#its especially egregious considering how much being anti-june is being anti-postcanon completely

[dare0451]

cosigning a lot of this. but/and, following the talk about the transmasc readings, im gonna be real, i kinda hate those for the beta kids? not just for john but for dave too. like.

ok i wanna be clear. i want homestuck to have good transmasc rep. i want that dearly. i want this comic queered to the nines and if i had my way we'd have stuck a t needle in yiffany's ass years ago. that dog deserves a wispy mustache. jane too lets get him on that shit too. i know roxy is transmasc in the meat timeline but theyre kinda doin jack shit with that so i want somethin better for yall.

i add this preface to be clear that im not against transmasc rep or think its distracting from transfem rep or anything (tho as juney said up top these headcanons Are rhetorically used to do so by bad actors within the community. but im not saying that about the work itself)

but if you think any of the kids in the beta timeline were childhood transitioners you straight up are not engaging with the story. at the start of homestuck all four of the beta kids are homophobic shame-filled little twerps. jade goes on a tirade about how shes not a furry (which is why shes the one exception i have for thinking the betas should always be depicted as being the agab the comic gives them, because while shes clearly afab she is Thematically trans so making her such in out of context art tracks). john is famously on the record as not being a homo sexual, and questions absolutely nothing about his life to the point he believes his dad is a busking clown. dave is casually homophobic and misogynistic. rose is. rose. their arcs are about accepting the parts of them that theyre ashamed of. skaia is a self-actualization engine with a terrible cost.

the transmasc read of dave especially has always bewildered me. his entire arc is about unlearning the standard of masculinity that was thrust on him as his birthright and obligation. he is inherently and unavoidably a cis boy at the start of the comic and the primary theme of his entire character is unlearning the habits and grappling with the traumas that come from being raised to be the macho man burly brawling hero. how is a character about the terrible cost of being raised to Be A Man good or desirable transmasc rep?

my point here is that i think pretty much all of the readings of characters being trans from the start in homestuck are just... fucking piss weak? the beta kids at least. i could see the alpha striders being transmasc, sure. but the betas? theyre. theyre so unavoidably cis at the start.

trans headcanons work for most media where the writers or at least their higher ups wouldnt dare make a trans character textual, if they even wanted to, which they dont. but when talking about an extremely queer webcomic made by a nonbinary person who handed it off to a team of queer people when it stepped down?

all trans configurations should demand better than "i think theyre probably trans before the story starts <3" and start demanding more june egberts. transitioning is a big part of life that tends to happen later in life. it being a part of a characters larger story should be expected, not written off as a headcanon. june egbert is someone finally doing this shit right and yet all anyone is doing is suppressing it in favor of anti-textual headcanons. demand better from your fiction! demand june!

June Egbert is, and always has been incredibly fascinating to me because of just, how many factors have conspired to make Homestuck fans show their collective transmisogynistic asses.

The main character of Homestuck transitioning is a planned future plot point for the official continuation of homestuck, that was spoiled in advance by a fan making a joke about finding some toblerones Andrew Hussie the author of homestuck hid in a cave.

The current main writers of Homestuck: Beyond Canon have went on record in an AMA confirming that this was indeed always the plan, even before they took up the project.

In spite of these facts, the general consensus among certain homestuck fans seems to be that "June Egbert" is purely a headcanon for the original comic that was "made canon" by a "Toblerone Wish" (a concept that didn't even exist at the time)

For a variety of reasons, the "canonicity" of the postcanon official continuations of homestuck is a mattter of much debate, (though a debate that most homestuck fans seem to err on a side of "it's not canon at all in the slightest," something the writers have feelings on I'm sure.)

All of these factors combined leave the concept of "June Egbert" in a very nebulous place. It's assumed by most to just be an "ascended headcanon" that was shoehorned in, it's a spoiler so it hasn't happened yet in any official media, and the official media it will eventually happen in is regarded by some to be nothing more than glorified fanfic.

If someone is talking about June Egbert, and you don't like the concept of June Egbert, you have your pick of a million different excuses for why she's fake and gay and not worth discussing and bad writing and just the authors doing a gay dumbledore*, paying lip service to representation while actually doing nothing.

And of course, lots of people *don't* like June Egbert! Rather than being introduced as transfem from the start, she's in this nebulous position of discovery where people have to truly reckon with the idea of a "Pre-transition Trans Woman."

You can try to write off *some* of the backlash as transphobia, because obviously not everyone in this fandom is gonna be cool about trans people.

But there's no shortage of fans just dying to tell you about how much they like reading her as transmasc, or the idea of her being nonbinary or genderqueer or genderfluid, or literally anything besides a trans woman. And since they're fine with all those other interpretations, there's obviously no implicit biases driving their distaste for the concept! (if you want to try explaining the concept of "transmisogyny" to people like this you're braver than I.)

you can trust them when they say it's *just* a problem with whether or not it makes sense with the writing, or it just doesn't feel right somehow, or any of the thousands of excuses that this writing situation gives them to just Not Like It.

It's just, so interesting to me. There's not a lot of characters out there that get a trans arc in this way, that leaves room for open denialism and insistence that we have our trans cake and eat it too... Because Homestuck is a timeline spanning multiverse story, lots of people seem to want it to be an alternate timeline thing. Assuring us we can have this character share space with a non-transitioning version of herself and it won't be weird or imply gross things about trans people.

If you ask me it feels like a plotline that'd be really good for exploring some gender horror though, finding your true self and then being demoted to a footnote, an alternate version, because everyone around you likes your pre-transition self more....

Anyway I have no broader point beyond "hey look at this isn't this kinda weird. You don't get this kinda stuff often!"

*side note: it's a little ghoulish I think to compare "a future trans plot point that hasn't been given the chance to even happen yet, in an already famously queer piece of media, from a nonbinary author" to "some stupid shit done by the literal most famous transphobe of all time" but that's perhaps a discussion for later.