Transgender Transformers

Today was one of the many days where I couldn’t think of anything to blog. So, I asked twitter what to write about and my friend noarmsjames came though for me with this piece of awesome:

Case in point:

This actually isn’t my discovery, James Adomian retweeted a fan who tweeted this to him about a week ago.

Anyway, Starscream being a giant, evil dragqueen doesn’t necessarily mean that he’s transgender. As any gender advocate will tell you, gender bending does not necessarily indicate a desire to transition. Some queens are just fabulous; some boys are just girls, and visa versa. No big deal.

The idea of transgender people being like transformers works insofar as they are one thing presenting as another thing, at least until transition. I don’t actually know that much about Transformers, but I have a feeling that on whatever planet they come from, they’re not all running around pretending to be cars rather than being themselves all the time. They probably feel that they have to pretend to be cars in order to fit in with the rest of earth society. They probably think that the people of earth aren’t ready to accept giant robots into their society. And they may be right, which is why they stay closeted except to their fellow transformers and a few chosen allies, and they’ll never really know if their adopted planet could welcome them, the real them, with open arms. The world of a transformer really is quite small. Of course, the benefit to being a transperson, rather than a transformer is that 1. There are already a lot of other transpeople out in the world and 2. The government probably won’t try to capture and dissect you if you come out as trans.

2 Replies to “Transgender Transformers

  1. I’ve always thought of Transformers as a robot form of ourselves. Transformers use their vehicle mode for work purposes. The way that our bodies are built, we have to buy and use vehicles to perform tasks like hauling, lifting, transportation, etc. As robots, Transformers can simply BECOME the vehicles needed for the task at hand. So I guess that would make their robot mode more of the casual “out on the town” form of themselves. The whole, kick back watching the war with a couple of buds, tossing back a six pack of coolant, lubricant, oil or whatever it is robots drink these days kinda thing.

    I think our need to give robots any gender identity at all is a bit presumptuous on our part. They’re not human. They’re sentient machines. They don’t necessarily have any gender at all. They might appear to be male or female just as a human may “appear” to be male or female but I think I’ll leave it up to the robots themselves (and us as individuals) to decide what gender they or we identify themselves or ourselves as.
    Oh and to address the end of the post, 1. Very true and 2. Don’t be too sure. I don’t put anything past the gov’t. Especially mutilation and torture as a way of learning how something (or in this case someone) works.

    1. I think that the transformers can be metaphors for ourselves in all our manifestations, queer or straight. And you’re right about assigning gender to robots and people without letting them assign it to themselves.

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