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to cis artists, yr allowed to draw trans characters to be clockable, in fact i encourage it. it's not politically incorrect or offensive to depict trans people as being obviously trans, especially if you're drawing cartoons. its not a stereotype a lot of us just look like that
i mean, i know a lot of trans people disagree, but eventually every ally has gotta bite the bullet & use their judgement to decide what's best for the group they're allied with. literally just give her stubble, it's quick, it's easy and it's free.
coding is neutral, it's just aesthetic, framing is what actually matters. no one's out here calling ms frizzle an antisemetic caricature. its not racist that u can tell the one car in Cars that sells gas is black. when cartoons show a man in a dress & treat the contrast between makeup and body hair as being self evidently funny, that's transphobia. but that doesnt mean its bad to have a big hairy man wear makeup in your illustrated works, thats just normal hot guy behavior
my opinion as always is that there are two important things we'll regularly leave out of the conversation- everybody fixates on the simple look of a character (ie curves on a trans guy), but what is actually important is variety and characterisation. so, you might think "ugh another show about gay people where their arc is the bigotry they face", the issue isn't "depicting what we often really experience is bad", as some people frame it, the issue is the lack generally of variety. when a character wears a dress as a joke, it's framed as a simple aesthetic issue of the show, but it's really the inadequate characterisation to show this is a guy who likes to be dressing in a gender non-comforming way, and whether or not it results in judgement from others- heck, in school guys often did wear dresses as a joke on non-uniform days (I'm not american, it normally is a thing in my country that schools have uniforms), so having a guy wear one as a joke is possible, the world just needs variety in reasons and characters that carry those reasons in the shows, where you can tell the intent isn't to mock trans/gnc folk. going back to op's example, we need trans characters who don't actually pass, but we need variety and characters that work with however they look- guys with curves who aren't being made the simple butt of the joke, but rather are just a guy with curves, and both trans and cis guys like that (I know cis guys with hourglass figures pretty much). like op said, the aesthetics aren't bad, they simply are badly executed a lot of the time. I'm a hairy person in makeup, and it has been a relief meeting people in hospital who actually don't treat that as weird and funny, but just "dude, your eyeshadow is so well blended" and that's it, and it'd be nice if we could see that energy in tv shows more. sorry to ramble btw op.
OP, I'm a trans woman and seeing clockable trans women in media gives me dysphoria
This is not a joke, I'm not exaggerating, I literally turn off what I'm watching
What now?
I'm sorry but your dysphoria isn't anyone else's problem. if someone else "gives you dysphoria" thats your cross to bear & not on them.
hi :3 the goal of trans liberation is not & will never be getting every trans person to pass. i'm autistic, i had a good ass chance to figure out that i was trans early in life considering my older sibling was trans & i had ample opportunity to learn what that meant, its just that i have a hard time identifying my emotions in the best of circumstances & don't put much stake in how i'm perceived anyways. i take hormones to feel internally in balance with myself, but i didn't voice train, i don't wear women's clothes, i don't feel the need to shave regularly, i haven't been gendered correctly by a stranger yet & that's fine. i no longer feel like i went through the wrong puberty, so to speak, i'm just having a 2nd one now. we'll always exist, representation isn't just for you. we're not just fighting for trans youth, we're fighting for trans adults too.
and like, cis people are allowed to draw what literally exists in reality & always will. like yea they should consult a sensitivity reader but like, if your sensitivity reader tells you to make a character less visibly trans on the basis that its offensive to trans people who want to be invisible then i will veto that sensitivity reader lol
the thing about passing is that for the vast majority of trans women, it’s not something that just *happens.* a cis woman with short hair, no makeup, wearing t shirt and jeans, putting no effort into appearing conventionally “feminine” still gets gendered correctly most of the time. which is as much of a nightmare for trans men as the opposite is for trans women. for a trans woman to pass effortlessly, she almost certainly has to have transitioned early or have one of those perfectly non-clockable body types, which is genetic lottery and super rare. for most trans women, passing at the high end requires expensive surgeries and procedures like laser hair removal/electrolysis, facial reconstructive surgery, hair transplants, and at the low end requires hours of makeup, voice training, posture discipline, outfit coordinating, etc etc etc, and not a lick of it will matter if you’re even in the neighborhood of six feet tall, because most people don’t choose how they gender people they just do it automatically based on silhouette. so if your goal is to pass, you have to build your entire appearance and aura around that abstract ill-defined social instinct.
that’s a lot of money and time for a population that’s chronically impoverished! for someone like me, a 34 year old trans woman who didn’t realize i was trans until 27 and started hrt at 28, the baseline expectation for getting gendered correctly in public just feels impossible. my hair is thinning, i still haven’t been able to afford LHR on my face let alone better clothes or shoes or jewelry or makeup etc etc etc.
so when i see a fictional trans woman who passes perfectly, never gets misgendered, whose gender isn’t a point of contention or conflict, that isn’t good representation to me. that isn’t even representation, as far as i’m concerned that’s just a cis woman that you’re calling trans for brownie points! when the only trans people i see in media are drag queens and cis-passing rich celebrities, i see the binary society imposes on my femininity. if i’m not one, i must be the other. no hate to anyone in either group but that’s just not me! i don’t WANT the surgeries, i don’t WANT to get good at makeup, and i feel like the right of a woman to be respected regardless of how she presents is a cornerstone of real feminism!!
you want to know what’d make me feel less like shit about myself, about my place in the world and society? if there were more clocky trans women in media. not only would i ACTUALLY feel represented, that would also help to normalize the existence of clocky trans women to cis people who only ever see the drag queen / celebrity side of transness. if there were more clocky trans women in media getting aggressively gendered correctly, their pronouns defended and enforced by other characters in the show, that would ACTIVELY make my life better because it would make normies aware that this tension even exists. because i know it’s not intentional nine times out of ten! if we all agree that media plays a huge role in shaping how society sees minority groups, then we should be advocating not for media which only shows the glossy happy perfectly prettily acceptable side, but media which accurately reflects the lived experiences of real trans people in the real world.
also clocky trans women are hot and i like looking at them