wait but i care about your thoughts on sam and gender, i wanna hear all about it
@prettygayrose said: I feel terrible for asking multiple things...but I NEED TO KNOW....PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE GET INTO YOUR FEELINGS ON SAM'S GENDER I WILL BE SO GRATEFUL!!
HI sorry im answering this so late. its been a whole ass week huh
i know sam as a trans lesbian is super popular & i think it’s rad but i also dig sam as a trans man and here are my thots about that, with the obvious disclaimer that i’m not really a professor i just play one on tv:
obvs sam as trans either way is like...since birth there’s something ~wrong~ about him you know except the only thing thats wrong is that everyone thinks hes a girl and hes not
i also like aspec sam and i feel like i read somewhere that trans people are more likely to be aspec though i can’t find the source so that may or may not be true. (EDIT okay i found this study which gives the percentage of trans people IDing as aspec at 4%, which is 4 times higher than the infamous figure of 1% that floats around about ace people in the general population, but it should also be noted that trans people are more likely to be any kind of queer - gay bi etc - overall. anyway aspec transman sam winchester is my point)
i think john was always kind of disappointed that dean wasn’t mary and it would be a neat foil if he was equally disappointed that sam wasn’t himself. the irony there being in fandom and in canon to some extent dean favors mary and sam favors john. so dean is a boy which is not mary’s gender and john is equally disappointed that sam “is a girl” which is not john’s gender except sam’s not a girl
john always belittling sam and never listening to him and making him feel like he can’t be trusted is actually now just misogyny bc he thinks sam is a woman. and dean’s the favorite by virtue of being “a real man” and dean’s not even that manly. it would be INFURIATING
the earlier seasons and for sure their childhoods have this thing about sam being small and weak and usually in need of protecting and also frequently underestimated which are all things that, in fiction, we associate with little sisters, which is what the world thinks sam is to dean
my biggest preference for trans guy sam is how well sam grows into manhood in the late seasons. late season sam is reserved and quiet about his pain, and he takes on protective and leadership roles, slips into this head-of-the-family sort of position (when dean kicks mary out of the bunker in s12, sam is the one she looks to after - like he gets the final say in whether or not that stands). and i’m not saying these things can’t be true of someone of any gender, but those mannerisms are all things we traditionally associate with men, especially in fiction, and sam embodies them SO WELL
and again, this is a stark contrast to dean heart-on-my-sleeve winchester, who to some degree had to be emotionally abused into his protective role of sam, and has always struggled with the more “traditional” aspects of manhood to the point where masculinity for him is a performance he has to get a good grade on - vs with sam, it’s just part of Who He Is
and struggles w/ masculinity being something they can sort of relate to each other with and bond over
like we watch sam become a man in supernatural so it would be cool to mirror it with him almost LITERALLY becoming a man
think about sam “becoming” something sinister in seasons 2-4 and he grapples with maybe just becoming who he’s meant to be. think about him liking to hang out with ruby and get away from dean because ruby doesn’t misgender and wants him the way a woman wants a man
we all said “cas bringing trans man dean back the way he wants to be” but cas bringing trans man sam back the way he wants to be 🥺
as sam becomes more outwardly masculine-presenting he realizes the “boy version” of himself looks a lot like john and then he has to deal with THAT
john seeing dean in mary being foiled by mary seeing john in sam when she comes back and the baby she thought was her daughter is now her son and a man too
anyway! trans man sam.
[spn masterpost]
