, yknow, external transphobia.
ANYWAY, it’s hard to make a statement about the breathtaking plurality of the trans experience in, well, one statement. so when it comes to what’s transphobic, some stuff is obvious, some stuff is complicated, some stuff is subjective.
i’m not saying let terfs and avowed transphobes off the hook, obviously. but i am trying to point out that acts of transphobia and, i guess you could call it transphillia, need to be engaged with as an ongoing discussion, rather than a series of isolated, easy-to-diagnose problems.
Yeah I didn’t realize I was a lesbian until I was an adult, and didn’t really realize I was trans (due to never having heard about fluid or nonbinary identities until I was already an adult) until like five or six years later.
The sorts of stories I want to read and tell about that kind of experience could easily come across as homophobic or transphobic to someone who “always knew they were different”, because I DIDN’T realize that my experiences weren’t normal for your average cishet girl. I was weird and awkward and had a strange relationship with girlhood and boys but it never occurred to me that I was anything but a cishet girl and I DON’T feel like I was “always trans all along” in the sense of not referring to my younger self as a girl.
There are all kinds of needs and ways to be queer and to be trans and to need to see yourself in fiction, AND sometimes people will want to explore that in fiction even if it wasn’t THEIR experience and that’s not a bad thing - it’s just a matter of being open to discussion on all sides and being willing to say “I did that badly” but also to say “I hadn’t thought about people needing to see that take” sometimes.
(and obviously this only goes for good faith actions etc etc etc)
All good additions! I do want to add one thing that I’ve been seeing crop up in the notes a lot (not in the above reblogs), which is… assuming bad faith for common transphobic elements, most obviously the “magic cisswap where the characters treat genitalia as being gender.”
Which… yes, it can be transphobic, but part of what my original post was trying to address was that you can generally find a valid reason for anything if you assume things are being written in good faith. I can bet that a solid number of those fics are being written by teenagers who don’t yet know what gender euphoria is, but are subconsciously processing what they think about their own bodies and identities through the lens of genderbend fic. They’re only just starting to think about gender critically, and maybe their community is gender essentialist, and they’re projecting with the thought of ‘well, if this happened to me, I’d be ready to identify as a gender other than what I currently identify as’ without having the safety or context to recognize what it is that they’re feeling.
Yes, some of it is absolutely being written by cis adults who should know better. There is definitely TERF rhetoric in some of these.
But saying ‘this handling of the trope is always transphobic’ is pretty much the exact opposite of what I was going for. There’s almost always a good reason for something to be written, in theory. We just need to think critically when we can, and tag appropriately so people can avoid things they find triggering.
the original op was talking mostly about genderbending in fanfiction but i’d also like to take this opportunity to talk about genderbending in manga, which includes crossdressing and cisswaps.
as someone who had a genderbender manga phase when i thought i was cis and still kinda read some from time to time, it did help me deal with gender stuff BUT a lot of the stuff i found were also pretty gender essentialist.
they were usually stuff like “my best friend ♂️ turned into a girl ♀️ and now im in love????” (there were always the mars and venus symbols in the titles). not to mention the trashfire of a genre that is tsf.
the genderbender genre is somehow simultaneously inherently queer while also some of the most cisheteronormative bullshit i’ve seen.
i can see how it can help queer people, especially trans people, process emotions that they aren’t that familiar with yet, but it also can perpetuate harmful stereotypes a lot of the time.
in a lot of the manga, the originally male genderbent character ends up thinking “oH No My BrAiN iS TuRnInG FeMaLe ToO” when they transform. their straight male friend ends up getting feelings for them. the protag’s sexuality also gets changed most of the time and they become much more stereotypically feminine, regardless of their original personality.
just once, i’d like to see a genderbender story where an amab protag gets “turned into a girl” and experience dysphoria. most of the stories were so obviously written by people who have no idea that trans people are a thing.
i also find it super frustrating how manga that are explicitly about trans people are tagged with stuff like “crossdressing” or “genderbend”. it just feels disrespectful to me. i don’t really know how to word it, but it feels like by tagging trans stories as those they’re reducing it to a gimmick or smth. a trans man just living their life isn’t “genderbending” because they’re men and not “women that somehow got turned into men”.
anyway, genderbender as a genre is extremy dicey territory and very easy to mess up. a lot of stories in the genre are written by people who doesn’t know that being trans is a thing so they often end up poorly executed and can feel pretty festishized.
i don’t want to dismiss the entire genre as it was pretty important to me exploring my own gender. not every gender bender manga is bad.
an example is “kashimashi girl meets girl” a yuri/wlw manga that actually handles the subject matter quite well.
another is “ouran high school host club” (as full of imperfections it might be) where the haruhi’s entire thing is that she doesn’t care about gender or gender roles, she only values who the person is. she’s one of the first characters i really resonated with and she can be read as nonbinary.
genderbender manga is important to me, but at the same time, it’s plagued with so many harmful tropes and stereotypes.
anyway, feel free to correct me if i said anything wrong or offensive, i’m only human. i’m just talking from my own viewpoint and perspective.
your-squid asked:
Could you fill me in on the whole grape-kun thing?
carnival-phantasm answered:
A japanese zoo, Tobu Zoo, had a colab with the anime Kemono Friends where they added cutouts of the anime characters to the enclosures of the matching animals to attract visitors and stuff, one of these characters being Hululu, an airhead anthropomorphic Humboldt penguin:
Grape-kun, an old humboldt penguin who’d been abandoned by his former mate due to his health issues, started showing a lot of interest for the cutout, staring at it for hours, trying to reach it on top of the tall rock where it was placed, and even trying to court it.
Of course, Kemono Friends already being a surprise hit show, the thing went viral and tons of art, jokes and other content were made. Even after the colab was over, the zoo didn’t remove Grape-kun’s sunshine, and Hululu’s VA Ikuko Chikuta even visited Grape-kun during an educational event:
Unfortunately, Grape-kun was already old and his health started to deteriorate. He was removed from his enclosure for treatment, along with his muse of course, that was placed next to him. On october 12, 2017, Tobu Zoo announced that Grape-kun passed away, with Hululu by his side in his final moments. Once again Grape-kun started trending, this time in a sadder tone as fans, visitors and part of the Kemono Friends staff paid their respects.
As a final homage to Grape-kun, a new cutout was added to the penguin enclosure in january 2018, immortalizing this romance:
And thus ends the tale of Grape-kun and Hululu. May our little Friend rest in penguin heaven with his anime wife, gone, but never forgotten.
Truly this is one of the only situations where each word felt like someone was punching me in the face and it kept getting worse
For future reference.
Thank you.
For those who would ever need it. -C
reblogging here because i can see this being relevant to anyone who’s ever tried to get out of an abusive relationship
Reblogging because that last comment made me reread the whole thing in a new light and realize this could be vital information. So, putting it out there for everyone, and hoping no one ever really needs it.
I’ve come to make an announcement: Shadow the Hedgehog’s a bitch-ass motherfucker, he pissed on my fucking wife! That’s right, he took his hedgehog-fuckin’ quilly dick out and he pissed on my fucking wife, and he said his dick was “this big,” and I said “that’s disgusting,” so I’m making a callout post on my Twitter.com: Shadow the Hedgehog, you’ve got a small dick, It’s the size of this walnut except WAY smaller. And guess what? Here’s what my dong looks like! That’s right, baby, tall points, no quills, no pillows — look at that, it looks like two balls and a bong! He fucked my wife, so guess what, I’m gonna fuck the Earth! That’s right, this is what you get: my SUPER LASER PISS!! Except I’m not gonna piss on the Earth, I’m gonna go higher!! I’m pissing ON THE MOON! How do you like that, Obama?! I PISSED ON THE MOON, YOU IDIOT!! You have twenty-three hours before the piss drrrrroplllllllets hit the fucking Earth! Now get outta my fucking sight, before I piss on you too!
Happy one year anniversary to the video that gave us this improvised gem.
Happy 2nd anniversary to Eggman pissing on the moon
Happy 3rd anniversary to Eggman pissing on the moon
Happy Anniversary, y’all.
Me: *Decides to go afk while flying to see what happens*
My skykid when they realised they can't stop themselves from flying into a wall at high speed:
found a subreddit that’s either a domain of the Hunt or is gearing up for some kind of ritual
there’s 45,000+ people subscribed to this subreddit. commenting on any post is against the subreddit’s rules, and any comment will result in a 3-day ban. people ignore this and comment anyway, for the rush.
the mods are outnumbered (there are about 10 of them from what I can see) and so they bring in a bot that autobans people.
everyone, mods included, collectively decided that this was no fun, citing the fact that the sub was all about “the thrill of the hunt”. the bots were duly suspended. the everlasting game of cat and mouse continues.