Characters
(loved trope) Trans characters who do not/cannot pass but everyone still respects their identity
Lev from The Last of Us Part II: Lev is a trans boy who cannot medically transition due to being in a zombie apocalypse with a fascist government, yet the main cast in the story supports and affirms him as male.
Denise Bryson from Twin Peaks: A trans woman DEA and FBI agent. She does not pass in the series, which is an integral part of her character; her boss simply tells people who don't like it to "fix their hearts or die."
Cordelia from Vinland Saga: As a trans woman living in Northern Europe during the Viking age, it is impossible for Cordelia, who has a hulking, muscular figure, to transition to female. But despite not looking the part physically, everyone is cool with it and refers to her as female.
Ladiva from Granblue Fantasy: A pro wrestler who makes no attempts to pass (save for hair) and is still beloved by the cast as a maternal figure, serving as a stark contrast to her species' women who are petite.
https://giphy.com/gifs/JJ06FsBPgjq9y
Walton Goggins in SoA. Been a while since I saw it, so there’s still probably trans jokes, but I remember her being portrayed as competent and the main character Jax showing respect.
The funny thing is the character's name, Venus Van Dam, was an Easter Egg to "Cletus Van Damme" on the Shield, an undercover alias also used by Walton Goggins' character, Shane Vendrell.
My wife watched this one recently. She starts off as a joke character, but as the series progresses, she gets extremely fleshed out, including the fact that she's seen as a joke and how damaging that was for her, and how she just had to learn to live with it, and has always lived with it.
It's largely not "woke", as you're using the term. It's still full of regressive machismo, violence, sexism, etc. Venus won the men over by being insanely charming, likeable, and smart. Kind of the exception to the rule, none of the other women got the same treatment. Jax respected her but a lot of the other men didn't, at least behind her back. Also Tig had a thing for her and got teased about it a lot iirc.
Edit: also she rolled with a lot of the trans jokes and gently put the guys in their place enough that the jokes stopped.
Honestly, flawed as the latter half of SoA was (Venus was introduced in season 5, at which point the enshittification had well and truly settled in), this character was handled surprisingly unproblematically IIRC.
Like, her relationship with Tig is played completely sincerely and without judgement. There’s even a scene where Tig laments negative comments he gets about being a “cocksucker” and he’s just like “Yeah, I suck cock, why are we making a big deal about it?”
As a kid, I never even registered her as male. The “gruff sounding tavern keeper” was completely normal to me so it didnt even click in my head that she was trans.
My mom had a naturally mannish figure. She was nearly 6 foot, had hands the size of my head, and had a voice that was regularly mistaken as male over the phone. She still wore make up and in fact did her make up like Doris, the thin eyebrows and heavy lined lips. I always thought Doris was like that, and that was the joke.
My mom was a troubled person, she probably felt insecure when seeing her but she played it off as just laughing at the trans person. She would never clarify to us kids that Doris was a joke about crossdressing though, so her laughing just looked like her thinking "at least I'm not that ugly". I dunno, it's one of those things where she didn't see it but everyone else did and was just polite.
My mom was 6 foot 1. Very wide shoulders. Did not do her makeup like that. I thought it was supposed to be like how those evil Russian ladies in old movies did their makeup, lol
It makes the fairy god mother seem worse, in my eyes. She could’ve given Doris a better transition, ain’t no way should couldn’t have, yet it comes off like she half assed it
I mean the before and after looks like she changed her hair, eyebrows, and put on make up. Compared to what the Fairy Godmother can do, why wouldn’t she ask for more than that? My headcanon is that FGM didn’t like the idea of helping her transition, so she did the bare minimum for Doris.
To me this is a kind of an Idea from family guy situation. The joke with Doris was very clearly "she's so ugly she looks like a man" but then realized that's pretty uncouth and made her one of the girls
I rewatched all the seasons of venture brothers before the film came out, back to back. After a little while I didn't even notice that her voice actor was one of the male creators, it just stopped registering as being different
Honestly as a kid I just thought she just looked manish and that was why she was cast out by all the prim and proper good looking in the kingdom of far far away. Like Shrek she did not fit into the traditional fantasy looks.
Considering that it's Twice and Himiko that react most intensely - figuring out and being accepted as their real identity is kind of a core element of their stories, too, and they are the most actively emotionally invested in the other members as a whole.
Plus, for Himiko, Magne was the only other girl in the LoV, and for Twice, I've seen some folks read it as him having feelings for her.
Big Sis Magne is a actual goated representation, and her situation also says a lot about hero/villain society in the MHA universe. I really wish that she was a more talked about/relevant character.
I agree because the hero and presumably more well off Tiger was an extremely well passing trans man compared to Big Sis not being able to present fem in quite the same way.
I honestly think that the reason she got killed so early on was because Horikoshi didn’t know what to do with her/wasn’t confident in his ability to properly write a trans character
ESPECIALLY being introduced opposite Tiger, who is also trans but is able to pass and see more broad acceptance because of his quirk and resources from successful hero work. Really hits how hero society and quirk acceptability can impact people in very similar situations.
One weird/interesting aspect of her quirk is that it assigns magnetic polarity to people based on gender, and as far as I can tell from the source material it's based on chromosomal gender.
I think that you might be correct, apologies for the mistake. Unfortunately, Magne is a really underbaked character before she's killed. It's a bit of shame, because she could have been used to explicate the LoV's status as outsiders and marginalized. There's only one other explicitly trans character in the series (Tiger) and his trans identity is not a part of his personality or characterization. It's only mentioned in a character profile omake.
The way the villains actually stood up for her and told people to fuck off made me love MHA and I will always say that no matter how much people hate the fandom.
Toga was a fucking psycho but I never could judge her too harshly because of how quick she goes from polite to homicidal when Overhaul misgenders Magne
Best character in the entire series. The only time I was emotionally invested. Most people didn’t like Hotel but I did feel like the end paid off very well.
I love that they clarify that Liz is trans but not gay. A small correction for mainstream audiences that do not fully understand the LGBTQIA+ community.
It's not actually her who says that, it's her boss who says it to other people about her
Also I'm not sure there's evidence that she doesn't pass in universe? I mean obviously cooper knows since he knew her before her transition, but I think she even says that she found out she was trans when going undercover as a woman so I think that suggests that she is meant to pass.
Her boss is played by the show's creator David Lynch, and he basically yells it in case the audience doesn't get the message. David Lynch was a real one.
he LITERALLY yells it, because director gordon cole of the FBI is canonically very hard of hearing, so lynch is almost always wearing hearing aids and half-shouting to hear himself.
She does pass towards multiple characters like Ernie and Audrey, like the iconic "They have woman agents?" line
and you can't forget the part where she's dressed up as a waitress to sneak a gun to Cooper, even Jean who had just seen her dressed as a man can't tell its her.
also this is the only context I can easily mention this, but its a funny coincidence that David Duchovny played Denise because he played Mulder on The X-files and the spin off of that The Lone Gunmen has one of my favorite episodes of TV about being Trans
You really do. It’s unlike anything else and Lynch had his soul in the right place.
There are some doldrums in season 2 but if you soldier on, season 3 is a work of art. Under no circumstances skip the season 2 finale, which was Lynch returning to a show he’d been away from and lighting everything on fire.
It'll take a while to get there, but episode 8 of season 3 might be the greatest hour of television ever made. I still don't understand how they got away with it and I can't see any way that anything like it will ever happen again
"Well well, if it isn't my little spray of Stardust. Ticker's gonna put the comm on the hook and take five. How are you?"
For those interested, Ticker lives in a society called Fortuna, under the rule of a faction called the Corpus that have a literal religious worship of profit and commerce. She was born into debt she can never pay off, her entire people are. Their organs, limbs and even brains are taken from them piece by piece until they can pay it off; most never do.
She's not able to transition because she literally doesn't have legal ownerships over her body, but never the less she acts as a beacon of gritty, weary hope in the hellscape she lives in. Ticker can be found in Fortuna, where she runs a black market where players can buy the dept of people she's found coming up to their "final collection".
"A person gets told a lot of things over the course of a life. Who they are. Who they should be. Amateurs, lecturing a professional. Anything that can't survive scrutiny, shouldn't."
"Some see life as adversity or adventure. The adventurers make it."
"They can save themselves, with a little help."
"The life we get is so rarely the one we planned for. You've done good, Stardust."
That line about amateurs lecturing a professional actually helped me a lot in my start of my transition when I was still too ... people minded about this whole thing. By now I try to be very natural about me being a woman, just work in progress ;3
I recently rewatched Life of Brian and was pleasantly surprised by the treatment of Loretta. They make crude jokes about her because they make jokes about everyone in Monty Python, but it didn't feel overly mean spirited and her friends were pretty consistent with respecting her name and pronouns. Was expecting far far worse for a movie from the 70s
Also ironic considering John Cleese's less than accepting views on trans people (especially women) in real life. Always a shame when once bold thinkers become the very archetype of pearl clutching conservatives they used to lampoon.
I can't find the quote but I recall Eric Idle saying something along the lines about how she was created only as a source of a couple of jokes (like pretty much all the characters), but he's quite proud they created her because of how unintentionally ahead of the time she was.
I feel like they were okay with it until the part where they mentioned that they wanted to have a baby. Biologically impossible is where they drew the line.
Morley from One Piece is a Giant, and MtF. While obviously not passing, aside from wearing a skirt, everyone who knows her respects her gender. And whenever someone makes the obvious mistake of misgendering her, people immediately correct them.
Also, Morley is friends with....essentially the god of trans people. Ivankov has the power of hormones, and can change anyone's sex at will. Including their own, which they use often. The fact that Morley didn't ask Ivankov to make her more feminine indicates that Morley is already happy with how she looks. And again, everyone respects her.
Imagine being a trans person terrified of needles looking for ivankov to essentially change your entire biology and physionomy to your prefered gender only to be faced with the terrifyingly huge needles Ivankov turns their fingers into.
While on the topic of One Piece, there's also Yamato.
While whenever he's a transgender man or not is a topic of many debates (it's a bit complicated), he still canonically uses masculine vocabulary for himself, uses the masculine "I" pronoun, uses the men's bath house (together with other man) and generally wants to be treated as a man. He's also a target of gags specific to men characters; for example when a cool robot appears all male characters, including Yamato, get super excited and get sparkly eyes, while women characters remain unimpressed.
Despite the fact he still appears very feminine, everyone treats him like a man. Even his father, who's an abusive tyrant, calls Yamato his son.
Yep! Which is why i am baffled when people do not respect his pronouns. If Luffy, the objectively most good guy, and Kaido "i will enslave islands and cause a global war", both agree that Yamato is a man. Then so should we. It's that simple.
"yeah my kid is gay or Trans or whatever, thats fine, thats not the part I have a problem with, its this OTHER THING" is such a funny trope to me in and of itself i hope it becomes more common.
He's one of the best examples. Too often we're talking about trans women who just don't look feminine enough. Here's a dude with massive tits and zero fucks and I love him for it.
Oda was afraid of success for not making Yamato muscular. There was no reason for Yamato not to be muscular. You're telling me Kaido's direct offspring who is provenly almost as strong as him has those noodle arms?
FOR REAL!!!! But Oda generally has that problem when it comes to female/AFAB characters. They're all stick figures with muscle atrophy, unless they're meant to be in some way funny and/or unappealing. Hell, even Ivankov's female body loses all the muscles 😭
At least Yamato's fanartists got the memo and draw him with some delicious muscles 🙏
I'm pretty sure Oda just saw Rocky Horror Picture show at an impressionable age and based his entire view of trans people around it. I vibe with his general politics and ideas around anarchism but holy fuck does almost every example of a trans woman he draws trigger some deep self-hatred and dysphoria and looks, reads and feels like the exact kind of stereotype that TERFs cook up to justify their hatred for us. Especially egregious when Sanji is sent to transphobia island. Not saying Oda has any malicious intentions with it, just that it feels so bad to watch as a trans person.
I mean ffs they literally have Tim Curry dealing magical HRT for free, fucking form a line.
I think Oda suffers from "confused but has the spirit." His early work depicting trans people is problematic at best but he doesn't villify them (e.g. Bon Clay, Ivankov). Later trans characters are a lot better represented (Kiku, Yamato, Morley). I think he just didn't have a lot of exposure to trans people growing up. (Bon Clay is based off the traditional Japanese charicature of a gay person, for example.)
I know you said almost, so I'm gonna cherish those examples that feel better.
Kiku is a passing MtF samurai that has shown to be an adept warrior but also is the heart of her group.
Bon Clay is non-binary and has a silly yet powerful phrase in "You can stray from the path of a man, or the path of a woman, but there's no straying from the path of a human."
Ivankov falls into that eerie look that Oda tends to use for most Okama, but they are a very nuanced character with a really interesting backstory. A Queer anarchist in all definitions of the word queer.
All that said... there's no defending the gag jokes in the series. It really feels like Oda got stuck in some stereotypes and gag jokes he likes to repeat quite often. It's like how he is very capable of designing very interesting female characters, yet most relevant ones are Nami clones.
Oh your feelings are completely valid! One Piece is my favrotie manga and i do love the variety of queer people, but you are right about the portrayal of trans people.
One quote that i saw was basically this "I think Oda thinks trans people are weird/freaks. And he also thinks weird/freaks are the best type of people". I have no doubt that Oda has no ill intent when writing queer characters, that's why all of them are accepted in the story and are always good guys. But he is ignorant. And he certainly doesn't understand the nuisance that trans people experience. So he makes glaring mistakes, like drawing trans women with masculine features.
I'm sorry you have a bad experience watching a series i love, i just hope you understand that his trans characters come from a place of love and ignorance. NOT an excuse, but an explanation.
I mean not everyone affirms Lev's gender, that's the reason he's on the run and why Abby helps him. But I take your point that the "good" characters (and I do think Abby is good at this point in her redemption arc) affirm his gender.
but he does pass to abby. she simply always assumes he is a boy and he never corrects her. you can see she says things like “you’re a good brother” and “they wanna kill a little boy because he shaved his head?”. i’m pretty sure this all happens before she hears yara use any pronouns for lev and it certainly happens before she is explicitly told by yara
yep, abby says lev looks like an 8 year old pretty early on in their interactions. she simply assumed he was a boy from the start, perhaps also thought he was younger and thus more androgynous.
on reflection, the “you’re a good brother” line comes after she hears him deadnamed by the seraphites so by this point abby’s words could be intentionally affirming, but abby asking why they wanna kill him, lev saying “i shaved my head”, and abby responding with “they wanna kill a little boy because he shaved his head?” happens before they encounter seraphites together and she hears pronouns used for him.
also when she first asks why they’re being hunted, and he simply says he shaved his head, she says “fine, don’t tell me” implying to me that she doesn’t even initially consider that might be the truth or the significance of the traditional hairstyles for seraphite men and women. if she has noticed the tradition, her meaning could even be, “wait, isn’t that what the males in your group do? what’s the problem with a little boy doing it?”
Coach Beiste transitions on Glee and gets universally accepted.
Paradoxically, they treat this trans character (played by cisgender actor) very gently, while also portraying a lot of transphobia towards Unique (who was played by a nonbinary actor). Aaaaand that's what you missed on Glee!
It's kind of shocking how progressive that movie is in hindsight.
On top of the prisoners actually being mostly respectful (as much as they can be) to Sally-Can't-Dance, they arent flat, one-dimensional villains.
I mean, they arent your modern sympathetic villains with tragic backstory, but they're all highly intelligent, adapt swiftly to changes to the escape plan, and I cant remember exactly but I'm fairly certain none of them use racial slurs against each other. They're written like actual people and not movie monsters, for the most part.
I always love the part where Cage is fighting his way through the prisoners and Sally attacks him. He goes to punch her the same as the rest of the prisoners, but pulls back and slaps her instead. Gender affirming violence!
Sometimes people don’t know what pass means lol, Lev absolutely passes. That’s why when TLOU2 was released and it was said there was a trans character, Abby was the one getting hate for “being trans”, not Lev. No hate on you just specifying that passing doesn’t mean fully medically transitioned
Edit: Oh shit, I forgot the "does not pass" part, was too excited to share trans characters.
Since someone already mentioned Magne from MHA, let me introduce you to Tiger from the same series.
Unlike Magne, who is a villain, Tiger is part of the heroes group: Wild, Wild, Pussycats.
Tiger is a trans man who has no qualms in still dressing up in skirts and whatnot. Remember, kids, gender identity =/= gender expression. A trans man/woman can still dress in feminine/masculine clothes.
idk this show but if they are a trans man then they totally pass as a man. Did you mean to say trans woman? (again: I never heard of this character, just going off the pic you posted)
It's no secret to everyone she's trans, but not a single character that interacts with her expresses any bigotry. She acts as a maternal or guiding figure for the main characters. It's even implied she had a fling with Date at some point after he lost his memory. My favorite trans character tbh
This is one I actually like because she feels way more like a real person, and she's allowed to be silly, weird, and funny. And kinky. The creator has shown a lot of love towards trans people and trans rights and it feels like it comes from a genuine place of wanting to connect with a queer audience and understand our experiences.
I wish we had more examples that felt less exaggerated, it feels like whenever people try to make non-passing trans characters they usually go way too far past what most non-passing trans people look like and make them hyper masc or fem based on their agab, instead of looking more like how most non-passing trans ppl look irl (would also kill to have a butch transfem character that looks more like common irl butch aesthetics but we rarely even get cis characters that do that aesthetic well soooo)
Yeah, a lot of these cases I usually refer to as a case of "love the freaks". It's "wholesome" for the cis audience but it's also reasserting some underlying blind spots/biases that are sort of gender essentialism-adjacent that still seeks to define us by our biology, but because they're being "nice" about it we're supposed to smile and not have it trigger dysphoria. Which it does.
There's another example of these in Gintama where it's 2 I guess crossdressers(?) where it's clear that the creators don't actually know the difference between various queer people, that are on the side of the good guys, but they're always drawn with masculine features you don't even find on other male characters like constant visible stubble.
Ladiva in this case also bothers me because like, if you want to represent clockable trans women you probably don't have her wear a full goatee permanently, especially when there's a character as pretty as Grimnir in the game. Even if she chooses of her own will to not magically alter her body in order to actually be relatable to trans people she'd probably do more for her appearance. But she's not meant to be relatable to trans people, she's meant to be a sympathy bucket for cis people.
The opposite of this is "the magical trans woman" trope also found in a lot of anime where it's literally just a female character who never developed any masculine traits due to the power of sheer fucking will and bullshit who we're told is trans as like a fun gotcha or character flavor.
Hyun-Ju from Squid Game season 2. She and the other characters do not see her as passing and immediately notice she is trans, and she hasn’t been able to get surgery yet because she is poor and lives in a place that isn’t accepting. She originally hopes to win the games so she can get bottom surgery and move to Thailand.
Despite a couple of the other main characters in the season accidentally being rude or confused about her gender at first, they quickly become extremely accepting towards her gender and treat her like family.
Alice from superjail is such a bizarre example of this, her design is objectively an aggressive transphobic stereotype, she has visible stubble, dark arm and leg hair, exaggerated muscles and a forever visible bulge... BUT every single character in the show uses her name, pronouns, and feminine comments directed at her. The main character who is shown to be straight has a very very obvious crush on her and finds her gorgeous and sexy. She is aggressively sexual towards the inmates which is another stereotype, but when the inmates are rejecting her its never because shes trans, its because she can kill a man with a single finger and punch them into the sun. Theyre scared of her, not disgusted because shes trans. Its so strange to see a trans woman being a main character in the early 2000s being equally supported as her own character while also being written because the creators thought the stereotypes were funny
Slight clarification on Ladiva, Draph women absolutely do have horns. All Draph have them. Also “petite” in this case specifically means really short, like below 5ft. Physique wise they’re all fucking stacked.
I think it is wild how Denise Bryson doesn't pass in twin peaks but Paul Smecker passes in "the boondocks saints" to the 2 mobsters, tho not to themself and the terrible dysmopha episode they had looking in yhe mirror
Lev is a child. He passes because he looks like a little boy for the time being, which will not be the case in a few short years. All of the other characters call him "he" a first because they think he's a boy just by looking at him, not out of any respect for his identity, that comes later.
Diane isn't the one who says the "fix their hearts or die," line, it was Gordon Cole (Lynch's character). More touching TBQH IMO, David Lynch I believe was kind of soapboxing at that point but I really appreciate how he wrote Cooper's relationship with Diane all the way back in the 90s. As an Inland Empire (lol) Hollywood type of guy, I wouldn't be surprised if Lynch had personal relationships with a lot of trans folks long before trans struggles entered the mainstream public consciousness. Either way he was totally based for Diane and the line "When you became Diane I told your colleagues-- those clown comics-- to fix their hearts or die!"
Controversial cause half the Fandom will say he is not trans, but I think Yamato fits this. Uses he/him pronouns, is referred to as the son of Kaido and joins the boys in the bathhouse at the end of the arc. I think the fact he "doesn't pass" makes a lot of people say he is not trans.
Tbf most mangakas have the gender studies literacy of a shrew. A lot of characters in Japanese media are in a weird middle ground where you can read them as trans but the author certainly doesn't.
Witness list includes Haruhi Fujioka, Sailor Uranus, Chihiro Fujisaki, and Bridget GG pre-Strive.
Sort of fits this trope: Wekatta, part of a side quest in Horizon Forbidden West, cannot physically transition because modern civilisation collapsed over 1000 years ago. While she describes the social difficulty she faced when she started wearing female clothing, the protagonist Aloy seems to completely accept her for who she is
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u/PerceptionStock7437 3h ago
https://giphy.com/gifs/JJ06FsBPgjq9y
Walton Goggins in SoA. Been a while since I saw it, so there’s still probably trans jokes, but I remember her being portrayed as competent and the main character Jax showing respect.