so a topic im sort of interested in recently. i think it's common--not just common, *fundamentally human*--for people to be inspired by stories. in particular, for trans people, who overwhelmingly exist in a world that tries to deny us existence, stories can be especially important as a canvas to imagine alternate life possibilities upon. so if you feel this describes you, what does it look like for you? and what stories inspired you?
(im not trying to be overly limiting here, if you are not trans but feel you have a similar story to share, please feel free.)
anyway, i'm sure i'm leaving out a ton, but like...
orlando - the blockbuster video rental era was a wild time where your grandmother could pick an essentially random movie when youre like 8 and it turns out to be the movie where tilda swinton plays a male character, who gets a sex change operation, and spends the rest of the movie as a now immortal and ageless woman. a truly baroque work, and, well, unforgettable is probably the word, lol.
final fantasy 4 - rydia. "wow, she disappeared and came back as a cool, magical lady! i wish i could do that too!"
azumanga daioh - i was an awkward teen on the internet who liked earthbound and shoujo ai and my girlfriend, who was also the first trans girl i ever met, showed me this, which felt like a glimpse into a life i would much rather have been living. a few years later, i went to a con, and another girl, who i met on an azudai forum, drew me a post-it-note pencil picture of kaorin and sakaki as a nurse assistant and veterinarian. and i kept it with me all the time and i was like, ok, this is the plan, this is what i want to do with my grown up life.
paper mario: the thousand year door - haha, it's just sort of remarkable when you find out something is conceptually possible to other people. you know? it's not just that vivian was the best and most amazing character in a game full of great character writing, it was... that the idea of her was possible. that this was something that the general public was theoretically capable of intelligently parsing.
grimgrimoire - understanding myself as a lesbian was really central to understanding my relationship with gender. this game about a lesbian witch overcoming the forces of time and space to save her homunculus wife really helped, in this regard. also, do you like my avatar?
homestuck!!! surprisingly enough - so i feel like maybe some context here is lost in the fog of debate. you just. did not fucking get female characters like you got in homestuck. it was. such a *moment*. the way they are like. not only interesting dynamic characters but movers of the story, of the world. equals with no difference, if not often betters. like, do i have to list their names?? sing the tale of their meritorious deeds? i don't have to tell you what you already know, but. it really felt like the dawning of a new era. in my life, and in the world. it really seemed like the tide was shifting, that old ideas and orthodoxies were dying away. (it was nice to have been optimistic.) and i think it was these distinctive, memorable characters and dynamic, emotionally intense stories about cyclical change and infinite possibility and hellbent sacrifice, featuring a bunch of extremely gay characters and cool women, that. well, it really encouraged me. i could also say a lot about calliope herself, and... what it meant to me to see a character who, was hurting like i was hurting back then, regardless of what the author intended for this character. you find what you need to get you through life. the ideas, concepts, frameworks, symbols, exemplars we glean for ourselves from stories and from pieces of our environment, all of those things that are guideposts towards a better life. no matter how ridiculous it is that i like... had to thread things together using bits of acquired knowledge and from patchworks of myth and storytelling, in order to understand myself, it's fine because it was what i needed and it worked. im not sure if i can fully describe the feeling of completeness i now live with, having been transitioned for some time. no matter what happens, i can say that i truly lived. and this was a catalyst for me.
honorable mentions:
-paradise kiss
-one piece
-twin peaks
-kids in the hall
-tangent alert! it is actually kind of funny, upon reflection, how few of the formative works i am thinking of actually address trans topics at all? holy shit. i guess there just weren't/aren't a lot of portrayals of this stuff at all, and even a lot of the ones i can remember are compromised. i mean really one piece's treatment of lgbt characters is sort of egregious and pastiched, but it felt so well-meaning as a teen that i cant help but recall it fondly. kids in the hall has nothing do to with trans topics, but it just has unbelievably naturalistic drag, which like, i dont know how to put this, made it feel like it was possible to do something like that and not become inherently a caricatured figure. but like honestly, what else was there available except "interpreting the idea of being a trans woman from things that are not about trans women". hey, by the way, did you know that i can just keep typing as much as i want into this list entry and make the post as long as i want and no one can stop me? it's cheaper than therapy! heh. heheh. lets see. seriously though, who was writing about trans women back then? what portrayals of our stories did we have? you had grant morrison and neil gaiman writing what in retrospect looks like intentional slander, you had warren ellis who couldn't write about transsexuals at all (sorry for outdated terminology.) without portraying us as wacky half-aliens. uh, the world according to garp, that's slander, rocky horror is for straight people, rent is for straight people, hourou musuko is terrible, shimanami tasogare lasted for like 3 chapters. i didnt know about star trek ds9 so i couldnt have known about jadzia dax. i didn't know about hunter x hunter, so i couldn't have known about alluka. kill six billion demons didnt exist yet. and there are some scattered indie works about us and some are quite good but basically almost everything else that isnt a hateful south park/family guy style caricature falls into this middling range of like, "questionable content" tier media where trans people are acknowledged but in a context so tepid as to make us even more alien to the audience which, given that it draws from the well of Society, is surely composed of drooling fuckwits. sorry, that sounded so accusatory, like, lets rewind for a second here. jeph jacques, let me say, im not particularly interested in your webcomic but i think that what you did was so bold given the climate at the time that i think you deserve the ally medal for excellent service in making troglodytes angry. and so with a dearth of widely known stories, with a *denial of access to the public mythos* you have to, alone, growing up, piece things together from like incomplete broken fragments like "oh everyone thought faris from FF5 was a boy but she was ACTUALLY a girl!..." and "oh i heard that some of the sailor scouts in the later seasons are BOYS that turn into GIRLS!!" and "whoa did you know that dark souls 2 has a gender coffin??" and. what comes of it is a personalized, hypercontextual bricolage story that's known and understood and interpretable only by you, which is i guess the concept that made me want to start this thread in the first place. like, the trans story, it is not a major motion picture for general audiences that everyone holds in a sort of breathtaken awe and reverence and quotes all the time, it is not a hit breakthrough international manga series, it is not a thing bingewatched. at most, it is, as stated previous, an indie hit. small, brilliant but easily eclipsed. i want so badly for the tide to shift!! i want people to know trans people's hearts, and for this world to learn the kindness and strength of spirit that it takes to embrace what is different instead of destroy. i want people to understand our story so that, political parties in all nations stop trying to compete to see who can publicly defame, threaten, and oppress us more actively. i'm so sorry, seriously i feel like it's, almost like, literally rude of me to act this way? to like start what is ostensibly a normal thread in this nice forum and then to just get so hung up on the topic i'm talking about that i start writing a gigantic non sequitur run-on paragraph that crescendoes in what is basically a plea for clemency from the universe itself, a desperate star-wish that maybe in the eleventh hour, human decency and compassion for trans people might prevail?
-oh shit, i totally forgot about rocko's modern life! gotta give props to the crew who made that one happen, honestly pretty cool and well handled.
This post was a Magic Mirror production. Problem Soothe, now playing in a theater near you: https://magic-mirror.neocities.org/problemsoothe/ps0000
hate to say it but. among us of all things
honestly? among us makes total sense. the sussy impostor was your cis identity all along...
This post was a Magic Mirror production. Problem Soothe, now playing in a theater near you: https://magic-mirror.neocities.org/problemsoothe/ps0000
Honestly Homestuck was a big one for me. Specifically it was seeing Aradia go from emptily moving through life as a ghost to her fun, energetic character once she is revived and being like "Wow, that's so cool! I wish i could do that". Hell, Psycholonials was what pushed me into thinking of myself as not a man, even if I still hadn't figured it all out yet.
This one's pretty obvious, but I Saw the TV Glow is kind of what pushed me over the line into admitting to myself that I was definitely a woman. It was just kind of like "I relate to this too much for there to be any other explanation".
Thinking back to my childhood, though I was a long way away from any kind of gender revelation, I remember playing Portal 2 and getting a weird sense of joy whenever I saw myself through a portal. I hadn't played many games at that point, and the ones I did were often stylized or featured a male protagonist, so something about being able to see that the what I was thinking of as "myself" in that moment was a girl definitely impacted me in a way that I didn't really understand at the time.
whoa, i got grimgrimoire a little while ago from a local retro shop but knew nothing about it, i'll look into playing it when i move and unpack my games, thank you :>
this might be a super weird one, but i was born in 1991 so bear with me -- one of the earliest works that made me start thinking about Gender Shit is probably The Lion King, because i could tell that child-simba's singing voice was a woman. this was right around the time i learned bart simpson was voiced by a woman too, so in my head child-me is going "WAIT WOMEN CAN BE BOYS?"
another fucking huge one for me was freeza in dragonball. remember, in the 90s, dub freeza was voiced by a woman. the most badass strongest bad guy!! i think roles like this helped so much with my voice dysphoria, although in my case it was so severe that only testosterone was able to fully fix it.
and then when pokemon gold/silver came out i noticed some pokemon didn't have a gender. the coolest, most powerful, LITERAL LEGENDARY pokemon were among these. so now child-me is screaming "THERE'S MORE THAN MALE AND FEMALE?" pokemon probably plays the biggest role here overall, but the ungendered legendaries was the biggest early influence for me.
one of the biggest moments i look back on a lot was renamon in digimon tamers saying that digimon don't really have gender like humans do, when asked if they're a girl. this was basically THE quote i used with my first "fur"sona, which was a chao -- they don't have genders either. turned out i was super ahead of the LITERAL CANON back then because now all chao are referred to as they/them canonically.
when you grow up trans masc in the 90's you don't really have much, except ranma 1/2, but i didn't get to watch or read much of that one until way later despite LOOKING FOR IT EVERYWHERE. [no it wasn't "banned", my parents didn't ban me from specific media, i just couldn't find copies. anime & manga was still rare.] most of my childhood/teenage exposure to that one was random dvds my brother found for me at blockbuster.
there's probably more that i'm forgetting.
[url=http://mysticwish.monster/]Mystic Wish[/url]
THERE WAS NEVER A "MOMENT" I REALIZED I WAS TRANS AS THERE WASNT FOR WHEN I REALIZED I WAS GAY. I ALWAYS KNEW EVEN AS A WEE LAD. IT WAS MORE THAT I DIDNT KNOW IT WAS SOMETHING I HAD TO LABEL. OR THAT THERE WAS EVEN LABELS. I WANT TO SAY SEEING SPRINGTRAP FROM FNAF CIRCA 7 YEARS OLD WAS THE FIRST TIME I uNDERSTOOD THAT I WAS 100% A GuY.
Sincerely, rupaul superfans
oh wow i've only seen one person ever talk about having seen orlando! i watched it in a uni film class ages ago, it's a really fascinating film! i could totally see it being a childhood awakening for someone, i just never wouldve expected someone would actually. like. see it as a kid DJSHKKFSSHHK
Zelda. I really liked Link and I made a "gender8ent" version of him named Linky. I think it's that liking that game was like... Really the only particularly masculine thing I did prior to high school? I was always very feminine so there weren't any "tells" that I'm non8inary, I had to figure it out all 8y myself. Playing video games isn't even really percieved as that masculine anymore, even if it was a little 8it more when I was growing up. 8ut I was DEFINITELY deeply o8sessed with that twink man to an unreasona8le degree for a cis person. It did turn out that my transition goals are more or less pretty similar to how he looks. 😭 I would like to mention Sheik 8ut I never got into OOT until after I came out so...
I unfortun8ly do also have to mention Changed. 8ut I will say no more than mentioning it.
Homestuck actually kind of o8fusc8ed my gender pretty horri8ly, 8ut that's not the fault of Homestuck, that's the fault of me 8eing fictionkin and a little fucking weirdo.
I guess there just aren't that many opportunities to have my eyes opened 8y media considering the Limited Interests(tm) symptom of autism and the fact that my gender is pretty weird and rare to find a good metaphor for.
I think reading El Goonish Shive as a kid was a big stepping stone toward realizing that I'm nonbinary. Even way back before one of the main characters came out as genderfluid. I just saw the shapeshifting and gender-bending and wished I could do that too
The blurring of identities and genders in Kingdom Hearts made a big impact on me growing up, and in a weird way so did the styles of digivolution in 02 and Digimon Tamers. Even though neither of these series is explicitly trans, ideas of transformation as connected to your identity and identity as defined partly via the relationship you have with other people was always something that shaped my personal conception of gender a lot.
To wit: The World Ends With You, a DS game with some overlap with Kingdom Hearts but a more distinct identity and mature themes. One notable mechanic in TWEWY is the way it handles wearing clothes. Its set in modern day Shibuya, and equipment is literally just shopping from different clothing brands and such.
The only thing stopping you from wearing girl clothes is the "Bravery" requirement those clothes have--girls clothes tend to have higher BRV requirements than more masc clothes. Your one girl playable character also has a higher BRV stat than the three boys do. But you can grind the BRV stat up for all of them over the course of normal gameplay if you know what you're doing, so dressing Joshua in lapin angelique lolita outfits is just kind of my right for playing through the whole game.
'"I thought this was a love story," you say.
Your Lola's insistence has remained with you since the beginning, and you say these words in a quiet manner, with a shrug, as if to let these performers know it is fine, it does not matter that much, this thought—that maybe the definition of what a love story is could be stretched to include all that has up till now taken place. You say it like an apology. Like it is a thing to be apologized for.
A runaway child, charging through the porcelain shelves:
I thought this was a love story. I had hoped this was a love story.
You say it with shame, embarrassed at having said it, wishing you could take it back.
You say it, worried that you have betrayed some secret part of yourself that does not wish to be exposed—
an old gremlin in you, sick and yearning. You say it with hope.
Timid, and without conviction.
The hope of someone who knows they are about to wake from a dream to a reality they do not understand. The pub awaits, as does your empty bed.
I thought this was a love story.
You regret having said it; as if you know it will lessen the quality of the tale. Rob it of its smoke and shadow. But still, you say it.
And this moonlit body smiles. And from the wings the patting of the drums slowly builds, and the curtains behind the dancers rise. Because you are right, this moonlit body tells you;
This is indeed a love story. Down to the blade-dented bone.'
-You, in the Inverted Theater - The Spear Cuts Through Water
"I don't care if the best I can hope for is half of what I want. I'm not here for a realistic outcome. I'm just going to fight! Forever! With perfect greed! Until I get everything!"
-Saturn, Heaven will be Mine
my memory is MEMORY BAD!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! i dont remember
i do remember my chosen moldy tiger mom helping my brain calm the fuck down for once. and while i waas rereading HOEMSTRUCK AND A karkat made my brain enjoy itself as a male. NOT WOMAN
i think the first thing for me was seeing ruby from steven universe, thinking she was a boy, finding out she wasn't, and then thinking that the concept of "girl who looks like a boy" was SO COOL. i was also very into the idea of "genderbent" characters, my first exposure to that probably being the fionna and cake episodes of adventure time. marshall lee did things to my little brain lol
the thing that really pushed me over the edge in realizing i was a boy, though, was my chemical romance. lmao. it was seventh grade, so i was starting puberty and reeeaaally starting to hate my body for reasons i couldn't parse, and definitely wanted to look like the members (especially gerard). also, there were just a lot of trans mcr fans online who helped me out <3
psycholonials for sure helped me be more comfortable with not being a super binary trans guy. it took a while for me to get comfortable dressing femininely (by which i mean, i JUST did) and i think psycholonials played a part in that (as well as. yknow. having friends who support me and being more confident because of that.)
oh my god i just remembered. when i was in i think third grade i came up with this story about a "prince" and princess who were betrothed to each other, but both hated the idea of ruling and decided to run away together and just be besties. but the "prince" was actually a trans woman (and this was important to her lore) even though at that age i don't think i even knew what being transgender was? if that's not hilarious foreshadowing i don't know what is.
so glad someone else also said steven universe because mine was definitely very much steven universe lol
oddly no media specifically cracked my egg. instead i used to watch a lot of reddit memes to help me deal with internalized homophobia (onetopic and the click specifically,) while simultaneously writing a ton of fanfiction with a certified Cool Dude protag that was in retrospect an obvious self insert.
Then after a while of watching trans memes, i suddenly switched the protag to a Cool Girl in new stories, and after a bit realized my protag was, in fact, a self insert, and i was, shockingly, trans.
Nowadays im more enbie leaning, but still def transfem af lol
that thing you said? wild. probably.
jojo's bizarre adventure made me realize that i could in fact be a very physically fit androgynous man with a full face of makeup and awesome clothing
i cant really remember shit from fuck but im pretty sure one of my top ones is. an mst3k fanfiction where joel was transmasc. that permanently changed my brain chemistry i think
"Lalonde" - Even her name sounds like a wine brand.
