Before anyone tries to murder me, I'm not trying to "cancel" the Batfandom. I love Batfam and will continue to. But a lot of posts call out a specific part of canon as problematic completely ignoring the root source.
"Making Babs walk again is ableist." Yeah, it was. But they also made Babs disabled because able-bodied writers see being disabled as a fate worse than death.
"Making Talia a rapist is racist." The Al Ghuls are racist. The entire concept of "evil arab assassins who are terrorists" is racist. Damian Wayne's creation was racist.
"Sexualizing Dick Grayson is antiziganism." Making a poor circus performer Romani was antiziganist from the get go.
"Making Cass talk is ableist" I hate to tell you this but making the Asian girl an living tool for murder was racist actually.
"People not acknowledging Bruce as Jewish is antisemitic" Batman was made by Jewish writers, so it's definitely not antisemitic for him to be Jewish. He should be. But honestly do you think that highlighting the Jewishness of the superhero symbolized by literal vermin is going to sit well on every single Jewish person ever?
"Not letting Kate get her happy ending is lesbophobic" bruh they made the Lesbian a US soldier.
"People ship Bruce with his sons and that's pedophilic" Did you know in the 50s-60s Robin was considered and adult man and Batman and Robin were the most widely acknowledged gay icons in that time by gay men and retconning Robin back down to a child was done in large part to demonize the people (gay men) who identified with them back at that time.
I love batman, I do. But y'all really sort of only think about how problematic it is when it's about your least favorite parts of canon, when in reality, Batman as a franchise has had deep roots of racism, queerphobia, and abelism for decades now.
I'm not trying to murder you or anything, but I am going to point out that your reasoning is extremely flimsy for some of these points and you're objectively wrong about others.
"Making Babs walk again is ableist." Yeah, it was. But they also made Babs disabled because able-bodied writers see being disabled as a fate worse than death.
That is not why Babs was made disabled. Babs was, in fact, made disabled by a disabled, terminally-ill woman and her husband who despised DC's misogynistic treatment of her in The Killing Joke. They thought that being shot through the spine would have some permanent consequences for her physically but believed "she could still be a hero" despite that. Which is why John Ostrander and Kim Yale wrote Oracle: Year One...a hopeful and triumphant narrative for Barbara that allows her to heal, reclaim agency over herself, and chart a new path forward as a disabled woman.
Kim Yale was a trailblazer in the comic industry for a lot of reasons, but two of her biggest priorities while she worked for DC as a writer and editor were to 1) safeguard and revive female characters in an industry actively hostile to them, and 2) increase diversity in a heavily white, male, able-bodied universe.
Kim Yale, the co-creator of Oracle, remains to this day the only disabled woman who has ever gotten to write Barbara Gordon in an in-continuity comic and the only physically disabled person to ever write her (Marieke Nijkamp, author of the out-of-continuity book The Oracle Code, is the only other disabled author who has written a Barbara-centric comic; she has autism). She and Ostrander absolutely did not believe that being disabled was "a fate worse than death," and to say that indicates to me that you do not actually know anything about the history of how Oracle came to be. Not to mention that at least half of the reason that Babs is no longer visibly disabled or Oracle is actually due to that ableism of people "thinking being disabled is worse than death" you mention.
"Making Cass talk is ableist" I hate to tell you this but making the Asian girl an living tool for murder was racist actually.
One, literally the entire point of Cass is that she's not a living tool for murder, that she stubbornly refused to be that tool after killing one person as a child and promptly ran away from that life. She deeply, truly believes in the sanctity of life and is even more strident about preserving life than Bruce is. And she came to those conclusions and formed those beliefs completely independently of any external influences. The main point of Cass’s story is that she made the decision to become a hero. She chose, all on her own, to no longer be a weapon for her father to exploit. She didn’t need someone to ‘save’ or teach her the right path in order to do so; she is given total agency over asserting her own morality and decisions in relation to how she was raised. It's a deliberate subversion of that trope!
Two, making her talk wasn't ableist; not only did she always have the ability to talk (she says her first word, "Stop!", in her very first appearance), but Cass remains visibly disabled throughout her entire solo run after her brain is rewired. She initially can't read and has extreme difficulties learning how due to her brain literally being wired differently (which is mentioned several times and is a significant plotpoint on more than one occasion), has difficulties speaking that manifest in delayed speech patterns, and temporarily loses her ability to read body language as a result of "gaining" the ability to speak (only getting it back via her fight with Shiva). Her disability manifests differently after she gains the ability to think "normally," but she is still very much disabled.
It was also an attempt to avoid the racist "silent Asian woman" stereotype that Peterson, Puckett, and Scott realized keeping her silent had the potential to fall into. They decided to pre-emptively solve the problem by having the meta give her the ability to understand speech "normally," but were very careful to show how that incident was not consequence-free for Cass nor was it a magical disability cure in any sense. Again, deliberate trope subversion!
Three, you cannot talk about Cass's creation without understanding the context in which she was created. Cass was only created in the first place because Scott Peterson and Denny O'Neil refused to magi-cure Babs, take her out of the wheelchair, and make her Batgirl again. Because they were getting hundreds of letters from disabled comic book fans telling them how much Oracle meant to them! So when Mike Carlin, DC's Executive Editor, told Peterson to create a new Batgirl, what did he do? He and Kelley Puckett deliberately created another disabled character that also increased racial diversity in a heavily white superhero family. Cass's entire creation and character narrative is one of deliberate trope subversion and creative attempts to increase diversity. And that is established from the get-go. Her character fell head-first into racist tropes well after that, largely during the Evil Cass era.
"People not acknowledging Bruce as Jewish is antisemitic" Batman was made by Jewish writers, so it's definitely not antisemitic for him to be Jewish. He should be. But honestly do you think that highlighting the Jewishness of the superhero symbolized by literal vermin is going to sit well on every single Jewish person ever?
Nothing is ever going to sit well on "every single Jewish person ever," because Jews are not a monolith. Nothing will ever please everyone. That doesn't mean it's not worth doing, and given the choice between acknowledging Bruce as Jewish via his connection with Kate Kane (who has been deliberately, explicitly Jewish since her creation) and deliberately refusing to acknowledge it...it's pretty obvious which option is more anti-semitic. This is an extremely flimsy reason to deny people representation from one of the oldest and most popular superheroes in the world, and honestly just feels like you were desperately reaching to find something problematic to say about him. You'd have much better luck angling from the "various adaptations basically make him a cop" route.
Also I know this is largely semantics, but bats are not vermin. Definitionally, they can't be. Most varieties of bats eat bugs and are vital ecosystem balancers, and are thus beneficial to humans. They’re not competing with us or our pets for food, and they don’t infest places. They are also revered animals in several cultures.
"Not letting Kate get her happy ending is lesbophobic" bruh they made the Lesbian a US soldier.
There are plenty of LGBTQ+ people in the US military despite decades of discriminatory policies aimed at barring them from service. Soldiers come from all walks of life and are every type of person you can imagine. There are also plenty of other active soldiers and veterans in the DCU, so I'm not sure what this point is supposed to prove on its own.
Kate was expelled from West Point before graduation (specifically because she refused to deny that she was a lesbian). It's kind of the big inciting event of her backstory. So while she was a cadet, she never actually served in the military.
Greg Rucka created her with that backstory specifically to note the consequences of Don't Ask, Don't Tell. And he created her with that backstory in 2005 and explicitly showed it in 2009, when that policy was still in effect.
Kate being from a military family and wanting to be in the military herself is a vital aspect of her characterization and character development. It informs everything about how she approaches her life, her family relationships, and being Batwoman (as 'putting on a uniform' to carry out a mission, in the words of Rucka himself).
It's genuinely important to Kate's character that she is both a soldier and a lesbian. In fact, refusing to lie about her sexuality despite knowing that telling the truth will bar her from the career she wants to pursue is the moment Rucka identifed as "when Batwoman was born." She is a superhero specifically because she is queer and was denied the ability to serve in the military based on that. This isn't problematic; it's just apparently your opinion that soldiers shouldn't exist or be depicted in fiction.
"People ship Bruce with his sons and that's pedophilic" Did you know in the 50s-60s Robin was considered and adult man and Batman and Robin were the most widely acknowledged gay icons in that time by gay men and retconning Robin back down to a child was done in large part to demonize the people (gay men) who identified with them back at that time.
No. He wasn't. Burt Ward on the Batman '66 television show was an adult man. Robin everywhere else was still clearly a child. That was the whole point of him being a founding member of the Teen Titans in 1964 and officially going to college in 1969. He was explicitly in high school before that point, and consistently became Robin at some point between the ages of 8 and 12. There was absolutely zero retconning that happened there. Not to mention that they were far from "the most widely acknowledged gay icons in that time" like where did you even get that? Stop engaging in historical revisionism and homophobic talking points ripped straight out of Seduction of the Innocent and the 1954 Comic Book Senate Hearings to justify a nonsensical talking point.
Are there several problematic aspects embedded in the creation of some of these characters? Absolutely. Are there even more problematic aspects that were added at varying points later on in their histories? Again, absolutely. But this list is largely not it and even if it had been a list of largely true things, I think you should re-examine why you've chosen to invalidate fandom discussions of racism, sexism, homophobia, and ableism with "but there's other problems too!" whataboutism.
Discussions of bigotry do not need to examine every single aspect of a character's creation, history, or depiction to be valid and worth having. Those other issues are useful additions to the discussion because they may inform why that bigotry exists within a given story/authorial depiction or why a persistently awful aspect of a character's history continues to be relevant, but they are not usually necessary qualifiers to discuss contemporary issues. And with only one or two exceptions (the al Ghuls and Dick), the things you've pointed out aren't actually a "root problem" like you want to make them out to be. I understand that your intention is probably to widen the discussion, but instead it just comes off as trivializing those necessary conversations in order to insist they include topics that you yourself don't actually know enough about to make informed comments on.
