Genderbends are complicated, and I get why people have issues with them. Personally, though, I feel like there’s a lot of nonbinary potential for genderbend art, at least when done by nonbinary people.
By the way, my website has a store now! https://msladeillustration.com/store/
And you can back my patreon at https://www.patreon.com/genderland
It’s so interesting how the acting world pretends to care about trans people but also never wants to cast anyone with obvious gender variance.
Some childhood gender confusion.
Imagine that gender is like an aesthetic blog. Lots of people enjoy aesthetic blogs. We all know that aesthetics are socially constructed, but we enjoy them anyway. And what’s interesting is that certain people will naturally be drawn to certain aesthetics and not to others - and that’s ok. It’s totally individual and just a fun way to let people know more about you.
Now imagine that we lived in a society where there were only two types of aesthetics that people can discuss. Let’s say, vaporwave and grunge. And worse, when a baby is born, the doctor brands them with a tattoo on their arm and announces, “This baby will be running a vaporwave blog.”
In this society, everyone reacts to their assignment differently. A lot of people enjoy vaporwave and decide that they can live with being a vaporwave blogger. Some of these people are aware that the grunge bloggers have more access to photos than them and that grunge is more widely respected than vaporwave. So they lobby for equal photo access for vaporwave and grunge bloggers, which is a noble pursuit in and of itself, but that’s about as far as they go.
Some vaporwave bloggers really don’t like vaporwave and would be much happier if they were running a grunge blog. When they try to say this, other people get angry. “You’re gonna run a vaporwave blog and you’re GONNA LIKE IT!!!” Or they get confused. “So what you’re saying is that you want to be grunge so you can have the number of photos that grunge bloggers get. Come join us tomorrow as we rally for more vaporwave photos.”
Similarly, there are grunge bloggers who would be much happier running a vaporwave blog. And when they try to go to the rally, the vaporwave bloggers get mad at them. “You’re just trying to destroy our chance at getting equal photos from the inside! Why would a grunge blogger ever want to be one of us? You have so many more opportunities.”
There are even some people who don’t like either aesthetic very much. Or sometimes they’re feeling one aesthetic and sometimes they’re vibing with a different one. Or they’re actually really drawn to pastel goth but whenever they talk about it, everyone is like “Pfft, that doesn’t exist.”
This society would be way less of a hellscape if only everyone could just blog whatever aesthetic they wanted to.
Apparently the store is faulty at the moment. I will be setting up a new version of the store soon.
Wasn’t gonna leave you in suspense with that last comic.
I’m still not sure what my decision is yet. But I figure transitioning is a different process for everyone and I just gotta feel my way through it, you know?
Also, to save confusion, the guy in this comic is my gender therapist, who is a completely different bearded dude from the psychiatrist in one of my previous comics.
I have no one to blame but myself this time
CW: transphobia/transmisogyny, exorsexism, discussion of TERF logic, gender essentialism
A while back, I was walking with an AFAB friend and we were discussing Hanji from the anime Attack On Titan. I mentioned that I love how nonbinary Hanji is in the manga and how nobody knows what their gender assignment. To me, that’s awesome because it’s a direct challenge to society’s attempts to gender people as a form of control. But my friend was actually pretty uncomfortable with the manga’s take on the character. She preferred anime Hanji, who fits into cis/binary society much more neatly. That was the version she found empowering.
I’ve wondered about why we had such different reactions to the character. This train of thought brought me back to a lot of (cis) women’s spaces I’ve entered and how they would debate on whether or not they were ok with trans women and trans femmes. I think a big part of why they were so uncomfortable was because AFABs have been taught our whole lives that we are biologically inferior to people who were assigned male. And to cis women, that means that trans women are rivals who are stronger, faster, and smarter than them By Nature. Most likely, this is the reason there’s such a pushback against trans women being allowed to get uterus transplants. Because, without the one advantage of being able to give birth, there’d be “no use” for cis women any more and they’d be replaced.
Of course, this is a line of thinking that runs completely counter to everything the trans/nonbinary community actually wants. I know personally that I absolutely hate any mention of “biological difference between the genders,” even if it’s done in a supposedly positive way. All those little “fun facts,” like “Did you know that women have a wider range of vision than men but men’s eyes track movement better?” creep me the hell out. The same is true for a number of my trans/nonbinary friends. From birth, the idea of biological difference has been our enemy, and it has wreaked heavy psychological trauma upon the whole community. Most of us will be the first to tell you that there’s tons of human variation that doesn’t fit that mold at all. Some AFABs are physically stronger than some AMABs. Some AMABs are petite and slender and some AFABs have broad shoulders and facial hair. We’re not all these two monolith boxes at all.
It would be amazing for cis feminists to realize that gender essentialism (the idea that your anatomy controls your destiny) hurts them just as much as it hurts the trans/nonbinary community. We don’t have to be rivals. We can be allies working towards a common goal. The fight against the ways society genders bodies to control them. That’s what Hanji would want.