#enough to forget that men and enby people are also options

[tabl3]

girls r so neat

[infiniteglitterfall]

Well, don't forget "don't act like this show is representation for nonbinary trans people!"

like listen, I would love for all enbies to be played by enbies.

honestly, what i would really love would be for us to have enough visibility to be able to say things like, "okay SURE, they cast a nonbinary actor, but that actor is agender and the character is canonically a genderfluid demigirl, it's not the same thing and they're acting like all nonbinary people are interchangeable." I want the kind of visibility where we finally have the space to talk about nonbinary experiences as different genders, instead of a monolithic undefined thing.

But at the same time, it's like... Casting cis people to play binary trans people is bad primarily because it cuts down on the options for trans actors, and feeds into the cissexist idea that trans people are just cis people in a dress/a false moustache.

Casting cis people to play nonbinary trans people seems different to me. It still potentially deprives the piece of the experience that a nonbinary actor would bring to it. But there isn't a mainstream visual stereotype of what a nonbinary character would look like, yet. There isn't something for them to feed into, unless maybe it's a particular type of androgyny. And casting nonbinary actors still means requiring actors to come out as nonbinary.

And what I want aside... i agree that showing authentic trans experiences, and mentioning or showing some explicit sign that they're not cis, is important.

I assume that's why they showed Crowley as a nanny.

They gave us at least one look at a period when one of them wasn't presenting in a way that cis audiences should read as "male."

As an agender person who gets read as male, (and who's nannied, come to think of it), I feel frustrated when people treat those two characters as if they have to be read as cis.

I know how cis people will misread it. I want my own community to stand up for me and say, "these ARE nonbinary characters, and any cis people who don't think so had better listen up!"

When a television version of something has nonbinary characters that are nonbinary in the original version, I don't want my own community to try to take that away from me because it's not spelled out enough, or not written or acted by nonbinary people... or for any reason, really.

I want us to fight for better and better representation, and for all the different things that would represent each of us... without taking away what little we currently have.

I want to live in a world where we're loudly forcing cis people to accept the variety of our experiences. Not where we're loudly forcing cis people to portray us in the few ways we think that other cis people might accept and understand.

If the only important thing is that cis people are going to read them as cis... they're going to do that no matter what. Cis people are largely incapable of seeing anybody as anything other than a man or a woman, and once they've made that snap decision in either direction, it takes a LOT to change it.

They could've added references in every scene to the fact that these characters are both agender, and cis people would still insist they were both cis men.

They could've had Crowley stay in nanny form throughout the modern era, and cis audiences would've (at best) insisted on she/her, and thinking of this as a hetero trans romance, and we would've been stuck with the extreme problem of Tennant seeming to play a trans woman.

They could've had Crowley switch genders repeatedly throughout the modern era, and had different, gender-appropriate actor(s) for the other gender(s), and cis people would've complained that it was impossible to follow and turned it off.

I also see the existence of a third nonbinary character as a way that they're underlining and emphasizing the two main characters being nonbinary.

And I assume that Lourdes Faberes is cis, but I appreciate that they chose to show a third nonbinary character, using they/them pronouns, who cis audiences would read as high femme. Because that's roughly the opposite of what they would expect in a nonbinary character.

And it reflects actual thought about how they wanted to portray nonbinary characters. Because in the book, (quoting from entertainment weekly here), "Pollution is a sickly-looking man with long white hair and white skin."

With that portrayal, Good Omens doesn't just challenge mainstream ideas about what nonbinary looks like. It also implies that the character could be a nonbinary man. That a nonbinary dude can look like Lourdes Farberes and still be a nonbinary dude whose pronouns get respected. It gives nonbinary people room to really think about the different possibilities for Pollution's gender.

i really don't wanna start shit but the whole "neil gaiman is being homophobic thing" has less about "the show isn't queer enough" and more about the fact that he's over on twitter going "it's a love story but they aren't GAY, they're an angel and a demon they can't have sexualities" the point is he won't say that they're gay/queer/lgbt which comes across as pretty sketchy from a cishet white man. the content of the show itself and how queer it was or wasn't is a whole different argument, tbh.

1. He’s Jewish.

2. He wrote a story in mainstream media that boiled down to “transphobia destroys lives” in 1991. Based on the experiences of his trans friends. He’s been steeped in the community longer than his critics have been alive. He gets reasonable benefit of the doubt from me.

3. From what I saw, his argument is that it’s not gay because they aren’t men - they are, in fact, agender celestial beings.

Agender.

His argument is “it’s not gay, it’s another kind of queer,” and people are calling for blood because that’s not good enough.

At best, this is callous disregard for trans and a-spec people. At worst, it’s active bigotry. They’re literally arguing that a-spec folks aren’t queer enough.

4. People have literally said, in the very argument you’re talking about, that it doesn’t count because it isn’t unambiguous and direct enough for the Straights. If you’re gonna say “that’s not actually the problem,” please check and see if it is, in fact, the problem.

Six years before Ellen, Neil Gaiman publicly said trans rights. And now people are trying to paint him as a homophobe for maintaining that position.

Fuck that noise.