hi! i’m making a comic where gender expression, gender-non-conformity, transgender stuff, and beauty standards are big topics. i’m also trying to include a lot of disabled characters, in the main cast and in the background. i’m wondering if you’ve noticed disabilities (types, aids, tropes, specific disabilities) having weirdly gendered representation, and if there are things you’d like to see more in disability rep when it comes to gender. especially with more visible disabilities.
Facial differences, as a concept, are considered a masculine feature. Even if you do count the anime girls with scars through their eyes (that don't do anything), the representation is like 90% male.
Now, I've seen the "fandom take" on this to some degree where the solution is to make the most masculine women possible*, and to treat the disfigurement as another gender-non-conforming trait for a woman. This will come up later because it keeps happening.
“My perception is that my disfiguration makes it harder to be perceived as a woman.” [...] Coming out as a woman took Mikaela longer because of her disability.
Women with facial differences are degendered because of their facial differences at best, and dehumanized at worst.
The solution here is not that "masculine person [woman or man] with a facial difference=bad!", but to stop considering a facial difference to be a fundamentally masculine trait. It's literally just not. It's a human trait.
Intersectionality matters here too. Black, dark-skinned, intersex, and trans women are also seen as more masculine by default because of misogynoir, colorism, intersexism, and transmisogyny. It's not that women who happen to be any or all of these can't be masculine, but 1) it's not some default factory setting, and 2) as writers we make conscious decisions—things don't "just happen"—and we have unconscious biases we need to think about when making characters.
*for that author, that is. But even for those twitter artists people who can't imagine a genuinely masculine woman, you'll notice that their female characters with disfigurement will usually be more muscular, wear more unisex clothes, and be overall shown as less feminine compared to other women. Curious!
One exception here will be Down syndrome and similarly treated disabilities, which is also a segue into talking about developmental disabilities and how they're shown in terms of gender.
You will often notice that developmentally disabled people—and the more disabled they are, the more frequent it is—aren't really considered men or women. They're boys and girls. Mostly boys because visible disability is still considered a fundamentally masculine trait, but they're not shown as adult men either way. You'll be hard-pressed to find an adult, male character with Down syndrome that has facial hair or male pattern baldness. Same for an adult female character that's not literally dressed like a pre-teen.
You'll find that a lot of the time, this infantilization affects how the characters are presented in terms of gender. If we think of children as more-or-less genderless (at least compared to adults), and we do the same for disabled adults, you end up with this kind of situation.
And I'm not talking about making your developmentally disabled character into either a lumberjack or a tradwife, but allowing them the same amount of gendered expression as other characters their age get. Also allowing them to physically look like an adult of their gender, not some perpetual child. Visibly disabled people are allowed to have secondary sex characteristics.
Not sure how to nicely segue into any of my other points, so I'll just do them like this:
Interabled [straight] relationships. Good luck finding one where the woman's the disabled one. "Dying wife that's dying from the death disease and could've been a sick dog" is not a character.
Men with [the fandom version of] chronic illness. The one time a male disabled character is considered feminine/"babygirl"/not-masculine (but still adult) is when he's frail, physically weak, and needs help. Curious!
In a similar vein, mobility aids are often presented as overall emasculating. Especially wheelchairs, especially powerchairs, especially those really big powerchairs. Since this Iron Age idea of man=strong woman=weak is still going strong in 2026.
Female characters who use powerchairs are almost never actual characters. A man in her situation would probably be treated as "less" of a man, sure, but she's probably treated like a broken lamp that needs an expensive surgery or is/will be dead for the main character's development's sake. That is, if she exists.
Autistic female characters don't really exist. If they do, they are either written as extremely low support needs, or genuinely don't have any of the recognized symptoms of autism. Even in autistic advocacy spaces you still see people playing with this misogynistic idea that women can basically "turn off" their autism when it's inconvenient, since severely or even just unable-to-mask autistic women don't apparently exist.
Female characters with dwarfism also don't really exist. Dwarfism is The contender for most-male-dominated-representation award. "Chibi anime girl who's short but shows 0 other characteristics of dwarfism whatsoever, not even the proportions" doesn't count. "Fantasy short woman with a beard that lives underground" also doesn't count. I mean like, actual dwarfism. With symptoms other than "short", even.
Be careful with visibly disabled characters who use it/its pronouns. "Be careful", not "don't do it". Unless you're writing for a hyperspecific audience, almost no reader's assumption will be that those pronouns are used in a positive/neutral manner. For every character that uses them willingly, there's a million times when it's used as a dehumanizing insult. Introduce them in a way that's not ambiguous as to which is the case for your character.
Significantly disabled characters who, for any reason, express their gender in a specific way. Trans dysphoria, cis dysphoria, because they're questioning, because why not, because it's fun, it can be anything. It could be a trans woman who changes the voice of her AAC to a female voice as part of her transition, a cis man who needs his caregiver's help to trim his facial hair because it makes him feel handsome, a gender-questioning person who gets pink spoke guards for their wheelchair because they want to see if they like it or not. Basically: a disabled character who has autonomy, including over their gender and things associated with it.
Any visibly disabled character who's nonbinary on purpose. As in, the author actually knows that they're nonbinary and made them nonbinary on purpose. Not degendered or creature-like, but an actual nonbinary human being who is nonbinary, rather than just denied a gender by Big Society.
There's a whole field of gender-and-disability discussions in the personality disorder representation department. I'm not qualified to talk about any of the ones that are relevant (namely: BPD and HPD) but most of the female characters with either of these might as well have been made with female hysteria in mind, and you wouldn't be able to tell a difference. Overall not great.
To elaborate a bit more: while there are disabilities that either men or women experience more frequently (ex. ~80% of people with SCI are men, while ~80% of people with MS are women), there's no such thing as a gender-exclusive disability. You'll sometimes read otherwise because many medical sources are inter- and cis-sexist. So while it might take some research to figure out what exactly they mean by "it only happens in boys" (they almost always mean "X-linked recessive"), it's important to remember that there will be women with said disability as well. They just might be intersex and/or trans.
This is especially something to consider when writing a trans character. Having a disability that is so heavily associated with one sex is 1) very unlucky but happens, and 2) dysphoric. But on the other hand—you could have a trans character that is also intersex and has a disability that they wouldn't otherwise have if they weren't intersex. Think a trans man with Duchenne's and CAIS, or a trans woman with endometriosis and PMDS.
It basically boils down to the disability and gender intersecting, and what that means depends on the specific character. For example, if your character is a blind woman, she might feel safer having a big dog with her rather than a cane. If your character is an older, Deaf trans person from Ireland, they might have to change how they sign. And so on. You can consider how a totally blind trans character might experience dysphoria or navigate passing. Or how a character whose disability makes them infertile might experience that. Etc. There's definitely a lot of ways to think about how disability and gender can intersect rather than just doing the fandom classic of putting two borderline-random labels on a character and not elaborating further on either.
A lot of this is out of what I usually write about, so sorry if it's uneducated/less helpful.
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