#i also did have some experiences more similar to what trans women seem to recount though so idk

[vamptastic]

dgaf about egg jokes they're harmless and at worst mildly stereotypical do your thing im sure ive made one before. however. i do feel like the whole discourse was kicked off by that "egg behavior to wear women's deodorant as a man" tweet and we all collectively need to agree that that tweet was dumb & stupid and women's deodorant is objectively superior to men's. actually men's hygiene products in general just suck more except razors. apparently its manly to smell like shit and have dry skin. if i had my druthers id force every cis man to use dove deodorant. id mean id still do it if it made them transgender but i see it as more of a public service in terms of smell than in that regard.

[transastronautistic]

queer history: a chat with Anne Lister and Leslie Feinberg

you know what i’d love to witness? a conversation between Anne Lister and Leslie Feinberg. can you even imagine it??

Lister wrote, “I am made unlike anyone I have ever met. I dare to say I am like no one in the whole world.” but i think she’d quickly realize that Feinberg is “made like” her -- that Feinberg has a very similar sexuality and gender expression to her own, and truly gets what it’s like to be persecuted for those things. Lister’d be so thrilled and relieved to find she’s not alone!

and Feinberg? when ze was younger, ze was desperate to find hirself in history -- just like Lister, ze was convinced that “No one like me seemed to have ever existed” (Transgender Warriors, p. 11). Feinberg would absolutely recognize Lister as a part of the big beautiful queer history that ze eventually discovered.

there are many parts of Feinberg’s story that come to mind as i watch Gentleman Jack -- such as when Lister is talking to the little boy Henry, who asks if she’s a man, and she replies:

“Well, that's a question. And you are not the first person to ask it. I was in Paris once, dressed extremely well, I thought, in silk and ribbons, ringlets in my hair. Very gay, very ladylike. And even then, someone mistook me for a...Mm. So, no, I am not a man. I'm a lady. A woman. I'm a lady woman. I'm a woman.”

when i watched that scene, i immediately thought of this passage from Feinberg’s Transgender Warriors:

“...I was considered far too masculine a woman to get a job in a store, or a restaurant, or an office. I couldn’t survive without working. So one day I put on a femme friend’s wig and earrings and tried to apply for a job as a salesperson at a downtown retail store. On the bus ride to the interview, people stood rather than sit next to me. They whispered and pointed and stared. ‘Is that a man?’ one woman asked her friend, loud enough for us all to hear. The experience taught me an important lesson. The more I tried to wear clothing or styles considered appropriate for women, the more people believed I was a man trying to pass as a woman. I began to understand that I couldn’t conceal my gender expression” (p. 12).

over a century separated these two, but people who could or would not conform to their assigned gender suffered in both eras. both of these people longed for a connection to a wider community of people like them, longed to know why people like them were persecuted and hated and told that God reviled them. but while Lister did manage to cultivate a tiny haven for herself of loved ones who accepted her, she never found the wider community that Feinberg found -- the world of “drag queens, butches, and femmes,” a world in which “I fit; I was no longer alone” -- a world that extended beyond gay bars, deep into past millennia as well as across the entire globe!

Feinberg worked hard to dig up the answers to all hir questions of why -- “Why was I subject to legal harassment and arrest at all? Why was I being punished for the way I walked or dressed, or who I loved? Who wrote the laws used to harass us, and why? Who gave the green light to the cops to enforce them? Who decided what was normal in the first place?” (p. 8). what ze concluded was that the rise of class so many ages ago is what sowed the seeds of transphobia.

in Transgender Warriors, Feinberg argues that in ancient societies that followed a matrilineal system and shared all resources communally, whenever agriculture enabled some men to begin accumulating and hoarding resources, an intolerance for gender diversity would also arise (see pp. 42-44, 50-52). once these men had capital, they had power. the Few could use their capital to bribe, to threaten, and to control the Many. eventually these men would twist their communities into a patriarchy in order to ensure that they could keep the power in their own hands. for patriarchs rely upon a rigid gender binary to keep their power, wherein those assigned male are placed above everyone else. after all, if men behave "like women," how can we place them above women? if women behave "like men," will they try to force their way into the dominant group? if some people are too ambiguous to be categorized into either group, what does that say about our argument that this binary is the natural way of doing things or divinely ordained?

i think that there are some aspects of this history that Lister would be excited to learn. she’d recognize herself as one of those women trying to force their way into the dominant group, and agree that the patriarchs of her day were not happy about it. she’d appreciate Feinberg’s scholarship around those religious texts that she as a Christian and Feinberg as a Jewish person shared, how Feinberg shows that it was not God but men who decided that the gender binary must be enforced. Lister would heartily agree that her nature is God-given, not God-hated.

but the conversation between Lister and Feinberg would very quickly break down, for the same reason that transphobia sprung up: because of class.

not long into their discussion, Feinberg would be like “and that’s why Capitalism is the root of all evil and people like us will thrive only once we’ve overthrown the landed gentry and disseminated all the wealth” and Lister would be like. “excuse me. i am the Landed Gentry. the lower classes will get their callused hands on my wealth over my dead body"

and the relationship would promptly dissolve from there -- and i’d take Feinberg’s side 1000% and hope ze could knock some humility into Lister’s classist ass!

but anyway to me the similarities between these two historical figures combined with the stark differences in their worldviews only goes to show what an enormous factor class is! Feinberg notes this fact, that “trans expression” has existed among all classes -- and that social privilege makes a big difference in a trans or gnc person’s life:

“For the ruling elite, transgender expression could still be out in the open with far less threat of punishment than a peasant could expect. For example, when Queen Christina of Sweden abdicated in 1654, she donned men’s clothes and renamed herself ‘Count Dohna.’ Henry III of France was reported to have dressed as an Amazon and encouraged his courtiers to do likewise” (80).

(to be fair to Henry III, his gender non-conforming ways were used against him to justify his overthrow. but for a time, he had the means to express himself and to gather others who were like him into his court.)

if Feinberg had been born in the uppermost class of hir society, would that have protected hir from much of the cruelty and violence they experienced? after all, ze would never have had to scramble for a job, to try desperately to conform to gender expectations just to survive. Lister was able to spend much of her life refusing to listen to the hateful words circulating behind her back because to her face people tended to be much more polite. would Feinberg have had that experience too, had ze not been of the lower working class? would ze have never gone through the pain and struggle that caused hir to dig so ferociously into the history of transphobia and queerphobia?

it’s much less likely for someone at the top of the food chain to question the food chain -- even if they notice how the Way Things Are does work against them in some ways. Lister was unlikely to notice how a social hierarchy that pits the wealthy above the poor is intrinsically linked to the structures that pit men over women and confine each person into a rigid binary box -- because to notice that truth would have been to her own detriment. she may not have wanted to keep the cissexism, but she did want to keep her wealth.

As Feinberg puts it in Transgender Warriors when discussing afab people who fought for the Confederacy in the US Civil War, “just being [trans] doesn’t automatically make each person progressive.”

Lister was not prepared to fight a battle against her own privileges, even if it would also have been a battle against her own oppression. that doesn’t mean that those of us looking back at her story today can’t treasure what we have in common with her! we can. after all, in Transgender Warriors, Feinberg recounts the stories of the more “problematic,” complicated figures in queer history right alongside the ones that better fit hir own views. ze finds value in their stories despite the flaws, and we can too.

but at the same time, we have to acknowledge where Lister fell short, and do the hard work of examining our own privileges and considering how we can be better than Lister. we can instead be like Feinberg, whose marginalization -- as a butch lesbian, as a Jewish person, as a transgender person, and as a lower class person -- inspired hir not to cling to the privileges ze did have as hir only foothold in the power structure, but rather to be the best ally ze could be to people of color, to trans women, and others:

“We as trans people can’t liberate ourselves alone. No oppressed peoples can. So how and why will others come to our defense? And whom shall we, as trans people, fight to defend? A few years before he died [Frederick] Douglass told the International Council of Women, ‘When I ran away from slavery, it was for myself; when I advocated emancipation, it was for my people; but when I stood up for the rights of women, self was out of the question, and I found a little nobility in the act.’ I believe this is the only nobility to which we should aspire -- that is, to be the best fighters against each other’s oppression, and in doing so, to build links of solidarity and trust that will forge an invincible movement against all forms of injustice and inequality” (p. 92).

so, yeah. i’d love to hear these two people chat. i relate deeply to both of their experiences and think they’d find a lot of commonalities between themselves. ...and then with Feinberg i’d love to give Lister a piece of my mind when it comes to her classism.

[impala-pies-and-cas]

Does Supernatural Have a Problem with Representation and Diversity: A Mathematical Study

At the end of season 12, another fan favorite minority character, Eileen, was killed. This has come in a long line of favorite SPN characters who were people of color, women, lgbt+, and/or disabled being killed seemingly before their time. This, like other instances with such characters like Kevin and Charlie, sparked outrage from many fans. Some called the move sexist and ableist. Many said it was not inherently bad that Eileen died, but the way it was done was disgraceful and unworthy of such a beloved character. Other fans fought back against these claims, citing that everyone dies in supernatural and that no one should be immune. Besides, others said, with more representation, shouldn’t that mean more death?

But is there actually more representation? And is the death count equal? Are we being persuaded by biases and personal agendas?

After the season 12 finale, I’ve set out to see if there is a quantifiable difference in representation, huge differences that can be backed up by numbers and not just perception. Much of this is going to cover gender and race, as those are the easiest diversity angles to notice, but I will touch upon other areas. This information was not compiled to confirm any set of biases, but instead answer these questions at the heart of the debate and anger. Some of the information complied is quite obvious, but having set numbers is vital in these debates.

The rest, which is a lot, is under the cut:

A few notes/disclaimers before we begin:

All information is taken from seasons 1-12. When season 13 starts the numbers on here will, no doubt, have to change.

I have not counted every single character ever put on Supernatural ever, but instead elected to take my sample size from supernaturalwiki.com. I was originally going to pull a list from imdb, but I didn’t just want to record who was in what episode, but also who lives and who dies. To do this I would have had to closely watch the entire series over again. I have school and a job, so I have no time to actually do that. Instead, I collected my sample size from a site that has that information already on it. [I may end up redoing this using imdb and rewatching the show, but that will take months - if not years].

Jumping off of the first point, I have collected about 850 characters for this experiment that uses a lot of math and percentages. Obviously, these numbers are not entirely accurate since I couldn’t find everyone, but I highly doubt the percentages would greatly tip the scale in any minorities’ favor by a recount. This is just an example, but it’s a large sample size example that still reveals a lot.

Although many characters may not inherently be the same gender/race as their actor counterparts [see angels and demons] I am using the actor’s race and gender as the character’s. This is about on screen representation, so what you see is the most important. And, before anyone asks, no, i did not go up to every actor and asked them if they were a person of color or what gender the identify as; i guessed, but they were educated guesses. I followed this up until the show directly contradicted the casting. For instance: the actress playing the angel Benjamin is a black woman, but the character was presented as using he/him pronouns, so I listed Benjamin as a man of color.

In the cases of characters with multiple actors who fall into the same category (ie Meg’s two actresses are both white women) the character is counted once under that group (Meg is a white woman). In cases were the actors are in different categories (ie Raphael was portrayed by a black man and black woman), I count the character twice under each group (Raphael is counted once as a man of color and then again as a woman of color). I didn’t feel comfortable choosing one, and saying a character is 50% one thing and 50% another seemed more harmful that just counting them twice.

There are a few characters I couldn’t pin down as either gender, as either the wiki only used neutral pronouns with them or they were a straight up genderless creature, so I have a few characters in a gender neutral category. I have listed them, but they are by and large excluded from the majority of the analysis.

This is only about numbers and percentages, not how characters are portrayed on screen. The latter is more subjective and hard to discuss without bias getting involved. After all, I am one queer woman who can’t speak for everyone. 

If you’d like to see my very annoying spreadsheets documenting all of this, click here: [x]. For larger versions of the graphs, you can find them here [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8]

And now onto the graphs:

[Graph 1]

When you look at a strict gender breakdown of the characters, it comes out to be about 60% men and 40% women, which is, proportionally, a bit too uneven. The show should be hovering closer to the 50/50 mark. However, when race is added, the proportions get depressing. White men (blue )make up almost 55% of the total population of the show. People of color combined make up just over 10%, with each (moc are green and woc are orange) at about 5%.

[Graph 2]

The numbers get more interesting as we break it up into percent alive (the light colors) and precent dead or status unknown (the darker). While all groups have more people dead than alive, both groups of women have 43% of their population alive. White men have about 30% percent. Men of color are the most killed off group, at 20% still alive.

[Graph 3]

I further broke up the categories into how many episodes these characters have been in [this is not separated into alive or dead]. The brackets are 1 episode (top left), 2-3 episodes (top right), 4-6 episodes (middle left), 7-9 episodes (middle right), 10-12 episodes (bottom left), and 13+ episodes (bottom right). The columns go from left to right with white men, men of color, white women, and women of color.

NOTE: there are always far more characters in only one episode than any other grouping, and numbers of characters in each group constantly get lower on a bell curve. However, it is important to look at the percentages and comparable representation in each grouping.

As you can see, white people always have higher columns than people of color. You may also notice that at the 7-9 episode mark the graph loses columns. As of the season 12 finale, no woman of color has been in 7 episodes. While there is one man of color who has been in over 13+ episodes (Kevin), there are currently no men of color in 10-12.

I decided to break this up further into individual graphs for the different race/gender categories: first there are pie charts showing the group percentages in each number of episodes bracket . The second is a bar graph looking at the alive/dead status of characters in each number of episodes bracket.

[Graph 4]

There are so many men in 1 episode I had to log the graph. They currently have more characters in every category, save for 7-9 episodes where white women lead. Also, as of the end of season 12 there is at least one white man alive in each number of episodes bracket.

[Graph 5]

While they have far less characters in total than white men, white women do have a similar percentage breakdown.They do beat white men in the 7-9 episodes bracket, and like white men have at least one person who is alive in each group.

[Graph 6]

The graphs for men of color look very different than the other two. The do have a lower percentage of characters in only one episode, but that is mainly due to the lack of characters overall. Further, there are far more dead men of color than alive; the number of dead men of color in one episode is at a 78% death rate, far higher than any other group. They also don’t have any currently living characters past 2-3 episodes.

[Graph 7]

Women of color have, quantifiably, the worst record for representation in these categories. As I said earlier, no woman of color has been in at least 7 episodes. While they are tied for the group least killed off, they have so few characters introduced that it hardly makes a difference.

[Graph 8]

I also wanted to look at the number of people of color I could find in each season [once again i’d like to reiterate that this is based on the characters I could find from supernaturalwiki.com]. This bar graph has men of color in green and women of color in orange, tracking the number of each and both of them combined per season. While I give credit to season 12 for having the highest number of characters of color, that’s still at a lousy 16 characters, and when you can easily find over 100 characters per season, 16 is nothing to applaud. Further, if you count up all the characters listed in the graph, you reach 98. Not even 100 characters. That’s less than one new character of color being introduced every two episodes, which should be ridiculously easy to do. Supernatural still cannot do that.

I did also want to look at lgbt+ and disabled representation in the show.

NOTE: while characters like Hannah and Raphael have been in different gendered vessels, the show has never confirmed them as trans or non-binary, and I couldn’t find any human characters that were definitely not cis. I have decided that because of this lack of clear information not to collect stats on trans/non-binary characters on Supernatural, but that might speak for itself.

I found 17 characters who were confirmed in show to experience some form of same gender attraction. That makes up 2% of the show’s character population. Of these characters, 5 of them have been in multiple episodes. As of the end of season 12, 5 are dead (3 of the five in multiple episodes are dead). 5 of the 17 are people of color (only 1 of them has been in multiple episodes so far).

Tracking disability is harder, as many disabilities are invisible, so I stuck with characters with physical disabilities in multiple episodes, of which are only 3: Pamela Barnes, Bobby Singer (in season 5 he was in a wheelchair), and Eileen Leahy. They make up 0.35% of the show’s population. 2 of these characters were cured of there disability before their last episode on the show. All three are white. All three are dead.

So does Supernatural have a problem with representation and diversity?

Yes. It most certainly does. But not in the way people expect or often perceive.

Women aren’t being killed off at higher rates than man. Actually it’s quite the opposite. And white, straight, able-bodied women are pretty good in terms of representation.

The real problem is with the representation of people of color, disabled people, and the lgbt+ community.

And really, it’s not in the rates of them being killed off (well, men of color need to be killed off less). The problem lies in that these characters aren’t being introduced in the first place. It really doesn’t matter if 30% of white men are alive verse 43% of women of color when that comes out to 141 total living white men and 19 total living women of color. It’s not fair playing field.

Supernatural is a show set all across The United States of America and lives in it’s culture and lore. Nearly 40% of the United States is made up of people of color: black, asian, native, latinx, arab, etc. The show should reflect that. While the numbers on lgbt+ representation is still being disputed, the perception is that 4-10% of the population has same gender attraction and 0.6% are transgender. The show should reflect that. According to the US census, about 19% of the population has some sort of disability. The show should reflect that. It’s more than just adding in a few new characters of color and lgbt+ characters in season 12; tptb need to purposefully write in more diverse characters, cast diverse actors, and keep these characters around longer.

When people complain about Kevin, Charlie, Eileen, or others’ deaths in the show, this isn’t a matter of being sad a character is dead and not understanding how the supernatural death toll works. It’s being frustrated at a show which has so little representation and having one of the few characters in that category being ripped away from us, often in ways that are easily avoidable and/or disrespectful to the character. It’s characters being killed early on so we don’t have characters of color, lgbt+ characters, or disabled characters to go through the seasons with. It’s getting the bare minimum of representation and being told that’s enough and we shouldn’t complain any more.

There are people that aren’t bothered by the lack of diversity, and that’s fine. You’re in the full right not to care. But telling those who are frustrated and upset that they are overreacting, being childish, and are not true fans is beyond rude. It’s a silencing tactic, and it needs to stop.

No matter what side of the aisle you’re on, I hope people will read this and gain a better understanding of where Supernatural’s diversity is and why people may be mad. And, no matter what, the proportions tell us a change needs to happen.