I love the fact that peter parker after going through a window and crawling on the ceiling in a spiderman suit got asked if he was the spiderman and the guy fucking said no
we’re watching the new season of queer eye and my dad is actually crying over the ep with the trans dude, like he’s talking about his top surgery and my dad is in tears going “when you sculpt marble the sculpture is already inside, you’re just getting rid of what isn’t part of it! he’s just getting rid of what isn’t part of him!”
so from my oldass 70 year old dad to all my trans followers, y'all are marble sculptures and you’re perfect
I’m not even much of a fan of genderbends but goddamn am I even less of a fan of getting ordered around about what I should enjoy and how I should enjoy it and being lectured about how ‘problematic’ it is, when the real problem is that they’ve cast the thing in question in black and white and refuse to admit that there’s anything but their narrow framing.
Changing a character to the ‘opposite’ cis gender is a very different thing than making them trans or nonbinary. Insisting that people only change characters to trans is also really damn invalidating, because it implies that being trans is interchangable with being cis. Whoopsie doodle!
I think the real issue here is that a lot of people want to see more trans headcanons, but for some reason think that using sj words while being bossy and rude is the way to go about it. Dress it up in progressive language all you like; at the end of the day you’re still being bossy and rude to get what you want, regardless of anyone else’s valid feelings.
i get really irritated at kids who scream that genderbends are transphobic because they’re completely missing the context and history. they have no idea. it’s like to them, Cis People made up genderbends specifically to thumb their noses at trans people.
rule 63 was originally a guy thing, sexual objectification thing. it states ‘for every male character, there’s a female version of that character’, and not because the dudes who were into it cared about having more realistically rendered female heroes in their media. it was made popular on 4chan and porn boards and comics+gaming forums because you could reduce a manly male character into a sexy tits-and-ass pinup. there were related kinks of sissification, but mostly it was about getting to jerk it to a sexy female version of a previously unappealing, macho male character.
then women got hold of the rule and started going, okay. let’s look at the female version of this male character. let’s talk about being a woman in a man’s world. let’s talk about rorschach’s misogyny, tony stark’s womanizing, batman’s grimness, the fact there’s one girl ninja to every four or five guy ninjas, let’s talk about that in the hypothetical context of these male heroes being women instead. if there’s a girl version for every male character, what does that mean? what’s her story?
and it became this really amazing lens for female fans to interrogate stories through, to examine the effects of sexism and misogyny and masculinity, to introduce another woman into a story with very few, to identify with fully-rendered heroes of the fan’s own gender. and to interrogate the very nature of gender, which led into the development of genderbends where the character’s gender identity didn’t necessarily match their assigned sex, and from there an increasing interest in, and familiarity with, trans characters, trans people, and trans issues.
so like. people now reducing the issue to ‘cis people are gross and hate trans people’ is pretty ridiculous. it ignores basically twenty years of women questioning, confronting and then dismantling the de-facto heteronormative, exploitative male gaze in order to create the radically progressive fandom atmosphere as we know it today on tumblr.
I’d been trying to put into words my issue with the idea that genderbent versions of characters are somehow automatically, innately transphobic, and I think you pretty well nailed it.
Originally, it was called ‘genderswap’ or ‘genderswitch’, which was rightfully criticized for reinforcing a binary view of gender. Hence why it is now ‘genderbend‘. Things can bend in many directions.
Yeah basically.
Rule 63s can be transphobic and gender essentialist, no question, just as m/m slash can be misogynistic, but it’s not inherent to the genre.
The way I see it, rule 63 and trans/nb headcanons are two subsets of what I call “gender AUs”, and they’re not mutually exclusive. Girl!Sherlock Holmes is an example of one, trans!Holmes is the other, and trans woman Holmes is both. All those would be worthwhile explorations.
Yes! And all sorts have their place because all of them are exploring the experience of an under-represented group (or two) in a different way.
Thank you for writing this :) I never want to tell people that their feelings are invalid, but sometimes I think those feelings come from gut negative reactions that deserve to be re-examined. Like in this case, trans people have every right to be wary of something that could - and admittedly, sometimes does - re-enforce difficult gender stereotypes, and they also have every right to say genderbent art/fic isn’t to their taste or ask people to tag it.
But there’s nothing inherently transphobic about art that explores gender - quite the opposite, I think - and that’s what genderbends are about. It can be hugelybeneficial to imagine male characters as female in order to explore roles that aren’t traditionally given to women (I would really love to see a genderbent take on, say, Stacker Pentecost for that exact reason).
i just want to point out that i know at least five trans people who have referred to the place they see a doctor about HRT as “the rule 63 clinic”.
Yes, to all of this, and oh my god “Rule 63 clinic” has me rolling. I’m going to see one myself sometime in the next year. so.
I tend to back out of mediocre storytelling pretty fast, but some of the best fics I’ve ever seen were doing EXACTLY what Roach said… using gender bends and gender swaps as lenses to examine shitty canon through a feminist lens.
Some of the best had now-female characters who were actually saltier and harsher than their male alteregos, specifically because of sexism, rather than having characters become caricatures of femininity.
Is there a rule that says “A good writer can break all the rules and make people happy they did?”
tom holland just posted a video on instagram like “I’m sorry that there’s no new news on the spiderman sequel but I just got the script I’m about to read it!!” and he held up the script and it said “spider-man: far from home” so yeah he just spoiled the spider-man sequel title while announcing he had no news on the spider-man sequel,, good job tom
pixar really had to hardcore yank tony’s ‘i smoke a line of cocaine behind the school dumpster during second period’ character design to replace it with a facetuned love interest from a disney channel original movie . u already kno some pixar director mustve went back to the source material and noticed tony’s busted ass face and they had to scrap that shit immediately . he was literally too ugly to allow even a trace of his original face associate w/ the masterpiece they were abt to be making . rebooted his whole ass face then gave him his dark turtleneck and called it a day smh . mess
i’m screaming at the people reblogging this and saying that new tony is generic and old tony had some “character” like why do you people think that a man being ugly means he has personality . tony circa 2004 looks like he’d piss in the bushes outside your mom’s house and new tony looks like he’d wait 57 minutes for his food at a restaurant and still be nice to the waiter because they’re “just doing their best”. accept that pixar pulled the gag of the century and gave us the tony we deserve
pixar, completely remodeling tony’s clapped face: fuck a bitch named consistent character design and maintenance of the integrity of the original work. new tony is going to look like he would pay $60 for a gram of weed whether you losers like it or NOT
Homecoming is the only MCU film where we see Tony Starkjustfrom an outside perspective, and it’s hilarious to finally see him the way people in-universe do: suave, Cool™, always in control, definitely not an unstable Jenga tower of self-loathing and anxiety who uses a Cool™ persona as a crutch because his sanity is held together by scotch tape…
It’s also the only movie where we see Steve from an outside perspective and that is objectively more hilarious.