[about to rehash a point ive made 20 times but slightly different this time] okay see the thing is that, despite what people with negative amounts of ability to recognize transmisogyny in their pet milquetoast webserial* will tell you, twig blatantly and obviously presents jessie as uninteresting, without intellectual merit, without meaningful contribution, without right to respect, etc., the second it becomes clear she is a trans girl rather than a cis boy.
what's really something about this is that jessie experiences constant interpersonal dismissal from the cis boy protagonist, who sees her as smart, strong, funny, interesting, deserving of respect he doesn't afford many people, and just generally his life's top priority prior to her transition. after she transitions, that all evaporates, and he simply just no longer gives her the time of day in any meaningful regard. they're supposed to be dating, but he views her as obviously untouchable and unattractive, and her real role in his life is to be a useful doormat for him.
in this way sylvester is kind of a hauntingly accurate and plausible representation of commonplace real-world transmisogyny, because their relationship isn't supposed to be negative--he's a mouthpiece for what the cis male author genuinely believes is the most positive and accepting possible way to treat trans women. when sylvester sees jessie's expertise being immediately dismissed and ignored by the men she's attempting to lead, his venomous internal remark along the lines of "well, that's what you get when you decide to be a woman...duh" (& complete lack of any support for her) is, very obviously, just the type of thing the author thinks about trans women.
and this is all particularly blatant and disturbing because wildbow works generally aren't even misogynistic in this way. women are people in wildbow works. they have interiority and autonomy and real personalities and are constantly taking up meaningful space in the narrative. wildbow works generally Like And Care About Women (Real), to the extent where i would recommend e.g. worm to someone who wants relevant/interesting female characters and is willing to put up with some other issues.
in twig, sylvester is probably by far and away wildbow's most misogynistic protagonist, but he's still not reality-warping women into being uninteresting doormats. he dismisses lillian and mary's conversations offhand plenty of times, but there's always still another moment where he's fixating on how smart they are, and how much he needs to care about and support their inner world/emotional wellbeing. he fixates on how skilled mary is and how well they work as a team; on how lillian is so smart and cute and going to be The Best Doctor, so he has to make his own life about setting up her future. the way he completely disregards jessie in every aspect after her transition is such a blatant, blatant outlier, and it could not more obviously demonstrate twig's opinion that transgender women are A Secret Third Thing (Gender) that's Worse Than Cis Women and Lucky Just To Be Tolerated. twig does not think jessie can be interesting or skilled or smart or funny or confident or anything other than an endlessly accepting doormat after she comes out.
anyway. where i Wanted to go with this before i started joker monologuing is that sylvester is a painfully realistic depiction of mundane transmisogyny, the kind that really tears women's self worth into shreds--because he's a mouthpiece for an author who thinks that way--but, like. Twig shouldn't have to be painfully realistic in this way. If we're going to ship our 1920s cishet human experiment boy and trans human experiment girl the novel should be going full throttle on finding an amusingly psychologically bizarre way to make it plausible for this psychologically bizarre 1920s cishet human experiment boy to Be A #Feminist.
like. i think instead of being an evil boyfriend Or magically being a perfect one he should be, like, generically vaguely misogynistic but still at very passable levels for the era prior to jessie transitioning. but then once she comes out he starts thinking some shit like Women get their smartness ignored all the time 🤔.... Jessie (most special smartest favoritest interestingest belovedest bestest friend Forever) is a woman now.... 🤔 and then starts just straight up poisoning people who don't shut the hell up and listen when jessie is talking.
absurd quantities of the book prior to jessies transition are about establishing that sylvester sees jessie as this incredibly important wonderful person who he respects and trusts immensely and is endlessly grateful to and enamored with; instead of doing the depressing realistic thing where this all evaporates when she transitions, let's see him use his hyper-plastic human experiment brain to immediately invent 1920s vigilante administered transfeminism to resolve the tension of the world suddenly not respecting the person like 65% of his brain cells are solely dedicated to mentally hyping up. he's a human experiment in biopunk world who textually believes that frankenstein type mad science is the path to a better world, let me see him twist this to start mentally waxing poetic about how his transgender girlfriend is transgressing the laws of nature, like how twigverse frankensteins monsters transcend the laws of life and death, so that their powerful love must no longer be doomed by sexuality incompatibilities. Come on. There's funny/interesting ways to explore the potential psyche here. Let me see him just actually start threatening to shoot people who don't appreciate jessies awesome unimpeachable power in being, in his expert opinion, one of this planets two smartest and specialest individuals** [fluttershy smoking weed and a girl video voice] and a GIRL!
*i realize that many people who didn't realize this prior to the joint lakesbian v1leblood liveblog are trans women who read it at a formative age and were significantly impacted by the rare depiction of any trans woman whatsoever who was really cool for large portions of the book and also just wasn't an obscene caricature; i feel the need to clarify that i am not sideswiping at these women but rather recollecting that time a cis man on here said i was making things up for acknowledging the shift in how jessie is presented over the course of twig
**the other individual is him, and he is currently laying prone on the floor editing a dress onto jessies old wanted poster and adding that she is "devastatingly beautiful," to match the "devastatingly handsome" he added to his
