It is certainly textual that John Gaius' experience of gender is in some way fraught.
He awkwardly inhabits a rather specific kind of patriarchal masculinity, which often sits at a tension with his stated ideals. An unknown proportion of him is part of a planet that he assigned female and modelled after the beautiful, adventurous Barbie he had so preferred to her creepy male counterpart - something he describes as motivated by "a couple of scraps of id" (the Freudian site of unconscious primal desires). You also get the sense that John is a deeply unhappy person with a precarious sense of self worth, and that in many respects this predates becoming an eldritch immortal.
That would seem to be intended to read as a cis man experiencing - in a uniquely awful and particularly pointed way - the prison of masculinity and making that everyone's problem:
...the God of the Locked Tomb IS a man; he IS the Father and the Teacher; it’s an inherently masc role played by someone who has an uneasy relationship himself to playing a Biblical patriarch. John falls back on hierarchies and roles because they’re familiar even when he’s struggling not to. Even he identifies himself as the God who became man and the man who became God. But the divine in the Locked Tomb is essentially feminine on multiple axes – I think Nona will illuminate that a little bit more. (x)
However, reader interpretation does not have to depend on authorial intent, and individual readers are of course at liberty to interpret that canonical fraughtness as evidence of some kind of repression or dysphoria or more complicated relationship with gender.
That said... It's a headcanon that needs to be negotiated with some careful complexity. John spends much of the story ambiguously grooming a teenager, is subtextually compared to not one, but two infamous fictional predators of very young women, and is later revealed to have been a violent political extremist in something approaching our own contemporary setting. Imagining that his actions might in some way hinge on a trans identity - if "estrogen could have saved her", as the popular blorbo-rotating aphorism goes - also means grappling with the ways that might (however inadvertently) relate to strains of contemporary rhetoric about trans women.
tangentwithtanner
prguitarman
origamiaround
dailybridgerton
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