so me and @titsgirlbuffy on our joint watch noticed this line (in my header image!) from btvs s1e7 and immediately thought hehehe well he said he’s not a man, that means He’s Trans. partly due to the existing bank of star trek characters who clearly meant they werent human but just happened to phrase it a certain way – its great fun to just take these lines out of context and run with them
[ID: angel in a darkly lit scene saying “I can walk like a man, but I’m not one.”]
the thing is tho the further we got the more trans angel material we kept finding. like we weren’t even looking it was just There. so it went from basically a joke to the actual lens through which we’re now watching ats so. here’s the trans angel thesis post i guess!
so obviously this line was intended to mean hes a demon. its from the episode where we first find out hes a vampire, so the writers are clearly using “not a man” to mean “not a human being” as mentioned before. but then there’s the flashbacks in ats s1e15 to when he was alive and definitely human which…
[ID: three screenshots of angel and his father in 1700s dress. his father says “It’s a son I wished for! A man! Instead, God gave me you.” while Angel looks hurt]
i remember another post (which i will try and find and link to) saying that darla was trapped by societal confines of womanhood and she was drawn to angel bc he was being crushed by societal expectations of masculinity – “being a man” was something he resoundingly failed at in life. crucially also his birth name, Liam, is left off his headstone and no one ever calls him it again. in contrast to spike for example, who still responds to William, Angel seems to consider Liam to effectively be his deadname (which is funny yk given he only used it when he was alive), and both of his chosen names, Angelus and Angel, are much less masculine.
spike regularly refers to himself as a man, he also sometimes acknowledges that he’s not technically a man meaning not human, but for him this is paired with wishing he could be a man (”i know that i’m a monster, but you treat me like a man” btvs s5e22, “to be a kind of man…” s7e22). in every sense masculinity isn’t something that seems to cause him any kind of distress to be associated with, and while he still has a fascinating relationship to gender i think you’d be hard pushed to say he doesn’t identify as male (tho i’d love to hear any takes on that!!).
on the other hand, here we have one of the few times angel willingly refers to himself as a man in btvs s3e10
[ID: two screenshots of angel, crying and facing buffy, saying “It’s not the demon in me that needs killing, Buffy. It’s the man.”]
if there is a part of himself that he sees as a man, its something he associates with guilt, failure and weakness. obviously there’s other layers to this scene but i do think the word choice is interesting!!
and then theres what i consider one of the seminal trans angel episodes, ats s2e6. first of all he admits that he changes his appearance based on how he wants other people to see him, that he’s worried about what they think. the character he’s talking to in these scenes tells him since he doesn’t have an actual reflection, his outward appearance only matters when considering the people around him, and that there’s two versions of him – “the image you’ve worked so hard to create, and the real you.”
[ID: Angel, looking concerned and saying “Maybe my persona is a little affected”]
his outward - masculine - presentation is something he maintains for the sake of what others think of him, it’s not an authentic expression of who he is (see this post by @buffyology on how he literally seems to get his whole wardrobe directly from mens fashion magazines). also in this episode, he refers to the aspects of himself that he’s repressing as “it” – dehumanising but also degendering the things he doesn’t want to come to the surface
[ID: four screenshots of dialogue between angel and another character out of frame. he asks angel “it?” to which angel responds “the demon.” the other character then says “ah. But the demon is you.” angel says “no”, the other character responds “yes. That’s the thing you’ve spent so much energy trying to conceal.”]
he explicitly labels the things about himself he’s afraid of other people seeing with a genderless pronoun, lumping in the demonic aspects of himself alongside the other things being hidden by his artificial masculine outward presentation. he hates himself for being a vampire, and for having done awful things in the past, but also for failing to live up to the expectations of masculinity that he’s still hollowly trying to perform now as he was when he was alive.
masculinity is tied to humanity which is tied to morality – he ascribes the bad parts of himself to “the demon” which is also genderless, he equates his failure to be a good person with his failure to be a man. in ats s1e15 his father tells him he’s neither a son nor a man, and later on in the same episode darla tells a freshly turned angelus that he’ll never be able to get his father’s approval and that his defeat will last lifetimes – he’s still trying to prove himself a man and he’s never going to succeed. in ats s2e5 we get this exchange as darla burns angel with a cross
[ID: three screenshots of a standoff between angel and darla, in the first two he holds her by the throat while she burns him with a crucifix. she says “See? No matter how good a boy you are… God doesn’t want you.” In the third screenshot she stands apart and says “But I still do.”]
Darla’s word choice in this scene also links masculinity to morality and humanity - essentially saying he will never be a good enough person nor perform masculinity convincingly enough to be accepted by anyone but her, because he’s a vampire and he can’t change this fact of who his is.
but it’s not a moral failing not to want to be a man, and as much as angel tries to hide and repress it it’s still going to come through because it’s just who he is. while trying his best to Look like a man, he’s still finding ways to assert his identity through his choice of name and aversion to gendered language
[ID: two screenshots cropped to just show subtitles - “More than you might think, Mr. Angel.” “Just Angel”]
[ID: two screenshots cropped to just show subtitles - “Yeah, I’m gonna have to go with Dead Boy on this one.” “Could you not call me that?”] And then there’s this scene where he’s talking about the differences between him and Cordelia and like, i get the joke but also. come on. he cannot commit to calling himself a man without chickening out
[ID: two screenshots dodgily cropped and stitched together to just show subtitles - “Human. Vampire. Woman. Man… pire.”] admittedly most of these lines have fairly obvious intended meanings and me and @titsgirlbuffy were likely picking up on the subtext mostly because we were watching both shows through this lens. it could be argued as a niche reading - up until ats s3e6 that is, in which there’s a guy called Billy who can curse men to become fucked up and evil, who tries to curse Angel, only for him to be immune. A curse. That only affects men. to which he is, randomly, immune.
[ID: four screenshots cropped to just show subtitles - “[Cordelia] I don’t get it.” Angel replies “I don’t get it, either.” and Cordelia continues “I mean, you’re a man, so, why didn’t Billy’s touch affect you?”] I cannot stress enough that they genuinely didn’t have a good reason – whoever wrote this episode hadn’t come up with a decent explanation as to why angel was immune to the Curse That Affects Men. This is not a great episode but I do consider it to be basically canon confirmation that Angel at the very least isn’t cis.So to conclude, Angel is nonbinary/transfemme and has been trying and failing to perform masculinity well enough to hide this since he was alive. He objects to being called masculine terms and almost never refers to himself as a man, he changed his name to something more androgynous and refuses to go by his old name, and he admits to dressing and acting a certain way to seem more normal and masculine in other people’s eyes. He associates the parts of himself that he hates, fears, and represses, with genderlessness. And he is immune to a curse that only affects men. thank you for reading this long fucking post!
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