any thoughts or headcanons on trans jonathan byers??
I am cis so I don’t think I can contribute much to this hc, but I support this completely! I actually have gotten an ask a while back for trans Steve too! And probably a year or so ago I posted about Nancy being trans, maybe because I saw another post hcing her as trans, and there’s a few Nancy edits floating around that are unintentionally the trans flag colors and it’s awesome.
For trans Jonathan of course Joyce would be 101% supportive. Jonathan would probably tell her as soon as he was sure because he trusts her not to judge him. We see that in 1x01 when he feels comfortable enough to admit his guilt about Will’s disappearance and she comforts him while he cries. I just feel this family is very open with each other emotionally and something like Jonathan being trans would not phase Joyce at all. She’d help Jonathan do research on it, and they’d drive to Indianapolis together to get more resources (I can’t imagine a small town library like Hawkins’ would have much) and Jonathan would be so excited to learn about Stonewall and Marsha P.Johnson.
I can imagine Joyce going to a hospital with Jonathan to help him pursue top surgery and being incensed at the prejudice against trans boys and men, and trans people in general. The way we see her show her anger at Brenner in s1? The same sort of anger would come out in the face of transphobia against her son. She makes sure Jonathan binds in a healthy way, too. When she does something wrong and Jonathan hesitantly points it out, she doesn’t make him feel guilty, and she promises to do better, and then actually does.
I still hc that Nancy would fall in love with Jonathan no matter if he was trans or not. She knew him before he came out as trans and is the quickest to get used to using he/him pronouns for him. They’d been friends since they were in kindergarten, just like Mike and Will. Nancy was only the third person Jonathan came out to, after Joyce and Will, when they were both twelve. She hugged him tight and said she’d help as much as she could. She goes with Jonathan to the thrift stores to help him shop for boys clothes, and Jonathan quickly learns Nancy has great fashion sense and goes to her for advice sometimes.
In this ‘verse I like to think Karen would be accepting too, and eventually Jonathan would give Nancy and Joyce permission to talk to Karen about it too, and she’d help Joyce where she could. Ted is just too oblivious to contribute anything, Karen has to tell him to just shut up about it after a point (”Joyce has two sons, Ted, get used to it. If you can’t use the right pronouns for Jonathan, don’t talk about him” and just twelve year old Nancy grinning with pride at her mother.)
I know this is more about the people who know Jonathan than Jonathan himself, but I am cis and I don’t want to talk about things I don’t fully understand, anon. I hope this is okay!