Trans Superheroes

[ysabetwordsmith]

This article talks about trans superheroes. It raises a few good points and a lot of troublesome ones. TL;DR: Tell ALL the stories! So let's take a look ...


#1: Shape-shifters, or magic users changing appearance, are not transgender unless the default form they live in 99% of the time is transgender.

Well OUCH. That's a slap in the face for anyone who can't, doesn't feel safe, isn't ready yet, or otherwise hasn't taken up full-time presentation. It implies they're not really transgender if they don't. >_< A great big fuck no to that. You are transgender if your body doesn't match your gender identity.

I get that the point of this is wanting to show more variety of trans characters, but following it would have the opposite effect. Let's don't. Because I think we need stories about the stress of presenting in different ways, as much as we need stories about living full-time as your gender of identity. After all, most people go through the former before reaching the latter. And believe me, if you transform in any way to a different gender, you will have some very eye-opening experiences about it whether you meant to do that or not. Don't think that suddenly putting your penis on will get you out of a bashing, either.


#2: Your transgender superhero should not be tragic. They should not be an addict, or a prostitute, or any other “tragic trope.”

Tempting, isn't it? Let's tell stories about happy transfolk so people know that's possible. Certainly we need those, and there aren't many yet.

The problem is, trans lives often are tragic in a transphobic culture. Transfolk have higher rates of addiction, prostitution, and other tragedies compared with cis people. Erasing that does not seem like a solution to me. That's not to say that comics are handling these issues well very often. They aren't. But someone should.


#3: Your transgender superhero is not the comic relief for other characters or the audience. They can, of course, be humorous – but not intrinsically so.

I would tilt this a little: they should not be funny because transgender is treated as a joke unto itself. Many people are intrinsically funny; they are comics, clowns, and other entertainers. That's fine. You'll see a higher proportion of them not just among transfolk but any oppressed group, because humor is a defense mechanism. It can keep you alive. But let's honor that as a survival skill, not just a throwaway gag.


#4: Creating a transgender superhero that is killed off counts for nothing. Nowt. Nada. Zip.

True in that it does nothing for the continuing representation in the character cast. However, part of equality means getting to do all the stuff that other character types can do. That includes dying, and especially, heroic deaths. Look at the giant pile of trans corpses in comics and you'll see mostly hopeless causes, not people who threw themselves into a wormhole to save the world. I should add that trans deaths hit hardest when that's the only trans character in the plot, which is almost always the case. Most tropes can be undermined with plain old diversity. Add more trans characters and it stops being as dire when one of them dies -- especially as a hero.


#5: Having characters swap brains or bodies does not count. The transgender character has to have been born transgender; it can’t be an accident.

Once again, that's pretty hard on people who discovered their nature later in life, particularly if it came up after a triggering even such as they needed to take hormones for something, and let's not forget that occasionally someone gets into an accident and learns things about their body that had been hidden from them before. I reiterate: transgender means your body doesn't match your identity. That can happen in a variety of ways. In a superpowered context, body swaps, hostile transformations, etc. almost always produce trans characters. They want their original sex back, because they don't feel comfortable with the new one. However, the body and its hormones have their own pull, which can modulate gender and other experiences, which usually just contributes to the shear but occasionally someone finds it enlightening. This can lead to very trans stories indeed, if you look at what it would actually be like instead of playing it for laughs.


#6: The focus of the comic book story should not be all about gender. The hero should be a normal, well-rounded character as they are normal.

That's called background parity. It's a great thing and we do need it. But that's not all we need. Transfolk have unique experiences based on their sex/gender dynamics, and we need to tell those stories too. Certainly the characters should be well-rounded, but that doesn't mean their story (or some of their episodes) can't focus on gender. I mean, come on, a huge proportion of cis-het stories are about gendered themes, chiefly mate selection. Equality means everybody gets to do all the things!


#7: A transgender superhero needs to be a main character, have agency, and not perpetually be a background character or a sidekick.

I agree with this as a definition for main characters, which we do need. However, anyone can play any role. For diverse representation, we need trans superheroes, supervillains, sidekicks, minions, police, EMTs, firefighters, reporters, relatives, background characters, and so on.


#8: Transgender superheroes should not be dressed in a way that shows they are transgender. Clothing in and out of uniform should be normal, mainstream superhero clothing.

Yet another round of erasure, which is especially unpleasant for all the trans and genderqueer folks out there who are still trying to figure out what their "normal clothing" even is. Among the common options are: Dress in masculine styles. Dress in feminine styles. Dress in things that shout your transness because you are sick of hiding it or just want to be an activist. Make up a style unique to you as a way of expressing your gender. So let's take two of my trans soups: Calliope's wardrobe is a riot of pink-white-blue with a good handful of things that say "transgender" on them. Hyperspaceman simply dresses in masculine clothes, and deliberately picked a cape name with -man. Two trans characters, who are actually nothing alike other than being trans and having superpowers. That's diversity in action.

Also, look at how much of this whole article aims to make trans characters invisible as trans. You know what happens when people pass 100%? They merge into the wider stream of men or women. You can't clock them as trans. Which is actually fantastic for them if that's what they want, as many do, but it does bupkis for the visibility of trans characters. People have asked about dress mode and pronoun use among the Marionettes in particular. Why do the butch women in men's clothes and female pronouns stick out, for instance? Because the actual transmen tend to be indistinguishable from the cismen around them. The folks who mix it up a bit are more identifiable as some flavor of genderqueer.


#9: The hero’s villains/opposing force should not be gender or sex related. No one called ‘Codpiece’ ever again, please.

That's a nice fantasy. By all means write it. The problem is, being trans makes you an asshole magnet. I imagine this will be the same with superheroes and supervillains. Jackasses who sexualize their supervillainy will be drawn to pester superheras and female supervillains, and probably also trans ones. At least until they try it with Fortressa and she punches them in the pelvis, or Hyperspaceman and he dumps them an Islam-held island in the Maldives, or Calliope and she goes, "Oh look at the time, I'm too busy to deal with this!" and abandons them to Vagary's mercy. Or am I the only one who fantasizes about throwing some pervert's nuts under a bus? Somehow I doubt that.


#10: A transgender superhero should be a positive character. With almost no positive representation in the media for transgender people, this is vital.

I do agree that we need many more positive portrayals of trans characters, including superheroes. However, if you write them without flaws, they're going to be Mary Sue/Marty Stu/Marion Sam.


So I guess this is just a long-winded way of saying that I don't have the patience to wait 20-30 years for society to hike through the whole spectrum of identity literature before they get to the good part. I don't want to faff around with the pendulum. I just want to see trans characters DO ALL THE THINGS.

Comments

[technoshaman]

See, this is YA thing I like about you. It's not all hard-and-fast rules, not all Thou Shalt Do It This Way. It's *okay* for a character to screw up by the numbers, because real life is that way. I suspect you have an idea of just how rare that is. And, happily, it's not just you, it's a number of people who are probably reading this... SiliconShaman, DialecticDreamer, and Chanter_Greenie in particular, but they're not the only ones... who are writing life, not The Perfect Fairy Tale. It's *messy*. Lovably so.

[antisocialite_forum]

>> transgender means your body doesn't match your identity <<

Sometimes, not necessarily. Transgender is an *identity* and the identifying as part is what's important. There are a lot of people whose body might not *match* their gender but not be trans because they don't ID as trans for whatever reason. The choice in being able to identify or not and NOT being boxed in is as important in that as any label people get stuck with by default.

It's also moot if a culture doesn't always correlate body to gender. Then you can have a third gender person who isn't trans. My culture is like that, and I know someone whose culture has fluid gender roles based on social role and not body.

Haven't gotten to read most of this bc class, but I think it's important to comment, because treating identity terms as definitive labels does not help anyone.

- Gray

[kengr]

>>#8: Transgender superheroes should not be dressed in a way that shows they are transgender. Clothing in and out of uniform should be normal, mainstream superhero clothing.

Yet another round of erasure, which is especially unpleasant for all the trans and genderqueer folks out there who are still trying to figure out what their "normal clothing" even is. Among the common options are: Dress in masculine styles. Dress in feminine styles. Dress in things that shout your transness because you are sick of hiding it or just want to be an activist. Make up a style unique to you as a way of expressing your gender. So let's take two of my trans soups: Calliope's wardrobe is a riot of pink-white-blue with a good handful of things that say "transgender" on them. Hyperspaceman simply dresses in masculine clothes, and deliberately picked a cape name with -man. Two trans characters, who are actually nothing alike other than being trans and having superpowers. That's diversity in action.<<

Not super, per se, but my character Morgan in my "Boy with Something Extra" has an unfortunate incident at school that results in him having to wear the "emergency clothes" he'd pack. He hadn't counted on his underwear getting messed up too.

So here we have a guy with a body that's pretty much "female" except for his genitals winding up stuck in a set of biking gear (spandex shorts and top) with no underwear. and it's rather obvious that he's got breasts and a penis. (this causes no end of trouble in the next chapter which I really need to get back to working on)

It's not *deliberately* "dressed as trans", and it is in fact "normal" clothing. It's just a problem with circumstances that make his being TG *very* noticeable.

[peoriapeoriawhereart]

I'm suspecting part of the list's limitation is that it is allowing for those that write at the bare minimum- I've seen people hewing very close to The hero lives and the ensemble cast are all up for grabs as to who will die next-at which point only the hero matters and she's got to be All the Things because making the rest diverse is setting things up to end tragically.

The more apt thing is that for starters write inclusive stories without focus on those metrics of inclusion. Then as your own skill develops, branch out but leave room for the most personal stories be written by people with first hand knowledge.

[antisocialite_forum]

Since I am finally off the phone and out of class, long comment for you:

I feel like a lot of the article's rules are based around tokenism - it's a trend to include diverse characters so that the writers look like they're writing diversity, and then kill or torture them because it's "edgy" instead of like... Not being an ass and committing to it. But local trends are to write some pretty self-indulgent horror fic, which is fine until it becomes *the only thing* in most adult-oriented fiction.

There's also the headache of people arguing back and forth about a bait in switch in The Magicians (spoilers) which led the audience to believe that - holy shit, a pedophile is going to be the main villain, how often does that happen? to... Oh no, the villain is *really* the kid he abused, who is now shady af in adulthood. Johnny was pissed about that. It's easy to see the logic and where that character development could have happened, but it is such a shitty thing to do to real life survivors.

Mainstream media sucks at showing positive portrayals of underdogs. I can sympathize with the article author for steering people in that direction, because there are not enough good representations at all, but your solutions hit the problem where it lies. If you want something to be representative instead of entirely fluff or sadfic, you need to write the entire spectrum, or at least show pieces of it.
A decent way to do that is to look at population estimates, too - this is what the population statistics are for this area, if you're basing it on a real-life setting, or else... model real-life and tweak based on how the culture and people likely would have developed and do world building. But it seems like the art of world building got lost among the habit of writing what's been shown to sell instead of creating genuinely new fiction. :/

>> That's a nice fantasy. <<

And it can be hilarious to make an underdog character poke fun at various villainous forces they're at odds with in society. The thing is that those can feel excessive if the entire character is based around fighting those things, or the author sucks at balancing serious issues with humor.

>> Yet another round of erasure, which is especially unpleasant for all the trans and genderqueer folks out there who are still trying to figure out what their "normal clothing" even is. <<

At least locally, if you're familiar with the cues you can spot genderqueer people by style. They have their own clothing, hair, color schemes, etc. just like women and men do. Some people intentionally dress to fit their subculture, especially if they want to signal it to other people who might have it in common. There are a few people on the local campus who wear They/Them/Their and the Transgender/Nonbinary symbol on t-shirts.

Likewise, at the convention a few people went to last weekend, it can be really easy to pick trans women out of the crowd - and distinguish them from people who are genderqueer versus crossdressing - then there's that along with the genderqueer people who were only noticeably queer because they chose to show it through their accessories. There are differences. It's okay to *show* them, because how else are people supposed to see how to take someone *at face value* instead of thinking that trans people are invisible or that someone doesn't look masculine/feminine enough to count as a real guy/girl?

>> but it does bupkis for the visibility of trans characters <<

It's like "Dumbledore is gay" all over again. It doesn't count as representation if the audience needs to be informed after the fact. So far Paranatural (with RJ), Monsterkind (with Loise), and PragueRace (various, but Untamo and Miko are the starring examples) have done good with including trans and nonbinary characters without making it a primary characteristic. PragueRace is great with that because it actually treats being trans or nonbinary as background traits that come through in other parts of the story. And I'm sure these authors aren't the only ones who do this.
Good examples of trans characters do exist in comics... Just not what you'd find on bookstore shelves.

>> #5: Having characters swap brains or bodies does not count. The transgender character has to have been born transgender; it can’t be an accident.

Once again, that's pretty hard on people who discovered their nature later in life <<

They're also missing a huge opportunity to let cis readers imagine how their lives would change if that happened to them. Sure, you get the initial reactions that most people think about, but... Then what? Now you have a character who's used to being a different sex than the body they now inhabit. The extent of that change surpasses most people's ability to predict how they'd react to it - they're going to be blindsided and hunting for solutions for the most simple things that now no longer work for them, and discomfort aside. That creates a ton of unique issues along with overlap for stuff that trans people deal with. You get to show a cis person what it's like to be treated as a different gender. You can even play with gender fluidity there, if the character happens to like aspects of their different body or has the ability to change it.

>> #1: Shape-shifters, or magic users changing appearance, are not transgender unless the default form they live in 99% of the time is transgender. <<

The phrasing in that one is confusing as heck to me. Transgender is an identity, not a fixed state of being... It's also dismissive of gender fluid or multi-gender people who *might* be uncomfortable with their form some of the time but not all of the time or even not most of the time. Someone can identify as transgender but not live 99% of their life as the pinnacle of transgender experience. For some people it really matters; for others it doesn't. I imagine the same could be said to shapeshifters who routinely change their sex but whose gender may or may not change with it - and even if someone isn't transgender, routinely being mistaken for a different gender can have its own overlapping issues.
I get the feeling that the author has some idea of a transgender story that... isn't. There *is* no universal experience of transness. :/ And the experiences are there have a lot of overlap with other life experiences related to dissonance between expectations/desires and reality.

They're going to end up with another queer subgenre at a different polarity than the *current* examples, and not a diverse spectrum.

- Gray

[cmcmck]

And perhaps people should be aware enough not to attempt to write characters they simply can't fully comprehend.

It's my lived experience 24/7/365 and has been for over forty years............

[lone_cat]

With regard to #9, I know Austin is just a 'nary asshole cow-orker of Calvin's, but I'd still like to see Calliope or Vagary (or both together) go into the craft store and give him a metaphorical boot to the head.