i’m curious, would the historical setting affect how the LGBT+ characters in the comic label themselves? like we know that Edith is trans, but would she describe herself using that label within the setting?
loved your concept of trans cat characters using black dye to pass btw!!! i love unique worldbuilding about LGBT+ characters!!
Yes, it does affect how people label themselves! The label of transgender does not exist in this story’s setting, although the labels homosexual and heterosexual do. The availability of feminizing/masculinizing magic has also had a pretty big impact on the way transness is conceptualized.
The term cross-sex is typically used in similar way that we might use the terms transgender or transsexual. It’s more similar to how the word transsexual is used, since it is pretty much exclusively used to refer to people who have medically transitioned. Transitioning, or “crossing sexes” is viewed very binarily, and synonymously with medical transition. It is also sometimes abbreviated as CS (or CS-MF or CS-F for trans women, or CS-FM or CS-M for trans men).
There are mixed feelings on these terms. Just like in our world, people are constantly fighting over terminology LOL.
Here’s some in-universe history on it: The term was popularized by the first widely distributed text on HRT magic, Effects of Cross-Sex Usage of Clerical Glyphs. This book actually explored the effects of various glyphs on people of different sexes, but it’s most well known for the chapters on feminization and masculinization (using the glyphs that increase estrogen and testoerone).
The usage of the sex hormone glyphs by cis people predates their usage by trans people for feminization and masculinization. Estrogen + progesterone glyphs are vastly more well known as the contraceptive glyphs, and are much more commonly used as hormonal birth control by cis women. The testosterone glyph is also commonly used by cis men as an athletic performance enhancer.
Anyways, in-universe this was first text to comprehensively detail the effects of these glyphs when given to the opposite sex, as well as the first to provide dosages. While these effects had been known before in certain circles, this was the book that really popularized it.
The book became pretty ubiquitously associated with what we would understand as trans people, and that’s how the term cross-sex eventually just became the commonly used term. People started to use it in the sense of “crossing over from one sex to the other” and that’s how it caught on. Although the original book title it was being used in the sense of “involving the opposite sex”.
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