#wanda langkowski

[616witch]

ALPHA FLIGHT PRIDE FLAGS.

500 by 500px. credit appreciated but not necessary. flag list under the cut.

note; if you misgender sasquatch on this post i will attack you with rocks.

trans pride sasquatch, asexual pride master of the world, heteroflexible pride guardian, butch pride vindicator, bisexual pride shaman, disability pride puck, quebec pride northstar, straight ally pride aurora and lesbian pride marrina

[brw]

I am actually so curious for a breakdown on the Alpha Flight fandom’s transmisogyny. I’m not in that fandom and my knowledge of the characters really only exists in tangent to their appearances in X-Men comics, so I’m just curious about what the fuck is going on over there, knowing that you wouldn’t be pulling that out of thin air.

I'm not sure if you've been following my blog for a while or not so I don't know how familiar you are with her, but a lot of the Alpha Flight fandom's transmisogyny centers on the treatment of one Wanda Langkowski, aka Walter Langkowski who in the Bill Mantlo era of Alpha Flight had an arc where she ended up merging with her teammate Snowbird into a new form of a woman. In this form, Wanda generally becomes a happier, more positive person, affirming that she feels that everything is going right for the first time in a long time.

So this character is pretty clearly a trans woman. She's treated as a woman in the text, she clearly enjoys being a woman, and when she is shown as struggling, most of it has to do with her feeling unable to have relationships with women being now a woman, and being legally stripped of her rights to her property and finances by her ex-wife. I think the biggest clue that Bill Mantlo intended for her to be a trans woman is relevant in the letters column; while many letters send in misgendered Wanda, the responses to the letters always used she/her pronouns and always called her Wanda, again affirming that that is who she is.

So you have this character who is pretty clearly a trans woman, but the majority of Alpha Flight fans like to ignore this, which, as I'll get into, feels very connected to the fact that the majority of the Alpha Flight fandom, at least online, is actually the Northstar fandom who are a little annoyed they have to read Alpha Flight for Jean Paul.

Northstar, by virtue of being a mutant, being a Cunty Mean Gay™, and being Marvel's first gay character has a fairly significant audience of fans who are interested in him and want to read his comics from the perspective of queer comic history. And there isn't anything wrong with that in a vacuum, but you can tell that they are generally not interested in the rest of Alpha Flight and only care about Jean Paul, and like, maybe Jeanne Marie on a good day.

Northstar is also textually transmisogynistic to Wanda, saying to her face that he preferred her as a man. While Northstar is not canonically gay yet, he is heavily, heavily coded to be, so the subtext, not really subtext, mostly just text is that he preferred her as a man because she was more fuckable him then.

This is an interesting thing where some of Northstar's gaycoding goes hand in hand with his transmisogyny. You can't really separate the transmisogynistic way he treats Wanda from his broader history of being a gaycoded character, but it's a pretty unflattering trait so it's rarely dug into by the larger Northstar community.

Let me be clear, I don't dislike Jean Paul as a character, but a lot of his fans frustrate me, and I don't think it's a mistake I've personally been blocked by quite a few of the blogs that talk about him most on here, because this is something I do want to discuss with his character.

Deeper than this, in Alpha Flight there is a rivalry between Sasquatch and Northstar, because they both are very close to Aurora. Obviously, Aurora is Northstar's sister, and she is also often Sasquatch's girlfriend. And because a lot of people who read Alpha Flight are reading it for Northstar, a lot of people are primed to take his side in every confrontation with other characters, despite him being not really any morally better than the rest of them. Like, he is textually written as a misogynistic, ableist man, who is borderline abusive and controlling to Jeanne Marie to the point that she attempts to cut him out of her life entirely, but because he is to a lot of people the main character of Alpha Flight he generally is absolved of a lot of his flaws, and you can really feel this with how people react to Sasquatch when she and Northstar fight.

A good example is that I've seen people say that Sasquatch sexually abuses Aurora because she can't meaningfully consent because of her D.I.D., which is just a beautiful triple whammy of ableism, misogyny, and yes, reading a transfemme coded character in the most negative light possible so she's a sexual predator is transmisogynistic and I'm tired of people saying this shit.

(yes, this person has a dedicated tag to their transmisogyny, and a "manifesto" that is just purposefully reading this with the most disingenuous lens possible)

People have not and would not ever say this about Bruce Banner and Betty Ross, or Marc Spector and Tigra, but when it's a woman with D.I.D. suddenly she cannot consent and anyone who dates and has sex with her is actually raping her. I find this stance to be so vile, but it's the one people take because they desperately want Sasquatch to be abusive, and to always be in the wrong so Northstar is always in the right. It justifies Northstar's controlling attitude as him just protecting his sister, and his insane jealousy over her not paying as much attention to him as wanting to save her from an abuser. It's weird, it's gross, I don't like it.

Another one that someone actually replied to me is claiming that Aurora was only freshly 18 when she and Wanda started dating, which is just false and again, I think it's really suspect to try and make a transfemme coded character into a predator. Using a Handbook to the Marvel Universe as hard canon over actual comic issues and actual Canadian law to say that actually, Sasquatch was preying on an 18 year old girl is bizarre, is transmisogynistic and is gross. Particularly because if their age gap was meant to be that severe, John Byrne would have told us. We know what borderline illegal age gaps in John Byrne's writing look like. He's not subtle about it. Mac and Heather bring it up on a few different occasions that she was only 17 when they first met. Marrina is literally described as a woman child in the text boxes during her romance with Namor, and those are examples from Alpha Flight itself. I agree that Wanda is older than Jeanne Marie, and probably by a decade, but the idea that Jeanne Marie is only 18 or 19 being preyed upon by a 30 something year old is wrong and incredibly disingenuous.

Here's another thread from that same post of a different person (who has now blocked me) completely refusing to engage with any of my points and again, resorting to really badly done readings of events and in one case just straight up making shit up to make Sasquatch out to be the worst person in the room.

The fact that so many people want to make this trans coded character out to be an abuser, to be controlling, to be a borderline pedophilic predator to me absolutely reveals the transmisogyny in the Alpha Flight fandom. There are so many false equivalences, so many deeply disingenuous assumptions made, that it doesn't really matter these people on a whole exclusively he/him her and call her Walter, because all of their behaviour towards her is ripped straight from the socially ostracizing trans women handbook and I find it really disquieting.

There's a few other things I could go into, like the way she's just completely erased from conversations about queerness in comics despite arguably being textually bisexual, but to be honest remembering this stuff is raising my blood pressure so I hope this is enough of an explanation for you!

[avengerphobic]

when wanda finally gets her body back and she goes from sasquatch to just her regular human body and she's like a year into transitioning and she's like wtf did you do Samson and hes like oh yeah so i was reading your medical records and figured you were transgender so i decided to start hrt for you you're welcome

[comicpolls]

Worst Retcon: Round One Match Twenty-Seven

Carol is half-Kree

Sasquatch detransition

Voting ended onJul 4, 2025

[defythesky01]

[polarivere]

finally finished them btw! ty for the patience 🙂‍↕️

[chanth-thara]

goddamn 80s transphobia strikes.... :( i hate that i understand it. you've come back but you're not the same and they can't accept that.

[ammydeuscho]

BruceWanda WIP