>>118306090>>118310232>>118318453Body horror trans-Arcee was a good idea and a brilliant way of showing the horror of dypshoria but in a strange, inveted way: changed into the gender you DIDN'T want to be rather than being changed into the gender you do want to be. It also had some weird, metaphysical shit going on with Arcee being the only female Transformer and appearing in some way inherently different to everyone else. It meshed better with Cybertronians being some alien species and not just big silver humans.
The decision to make her into a regular transwoman who just got fucked over by a fucking cis blumpfter m*le was the most boring shit. It 'salvaged' her character in no fucking way. She was one of the most boring parts of IDW after the initial storylines, because depicting gender issues in any way that isn't "transwomen GOOD and everything TRANS RELATED GOOD" is forbidden in the current climate, and tumblrites couldn't go "omg these giant robots are literally me!!!" if a good dose of them weren't le whacky women and transwomen.
They could have just quietly ignored Furman's gender lore if they really didn't like it but instead they had to repeatedly bring it up again just so they half-assedly explain why an asexual species would be trans and to reassure everyone that there were women and that the writers weren't awful misogynists. For an attempt at a trans and feminist friendly narrative, it sure seems self-defeating to canonise that there is some difference between men and women that is so apparent and universal throughout multiple alien species (
>>118301045) that a race of giant sexless robots then had to force themselves into that strict binary. They literally might as well have said
>>118303924 for how stupidly they handled this.
>>118313941>>118316840Based. Gender should be something like hair colour for Cybertronians: it's just an aesthetic thing, one that some people love to change up frequently or work on for a long time, or just leave as is.
