Love Live has always been queer

At the end of a long thread full of examples of Love Live being explicitly gay, Andrea Ritsu asks:

When the “gay subtext” begins to take up more space than what regular text is there, maybe it’s time to reevaluate exactly what something has to do to count as “gay” to you.

Love Live has always suffered from its reputation as being aimed at male otaku looking for waifus, which to be fair, is part of its fanbase. But those are far from its only fans. In Japan, the fanbase is split roughly equally between men and women. Overseas, it’s likely that female outnumber male fans, with a large part being queer fans, drawn to the series especially because it’s hella gay; take a trip through the AO3 archives if you want proof. As Andrea’s thread shows, this appeal wasn’t coincidental. Love Live was queer from the start.

Which is why it hurts when even a mostly positive article about the franchise at Anime Feminist has paragraphs like this in it:

Both groups have attracted legions of adoring fans both in Japan and around the world, and you probably won’t be surprised to learn the core target demographic is straight men. Our birthday party for Nozomi painted a different picture, though. There were some men in attendance, sure, but a little under half of us, including the host, were women—and queer to boot.

This paragraph is representative of the article as a whole, which consistently reiterates that Love Live is aimed at straight male otaku but that suprisingly, it has gotten a large female/queer following nevertheless. Reading the article, you get the impression that the queerness in Love Live is a) accidental and b) a subversive reading of the franchise. This does a disservice to both Love Live‘s creators and its queer fans. To its creators because it implies that none of them knew what they were doing. To its fans because it implies they’re intruders in a fandom not actually meant for them.

We should get out of the mindset that any queer content in our Japanese anime is there only by accident, especially when there’s tonnes of evidence to the contrary. Demoting all queer content as “subtext” there for enlightened western fans to discover is a bit insulting to the original creators. It also reinforces the idea that any queer content is invalid, not real. With Love Live in particular the queerness was baked in from the start and has been only made more explicit as the franchise evolved.

Similarly, if you insist a franchise is aimed at straight men, than any fans which do not fall into that category are not legitimate fans. We should get rid of the idea that things are strictly “for men” or “for women” when we rightfully mock that idea when talking about pink screwdrivers or over the top macho moisturisers. Companies have their demographics to aim at, but that doesn’t mean we should indulge them in that crap. If only because it omits those who are neither male or female, but as said, also because it invalidates those fans you decide are the wrong gender to enjoy something. (As a personal aside, it’s also annoying if you decide all the things you dislike about a franchise is because it’s aimed at people like me. Lesbians can enjoy pinups too.)

Judith Butler says trans rights

Alona Ferber’s interview with Judith Butler in the New Statesman is a thing of beauty. You can feel the frustration of Ferber here, trying to get Judith Butler to agree with her transphobia and failing miserably:

AF: One example of mainstream public discourse on this issue in the UK is the argument about allowing people to self-identify in terms of their gender. In an open letter she published in June, JK Rowling articulated the concern that this would “throw open the doors of bathrooms and changing rooms to any man who believes or feels he’s a woman”, potentially putting women at risk of violence.

JB: If we look closely at the example that you characterise as “mainstream” we can see that a domain of fantasy is at work, one which reflects more about the feminist who has such a fear than any actually existing situation in trans life. The feminist who holds such a view presumes that the penis does define the person, and that anyone with a penis would identify as a woman for the purposes of entering such changing rooms and posing a threat to the women inside. It assumes that the penis is the threat, or that any person who has a penis who identifies as a woman is engaging in a base, deceitful, and harmful form of disguise. This is a rich fantasy, and one that comes from powerful fears, but it does not describe a social reality. Trans women are often discriminated against in men’s bathrooms, and their modes of self-identification are ways of describing a lived reality, one that cannot be captured or regulated by the fantasies brought to bear upon them. The fact that such fantasies pass as public argument is itself cause for worry.

AF: I want to challenge you on the term “terf”, or trans-exclusionary radical feminist, which some people see as a slur.

JB: I am not aware that terf is used as a slur. I wonder what name self-declared feminists who wish to exclude trans women from women’s spaces would be called? If they do favour exclusion, why not call them exclusionary? If they understand themselves as belonging to that strain of radical feminism that opposes gender reassignment, why not call them radical feminists? My only regret is that there was a movement of radical sexual freedom that once travelled under the name of radical feminism, but it has sadly morphed into a campaign to pathologise trans and gender non-conforming peoples. My sense is that we have to renew the feminist commitment to gender equality and gender freedom in order to affirm the complexity of gendered lives as they are currently being lived.

It shows the lack of intellectual depth in the socalled “gender critical” movement and how much of it is just a mask for transphobia as well as old fashioned homophobia. The resulting outbursts of terfy anger on Twitter after this was published only confirmed this. What was supposedly an intellectual hero of these people was quickly subjected to the Two Minute Hate. It’s rare to see terfs self own so spectacularly.

Transphobia has consequences

Sales of J. K. Rowling’s books in the US fell twenty percent short of the industry average:

Last month, sales in print books in fiction overall rose 31.4% in the U.S. from May, according to figures from NPD BookScan, with fiction titles in adult, young adult and juvenile sectors all seeing similar double-digit growth. The author of the “Harry Potter” series, by contrast, saw her print book sales in the U.S. rise just 10.9% in June. “Harry Potter” sales — including licensed titles not authored by Rowling — rose even less, just 7.7% for the month. While the BookScan figures do not account for other points of sale — like eBooks, sales to libraries and direct publisher sales — they do point to a remarkably sudden and sharp drop in print sales for Rowling’s books.

It seems that despite her habit of suing people for pointing out her transphobia, enough people have cottoned on to hurt her sales. Once again proving that the vast majority of people do not have any truck with transphobes.

Ding dong the witch is dead

The best thing I saw when I checked Twitter this morning:

Graham -glinner- Linehan suspended from Twitter

We’ve talked about Graham Linehan before. An Irish “comedy” writer who got famous for coasting off the talents of other people on Father Ted, he took criticism to a shitty transphobic joke on The IT Crowd so badly he became a transphobe 24/7. I used to follow him when I first got on Twitter, like I followed a lot of other UK comedy people, but over time his feed became more and more hateful. Just full on hatred for trans people, attempting to sic his followers on anybody who disagreed with him and whinging on how his celebrity friends were deserting him for telling the truth. He lost his friends, his family, his wife and arguably his sanity, but it wasn’t enough to stop his obsession with other people’s genitals. Ultimately he started accusing people of being ‘groomers’ for just talking about trans people. Which was the final straw for Twitter.

A hilarious epilogue followed, as Glinner went crying to Mumsnet, his erstwhile allies in the battle against trans people, only to have the posters there respond like this:

Glinner gets no sympathy on mumsnet

Sorry, who are you and why should I care that you’ve been banned from Twitter? You seem to be a man by the looks of it so why are you posting in the feminism forum? This is a female space.

Never was somebody hoisted on his own petard so beautifully. Thanks, another man. Mumsnet doesn’t need you anymore. On a more serious note, Glinner gone means a huge source of harassment against trans people and their defenders is now gone. There isn’t really anybody with the same sort of reach and audience as him. It once again shows how important no platforming is as a strategy to fight against bigots and nazis.

“Get over it and go pee”

Alison Bechdel already knew the score in 1995:

Dykes to Watch Out For comic from 1995 on transphobia

The titular Dykes to Watch Out Fo are walking out of a bad movie, when Jillian has to pee. Mo, who has to do the same, doesn’t want to enter the loo because Jillian, though cool, is a trans woman. Lois tells her off, saying she’s not going to wait around all night just because Mo has a transphobia attack. So Mo enters the toilets, only to be challenged by a woman on whether she is in the right bathroom. (Mo looks rather butch after all.) Jillian defends her, telling the stranger to take a closer look. After this, Mo thanks Jillian and says she would do the same for her. This is however no longer necessary now her “nobody knows I’m a transsexual” t-shirt has worn out.

So there you have it, the absurdity of the bathroom panic laid bare in a twentyfive year old comic. Trans women are no danger, the idea that you can tell who is and is not a woman at a glance is deeply homophobic and barring people from pissing in the toilets they feel most comfortable in is ludicrous.