casual transphobia in the fandom

re: duckbuster

hey. while providing absolutely no further commentary besides it being incredibly 18+, you should read y12k. that's all.

re:kevin

lol I never knew about this. Very fascinating!

i compleeeetely forgot about the shrek lusus thing yeah like Im fairly certain in the moment most Everyone just glossed over that because it was such a goofy shitpost ramble and like shrekdad was already a tumblr meme im like making myself laugh way too hard over this oooh my god i cant believe it all comes back to stupid tumblr memes. homestuck is good

if i could share my two sents on this situation:

im a trans woman, to me roxy and callie both read incredibly strongly as transfem coded, and i feel like nearly all evidence in the text of the original comic points to that. so to me, the choice with roxy and callies gender feels like transfem erasure (not maliciously mind you), and its personally frustrating. especially when trying to acknowledge transfem roxy or saying that you prefer roxy as a trans woman gets you branded a transphobe, like this thread does.

also, roxy is the character that personally helped made me realize i was trans, and so transfem roxy is even more important to me in that instance. so you can see how the fandom seemingly erasing it from history can feel a bit frustrating

@stagelights

I'm not going to say that I don't understand where you're coming from, because I also was a big fan of transfem roxy, but I do think you're bringing baggage into this thread where it doesn't exist. no one here is saying that transfem roxy is an illegal thing to headcanon. people here are complaining about the fact that people as a whole have just completely ignored everything to do with transmasc roxy.

I legitimately, 100% do not believe that anyone here thinks it is a Bad Thing to hc roxy as transfem (except maybe the atlas shrugged guy idk what's up with him). you talk about transfem erasure, and that's a fair perspective to have, but what's being talked about is trans erasure wholesale. the fandom at large just completely rejects the idea of roxy being anything but a cis woman, and that's a problem.

ok yea fair. i've just been burned a lot by a very common pattern where people will disregard any transfem read of a character while elevating a transmasc read of the character as the "correct" version, and thus tell me i'm bad or wrong wrong for reading that character as a trans woman, and i was worried that this was doing that again.

it felt sort of reminiscent of how i've seen a lot of people equate trans women reading kris from deltarune as a trans woman due to personally relating to them as the same cis people who will he/him kris and refuse to acknowledge their gender in the text.

@stagelights

I get you. especially like... the homestuck fandom is eternally tied to the danganronpa fandom whether anyone likes it or not, and the chihirocourse back in the day was legitimately insufferable (and we will not be rehashing it in this thread.) so being on edge is pretty reasonable. especially especially with all of the Other Stuff that has been happening lately which WE WILL ALSO NOT BE REHASHING IN THIS THREAD.

all of this to say. I get you.

my pc bluescreened in the middle of me writing this reply, which makes me think opening with a danganronpa joke was a bad idea or something. anyway,

yeah, no, i get it. as i said earlier in the thread, i definitely think it's an understandable reason to be upset, and can't blame anyone for it. i remember similar things happening with the "june erases my transmasc john headcanon!" stuff in the past, and while that has a prrretty obviously different power imbalance than this one does, i think they both have the same similarity of coming from a place of genuine "hey, this character means a lot to me and my sense of gender," and both were talking points made by a relatively small portion of the fanbase which was then used as a cudgel by a larger, genuinely transphobic section of it.

like with the june thing in particular, it was pretty quick to watch it become "mask off," and for most people to eventually just say that their actual issue with it wasn't that they liked transmasc john, but that they didn't want john to be a woman period. and i've seen a loooooooot of that going around unchallenged with roxy, a lot of in ways that're like. baby's first transphobia "b-b-but men don't act like that...???" type shit.

so i've decided to tie myself to the traintracks for the glorious homestuck empire's transgender future and fight for both of these goals to my very end. they're tying me to the front of a warship and hoping that i absorb enough missiles that we can safely sail across the atlantic. (nicki minaj voice) to freedom.

i used two completely different tying imageries in the comment to show my sheer dedication to being used as some sort of human shield and/or hostage? i guess? i lost the metaphor a while ago. you get the idea.

yeah was/(am?) a believer in transfem roxy back in the day but i remember being quite excited to have any trans representation AT ALL in homestuck when the epilogues dropped and then over time it kind of set in that it wasn't particularly dealt with well & it was a character i previously thought of as a trans woman so i admit got pretty annoyed (and sort of annoying about it) before, especially after his original design got revealed in hs2. but after seeing more and more people start being straight up disrespectful and transphobic to the trans men who liked him i've come around to being just like, come on now. my personal headcanons never take priority to me over human beings and as long as it's handled better in the future idc LOL

anyone in this thread tie ropes

@kevin

you are now both options in the transgender homestuck trolley problem

fuck.

>duckbuster "anyone in this thread tie ropes"
Not more than my shoes and fastening loads to my truck bed but I do look up knot tying guides all the time. I'm just not very coordinated so I only really know how to actually do a couple really simple ones for real.

>kevin "i've decided to tie myself to the traintracks for the glorious homestuck empire's transgender future and fight for both of these goals to my very end."
Trans roxy multi track drifting... Wait. Trains Roxy??? [x-files theme plays]

...are The X-files dated? Have I outed myself as Old?

Also the way people act as if Candy Roxy is cis when they CLEARLY states they don't identify as a woman and there's like an entire page in the epilogues about this. Just because they haven't come out doesn't mean they are cis. And then people use this as a justification to be transphobic about June "why can't John and June coexist like Candy and Meat Roxy"

I've been both a huge fan of the Epilogues from the get go (with some minor grievances about some specific happenings in the later parts of both routes, but coming out of it having tremendously enjoyed the bulk of it) and a huge fan of happily transmasculine/happily non-binary (defeminized sense of self despite pregnancy, it's legitimately awesome nuance) Roxy when it was happening within the comic.

I saw the discourse online (on Twitter specifically) about how it decanonizes the long-implied trans woman coding people have gathered throughout the years, and I thought it was very weird to not just accept that characters aren't trans "in the way you personally want." Years later, I do view my past thinking as somewhat reductive. There are regular transphobes, pieces of shit who argue for years that no character in any media is transgender whenever anyone indulges in the thought, and then there are intra-community transphobias of people who apply any type of biases towards fictional characters the way they would do for real people. Transfeminine Roxy could've been enjoyed by a large majority of trans homestucks, because of the chromosome characterization (Ro-Xy name reveal being in two distinct steps, establishing a certain importance to the letters XY, that is then confirmed by Hussie herself here to be a direct subversion for both Roxy, suggesting their transwomanhood, and Dirk, suggesting his transmanhood, which is very fucking funny in retrospect : https://wheals.github.io/formspring/formspring.html#andrewhussie448980558)

Both Johnny and kevin (https://fruityrumpus.com/forums/reply/689c0fdec24c58e653acb193) have pointed out the different ways these trans coding were not exclusively transfem but transmasc as well, and generally I do like a good arc of compulsory hyperfemininity being challenged. I'd very much like to hear about the pre-epilogues transmasc coding of Roxy, as I've never heard of it before, it's great that it was a thing already !

Also Johnny's take on both transmasc and transfem Roxy being able to coexist (https://fruityrumpus.com/forums/reply/689c01f1c24c58e653a844b5) is obviously a good & real one since well, Homestuck, even pre-epilogues, has always been a story of dubious canonicity. Most people engage with fanfics more than they engage with the original material, so naturally everything is possible including probably the shittiest fucking AU where everyone is cishet, which I would naturally not wanna handle even with anti-radiation gloves. Speaking of radiations, there's even that very popular one people enjoy where john sees dave gives birth to john.

[Unimportant rambling - you've been warned. Skip at your discretion]
Anyway it did lead me to wonder why they couldn't have gone further with less grounded paradox space gender shenanigans. What if both transmasc AND transfem Roxy had been a thing in the epilogues ? We did get transmasc AND non-fem non-binary, but what if their void aspect had interacted with the fragilization of a solid canon itself ?
What if they were transmasc in one route and transfem in the other ? (Given they're clearly gnc and fluid in both routes, wouldn't have excluded any type of non-binary). It would've been very Homestuck-y to have a Roxy that was paradoxically more "AMAB" Transfeminine AND "AFAB" Transmasculine depending on the route, and all that could've been even more of a cool exploration of gender I think. I do like the pregnancy talk in candy but I do think it could've been more trans. Like why was the pregnancy specifically enough to not have him be a trans dude, to the point where a lot of people seem to be seeing him as cis in that route ? (Roxy is never cis to me, I thought it was explicit enough but a lot of people, even trans-friendly ones, took the pregnancy bit as them being cis somehow..?) I think there's still too much taboo around explicitely masculine trans people getting pregnant, and Homestuck's ironic tone could've definitely approached the stuff in a funny and insightful, pop-referential way (like the whole Mpreg meme, defusing its limitations and the fact that it's usually considered a joke even in queer circles, to the understandable discomfort of some trans men). Like the fact that "mpreg" or "male pregnancy" wasn't even a part of the overwhelming list of content warnings still strike me as a huge missed opportunity. It would've made the transphobes even madder around Roxy, and would've also been the opportunity to have an "AMAB"-coded Roxy in the other route, written specifically with transfeminine experiences in mind. Just spitballing here, as I said I love the epilogues as they are (believe it or not-probably more than the original material).

[Quick(?)(no nevermind) responses about other trans characters]
-the one and only June Egbert is obviously really exciting, but I'd be lying if I said I was very patient about her reveal. It's been years, and I do take in mind the several years of harassment & smear campaigns halting the production of any homestuck content and harming the livelihoods of some of the writers (in heavy transmisoginystic abuse, to keep track of the transphobia of homestuck fans). But the fact that it's been confirmed to happen before the Epilogues makes me think it wasn't really a priority even for the work that was supposed to be the (un)happily ever after point of Homestuck, establishing closure. That was one of my main grievances (along with Feferi's treatment, since I'm probably the number one Feferi fan and think she did nothing wrong ever)

-Eridan's pesterquest route was literally one of the best ones. Especially after the way Feferi was treated (can you tell I like Feferi) as a point to deny both Eridan & Gamzee fans the redemption of their faves, the writers had to distastefully add in sexual harassment jokes for some reason, when having an actual heart to heart between Eridan & Feferi could've been good either way. If you didn't want Eridan to change, fine ! I'm more than okay with it, I hate the character. But you could've unpacked his feelings of entitlement by having him be threatening, scary even, instead of making it a big joke that's ultimately at the expense of the female character getting forced to kiss her murderer. So seeing HIM finally get a setting where the story was actually unpacking some of it, within a funny route that (Homestuckingly) mixes pop culture references with earnest character development, it was amazing. I loved the Eridan route, and I loved the trans subtext of it as well.

-Sollux is peak, always has been, obviously transmasculine, the dude's chill as fuck and one of the only friends who help Feferi in the original comic (yeah that's my metric of inherently Good characters in Homestuck.)

-Vriska..............is also inherently Good under my Fefriend Meter, they have one cute exchange that's quite literally the cutest, fluffiest exchange Vriska has with anyone in the entire comic and that's saying something I think. I don't like the meme "[x did nothing wrong]" because it's a direct reference to Hitler memes, but the people who argue Vriska is scum are usually an adjacent kind of evil (Vriska having turned into a receptacles for lots of transphobic, and misogynistic sentiment festering within the fandom. These people gotta chill way more than the ones viewing her as being on the side of good-which she explicitely is in canon)

-Jade.....is Jade even trans ? I like her a lot, she was my first favorite character (Fefriend Meter : Beep Boop Jade is Inherently Good)
I think it's safe to assume Jade is transfeminized. The transfeminization being so powerful that she's been considered both "ruined" for having that "trait" "imposed" on her, the way most people talk about it. They're not wrong, it was definitely a narrative choice. But it also gets very interesting because it does touch on many aspects of the perception of transfemininity, including the uncomfortable promiscuity, the whole scandal of cheating somehow pushing her status as a disgusting, irredeemable character (or alternatively, hating the text or even the writers for having dared "tainting" her character), the general lack of understanding of how her canon years of loneliness might've done that to her (most people associating that to her having a penis, with what I see as a little confusion between correlation and causation - but the writers might not have had the wokest ideas either, I don't know. It's complicated, and that's what makes it interesting.)
I do love Jade, including in the epilogues. I think she's touching despite it all, despite her awkwardness, despite her fumbles. She's good.

-Dave and Dirk are trans men as well to me. I like to see both Striders as inherently masculine, I don't know if anyone has envisioned transfem Dave or Dirk, but to me they both have very dude problems, specifically with irony and control. I don't have any strong feelings one way or another, cis or trans, I do like the idea that Dirk technically trans but doesn't like the term and looks down to anyone using it (https://fruityrumpus.com/forums/reply/689c150fc24c58e653ae3467). A pattern I enjoy a lot with him is the whole blurring of conservative/progressive ideology, and so I would absolutely see him argue against the entire concept of transgender people from a radically leftist angle of rejecting imperialist language that has shaped our entire LGBT identities around medicalist & psychologizing assumptions, erasing indigenous cultures via genocide and forced assimilation to american customs of sex & gender, and boxing all that in a shiny, capitalism-friendly set of beliefs improving consumption rates within queer & marginalized populations. Naturally, Dirk being Dirk, he would then call someone a "passoïd" or something, showcasing his hilarious hypocrisy Terezi has been studying within beyond canon.

Damn. I wrote significantly more than I thought.
To conclude on all of that, transphobia is still overwhemingly a dominant ideology in society, and there is no fandom or community (or even political parties/militant groups) that escape this. Consumption of any "progressive" media doesn't make you woke, and calling media "progressive" is more often than not a reach. I've often felt weird at people..overplaying the queer representation a bit in Homestuck, especially when it comes to congratulating the team for June Egbert "existing"(character that has yet to reveal herself, after all), prior to any characterization she might carry the legacy of. As of the latest update, John is a socially awkward, uncomfortable guy who reveals he's emotionally cheated on his wife with someone he didn't know the age of, which for many can be read as a weird way to delve into a transfeminine character (see obsession around Jade's cheating impulses, and naturally the real-life instinct of many people -including within the Homestuck community- to treat trans women as pedophiles.)
With that said, scourge sisters & rosemary are right here for really incredible lesbian ships, but in terms of trans representation, we can still read all of the comic in a very perisex/cis-centric lens without missing much. (candy route Roxy being seen as cis by many fans, June being nowhere to be seen except in a little flash silhouette as of very recently). Obviously, things will get more trans from here, but when discussing transphobia it's also necessary to be critical of the way trans lives are depicted. I am somewhat wary of June Egbert, especially if not written by a trans woman. We should condemn transphobia within the fandom, but we should not let transphobia in the writer's room either if it happens.
We will see how it goes.

admittedly in the case of roxy, roxy was *the* most poular trans girl headcanon in the fandom prior to the release of the epilogues (like it wasn't close if someone had heard of a trans girl headcanon for homestuck it was probably roxy) so there is more of a legitimate disappointment response about them being made transmasc in post canon to contend with there, but I do feel people who felt that disappointment have (largely) accepted and/or gotten over it from what I've seen

but yeah its an unfortunately ingrained staple of a lot of fandoms to act like an injustice is being done when a character transitions after being introduced (or is trans at all).

also re: june egbert wrt/her announcement and timeline of events

hussie revealing that june egbert was a goal for post-canon actually happened after the epilogues came out, as the epilogues fully released on april 20th of 2019 and the first toblerone being found + hussie's announcing june egbert as canon was in august of 2019, which was then followed by pesterquest hinting at june (the most obvious way being her getting her nails painted in jade's sleepover ending) and then homestuck^2 launching in october 2019 and beginning to build up to june with stuff like her feeling freed by her dad's house blowing up and roxy blatantly trying to investigate her obvious gender feelings in the last updates before it was cancelled in december 2020, and while beyond canon has been wrapped up in trying to finish act 1 it has made sure to let us know both in and out of comic that she's still coming, through AMAs and through june's whole divine gender revelation when vriska escaped the plot point. I think the biggest "hold up" on the front of june egbert now is mostly just that beyond canon is releasing updates at a slower (and honestly probably healthier for workers) pace than homestuck^2 was (and definitely than homestuck proper was)

also re: jade

YES i feel u on a lot of this so bad especially as someone who related to her furrier aspects. seeing a character who if I'm being honest was just about as closed to my idealized self as possible as a trans woman who had only realized she was trans like 4 months earlier was really meaningful to me and then at that same point in time running face first into the brick wall of seeing people talk about how epilogues jade was gross and transphobic and fetishistic immediately turned it into a pretty terrible time for me.

re: luna

I want to make it clear, seeing roxy how you want to see them is entirely up to the individual. by no means am i claiming that people who prefer transfem/ trans woman roxy over transmasc/ trans man roxy are inherently transphobic in that regard. both of these roxys are the same roxy. they are both equally important to the story. if roxy instead came out as a trans woman in the epilogues, or something similar, it would still carry more or less the same message- which is that roxy is trans. and he has always been trans.

the problem lies in the bizarre notion that transmasc/ trans man roxy is somehow "bad", and ive seen wayyyy too many people blatantly call him an abomination. as an artist who has drawn trans man roxy for quite a while now, the way some people interact with my posts is honestly...disgusting. important to note: there are also people who think transfem roxy is bad too!! transphobia all around. however i do think that transmasc roxy is still somewhat less popular than transfem roxy, and thus there are more people who sort of just pretend like it doesnt exist. which, as a fandom, we can do better!

re: trans woman hc of roxy

i seriously do empathize with this as a whole. how you perceive and interpret a character can be extremely special. when i read y12k by spicyyeti for the first time it seriously changed my life in a way i cant describe, not just as a trans man myself in regards to gender but like. as a writer in general. (sorry im always and WILL always glaze spicyyeti) more in regards to actual homestuck though, i went into it with more or less the same idea as some people in this thread (trans woman roxy was popular, so i just viewed roxy that way) however the more i read roxy the more i saw myself in him, specifically his deflection of his own gender as some sort of idealized mother with children nonsense to cope with it. as a trans man, ive always related to him in that way. there are so many times when i think it would be so much easier if i was just the pretty woman someone could marry and have children with. and as a gnc trans man who is overall very feminine, roxys hyperfem appearence/ way he carries himself really reads as a closeted trans man trying his absolute best to fit in. to do anything that will distract people. pairing that with his heavy drinking, and his aspect of the void, roxys relationship to his gender seems to be a prison he places himself in. maybe a prison the audience places him in, as well. (i mean more in regard to people who think hes cis btw)

there is so much i can say about trans man roxy. i think its worth it to explore more of this topic. btw i highly recommend y12k! all in all, however, trans roxy will always be true. she is beautiful, he is beautiful, and they all say something extremely important about growing up transgender.