#wonder egg did not handle everything with grace and tact but i will still defend trans momoe with my life

[otogariado]

during this whole ordeal of people ribbing on how tacky the baymax trans flag shirt is, and a lot of good points being made about the show staff being as blatant as possible so people can't feign ignorance and make excuses for the character being trans like they do in most cases when the character is "implicitly trans" (aka they don't shout or say I'M TRANS!!), all i can think about and remember is sawaki momoe from wonder egg priority

you have her be extremely uncomfortable with and getting distressed by being seen as masculine or a boy; you have her struggling with her best friend's (haruka's) feelings for her because she didn't fully understand at first that women can like other women and was upset because she thought her best friend sees her as a boy and that's why she was liked; you have her literally spend an entire episode bonding with a character (kaoru) who explicitly states he's a boy and wears a trans flag coloured jacket, and the episode's whole thematic narrative between them was his struggles of not being seen as a man by people around him was paralleling momoe's struggles with not being seen as a woman by people around her, and THIS SCENE HAPPENS ALSO

where she literally shouts "I'M A GIRL!" and rips her shirt open to reveal her trans flag coloured bra

and people STILL like insisting that she's "not a trans woman" and she can be interpreted in any other way

non trans people can relate to the struggles of trans people. there's a lot of overlap, and a lot of gender struggles have to do with a systemic issue of how society perceives gender and the unfair expectations on what it takes to be a woman or a man

but it doesn't make it right for cis people to insist that a character who is HEAVILY implied as a trans woman, only short of her saying ANYTHING about herself pre-transition (which is a gross thing to expect from trans characters and people just because you want "confirmation"), can be interpreted in a way that doesn't paint her as trans.

showrunners can liter their work with as much trans symbolism and subtext as much as they want, and non trans people will still find ways to dismiss this for their own convenience. and as seen with how people responded to momoe, they can be as tacky as they want by literally giving trans flag colors to their characters and people STILL insist on "intepreting" the character as being not trans

people always find excuses to disregard trans characters. so yeah, what they did for the baymax trans flag shirt was tacky, but when people always find ways to invalidate a trans character and "intepret" them as anything but trans then the creatives behind a media are allowed to be as on the nose and tacky about trans characters as they want. if people want to always argue and point to "vagueness" as proof of a character not being trans, then let's just not give them vagueness any more.