Maybe so, but would the trolls know that sufficiently for it to become such a part of their culture? Would they have any brain differences which are correlated with gender identity? And Kanaya commented about how humans are like Alternian mammals Without The Hermaphroditic Biology. I still like the headcanon that DMAB jadebloods become the Imperial Drones. Dirk did confirm that the original Alternian drones weren't robots.
I stick to the headcanon that Imperial Drones are any and all unfertilized offspring of the Mother Grub. never received any troll genetic slurry. also I mean. there are actual people who are intersex/hermaphrodites, they still experience gender it doesn't necessarily need to be a Big Thing, but like....trolls clearly experience gender. they could literally all be hermaphrodites, or even have multiple genitalia setups, and still know "hey there's a thing I feel" and give it a label.
trolls could base their gender on literally any number of things other than genital configuration, and thus could have a concept of it and a concept of transness without being a 1:1 reskin of humans for example, if troll gender is determined by their lusus like laz mentioned above, and jadebloods only/almost only get chosen by jade lusii (which would make sense if the only/primary jade lusus was a mother grub, which is by her nature female), and trolls get a varying amount of sex hormones from their lusus based on their lusus' gender... then they're going to have a concept of male and female solely from that, and any character who doesn't identify as the same gender as their lusus would be trans
From the Wiki: Spoiler: potentially nsfw It was confirmed in the text from clicking on Xefros' poster that the male troll Xultan Matzos had a "bone nook", so either trolls are herm-structured, he was trans, or the nook isn't actually a vagina analogue as fanon claims. Whatever they have, I think we can all agree it probably doesn't look anything like a human's.
yeah and honestly that is super what I like because it allows me to make their gender stuff as complex or simple as I like :3c (response to cassikat's post)
I... Don't think that was meant to be a blanket statement? with "Without The Muscle Definition" in there I think she was referring to creatures like Aurthour's species. It reads like another centaur joke to me anyway
the wiki has been laughably inaccurate on..many things, most notably their months-long refusal (and i do mean refusal, up to and including editing any mention of it out) to acknowledge dave and karkat were dating; i'm not willing to trust they have a 100% accurate totally unbiased interpretation of troll gender and biology. and, like, we apply "hermaphrodite" to aliens and non-humans, but intersex people very often view it as a slur, so it could just be that they don't apply that word to themselves because that's not a word for trolls?
It's also possible that gender is a hormonal/psychological difference which serves a completely different purpose in trolls than in humans. Like, I've seen a lot of headcanons where female for trolls is the Danger Gender - if you're female, it's basically an indication that you're naturally inclined to be more aggressive (physically or interpersonally) and dominant. I've also seen headcanons where gender is a remnant from when trolls were hive-dwelling colony insects, and had different roles in the hive. It's basically a completely different thing that gets translated into "gender" when talking to humans because that's the most similar human concept. As far as I understand it, human gender originates from reproductive biology and the psychology and brain chemistry that goes with those biological differences, and human trans people happen when there's a mismatch between the biological and psychological sides. Trolls don't have any of that stuff, so trans trolls are probably trans for different reasons and have very different experiences from trans humans. Of course this is all from a Watsonian perspective. From a Doylist perspective it's more likely that the creators just haven't thought about all this stuff this much.
I don't think the Danger Gender thing really works because Tavros is socially punished for not being aggressive, and literally every troll we've seen has been expected to be aggressive. Gender being based on a different function than in humans, yeah, that works. I always thought in trolls it would be more like the difference between soldier and worker ants than between mammal sexes. I just don't think they could all be entirely anatomically identical in every aspect or there'd be nothing to transition from or to.
me, planting myself in the Doylist category of 'creators didn't think about it much, I can and will do All Thing': my city now
Spoiler: troll gender discussion yeah, i have to say, i'm particularly fond of gender evolving from when they were weird proto-trolls Spoiler: nsfw??? weird alien hivetroll rambles feat. ants some species of ant will fight (whipping each other with their antennae, non-fatally) to determine which of the males is allowed to mate with the queen. so maybe proto-trolls do something like this, but because of [train noises] require two biologically 'male' (since they produce the slurry) trolls before the slurry is viable, so the proto-trolls have to mate with each other before mating with the mother grub. so a subset of proto-trolls tends to be the instigator of these mating-fights, and is generally rowdier than the other subset (but that doesn't mean the other subset isn't fighty at all) there's the birth of blackrom and the birth of a gender system that doesn't rely on the same things ours does. being expected to be aggressive doesn't mean that someone else can't be expected to be more aggressive. and social transitioning is a thing. maybe afab trolls have black lips while amab trolls have grey (this is a headcanon i have seen and like), there's something to transition to or from. afab trolls likely have breasts for some reason, there's something to transition to or from. a lot of trans people are also invested in a fantasy where someone can say one day "actually, i'm a dude/gal/neither/etc" and people will go "ok" and that's it, that's all you have to do, no one will question it and you don't have to have months or years of struggle to get people to stop questioning it.
Spoiler: anatomy Also I would absolutely kill to have fans do more weird things with troll anatomy than the standard dick-and-vag even if the dick is a tentacle.
Spoiler several people that I interact with on the canon Hiveswap discord are upset that they picked the feminine, makeup-wearing jadeblood into the trans guy. I’m just happy there’s trans representation but I seem to be among the minority there.
Spoiler as a feminine, makeup wearing guy who finds most of the jadebloods #relatable, I'm OVER THE FUCKING MOON happy about this, like, DUDE ITS GREAT AHHHHHHHHHH
Spoiler i get where they're coming from, and before it was confirmed canon i was a little concerned that people were going "he's wearing eyeliner so he must be afab" but honestly...trans dudes can be feminine too, i think it's kind of neat to have some femme transdude rep
