Are we allowed to "headcanon"/privately wish/think that real people were/are/had been trans? Well, I wouldn't wish dysphoria on anybody, but sometimes I doze off midday and wake up with strange convictions about musicians being trans, and it takes a few hours for it to fully wear off.
Obligatory Tales of the Abyss, but let me tell you about Spoiler: spoilers for a ten year old rpg how EXCESSIVELY hinted it is that the replica Ion is unrealized transgirl. Like, yeah, very feminine looking dude, that's one thing But there's also the fact that Ion always appears in the girl's side of the gender divided skits and, as a result, is heavily implied to room with the girls And you know. The whole big fucking thing about Ion's character arc is a "realizing you're more than the role you were born to play" arc because of the whole 'was literally only born to replace the original Ion' thing. When you remove the fantasy lens from that, transness is about the only thing that fits.
I've never had it happen with real people, no. Closest I have it happen to that is with gods. Though none of them quite match up to any of our identities in my mind. Manannán's gender is what it is. He is the ocean. How are you going to pin a solid human gender on that? Guanyin is also Avalokitesvara and vice verse. How are you going to pin a gender on her? When she is also a he, but also neither of these? Gods in general are where our definitions of self begin to really start to crumble apart. Certain gods in particular though. Manannán and Guanyin are the ones that give me the strongest non-binary person feels. It's a thing pretty commonly shared with trans Gaelpols from what I've seen too? The Manannán thing that is.
I don't think that gender really enters into the matter of deities. They are what they are. They're as stated.
I wouldn't really argue any of them as being non-binary is the thing? At least not as we conceive that. Manannán is Manannán. How would someone as vast as the sea fit into that definition? And Guanyin just kind of shrugged off gender. She's a woman circumstantially, but she never was a woman. Nor does she particularly care one way or the other. They do give me strong feelings though as a non-binary individual. So basically my gender weirdness makes their gender weirdness just a bit easier to comprehend? Or vice versa? It is a confusing thing. Though there are deities who are definitely gendered gods. Mara is definitely gendered and he plays a lot on gender. Namely in that he thinks he's superior to all women because wow he happens to be male. And given his views I can't say he'd have anything even remotely positive to say about a transwoman. EDIT: The any here specifically referring to Manannán and any of the many beings that all happen to be Guanyin but also not.
One of my favorite trans headcanons is Saren from Mass Effect, partly because model constraints mean that he ends up mirroring a lot of the "female turian" markers. Wide hips and thicker waist? Check! Notable facial flared phalanges? Check! Differently shaped crest? Check! I know it's not intentional, but it still tickles me to think of him being a DFAB trans masculine character. I also like headcanoning Aveline from Dragon Age as a trans woman, and saw someone once do an au where both she and Isabella were, and that was part of the tension between them: Aveline assuming Isabella was cis and being a little bitter about it while Isabella was pushing back against what she saw as unfair gatekeeping (on top of the existing gender/sexuality tension in game dialogues.)
I'd dig it up if I had it liked, but I think the person in question deleted their blog. :( It wasn't ever crossposted anywhere either.
For reasons I don't know I'm very fond of agender Terezi and genderfluid Gamzee, and became more so after annoying sexist "he hit a girl" tones in discussions of their kismesissitude (trolls are all excessively violent, why would their gender matter there?) Masculine and/or DMAB NB Frisk and feminine and/or DFAB NB Chara are my favourite versions. Kids' book series Redwall has an obvious case; continuity unfortunately wasn't the author's strong suit and two characters flipped genders between books, and I like to pretend this is why. One time I had a dream that Hetalia's Ivan "Russia" Braginsky was DFAB and had to do top surgery on himself because humans can't cause permanent bodily restructuring to nations.
I've been looking up some DirkJake trans porn recently because SURPRISE turns out I can do lady bits if the character's explicitly recognized as a guy and there's one where it says he programmed Sawtooth to give him a mastectomy and I just... eugh. That's one of the things where even though it's kinda realistic and definitely better than dysphoria all the time while you're also in a shitty mental health place I mentally wince and peek through my fingers at because wow performing surgery on yourself for this has so many possibilities of going wrong.
If anyone here has read John Dies at the End, I've seen some fic with transman!John, that was pretty good.
I once saw a post about a nonbinary!Ion headcanon that said something like, "The gender is expelled with Fon-Master-level Daathic Artes. True power." :::PPP ...Great, I just remembered Shin Megami Tensei's version of Mara, a.k.a. perhaps the most elaborately multi-leveled dick joke ever constructed. Who is nevertheless presented as a female goddess in one of the games, to the silent protagonist's brief bemusement. Though speaking of SMT, their version of Lucifer very much falls into the "what is gender to a god" category. Sometimes he's a guy. Sometimes he's a girl. Sometimes he's two people, one male and one female. Sometimes he's old, sometimes he's young. Why should the Adversary care about gender?
The fact that he's female in SMT is hilarious because Mara is one of the most furiously misogynistic gods I've ever seen.
Only in one of them. It was in Strange Journey- it's implied she was being drawn as one of the mother goddesses of the Schwartzwelt (it also almost happened to Amaterasu). My headcanon is that it was a case of multiple deities named Mara getting mixed up when Mara was summoned- some of the demons summoning her expected this one (that's the one Mem Aleph was calling out to) and some of them expected the... other one. So the result was an oddball amalgamation of the two massively different figures that happened to have similar names.
Agreed with all of this. I definitely consider Spoiler Frisk and Chara as nonbinary, but I'm not sure I'd go so far as to say it's 100% canon, and the people who do say that can be kind of annoying. There's evidence that Napstablook is actually canon NB; in-game they are actually referred to with they/them pronouns. (Image evidence within spoiler; didn't want to make my post huge.) Spoiler @emythos I did actually read John Dies At The End a few years ago, but I must admit I wasn't enamored with it enough to go looking for fanfiction of it. And of course by this point I'm hazy enough about the plot that it might be pointless. I've noticed a trend in the Hamilton fandom, where in many modern AUs - even most modern AUs - Lafayette is portrayed as nonbinary, usually with they/them pronouns. I'm not complaining or anything, just curious as to what has prompted this widely used portrayal of NB Lafayette. (Not sure I'd call it a "headcanon" per se.)
I like the idea of all of the ghosts being NB by default, with Mettaton as being a ANBAB(?) who transitioned to male? Mostly because the robotic identity works so well for that narrative and it just seems really cool that he has made his own identity and owned the hell out of it.
