I have a hot take. I've been thinking about it long and hard and cannot stay silent anymore. It's about the increasing popularity of boypussy in fandom.
Let me preface this with a couple things:
I love trans headcanons. I think they're essential to fandom, since fandom often overlaps with queer culture and identity; and
What I'm about to talk about is a specific and narrow trope that gets associated with trans identity but is not exclusive to it.
I'll talk exclusively about the jaydick community because I don't really care about others enough to have an opinion about them.
I'd talk about the feminized version of this if it was even remotely as popular as the masculinized version. It just isn't, and femslash in this community is rare as it is (that's a whole other discussion), so I'm sticking with talking about M/M.
At the end of the day, write and read what you want.
The boypussy trope is gender essentialism with extra steps.
Gender essentialism is the belief that there are inherent traits associated with biological gender/sex. It tends to be a harmful belief that excludes people from the expression that feels right for them and forcing people into binaries regardless of if they fit.
How I see this play out in the jaydick community is through compounded traits that get assigned to one of the boys, depending on who is the pussy-haver. In other words, the one with the vagina is almost exclusively also the bottom, and behaves submissively, and more likely to want to indulge in breeding/pregnancy kinks, and usually the one to adopt stereotypically feminine clothing or traits.
And to reiterate: this is not the same as a trans headcanon. The two may correlate/overlap but they are not the same. The boypussy trope fetishizes the inversion of cis genitalia and the gender expectations for that character. This sounds cool, because no man, cis, trans, or otherwise, should be forced to play a certain role; but scratch that surface and we get the automatic assumption that having a vagina makes you the submissive, breedable, and feminine partner. Further, the boypussy trope doesn't seem to ever consider the trans identity of the character. In other words, they don't seem to be trans except for having the "wrong" genitals. (I use "wrong" on purpose because I think that some of the draw in this trope is the shock value. I don't think anyone needs any specific genitals to identify how they want.) That might be a form of escapism for some, but it isn't for everyone.
When this was relegated to omegaverse AU back in the day, this made sense for two reasons. One, genitalia is usually connected to secondary gender, meaning that, yes, someone's genitalia often determines their place in society, but the character has an entire identity that encompasses that, too, that doesn't have to align with their role. Two, omegaverse is so popular that fans know what they're signing up for (for the most part) when they come across those fics/art pieces and can opt in or out at their leisure.
I'm seeing the boypussy trope spread across the fandom, outside of spaces that have specific expectations, and my fear is that in the rush to adopt this fetish (because that's what it is, no shame about it), we're going to unintentionally cause harm.
I don't really have a call to action for you, aside from asking that y'all tag your fics, art, and posts appropriately. But I also couldn't keep quiet about this anymore because I want fandom to remain fun and accessible for everyone.
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annaxmalina
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