#meanwhile rachel is slipping on her brass knuckles and plotting the speaker's untimely demise

[thejakeformerlyknownasprince]

What if: the animorphs were trans

I think I've written most of them as trans before, but I could also see each of them having a different experience with trans-ness.

Jake: Would just not bother to start performing femininity? Like, he'd mean to get around to it some time, but then he'd be at puberty and still wouldn't have bothered. And it's just so much easier being a boy. It requires less mental effort. His brain just defaults to boy-ness, and anyway he's bored of this subject already and wants to get back to fighting yeerks now.

Rachel: Is not only the girliest girl ever to girl, but has read all the feminist theory. She has clear opinions on her name, her clothes, her earrings, her hormones, her makeup, her hair... This is a girl who gets gender euphoria from spending up to an hour crafting her look each morning, and will never be caught with lipstick that doesn't color-coordinate with her blouse. There are a lot of TERFs in her town who keep ending up mauled by grizzly bears, but that's not Rachel's problem. She hears it was some other grizzly doing all that.

Tobias: Arguably he's already genderqueer and/or trans in canon, but he'd be the polar opposite of Rachel when it comes to talking about gender. He just is a boy, okay? Except when he's not. And that's just how it is. His gender is hawk. And sometimes it's hork-bajir. And sometimes it's andalite. And sometimes it's human. And if you ask follow-up questions he's going to disappear up a tree and never interact with humanity again.

Cassie: She's happy in her own body. Overalls are comfortable, dresses are fun, and anyone who can't figure out her pronouns at a glance isn't her problem. Okay, that one guy (#14) who called her a "boy" deserved to get kicked in the face, which is why she kicked him in the face. But everyone else trying to figure out her gender has their own problems, and she's not here to solve them.

Ax: Again, arguably not-cis in canon (his human body is implied to be intersex) but he'd be gung-ho about his gender just like Rachel. Andailte masculinity doesn't line up with human masculinity (e.g. Elfangor's comment about how Real Boys don't like STEM), so it'd be a lot of Ax Doing Boy Things in a way that doesn't make sense to Americans. But if gardening or sharpening his tail or refusing to learn math is what Ax is feeling, his friends aren't likely to question it.

Marco: ???? TBH I'm stumped. He both pulls genderfuckery (having long hair, being a clothes horse, going in drag in #51) and obsesses over being masculine enough. Him being the resident bicultural bisexual probably has something to do with it, but...??? Other fandalites, send help.