Thursday DE

[bjornwilde]

I have no brain yet but discussions in chat inspired me.

How well does your character understand gender (vs sex) and do they identify strongly with one? 

Comments

[have_no_mercy]

I think Tess is the only one who really understands, but doesn't have much time to do much about besides throw money at various organizations. She herself is cis.

Kylo doesn't care. He really doesn't. Male, female, child, alien, you're all the same to him. As for himself specifically, he is cis.

Frankly, Creed doesn't really get the idea and thinks this is just some new 2000s crap. He's cis and his women had better be, too.

[5ame_heart]

Dick's relatively easy here: a cis boy who doesn't really have any major concerns about maleness or masculinity, and isn't likely to develop them. He'll grow up in late 20th/early 21st century and understand the current issues, but if he ever wonders 'hey am I really male?' The answer will be yes.

Fives - I sort of think of clone culture about like Discworld dwarf culture in that it's monogender, but unlike dwarfs it's also mono-sex and clone culture stays insular enough that no one's looked at non-clones' gender and thought 'we could have that.' There are some things at play that we'd think of as toxic masculinity but there's no use of femaleness as an 'other' any more than all non-clones are an 'other.' Clones express themselves freely within the confines of their lived experience, so there's room for trans clones but I haven't seen any?
WHICH IS TO SAY - I think clone culture hasn't constructed gender and I think they use he/him as a default and maybe there are clones whose personal identity is other than male but I don't think they really think about gender that much? Anyway Fives is male.

Gamora is what her father made her, and later strongly rejects the parts of her she hates. I assume that if she had been assigned the wrong gender she would reject it, which is to say that she's a cis woman, and has never questioned her identity,

Simba is from a society with very tight gender roles and he fits in them perfectly - thanks Disney amd also thanks lion society? I assume that if he felt strongly more lioness than lion he'd have to face that.



Obi-Wan is probably the queerest? Like, I don't think he's ever given a second thought to manliness/maleness and has no strong feelings. He lives in a world where some cultures have stronger gender roles than others, where in his own there's probably some institional misogyny at play (*points at Jedi Council*) but in theory gender doesn't apply to Jedi. Obi-Wan would be just as comfortable living as any other gender, but he's been assigned male and there's no reason not to live there?

Kevin Sefton thinks about identity a lot and being a gay man from twenty first century Earth that includes gender. So he's considered it, examined himself and come down firmly on the side of "yep, cis man (and thank god for that I couldn't handle being a Black trans woman in the Met.)"

Beverley Brook is also from twenty first century London and is young and hip, so she understands gender as well as any young Millennial. She's a cis woman, but is also a river, AND there's a part of her that is also a white man, but that's a separate bit of her that isn't part of her gender identity in her usual aspect.

[zenigatcha]

Zuko: The whole idea of gender vs sex is not really a Thing in Avatarverse, at least not to Zuko. He's never experienced someone like that -- and while there's a lot of similarities to various Asian cultures - things like Chinese opera and Kabuki theater that had men playing women's roles - aren't in play here. Gender roles are fairly strictly enforced. (Lookin' at you, Northern Water Tribe.) So the idea of gender and sex being separate would be very confusing to him. Also, he's got way too much PTSD from years of exile and war for him to really haven given thought to sex or anything romantic. Yeah, he dated Mai (and in Milliways, Stephanie Brown) but he's still fairly innocent to anything beyond pretty boring hetero sex and heteronormative gender roles



Zenigata: This is a HUGELY loaded thing for Zenigata, considering what his son Oscar went through. He's got a whole swath of background in failing his queer son who got fucked up by his father's behavior with women, his own sexuality regarding Lupin, and so forth. His son was trafficked, implanted with a woman's memories as a child, and abandoned to die -- the only reason he survived the madness that surrounded the experience is Zenigata. Despite that, Zenigata failed him later in life and he knows that. Oscar went through terrible things due to Zenigata's mistakes, and he hasn't forgiven himself for that.

He knows very well gender and sex aren't linked, that there are transgender people, intersex, nonbinary, and so on. After Oscar, he's gotten better about being kind and understanding. He's not a bigot, though he still has Gay Panic over the suggestion that he's attracted to Lupin in any form - but that's less about Lupin (Zenigata's had male partners before) or Lupin's gender or sex. It has to do with the fact that Zenigata doesn't want to admit things, because it compromises everything he does.

Completely comfortable in his sexuality and expression, Zenigata has crossdressed and disguised himself as a woman to pull on Lupin's weakness and lusty nature, and he's never once been ashamed of it. He's an expert in disguise, and he makes a tall, athletic woman indeed-- but he still can manage running in six inch stilettos.

The Lupin franchise, especially during the gay panic of the 90s in Japan, has a really terrible history with treatment of queer identities - the soon to release blu-ray of The Pursuit of Harimo's Treasure is including discussions of the very issue and the disclaimer of how the behaviors Lupin displays are wrong, and were wrong then and now. Japan has been historically unkind to queer identities.

I could get into the cigarette code and Jigen being explicitly and canonically gay, as well as Lupin's first bisexual confusion moment on screen, but this is about Zenigata.

Summary: Zenigata ain't straight, he's cis, and he fucked up his kid with strict heteronormative gender roles and is now far more open and less stupid.

[for_everyone]

My very-much-only-headcanon for Twi'lek culture is that there are three widely-recognized traditional genders which roughly align to something like 'man' 'woman' and 'neutral,' and that at least in some cultures gender is not assigned but chosen by a Twi'lek child by around four years old, when they also choose their name. While it's possible to change gender after that, in the past gender roles could be quite strictly defined with women acting as hunter/gatherers who work outside (this is also my headcanon for why it seems Twi'lek women always cover their heads); men maintaining and building homes and villages, which were often built into mountains; and those of 'neutral' gender generally being designated/trained to be the community's historians/educators/religious leaders/etc. So it would be more culturally acceptable to many for someone to change their gender than act outside their gender role, because those roles were so tied in with the idea of community survival in what could be a very rough environment (hence when a child chooses a name and gender they are essentially announcing the role they plan to play in their community).

My idea is that this these are all old, predating-space-travel-and-the-galaxy-as-it-is-now cultural notions that have been in flux for a very long time (like, thousands of years) in part due to the influence of other cultures in the galaxy and the very gendered way that Twi'leks have been targeted by invaders, but also that much of these ideas still persist. For example, I sort of have the notion that some in Hera's community in Ryloth would tend to view her leaving the planet and doing work in the wider galaxy as her doing the 'feminine' work of supporting her people from outside her home while her father is doing the 'masculine' work of being on Ryloth and maintaining the home.

In any case, Hera is canonically a woman which in my headcanon translates as 'Hera chose the 'woman' gender when she had her naming ceremony.'


We don't really know anything about where Kanan came before being taken into the Jedi Order, and while the Jedi seem to allow/encourage their members to learn about and engage in practices from their cultural backgrounds, Kanan himself doesn't seem to know what that would be for him, so. We also don't really know how 'gender' is defined to the Jedi, though presumably in having adherents from so many different species and cultures, it should be flexible and broad?

But, you know, for all intents and purposes Kanan is canonically a cis man, and generally seems comfortable with the identity of being a man, whatever that means.

(look, SOMEONE and I'm not naming names here may have literally recently made a presentation on 'gender and sexuality and lgbt rep in Star Wars.' >_>)

[local_genius]

Hello is this presentation available to view? Asking for a friend.

[amiable_horror]

Raises hand for this presentation as well.

[moisturewave_aesthetic]

Bastion: Is aware that gender is an attribute humans have, as well as most humanoid omnics and some nonhumanoid ones, and that it's interrelated with physical sex and they match more often than not but not always. Can parse secondary sex characteristics and core features of gender presentation just well enough that they use "he" for gender-conforming cis-passing men, "she" for gender-conforming cis-passing women, and "they" for anyone else, rather than having to ask or else use "they" for absolutely everyone. They perceive gender, but, like, only minimally, and species is much more relevant to them; I make a point of avoiding "the man" or "the woman" in their narration in favour of "the human" (or "the skeleton" or "the mutant" or what have you; Gaster's the main one they know who's not human or human-passing).

Omnics don't have gendered features incorporated into their physical structure unless they have cosmetic mods for it; sculpted "hairstyles" are a popular one. The newer models with speech-capable vocal processors have voices that sound male, female, or androgynous, but if they don't like the default one, changing it only requires a software update or change of settings. It's much more complicated for humans and most of the significance flies over Bastion's head, particularly the gendering of activities, modes of dress, and personality traits; they can at least grasp why a person might want to have an attribute of personal significance correctly acknowledged, even though it's not an attribute they themself have.

Thurlow: They themself have an almost modern understanding of the subject, but not really modern labelling for it. They presented as female when they were young, attended university as a "man" because it was much more convenient than presenting as female or nonbinary then, but in the Neath they're free to be neither and dress however they want. (In significant part due to the Masters of the Bazaar, who are themselves vaguely masculine but distinctly not cisgender human men, and their most essential business is trading in real-life love stories so I have a hunch that they're directly responsible for the way that three decades after their purchase of the city homophobia is conspicuously absent from the playable world.) A modern AU version would identify as agender, pansexual and aromantic, but they don't know any of those words in 1898. They're also extremely cagey about the topic of both their gender and their sex if someone actually asks, but that's mainly because they've been asked variations on "are you a man or a woman" as if those were the only options a few too many times.

Wilson: So I've basically been playing him as Schrödinger's trans man; it's a headcanon I enjoy in general and I've gone out of my way to keep the option open but I haven't gone on the record and committed to it. And, I mean, he's from 1921, when going stealth was just about your only option if you were transmasculine and wanted to be seen as a man rather than a crossdressing woman (possibly a fraudulent crossdressing woman, at that), so it'd be very difficult to persuade him to reveal that information and he'd be as careful as possible about avoiding situations that would out him, unless he really trusted that it wouldn't ruin his life or his relationship with the people he was coming out to.

Also he's ace and biromantic (possibly grey-romantic, but however rare his attraction may be it goes in more than one direction), which applies no matter what his gender situation is.

His understanding of gender is pretty binary, though; if he's trans himself then he definitely understands it's not just a matter of what parts you have, and he's studied biology enough to know that sex isn't a universal all-or-nothing dichotomy, but it hasn't really occurred to him that being both, neither, or a mix of male and female might be an option for someone with standard human biology.

Aradia: She's cis, but that doesn't mean quite the same thing to trolls as it does to humans. Canon specifies that same-sex and opposite-sex troll couples are equally reproductively viable (which is why bisexuality is the norm for trolls; Aradia is no exception here), so they definitely don't have the same reproductive organs as humans, but most trolls present as either male or female with only a few being nonbinary, and adult trolls seem to have most of the same secondary sex characteristics as humans, and there's explicitly trans trolls in the spinoffs. Maybe trolls have two different sets of organs for producing gametes and producing the hormones that lead to different patterns of body development, or maybe there's an even more complicated reason (a headcanon I've used in the past is that their secondary sex characteristics are determined by the sex of the lusus naturae that raises them, since it pretty much always matches, but I was handwavey about what the actual process was there). And then there's gender roles; how I think those work for trolls is that Her Imperious Condescension - literally millions of years old and an absolute monarch - is personally the source of most of trolls' ideas about what femininity is, with masculinity mostly being defined as the opposite of that.

Cirava: All the stuff I wrote about Aradia still applies, but they choose to present as nonbinary. Probably they started out binary-gendered at least nominally, but they decided it wasn't for them. They've done a lot more personal introspection about how they relate to gender than Aradia has.

Wormwood: Their sex and sexuality are entirely normative for the plant side of their heritage, but definitely not normative for the mammalian bipeds Wormwood resembles. They have both male and female plant reproductive organs and self-fertilise automatically during blooming season; they enjoy blooming season, but interacting with anyone else's reproductive organs at any time of year holds no appeal for them. I'm hesitant to describe them as "asexual" in the human sense because a personal disinterest in sex isn't really what's happening here, but they're not allosexual either, they're just an alien plant creature from a species where partnered sex isn't a thing and neither is sex as a conscious action, it's just something that happens to you at certain times of the year, like hay fever. (Blooming is, in fact, a direct replacement for the hay fever that almost every other character experiences during lush season - excepting the lycanthropes in were-form, but including the spider/human hybrid and the robot - in Don't Starve: Hamlet.) I'm not sure if Wormwood is romantically interested in anybody or if they're aromantic; they've never gotten close enough to anyone to find out.

Wormwood themself knows very little about gender and would not do a good job of explaining anything in the previous paragraph even if it weren't for their abbreviated speech pattern. They respond to any and all genderings their friends present them with in Don't Starve Together with equally cheerful befuddlement, which basically means that everyone calls Wormwood "him" because the ones who use that as the default pronoun got there first. They do have a habit of calling everything vaguely anthropomorphic a "man", and they're aware of motherhood as a biological occurrence but I don't know if they associate it with a gender.

[bjornwilde]

Ahsoka identifies as a girl and that's about as far as she thinks of it. She identifies more as a Jedi than anything else...at least at this point. She seems to be comfortable with that gender, as far as it goes, and never seems to have any trouble with it.

Sabine identifies as a girl as well, and it more than comfortable with it. Mandalorian culture doesn't seem to put a lot of weight to gender roles.

Jessica Drew is cis and comfortable with it. I can't think of any times when she is shown uncomfortable but then again she's a character from Marvel and a well established one.

Viv Vision was programmed as a girl and so far hasn't had any reason to question that. She hasn't spent much time exploring gender but seems to be okay with the programing.

Dog presents herself as female, but I don't think that is because she identifies with gender. She's a bit beyond gender, imho. I think she likes the female form as it fits in with the Claire and she values them.

Alustin, I am pretty sure is a cis-gender man. He is quite comfortable with that and likely doesn't think on it. He's more curious about other people and things.

Tybalt is another who is cisgender and male, though his society would be fine if he identified as female or something else. And he'd have access to magic to make any changes to his body if he were uncomfortable.

Ben is cisgendered male and seems comfortable with it, though he died pretty young. It's entirely possible he might have explored other types of gender had he lived, though Reginald would surely have complicated matters. I don't think he knew much of genders until Klaus broke free of the Academy and began his wild ride.

[yinyangwizard]

YT understands gender vs. sex because she has a trans friend (not canonically: this is Millicanon). She is a straight cis woman.

Seimei’s original basis for gender norms is from classical Japan, but it has changed significantly over time. He understands gender in terms of yin-yang balance and sees it as having a rather loose connection to sex. He is male and some would consider him bi or pan, but he does not think of himself that way.

Murderbot comes from a setting where people can present as being on different gradations on the gender binary, as agender, or as one of a number of genders specific to their culture/region of space. People advertise their gender presentation in their public feeds. Since nobody else in Milliways has a public feed, Murderbot tends to ask people what their gender and preferred pronouns are when it meets them (yes, it’s awkward). Murderbot itself is agender and asexual. It is not physically or neurologically equipped to be any other way.

[fairy_fixit]

The game that Amascut and Fairy Fixit come from features a wizard who is extremely gender fluid who has been in the game since 2002, and while the portrayal of Pete/Peta hasn't been exactly sensitive, in world Pete/Peta and his/her constant gender switching isn't strange at all. Just wizard shit. Peta/Pete worked hard to become an expert at gender change magic, she/he earned the right to use that magic as often as possible.

It probably sounds weird that I am avoiding they but Peta/Pete's pronoun preference and gender presentation is extremely binary.

Anyhow, Pete/Peta is a friend of Fairy Fixit's so her ideas about gender is likely very influenced by the way Peta/Pete chooses to present as a binary. I am sure she has dealt with customers who don't have a gender or have a gender that is more on a spectrum than a binary or discretized choice, but she hasn't really seen it in fairies or humans. Fairy Fixit is firmly a woman. Zanarian fairy men aren't portrayed often in the game, though; they only showed up as part of the Fairy Mafia. There might not even be that many males in that species at any specific time and female might be the default.

Amascut is pretty firmly a woman, however, she is a lioness who is very proud of her mane. She's never disguised as a man, though. I don't think she cares much about gender presentation beyond making herself appear femme and attractive to whatever species or culture she is disguising as. There is always a dangerous edge to how she presents, though. As for her opinion on the gender presentations of other people? Food is food; the gender of the food matters little.