recap on Knights of Guinevere's "Baby's First Discourse":
scene of the show has frankie's asshole boss calling her "franklin." fans interpret this as misgendering and think frankie is canonically trans
dana confirms that frankie is canonically cis, she just has a lot of masc nicknames
people start saying dana is transphobic for this
additional context that people were mad at dana for not making willow "look more blasian" when she had a black dad and a korean dad, dana eventually had to confirm the black dad was a stepdad and willow was never intended to be blasian, so it makes sense that she would want to confirm things quickly so people don't get the wrong idea for a long time. people ignore this and decide her rush to confirm frankie is cis (when she was DIRECTLY ASKED, if i may remind you) means that she hates trans women
people also decide that dana is transphobic because a trans woman voiced the asshole boss (a cis man in the show afawk). trans woman actress literally has to come out and say she enjoys playing characters like him and likes being able to voice both male and female characters
dana puts out an apology saying that she didn't mean trans headcanons for frankie were bad, only that she was not written with the intention of being trans. she has previously stated this is her stance on queer headcanons so this is not a surprise from her
dana blocked people who were throwing parasocial fits over her confirming frankie as cis. everyone decides this means that she IS indeed transphobic and her apology means nothing
This is why we can't have nice things
So every part of this is a lie through virtue of an intentional misrepresentation of the order of events, plus massive exaggerations about scale & content of criticism.
This is not what happened. Categorically.
Here’s what happened:
• Show comes out
• A lot of people interpret Frankie as being trans because the pilot places a large emphasis on people antagonistically threatening her calling her “Franklin” and “Frank” meanwhile a happy memory presents her as being called “Francesca”.
• A very very small handful of people ask Dana if Frankie is trans
• Dana responds saying no in a way that some people have interpreted as dismissive (she herself later admits it came across a way she didn’t intend)
• An even smaller handful of trans women — in fact, exactly six — reply to her post on Bluesky quite mildly expressing that they are disappointed to hear that. A couple of them mention that they feel like she was much quicker to deconfirm this than she has been about other queer readings in her show (like transmasc Hunter). Nobody harasses her. Six trans women express mild disappointment/criticism because they feel personally let down by the fact that they remain unrepresented. You can find out exactly how many yourself & see the comments by using Clearsky (which unhides blocked comments) so there’s no need to make baseless suggestions that present trans women as crazy bullies.
• Some further context for this: despite the massive wins in LGBTQ representation in cartoons over the last ten years, basically none of this has reflected transfeminine individuals. The Owl House itself manages to get a few instances of nonbinary representation, but it’s contextually clear that these characters are not supposed to be transfeminine. Furthermore, Disney recently censored an entire fully finished episode of Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur about trans girls being excluded from school sports — so there really is reason for trans women to be frustrated that queer representation never reflects us, it is being intentionally constructed this way. Dana Terrace even tweeted in support of the episode and criticised Disney (much much more strongly than any of the trans women criticised her) for the decision, so trans women were expecting her to bring this energy to her new show that is unrestrained from Disney’s limitations.
• Dana then unceremoniously blocks those trans women. People she does not block, however, are terfs celebrating trans exclusion in the replies side by side these other mild criticisms.
• Some trans women on tumblr start posting about how it’s a pretty big red flag that Dana Terrace is selectively blocking transfeminine fans whilst allowing open terfs to celebrate a lack of trans women, because that is actually pretty alarming & concerning: not all people who support the rest of the LGBTQ community support trans women, it’s actually pretty big in the news right now
• During this time, it is discovered that Dana Terrace has quietly deleted her tweet in support of Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur. This also concerns trans women in the fandom.
• Some trans women point out that it’s frustrating to find out that the only openly transfeminine person working on the show is Kayleigh McKee, who is playing the character who was calling Frankie the wrong name and threatening her.
• Some trans women point out that whilst transfeminine actors should be able to play whoever they want, it is frustrating that in the animation industry most of the voice acting roles are only available to trans women who are comfortable playing men. Nobody said that it is transphobic that a trans woman is playing a cis man. That’s a massive exaggeration of a point that amounted to a transfeminine version of “Arabs should have more acting roles available to them than just terrorists” or “Black men should have more acting roles available to them than just drug dealers”. The point isn’t “Grrrr a trans woman is playing a cis man and she was forced to!” it’s “Well yeah, of course the trans woman playing a cis man is comfortable with it. No trans woman who feels otherwise is able to get any voice work”. Pretty prolific transfeminine voice actors on this website have posted about it. Obviously Kayleigh McKee is playing about how she’s fine playing Sparky (and I’m sure she is) — she likes job security, and trans women who are picky about not playing men don’t have any.
• These posts are decried, dismissed, exaggerated & strawmanned by people like OP to misrepresent legitimate criticism from transfeminine people as self-obsessed delusional harassment campaigns bullying a cis woman with a much larger platform than them
• The trans women in question are in turn actually harassed — for example, somebody send me rape threats because I posted criticising Dana Terrace for retracting her support of Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur. I have had literally dozens of asks calling me crazy, mocking me, calling me delusional & selfcentred and trying to “force my way into women’s spaces”.
• The Knights of Guinevere tag has become a slurry of posts from non trans women saying “Trans women are such delusional bullies for saying there’s any transphobia surrounding this show or the fandom” meanwhile the other half is fanart from open TERFs drawing the characters wearing TERF pride colors personally thanking Dana Terrace for shutting out the trannies
• People start making posts like this exaggerating everything that happened so they can dismiss any criticism from transfeminine people as delusional bullies & intentionally twist the timeline into the wrong order to make it look like Dana was blocking people due to a large wave of criticism rather than the other way around
• Everybody ignores the terfs celebrating her in her replies, terfs filling the tag, and the fact that Dana Terrace retracted her support for Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur in order to present a misleading version of events.
Please stop lying. Dana Terrace wasn’t harassed at all. I and any other trans woman talking about this has faced so much more harassment since we started talking about it than Dana Terrace did — each.
When you present trans women as crazy bitches bullying cis women into letting us be part of their thing.., you start to sound transphobic yourself.
No one gets to be shocked that some trans women are claiming that Dana Terrace and the KoG community are TWERFs when literally all that has happened over the past few days is both her and the community treating trans women like dog shit and ignoring the fucking plethora of TWERFs that flocked to the community after the fact.
All I see in the KoG tag is just post after post after post after post after post of fucks like OP going "Ugh, fucking stupid trans women, how dare they criticize Dana Terrace!" While doing fuck all about the TWERFs getting comfy in their space.
Remember that "1 Nazi sits at a table with 4 others, now there's 5 Nazis." analogy?? Remember the Nazi bar post everyone reposts occasionally?? Until you all start doing something about the literal hate movement making itself welcome in your community, none of you get to complain about being labeled as part of that movement.
