TADC obsessed anon here: I more meant what you thought about it as representation or whatever. As a fellow trans woman, what do you think about how a: it was a major release, doing gangbusters in theaters and it may be one of the most popular works ever STARRING a trans woman and b: how disgusting people have been acting about it?
As I grow older I think that the lens of "representation" can be a very limiting way to view queer fiction, especially things drawing from a queer creator's own lived experiences, and Jax's story is a great example of why.
By some rubrics, Jax is "bad transfem representation." She's a fucked up, maladjusted person who never actually even transitions, who pushes away and hurts most of the people close to her, and whose story ends tragically with something that partially evokes suicide. (Though the abstractions are still, you know, alive, and they seem to still be in there somewhere, so I don't like reading it as a 1:1 metaphor. And also obviously Jax's real world counterpart is still alive and seems to be doing better lol.) Jax isn't an aspirational character for trans women watching the show or someone who makes trans women look good to cis audiences. She's unflattering and suffers a downfall of her own making and only realizes that she's still capable of being loved after it's too late. Thus, "bad representation."
The tragedy of Jax's story is something deeply personal, a cautionary tale about the ugly side of dysphoria and internalized misogyny and bad parent-child relationships and what happens when you repress yourself into a jaded, irony-poisoned mess rather than letting yourself be vulnerable in front of other people. It's a pain that a lot of us can relate to, because real people don't always mirror "good representation," and seeing that pain expressed in a work of art like this helps us process those feelings and know that we aren't alone. The ugliness isn't a mistake, it's the point.
Yes, I also love cute and fun and hopeful and sappy stories about queer characters that make me feel warm and fuzzy inside, which is closer to how most of the other characters' stories end in TADC, living happily ever after in a version of the circus where they get to live life how they want to live. Neither is the singular "right" way to tell queer stories, because we need more of ALL kinds of queer stories, because art is subjective and different things will speak to different people. And it's beautiful that this is a story reached such a wide audience and was able to speak to so many people. I hope Jax put things in perspective for some folks.
Unfortunately, there are a lot of people out there who care more about the wellbeing of fictional characters than the treatment of their real world creators, and this is how you get shit like people harassing and misgendering actual real trans woman Gooseworx and calling her a raging misogynist and all sorts of other heinous shit just because they didn't like the way she wrote her fictional cartoon trans woman Jax. People are insane about cartoons and are extra shitty to visible trans women online, what else is new?
amandla
turnnoffyourmind
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