About your tags on my post: I don't know when Unique came out either. She wears a dress in the next episode and no one has much of a reaction to it (that I can remember) so I just assumed that everyone knew. I thought they said it in season 3 because she was a big deal in 3x21 and everything but who knows? Maybe it's like how Kurt never really came out to anyone after his dad. People just assumed and he just stopped correcting them? Maybe that's what Unique did? Does she ever call herself trans?
Okayyy so I’ve been like skimming through the episodes since her intro and like. She basically just tells Kurt and Mercedes that she has an alter ego named Unique and explains that Unique is a girl. And when they’re telling Sue about it they still refer to Unique with he/him pronouns. But then they see Unique again and they use she/her. And Sue just calls Unique “he/she”. But everything out of Sue’s mouth is crap so we don’t need to talk about anything else she says in regards to Unique :)
I mean I’m pretty sure everyone just thought that “Unique” was just a drag persona or something. So they freak out when she wears makeup to school bc they thought it was part of a stage costume. I mean even in the fifth episode they’re still calling her Wade and using he/him pronouns. And surprisingly Finn is the only one talking sense and using correct pronouns
And then Unique comes back in the 8th episode and Marley calls her Wade but then immediately corrects herself. And Unique says the thing about her parents:
“They're trying to protect me. But what they need to understand is if I'm not being true to myself, at least when I'm performing, then there won't be anything left inside me to protect. So they can keep talking about sending me to a camp for little boys who like to wear dresses, but I will not and I cannot be ashamed of who I am or how I look.”
So, great, way to casually drop that Unique’s parents want to send her to some kind of conversion camp, that’s cool. Anyway it basically gets dropped after that, and everyone’s cool with it. At least until Feud when Ryder has to be transphobic for one episode.
But yeah I went through the episodes and they literally don’t say “trans” until Sweet Dreams. When Unique says she’s taking birth control to make her boobs bigger and that “trans kids everywhere are doing it”
So. Just the other week, I was going through ancient facebook messenger conversations of mine and deleting them. Stuff dating back to like 2009. And one of the last convos I had with one friend was about the new episodes of Glee, circa late 2012. So we were talking about s4 and the newbies and The Role You Were Born To Play and we were literally both like “haha it’s so funny that Figgins thinks Unique is really a girl haha :)”
so like. Yikes. I mean obviously the main issue was me just being an uninformed, ignorant teenager who didn’t understand that stuff because I really hadn’t been exposed to it at all. But I also don’t think they did a great job of explaining it in the show. But either way, it definitely went over my head as a kid. So lump me in there with the fictional teenage boys written by fifty year old men, I was part of the problem