LGBT – Page 4 – Wis[s]e Words

Historical queerness

Published on September 15, 2019Leave a comment

When the socalled “lovers of Modena” turned to both have male teeth immediately alternate explenations were sought for why they were holding hands:

Some of the suggestions for the link between the two skeletons are that they are siblings, cousins or soldiers who died together in battle, study author Federico Lugli told Italy’s Rai news site

Because what we can blithly assert for a presumed straight skeleton couple, we apparantly cannot do for one that looks a bit gay. As James Lórien MacDonald put it on Twitter in a thread explaining why putting modern labels on ancient relationships is a bit dodgy:

So. It was assumed that these people had been lovers because they were holding hands, and that they were male and female because they were assumed to be lovers. Perhaps there are other reasons to be buried holding hands, and maybe we’ll learn more about those relationships.

Again, this is something we do without thinking when it comes to what we assume are straight couples. None of that “well, they might be cousins” namby-pambyness then. Of course other civilisations had different ideas about sexuality and gender than our own, but if this is only an objection when it comes to queer people it all feels rather hypocritical. Personally I don’t see the harm in claiming these skeletons for the gay camp when the opposite happens daily without anybody noticing or complaining. The specialists can argue over what those two skeletons really were.

Lily in parliament!

Published on May 3, 2019Leave a comment

In events bizarre even for 2019, we’ve had what is possibly the first depiction of an anime character shown in the UK parliament and it was everybody’s favourite trans zombie Lily!

Joanna Cherry holding up a poster of Lily saying shut the fuck up terf

Unfortunately it was transphobe/terf defender Joanna Cherry who held up that poster of Lily, not as a rare example of anime getting a trans character right, but in an attempt to prove this particular picture was a death threat and the very word TERF was a slur on women. Which it isn’t of course, but you may ask yourself, well, how did we get there?

Lily says: shut the fuck up TERF

It all started with SonicFox, professional gamer, gay black furry and trans ally, tweeting a short video of him playing Mortal Kombat 11 and applying a fatality on Sonya Blade while shouting “die TERF”. Sonya Blade’s voice actor being one Ronda Rousey, ex-wrestler and still transphobe, not to mention a Sandy Hook conspiracy theorist. A nasty piece of shit in other words, with Sonic Fox letting off some steam there. He posted it to his Twitter and that would’ve been the end of it, if not for Helen Lewis.

Helen Lewis is one of the Grauniad/New Statesman stable of pet transphobes, also including Germaine Greer, Hadley Freeman, Suzanne Moore and Julie Bindel. These are all career media “feminists”, largely left irrelevant as times moved on, who have found new relevance by becoming transphobes. In the process intentionally or accidentaly providing cover for American right wingers to expand to the UK. Lewis found Sonic Fox’ tweet, immediately did her “I want to speak to your manager” schtick and demanded he recanted. Which he didn’t of course. He just found this whole thing hilarious, a bunch of white, middle aged, English TERFs demanding he stop mocking them.

Which started the usual TERF brigading, where they rope in all their followers to mass report, mass harass somebody to get their account suspended or them fleeing from Twitter. They ultimately got their victory by getting Sonc Fox suspended for a couple of hours and forcing him to delete his tweet. In the process Lewis got the usual sort of meme responses from people annoyed by her transphobia, several of which featured this picture of Lily, holding a badly photoshopped in gun, saying “shut the fuck up TERF”. And it’s one of these tweets that Joanna Cherry cited in a Human Rights Committee Q&A session in the British parliament. And she lied about it. She said it said shut the fuck up, cunt when it really said, as is clearly visible in the video, “shut the fuck up, terf”. And terf is not a slur, not an insult.

So first she lied about terf being a slur, when it in fact was coined by trans exclusionary radical feminists as a neutral description of themselves, then she lied about the actual “slur” on the image. It’s not the only time she lies. She talks about Sonic Fox’s original video as if it’s actual violence against actual women instead of him playing a video game death scene. (Incidently, terfs on twitter are currently busy slandering him by claiming all instances in which he playing a male character in Mortal Kombat hitting a female character are examples of misogynistic violence…) She also pretends that the person supposedly targeted by Sonic Fox and others is some ordinary woman rather than the deputy editor of the New Statesman. Three lies found with just a cursory glance at the video.

So why is a member of parliament trying to gin up non-existing problems of non-violence against not actually women, but video game characters, but completely ignoring actually existing violence against actually existing women, against trans women? Is Cherry a transphobe herself or just an useful idiot?

At least the creator of the picture could laugh at all this.

Graham, Graham, Graham Glinner — there really is no one dimmer

Published on January 21, 2019Leave a comment

Graham Linehan has been mentioned here before, but now we’ve got a new person more mature than our Glinner and his very normal obsession with trans women. Twitch streamer Hbomberguy got pissed off so much at Glinner’s attempt to defund the trans youth charity Mermaids he decided to start a stream to raise money for it:

So far he’s managed to raise over £250,000 for Mermaids and made tens of thousands of people aware of how much of a transphobic knob Glinner is. Who said gamers were all trash?

This zombie is trans and that’s NO coincidence

Published on December 18, 2018Leave a comment

Just in case you thought Lily coming out as trans in episode eight of Zombieland Saga was a coincidence or a Crunchyroll SJW conspiracy, we got this shot of her the very next episode, or do you think that’s coincidence too?

Zombieland Saga: Lily creates a rainbow

What pisses me off is that there are probably a lot of people who would still believe this rather than admit even Japan has LGBT people or animators clever enough to put together a visual pun like this. Which is a bit strange for people who profess to actually like anime, but this sort of double think is sadly common among the 4-chan crowd. Not uncommon outside it either and if you want to be depressed, take a look at the Zombieland Saga talk page at Wikipedia. Marvel how one stubborn wiki editor just refuses to believe all evidence and insist Lily isn’t trans. And there’s a lot of evidence, as Andrea Ritsu proved with her video:

It all shows that what looked like Lily coming as trans in episode was in fact Lily coming out as trans. What those who deny this are doing is actually what they usually accuse others off: projecting their own bigoted values on anime, desperate as they are for a form of entertainment not ‘spoiled by political correctness’ or whatever. It’s disappointing that this attitude is so prevalent in anime fandom, rather than being happy to finally see some positive trans representation. There was no need for Zombieland Saga to do this, but they did anyway and that means a lot. There have been a lot of could be trans characters in anime — most being the obligatory feminine boy who likes to dress as a girl — but few who actually stated they were trans. Having Lily as an out character, for whom being trans is part of her personality and not a gimmick is a step forward. Trying to deny it with dumb conspiracy theories does nobody any good.

All of this also proves a point I’m trying to make with this series of the 12 days of Anime: that a lot of the more interesting things in anime happen not in what we in the west think of as prestige or core anime series, but in series with less critical attention. Your slice of moe, your pretty boy series, the sort dismissed as trash, or only of interest to hardcore otaku or fujoshi. Here we have a series that nobody really expected anything off, an idol anime even and it has given me at least some of the most emotional stories of the season, if not the year. It’s not just Lily, but also Saki’s lesbian biker past or just having Yugiri as part of the cast, a former courtesan and therefore not likely to still be a virgin, which is a Big Thing for purity obsessed idol fans. Zombieland Saga now has gotten a bit of attention from western fandom, but there have been plenty of series this year which also deserved it but haven’t gotten it. Which is something I hope to remedy a bit with this series.

This is the fifth post in this year’s twelve days of anime challenge. Tomorrow: Himote House, another underrated series of this season.

This zombie is trans and there’s nothing you can do about it.

Published on November 25, 2018Leave a comment

Not that it hasn’t stopped the troglodyte part of anime fandom from trying up to and including self styled Japanese speakers proclaiming Crunchyroll translators made it all up.

Zombieland Saga: sleeping Lily

Nu-uh.

Lily is a trans zombie girl. Not a crossdressing boy, not a fetish, not anything else. Zombieland Saga episode eight makes that very clear. It turns out Lily died in the middle of an argument with her father, when she had locked herself up in her room and discovered she was starting to grow facial hair and died of shock. She literally died of gender dysphoria. And when she explains this to the other girls, the episode takes great pains to establish that Lily is Lily, and while Saki does roll around laughing at Lily’s deadname — the most masculine of masculine names — they’re quick to accept her as she is, the voice of reason coming from their manager/ressurrector of all people. Hell, they’ve got Sakura, the main protagonist wearing pyamas in the colours of the trans flag. Subtle this is not.

Zombieland Saga: Sakura is a trans ally

I’m not sure what angers me the most about the attempts to deny all this, the casual transphobia and erasure or the even more casual racism that underscores it. There’s a particular kind of weeb who is attractive to anime and Japanese media because they believe all cliches about Japan being a conservative nation and how that measn there isn’t any SJW crap there, who refuse to accept that Japan has feminists and activists and LGBT people too, just like any other country. It’s this sort of person who believes that anything that contradicts this view is the result of meddling by activists translators at Crunchyroll or whatever. Even when the voice actor of Lily almost literally confirms Lily’s trans, she’s not believed. This is rather insulting to the original creators who set out to and succeeded in creating one of the better portrayals of a trans girl in anime, zombie or not. Anime has done a lot of flirting with genderqueer characters, but usually doesn’t go much farther than having cute boys crossdress without explicitly coming out as trans/genderqueer. That we get a wave of socalled “fans” throwing a tantrum the moment a genuinely trans character shows up is not surprising but still disappointed.