Shrieking Nonsense at Fearful Things

she magicked my leg-between parts with her bitch-wizardry

[twitblr]

[vaspider]

Just a reminder that Sandman said Trans Rights in 1991.

[vaspider]

If you have not read A Game of You, and if you didn't read A Game of You in the early 90s when it was first released, it can be hard to understand how much it meant back then, and what it was dealing with.

Wanda was the first time I saw a trans person depicted sympathetically in any media. She was the first time I saw a trans person who wasn't a freak, a punchline, or a joke, presented as something ridiculous, to be horrified about or feared. It's certainly the first time I heard anyone say their chosen name was their Real Name, or was introduced to the concept of what we would now call a deadname. Wanda is clearly depicted as a "clockable" trans woman - she doesn't perfectly pass, she's got broad shoulders and big hands and she's drawn with a girlbulge in the scenes when she's in her underpants bc she got woken up at night - and she's a trans woman who either doesn't want or is afraid of GCS. She doesn't fit the neat Harry Benjamin mold of trans women who all want nothing except to get surgery, pass and go stealth. That's pretty normal today, but then?

That was radical. That was wild. That was freedom. Not within the trans community itself, per se, where there were and always have been lots of trans women who didn't fit that mold? But as presented in a widely-released comic book? Holy shit!

Hazel comments on Wanda's penis at one point, in a mildly confused way, and Wanda brushes it off, lets Hazel know that isn't cool. Same with her asserting which name is her Real Name. For a sheltered kid who was in high school in rural Pennsylvania when A Game of You came out? I actually learned a lot about how to be polite and cool to trans people from the boundaries Wanda sets for herself in A Game of You.

What about Thessaly?

One of the biggest objections to A Game of You's presentation of Wanda is Thessaly's denunciation of her as "male." Much has been made of that as an indication of @neil-gaiman perpetuating a transphobic viewpoint, but let's be clear:

Thessaly is an asshole.

Okay, that aside - Thessaly is an asshole - she's also reflective of the viewpoints of Dianic Wicca, which was on the upswing at the time, and the bioessentialism of which actively poisoned pagan communities. Those communities are still dealing with the fallout of that. When I first read A Game Of You, I understood who was being referenced immediately, because I was also trying to push out of my Evangelical upbringing, and Dianic Wicca was pretty much all there was, then. I knew what was being referenced, and A Game Of You actually showed me the problem with that sort of absolutist thinking. Who wants Gods like that?

"But what about the statement that the Gods don't recognize Wanda as a woman? Is that a moral statement one way or the other that a Final Authority doesn't view Wanda as a woman?"

If you read the rest of Sandman, you should be aware that being a God doesn't make you anything but a pain in the ass. Gods aren't inherently anything in Sandman, really.

There is one figure who gets pretty close to being a real moral authority in that universe, one who tells Dream to get over himself, one who approaches humanity with love and compassion. One who meets people where they are and sees them for who they are.

Death.

And in Death's company, Wanda is a woman, treated like a friend, like one of the girls.

The moral authority of that universe spoke quite clearly.

Now, there's a lot to be said about whether Wanda needed to die - I have always wished she hadn't - or about The Connoisseur. The latter is a choice that wasn't great at the time and really hasn't aged well.

Anyway, Wanda was really important in me understanding what being trans even is, which is part of how I came out as an adult, finally. My original trades from the early 90s have gone missing, and I'm heartbroken about it, but I am hoping if I rip my basement apart when I get home from my wife's GCS, I'll find them.

You should read A Game Of You. I wish I could gift you all the meaning and weight it had for me at the time. It was so powerful, and I can't wait to see how she shows up in the show.

And Neil? Maybe this time, Wanda can live.

[lessimitationmorereality]

Saw a comment before, complaining that he doesn't understand what he's talking about because Wanda appears as a perfect passing cis woman after death. Uh. If he'd drawn her as still "visibly trans" after death, they'd be yelling about reinforcing stereotypes and "see he's showing she's still a man" or thing like that.

Would that have been a more radical presentation? Sure. And more complex, but again that opens it to even more misinterpretation.

Most critical thing: There's only so much that can be done with one character. One character will never represent everything perfectly.

I've seen older trans women say it was the first mainstream media to make them feel truly seen. And if this single character still looked her living, clockable trans self after death, how much despair might that have caused? One character, in 1992- more radical, surely, but more appropriate? Hard to say.

And it's a blindingly clear "shot fired" to cis people- she is and has always been A Woman, they just wouldn't let themselves see past physical characteristics. This has some problem implications, for sure. But it's a very clear, positive message. We do have to consider the message going out to the majority cis audience in this way. It's a hard balance.

And absolutely agree, hopefully this can be adjusted. Make the necessary changes. Done right could be a real gamechanger.

[vaspider]

I always understood it to be not that she was a perfectly passing cis woman, but that she looked in death the way she had always looked in her head. Maybe that's just because the way I have always looked in my head isn't the way I actually look.

[roach-works]

also at the very end: god, witches, the narrative constraints of an epic quest, and wanda's own parents had all come out and said that wanda wasn't REALLY a woman, that they should get to define wanda's gender for her, because they knew better. they had authority, they were authorities.

but barbara looked at the gravestone and said 'no. you're all wrong. wanda was exactly who she said she was.' and wrote her real name there in lipstick.

that was perfect.

[glamourweaver]

Also if you’ve been following Neil talking about this topic, he is cognizant of how the story’s importance at the time doesn’t necessary translate to a currently resonant important message, especially given the show being set in the 2020s. As such he has said he is deferring to the leadership of the trans and non-binary writers in the Sandman writers room on how best to handle Game of You if they get there.

[vaspider]

Yes, I know. That it doesn't translate to modern day the way it was when it was written has been discussed - but what I hadn't seen talked about is the context of when it first came out, and what it meant to those of us who saw ourselves in it for the first time.

There's a tendency to throw out all of our past stories once we outgrow any aspect of them or the community grows or changes, as if they never mattered. It's important to talk about the context of the stories, to talk about when they were published and why it mattered.

Lou Sullivan and Keith Haring died of AIDS during the years that A Game of You came out. Marsha P. Johnson died -- was probably murdered -- during it, and Brandon Teena was murdered between the run and the release of the trade. The year after the trade came out was the most lethal year of the AIDS epidemic and the year that Tyra Hunter was left to bleed by EMTs and died after they stopped post-auto-accident care upon discovering she had a penis.

This was the world of A Game Of You, the world where my father gleefully repeated to me William F Buckley's modest proposal that gay men forcibly have their HIV status tattooed on their asses. The world where most of my friends just assumed that all gay people -- and all transsexuals, the polite word for us then -- had AIDS. I certainly thought I'd just end up dead one way or another before 30.

It has been talked about a lot how and why it doesn't translate, but it is impossible to expect people who weren't alive then, or were too young to understand, the sort of emotional freight this storyline carried, why it was important in the first place, and why people get defensive of it. I've seen people -- for example -- write about Thessaly's denunciation without putting it into the Dianic Wicca context - and that context is what makes it matter. Absent that context, it's just some old woman being a dick. With it, it's a commentary on the harm occurring in the real world at the time.

We've been talking for years about how it is a dated story, but I had never seen another trans person say "I needed this story, and here's the context I came to it in."

So I explained as best I could.

[greatgodempresspan]

RE: the “gods not recognising her as a woman” - elsewhere in Sandman there’s a story of Death coming across a woman who has been given powers and immortality by Ra and her response is basically “He’s doing this? Still making soldiers to battle Apep? I keep telling him, I took her the other side *ages* ago.”

As a teen I remember reading this and taking it to mean Death was indicating Ra might be going senile(?), but for the purposes of this thread it sure does hammer home the idea that the gods that appear in Sandman often don’t know what’s up.

[vaspider]

That's a great point! I love that particular story.

[flareonfloof]

broke: reading the dracula novel

woke: signing up for emails to experience dracula in real time

bespoke: experiencing the story of dracula third-hand via gossip amongst your mutuals’ networks

[chameowmille-deactivated2023062]

walkin

[galvantual-moved-deactivated202]

y'all want some fumking cat?

[night-time-anxi-tea]

Buddy, friend, mate, pal-o, why did you reblog this so many times? How many times did you even reblog it? Why did you fill my dash with this cat?

[galvantual-moved-deactivated202]

i do not know how many times i have reblogged it

but i have reached the post limit once today amd i,xm not afraid to reach it again

[jonpertwee]

The nuclear family setup is so stupid. We should all live in interconnected tunnels with our friends.

[ampervadasz]

[were-ralph]

WHAT THE FUCK HELLO???

[catwingsthespatula]

My sister puts glasses away upside down.

Because our mother does,

Because her mother did,

Because her mother lived through the Dust Bowl.

One day my father sat me down and told me about epigenetics.

How the trauma he went through

As a child in an abusive home

Wrote itself into his DNA

And, in turn, into mine.

How he and his brothers,

In various ways,

Are all sick from it.

How I might be too, someday,

And I’m not sure I’m not.

I hear people say,

When will we get back to normal?

And I think of a woman born in the twenty-first century

Who puts her glasses away differently

Because of what her great-grandmother endured

Ninety years before.

[roguemonsterfucker]

I’m suddenly in love with the idea of a demon taking over the world and then his human (kidnapped) companion is just live-blogging their experience with him.

“I saw his minion decapitate a senator today and then we went for ice cream.”

[roguemonsterfucker]

“I told him about the phrase ‘eat the rich’ and he took it literally. He said Bezos didn’t taste good.”

[roguemonsterfucker]

“I told him how shitty the US healthcare system is and now he’s reforming it because he wants all his human servants to be healthy.”

[slitherpunk]

*exports you as a jpeg* *and turns the quality waaaaay down*

[devipotato]

[xdead-god-dreamingx]

[wedding-shemp]

Tiktok SEEMS like it fills the same ecological niche as Tumblr circa 2014, but everything that happens on tiktok is the result of some multitrillion dollar conglomerate setting a Rube Goldberg machine I'm motion that makes people act insane , and this leads to an increase in profits for someone somehow. Tumblr was just good old fashioned mass hysteria.

[literary-potato]

“When someone on here stole human bones for a magic ritual it was because there was genuinely something wrong with them. If someone on tiktok did it it would be because they were trying to sell you shovels”

@clarascuro you can’t leave this in the replies

[grimeclown]

Wtf do u even mean “the thread of prophecy is severed” if the grand design is so fragil as to come unraveled by th severing of a single thread then maybe there’s a better Destiny in store for those who hold tha scissors -_-

[grimeclown]

I think if he was TRULY essential he woulda had more fire resistance tbh

[tlirsgender]

Everybody needs that one friend who's better at piracy than you so you can ask for links to tv shows or perhaps movies and they just Have them. They're like genies. This is a priceless gift when unfamiliar links scare you when you try to google Watch free online yourself. Very literally it does not have a price. You aren't paying for it

[headless-horsepossum]

My uncle is autistic so he has sensory sensitivities, and he's largely nonverbal so he can't tell you what those sensitivities Are, so what he does is, if you give him a shirt that is a bad texture, he goes and gets his scissors and he cuts it into tiny little pieces so no one can ever ask him to wear it ever again, and the thing is is that he is so totally right

[headless-horsepossum]

This post is okay to rb and also if you are neurodivergent when you are In A Situation you are advised to think "is this when uncle matt would go and get the scissors" and if the answer is yes then it is time to put your foot down

[charlattes]

[katyamxo-deactivated20230630]

SCREAMING

[getoutofmyjaneway]

To the woman that inspired countless girls and people of color, we will never forget you.

You will always be in our hearts.

Thank you for going where no woman had gone before.

Nichelle Nichols 1932- 2022

[spoonwizardd]

gender is a performance and im getting heckled by those old gay muppets

[milkflys]