I am SO glad that things are changing for the transgender community. It was pretty seriously dangerous to let that information out even just a decade ago. I mean, it can still be really dangerous, and the hurdles are unimaginable, but what change has happened and the awareness of it has been so good.
But that’s the big secret. Which is why Dije did his best to take the entire burden of it after realizing his mistake.
I became friends with someone who was transsexual around this period, and she was so helpful in answering questions and helping me with my immense ignorance on the subject. And the more I learned, the more I wanted to put it in the comic, and to really treat the subject as responsibly and well as I could. Fingers crossed that I did, even as it becomes more dated.
So THAT’S where all this was leading! This is my first time through the series, so I was none the wiser. I would have said what’s all the fuss, we are much more enlightened these days, until this election season. Now I think we’re regressing as a culture.
I tend to agree. When you have despicable cartoons of unshaven, filthy-coated leering perverts bursting into women’s rooms, proclaiming they’re trans, we are facing a culture of demonizing people of a different sexual orientation into just another form of sexual predator. Ignorance is not just these people’s strength — it’s their ONLY strength. And it’s getting stronger. I think we are not that far from pogroms and burning bathhouses with the people inside pressed against the bars — as happened in San Francisco as late as 1967. With smirking police next to the smoking bodies.