I've seen people call Lestat THE quintessential cis man, but To Me, a fully cisgender reading of Lestat just doesn't really make sense and is boring. One of his earliest memories, a character-defining moment, is him identifying with and empathizing with women who were burned at the stake for not aligning with Christian patriarchal views. His transgender dad-mom lives vicariously through his manhood, and he feels a deep, unshakable connection to her and has a fascination with her appearance, specifically her feminine features. His only physical difference is that his features are "cruder"; comparing his appearance to hers is the only time he speaks with an almost negative connotation about his own looks. And they mirror each other, but as inverses. But this is because he is a cisgender man, obviously, and just wants to fuck his mom. Only Gabrielle gets to have gender stuff going on; nothing else is there. And of course, he made Claudia because it was the only way he could create something, just like how his mother created him, and how he created her. And the first thing he says is "I'm like a mother, I want a child," but this is all very cisgender of him, nothing there at all. And Akasha targets him because he is the quintessential man, but she is wrong, and he can not stand to be this figure for her. And her abuse of him, which happened because of this quintessential manhood she saw, shifts him into hypermasculinity, his body becoming stronger and unambiguously monstrous, and he hates it; he experiences dysphoria even. And while this dysphoria is not over his gender, it is important that these changes in his body were so tied to Akasha's gendering of him. just things I chew on...
