Trans Reveals and Gender Parity

[thorondraco]

it's not explicitly stated anywhere. the idea probably has its origins in the fact that karkat refers to his nook a bunch of times in the comic, and it's an easy assumption to make given that trolls reproducing "bisexually" would need to be universally reproductively compatible with each other, but the actual form and function of a "nook" aren't exactly explored in-depth, and a lot of its usage would seem to imply it could just be ANY orifice in the body.

the 'bulge' is less ambiguously a sex organ, but as far as comic canon goes it's only a word used by the boy trolls (karkat and sollux in particular) or by terezi to refer TO the boy trolls.

I am pretty sure the nook is actually their ass. Think nook means a crack or crevice? That could reference the female part but Terezi once used the term 'head up his nooko' towards Karkat which is a strong parallel to head up your ass.

What i think we CAN say with certainty is that Trolls do in fact have sexual dimorphism, along the same lines as human beings. All the adult trolls depicted in a non cartoony style show human proportions and differences, and the times the humans and trolls weren't depicted cartoony like in Act 7, or at least on the same level ofcartoon, display similar traits.
Case and point the empress' hips. God Fuckin DAMN.

Why though... eh it was probably originally just so they were something recognizable, not have weirder aliens like the cherubs pop up yet. But it doesn't mean theories can't be made of the creators of homestuck can't make an official explanation. We will have to see.

[JakeMorph]

I just assume that time Tavros got a boner in that Paradox Space comic is canon.

How do they provide so much fluid for the heart or spade pail? I believe it's been implied that the mutual result of the red or black concupiscent ritual is the prodigious vomiting of genetic material.

- Homestuck: Book 4: Act 5 Act 1

[TH4NK YOU B3N]

yeah nooks are buttholes. if you translate damara's quirk, she makes sexual remarks that correspond to human anatomy.

I'll be honest b3n I find it a little disappointing that you've promptly decided to start ignoring your own thread immediately after ive made a comment criticising what you believe to be "trans woman coding"

I ignored this because of thorondraco's post put me in a mood, but I'll let you take it personally if you want. Also, my wifi adapter broke in the middle of making this post so I haven't actually looked at any of your posts after this one either.

Would you rather I read your post and get mad online? You want that satisfaction? I don't see how you would gain anything from that, since it's not like either of us are the types to change our minds when subjected to guilt-based tactics. Talk to me over Discord, but we're not doing it here.

I really haven't read what you've said, but I'm assuming it's something like "I'm offended by you pointing things out in the joke comic." I mean, I can't really take the opinion of someone who claims that Lanque is bad representation. And I've only seen people claim that because ... they wanted him to be a lesbian? they don't like the idea of a man having sexual agency? Again, glad I haven't read your post), but here are three potential answers that might satiate you but probably not.

More facetiously:
Hysterical Dame is Girl Problem Sleuth, which means Hysterical Dame isn't cis. Kanaya has the same chainsaw that has object duality with lipstick. Object duality is when something transforms. Girls.

More seriously:
Trans coding is when I like a character. Everything else is justification to confirm what I already believe.

Genuine answer:
"I'm not a dude" is intended trans coding for Vriska, and there is no reason to pretend that such logic would apply to Kanaya. I don't go into detail on every reason Kanaya is trans because I don't really expect to be questioned with such scrutiny.

Let me give you a trans reading of Calliope, to show you what I can do.

There's Calliope, whose chumhandle, when translated, says "A girl in a boy's body who is forced into the shadows." She fantasizes about what it'd be like to be to be part of a world that she's barred entry from. She struggles with body image issues that result from comparing her body to the bodies of trolls and humans. Her pragmatic alter-ego, Caliborn, kills her in order to survive a cruel and unforgiving universe. She meets an alternate version of herself. Alternate Calliope functions as a cynical rationalization for why she couldn't come out sooner; only to be driven to suicide by a game that demanded her to be someone she's not. But fret not! Roxy slips a proposal ring on her finger, and it is only with .

Someone could take that stuff in a story that adores her, that celebrates who she is as a member of fandom, and say "Uranian is an offensive and outdated term, and it's offensive to compare women to bald green monsters in cosplay." And, I could, in response, throw up. There is no way that someone could miss the point so badly unless they are projecting their internalized transphobia onto stories that have nothing to do with that.

And, yes, I can do that, but it takes me hours to do so. And it's not as if I've written many words! Essay writing has never been my strong suit, and when I have to think about gender dysphoria and social isolation in detail, topics that hit close to home, my brain shuts down and I have to distract myself with mindless video game tasks until I can push myself forward. When it comes to Kanaya, who is already socially accepted by her peers, I admit that I'm in unfamiliar territory here. Knowing what we do from Hiveswap Friendsim, I can take these lines:

You are one of the few of your kind who can withstand the BLISTERING ALTERNIAN SUN, and perhaps the only who enjoys the feel of its rays.

You are one of the few of your kind with JADE GREEN BLOOD. As such you are one of the few who could be selected and raised by a VIRGIN MOTHER GRUB, an event so rare as to elude documented precedent.

And, knowing that Jade bloods are meant to live in the caverns and not just work there, it seems that Kanaya is being excluded from a world she is otherwise supposed to be a part of. As a small child, she had trouble sleeping in the daylight, barred from the duty of motherhood for reasons she couldn't understand. But Doc Scratch, a man with a plan, woke her up on Prospit, and she would learn that she could play a role in propagating with the troll race, even if she couldn't in this universe.

But that's me trying to squint for subtext that arises from knowledge in extra material. Why bother reading into that for online strangers when I could to point at Kanaya talking about her cursed bulge? Why not learn to see it for yourself? I'm not Wikipedia or Carl Jung.

Read about Malo's manifestation theory, look at the page where June answers Kanaya's message pretending to be Rose, and contemplate to yourself "Is this symbolism or is this just as close as it gets to blatant telling while managing to slip under the radar?" Since June Egbert's been declared canonical, you can treat her as a given, which makes extrapolation much easier than it otherwise would. My Discord is in my user profile. In the meantime, I will go back to asserting my boundaries and feeling bad about my life situation.

[JakeMorph]

jesus christ i'd noticed your tendency to respond in ill faith to people on here but i think this takes the cake

[MorganMustDie]

Not to try to undercut the immense amount of analysis you're putting in, which is impressive, but aren't jadebloods canonically all AFAB? Not trying to stoke fires or anything, just curious if that's been taken into consideration

[JakeMorph]

jadebloods are described by aranea as almost exclusively female, but not wholly exclusively in any capacity.

[MorganMustDie]

Fair call, I must've missed that :/

On a semi-related note, as much as I dislike how this debate tears people apart, I do enjoy having it and I think it's pretty interesting. It's the intensity of discussion people would have way back in the day about unrelated stuff, but it's a shame it seems so personal these days. Take me back to when FtM Dave headcanons were everywhere, pure, and generally smiled upon by everyone. Those were the days...

[thorondraco]

I just assume that time Tavros got a boner in that Paradox Space comic is canon.

How do they provide so much fluid for the heart or spade pail? I believe it's been implied that the mutual result of the red or black concupiscent ritual is the prodigious vomiting of genetic material.

- Homestuck: Book 4: Act 5 Act 1

I would almost prefer someone turning into a literally eldritch dick over a 2 girls one cup situation.

But yea think we can file that under 'this is more bullshit' category. And to be fair it is more blatant than most of Hussie's commentary. There is plenty of other things he says there that is either legitimate statements mixed with bullshit.

jadebloods are described by aranea as almost exclusively female, but not wholly exclusively in any capacity.

If i am not mistaken i think the only example of a male jadeblood is Cliper, swifer's friend. As in sex to be clear, what he was born with. We got Lanque who is a man but a transgender man, and thus was born female...
I do think when people speculate about all this gender and sex stuff kinda overlook the setting. I think the idea that trolls have gender dysphoria 100% works. Just because peeps live in a society that probably doesn't oppress peeps who are transgender and nonbinary doesn't make it any less of thing, something those peeps have to learn about themselves and understand.
Also i am pretty sure the twelve billion other stressors and general oppression probably affect gender dysphoria indirectly too. Especially when literally everything has the death penalty and the rules are meant to be bassackward and confusing.

But trolls are different fantasy scifi species and have a lot of elements that would interact in unique ways with gender dysphoria, nonbinary and other things. And other factors that ern't part of that. Like out poor homeboy Cliper. Screw purplebloods being the more repressed, Cliper is so oppressed his race's genealogy has only permitted him to exist so far in all of Homestuck.

[egg]

Did we accidentally turn this thread into Broken Troll Worldbuilding 2?

[calamityCons]

I mean, Broken Troll Worldbuilding is still there, if we wanted to continue talking about how fucking little consistency or believability is involved in the trolls' world.

[JakeMorph]

some of you guys seem awfully eager to interpret any discussion of troll world building as "broken" LOL

If i am not mistaken i think the only example of a male jadeblood is Cliper, swifer's friend. As in sex to be clear, what he was born with. We got Lanque who is a man but a transgender man, and thus was born female...

your point being? a male jadeblood is a male jadeblood. aranea says it right there, they exist.

and I know you've had this explained to you before lol but just because cliper is a dude (do we even know this for sure?) does not mean he was "born male" (which is not the preferred phrasing - try "assigned male"). a character doesn't have to be confirmed a trans guy by an author for it to potentially be true.

[thorondraco]

some of you guys seem awfully eager to interpret any discussion of troll world building as "broken" LOL

If i am not mistaken i think the only example of a male jadeblood is Cliper, swifer's friend. As in sex to be clear, what he was born with. We got Lanque who is a man but a transgender man, and thus was born female...

your point being? a male jadeblood is a male jadeblood. aranea says it right there, they exist.

and I know you've had this explained to you before lol but just because cliper is a dude (do we even know this for sure?) does not mean he was "born male" (which is not the preferred phrasing - try "assigned male"). a character doesn't have to be confirmed a trans guy by an author for it to potentially be true.

He is referred to as he in the epilogues. He was captured and imprisoned by Jane in candy though we don't know his ultimate fate. it seems likely he got saved though cause Meenah helping to motivate ol karkat. I looked up and saw him mentioned as thus after the second bonus update cause i was like 'is that a dude jadeblood?'

And yea maybe he is transgender but if we apply the setting feature here, its more intersting if he is cis here. Cause literally he would be the only god damn example of his kind in all of homestuck. There are more fucking Fuschias at this point than cis jadeboys. Cause that is what the setting has done, made it that a jade that is a cis male is like, the rarest thing ever.

And i was just trying to be sciency with the terminology. Know the term cisgender, just not sure if it applies to biology talks. Under the impression it can be a bit incompatible in such terms.

[JakeMorph]

i guess that could be "interesting" if we assumed that the jadebloods were still a caste dominated by women on earth c, which we can't, because jadebloods on alternia and beforus were produced naturally from a mother grub bar two. jadebloods on earth c came out of an ectobiology machine that has to alter their DNA to a certain extent to even work.

i don't see how it would make a difference whether he's cis or trans anyway, on alternia he'd still be a man in a female-oriented social class. it's his gender that's socially relevant in this case, not whatever he happened to be called when he was created, and i suspect this is something that will be looked at in hiveswap act 2 with lanque.

[xeno]

"I'm not a dude" is intended trans coding for Vriska, and there is no reason to pretend that such logic would apply to Kanaya.

Not to be overly pedantic, but how would we know if either of those were intended as trans coding?

[Robot_Face]

"I'm not a dude" is intended trans coding for Vriska, and there is no reason to pretend that such logic would apply to Kanaya.

Not to be overly pedantic, but how would we know if either of those were "intended" as trans coding?

From the author's Twitter. I don't have links to the tweets on me, but I remember them saying so.

[xeno]

Wait...

Now I can't tell if we're talking about Homestuck or Pesterquest. Up until now I had assumed both lines had come from the former.

[thorondraco]

i guess that could be "interesting" if we assumed that the jadebloods were still a caste dominated by women on earth c, which we can't, because jadebloods on alternia and beforus were produced naturally from a mother grub bar two. jadebloods on earth c came out of an ectobiology machine that has to alter their DNA to a certain extent to even work.

i don't see how it would make a difference whether he's cis or trans anyway, on alternia he'd still be a man in a female-oriented social class. it's his gender that's socially relevant in this case, not whatever he happened to be called when he was created, and i suspect this is something that will be looked at in hiveswap act 2 with lanque.

With lanque its the experiences of someone who transitioned and their outlook.. With a certain percentage chance of the transition being petty in nature maybe? I guess it depends on if the friendsim routes were implying that he is a faker faker fake of an individual or he literally has a personality disorder and swaps between emotional and personality extremes.

With Clipper it could be him being the only person like himself on earth c and how that could impact him as a person. A very different story could be told between them. Dude could feel isolated and alone.

Though that is a point ectobiology could let you produce as many versions of someone as you want but they would still be an incarnation of that person more or less. Hard to tell.

Eh my thoughts are kinda mixing into a headcanon if have. That the Signs and zodiac stuff in fact reprsent a kind of Template system and there are normally only so many versions of a torll. This theory is kinda fed by the ancestor and descendant thing and also Sollux statement in karkat's pesterquest route, implying that Signs are not in fact unique to an individual and you can have multiple people with the same sign. If that is true it may mean even with ectobiology, there is only so many different 'templates' to access. But its only a theory.

[JakeMorph]

With Clipper it could be him being the only person like himself on earth c and how that could impact him as a person. A very different story could be told between them. Dude could feel isolated and alone.

i don't think you're fully grasping that a transgender man is still a man and would still experience the feeling of being the """"only"""" man in a female-dominated caste (and again, aranea makes it quite clear that 'jadebloods are female' is not a rule.)

Though that is a point ectobiology could let you produce as many versions of someone as you want but they would still be an incarnation of that person more or less. Hard to tell.

this just is not true? an ectobiology machine can only make ONE version of a person, who will be THE version of that person, and go back in time to become themselves. anyone else created from that genetic template has to be mutated from it. we've got an example of this homestuck^2 with vriska maryam, who is obviously not just "an incarnation of vriska". she is her own person.

[thorondraco]

With Clipper it could be him being the only person like himself on earth c and how that could impact him as a person. A very different story could be told between them. Dude could feel isolated and alone.

i don't think you're fully grasping that a transgender man is still a man and would still experience the feeling of being the """"only"""" man in a female-dominated caste (and again, aranea makes it quite clear that 'jadebloods are female' is not a rule.)

Though that is a point ectobiology could let you produce as many versions of someone as you want but they would still be an incarnation of that person more or less. Hard to tell.

this just is not true? an ectobiology machine can only make ONE version of a person, who will be THE version of that person, and go back in time to become themselves. anyone else created from that genetic template has to be mutated from it. we've got an example of this homestuck^2 with vriska maryam, who is obviously not just "an incarnation of vriska". she is her own person.

Well OBVIOUSLY they would feel that way in such a situation, peeps feel isolated when in groups they don't feel they belong in, a universal thing throughout most social groupings. A very human thing to fear being ostracized. Trolls are the same in such a regard, cisgender or transgender or any of that. That is just the truth of the matter.

Though i am pretty sure there are more transgender jadebloods in existence than cisgender males.

Sighs. that is the entire point of the matter. Cliper's potential here stems from the stated rarity of a cisgender boy amongst the jades. We don't know if such a thing would be have focus though, he might just be a secondary character and remain as just that. Could be they plan on exploring the idea with someone or something else?

If Cliper was anything else but a jadeblood he'd just be the troll with a clipboard who is friend with Swifer and i guess we wouldn't be having this conversation? Shrugs.

[egg]

Wait...

Now I can't tell if we're talking about Homestuck or Pesterquest. Up until now I had assumed both lines had come from the former.

Pesterquest, the implications are contained mostly therein. I sincerely doubt Hussie wrote Vriska intending her to be trans, considering the background of when Act 5 was first released and how in-tune Hussie was with Internet culture at the time. The Vriska trans thing seemed to have been a confirmation of a headcanon based on a few decent arguments taken off of Vriska's pesterlogs, but the thing is that you could make a trans headcanon for every character in Homestuck. Not that I think that's a bad thing of course.