peter and elias are soo funny to me as a villainous duo because one of them dresses like ‘lighthouse keeper’ is an acceptable aesthetic, absolute captain birdseye off the shits, built like a brick shithouse and one of them is a twinky little victorian dandy who still thinks that men’s corsets are in fashion. on a related note, one of them beat a man to death with a lead pipe and shot an old woman three times in the chest and has torn people’s eyes out with his bare hands before and will again, and one of them has to use his gay little mist powers to kill anyone, and this is funny because it is absolutely not the way round you’d think
Bold of you too assume lighthouse keeper isn’t an acceptable aesthetic
i’ve really been thinking a lot about the exceptions people take with the trans jonah magnus headcanon the past few days. and obviously any discomfort people have is valid, but what really upsets me is this idea that the people who make trans jonah content obviously haven’t thought it through or something
so i’m gonna talk a little bit about why i like the trans jonah magnus headcanon and why it’s meaningful to me and several people i know - all of us transmasc ourselves - and why some of the arguments i’ve seen are upsetting
first, i think i need to address this idea people seem to have that apparently people saw jonah magnus and thought “evil bodyhopping villain? must be trans.” as if the people with this headcanon think those are qualities at all related to or indicative of a person being trans. there is obviously a problem with villains being queer-coded in mainstream media - but you’ll also find that it’s precisely because of this that so many queer/lgbt+ people relate to villains. i know that’s a big reason i do. but to conflate that with “these people see evil and think trans” is absolutely absurd.
and it’s doubly absurd because the overwhelming majority of the people with this headcanon are trans themselves - most of them transmasc. this is clearly not a case of cis people not getting it
what it is is a really easy way to just write the headcanon off as people not having thought about it and being influenced by internalized transphobia. personally, i think it’s a really lazy way of trying to make a bunch of trans people projecting and making content for other trans people look bad instead of honestly engaging with the fact that there are things you might find uncomfortable that others can and do take comfort in
so what actually happened?
in reality, people saw jonah magnus and his ability to bodyhop and thought “i can project and live out a power fantasy through that projection.” if you’re a trans person who hasn’t wished with everything you have that you could be in a different body, then i’m glad for you. but for me, a fat, chronically ill trans person with dysphoria and dysmorphia, the idea of being able to just have a new body is a fantasy comfort
it is also, importantly, fiction. it’s not real and could never be real. headcanons are not representation. jonah magnus is not and will certainly never be trans in canon
transmasc people writing jonah magnus as transmasc are largely projecting and exploring their own relationship with their bodies and trans experiences, and i don’t know how to properly express in words how fucking shitty it is to see other people - other trans people - go beyond expressing discomfort (which is fine and good) and start being actual assholes to real life trans people
like, i have seen arguments phrased in such a way to suggest that “actual” trans people wouldnt like the headcanon or write a trans experience in a certain way. as if having a headcanon of all things has any bearing on someone being trans
basically, everyone i’ve spoken to who headcanon jonah as trans have thought about it extensively. any people saying that people with the headcanon just haven’t “thought critically” about it are wrong and are just angry that people have come to a different conclusion than them. and even if they haven’t given it much thought? it’s a headcanon and please, dear god, let trans people fucking live
lastly, anyone who says they’ve done “everything” to not see this content and still see loads of it are being disingenous at best, because i actively look for the content and follow basically everyone who makes it and i still so rarely see it if i’m not explicitly looking for it (which is how i find trans jonah discourse, too, because assholes like to tag their hate)
This is a really good post that nails a lot of my feelings on the subject as well. I’d like to add some thoughts about the way a lot of the anti-trans Jonah headcanon posts are framed, as well as some related views that are all kind of the same general thing.
A lot of times the objection to trans Jonah headcanons is couched in language like, “Jonah is the definition of cishet white male privilege, the whole point of his character is the way he exploits privilege and oppresses others for his own gain, and if you think he’s ever experienced oppression before in his life then you have completely missed the point of the character.”
And I don’t really want to argue with that reading of the character - I think it’s well supported via textual implication, I agree that Jonah as a character exists as a representation/metaphor for the way privileged people exploit and abuse others, and I do in fact believe that Jonny’s intention is for him to be a cishet white man. (Probably. You could argue the het, I think, considering what Jonny’s also said about LonelyEyes, but that’s not really the point here.)
What I do want to object to, though, is the idea that “Jonah having experienced any form of oppression for any facet of his identity whatsoever” and “Jonah being a privileged person who oppresses, exploits, and abuses those with less privilege than him” are mutually exclusive. They aren’t, and insisting that they are comes from and feeds into a group of beliefs that I think are very dangerous.
There seems to be this idea that oppressor vs oppressed is a very strict black and white division, where people either belong to one group or another and there’s no overlap. There also seems to be this idea that being oppressed, marginalized, or victimized is a moral virtue and confers virtuousness on the person experiencing it. There ALSO seems to be a related idea that since being a victim is a moral virtue, then the victim must be morally virtuous, and if the victim is not morally virtuous, then they’re not actually a victim.
(See: “Peter Lukas wasn’t abused as a child, he’s a rich white man from a rich white family that exploits people and is literally a metaphor for capitalism.” This is true! He’s a terrible person who came from a very privileged background and literally eats people! He was also treated, as a child, in a way that is unambiguously emotionally abusive.
The fact that he grew up rich doesn’t mean it wasn’t abusive, and the fact that as an adult he’s a terrible person who perpetuates the systems of suffering his family profits off of doesn’t retroactively justify his childhood abuse.
Saying he was abused isn’t saying you must suddenly sympathize with him and forgive all of his actions; the idea that a victim of abuse automatically becomes a martyr who can do no wrong and whose every action must be excused is completely ridiculous. There’s a real problem here on tumblr where someone having trauma, being mentally ill, or having been abused means they’re automatically in the right and not responsible for any harm they may cause, and that’s just not true. If you hear “Peter Lukas’s upbringing was abusive” and think that means you must now forgive and condone all of his actions, then that’s actually very much your problem with what you think victimhood means.)
A lot of people have written about how they find meaning and value in writing Jonah being trans, how they feel like it adds depth to his motivations. I’m not going to repeat all of that. (Maybe in another post sometime.)
All I’m going to say is that it’s extremely possible for Jonah to have experienced oppression during his life, and to have decided - because he is the sort of monstrously selfish and entitled person who believes the world owes him things and that his own personal suffering is more acute and more important than anyone else’s - that as a result, he was going to make sure it would never happen again by making sure he was the one with the power to hurt others.
That’s an unpleasant reaction to have, and it’s also absolutely a thing many people in real life do. If you don’t think that’s ‘good representation’, well, I don’t know what to tell you. Sometimes people aren’t good. Sometimes the point of a story is how easy it is, when you’ve been hurt, to decide the only way to keep it from happening again is to hurt everyone else first and worst. Sometimes, if something makes you uncomfortable, it’s good that it does, and you should think about why it does and not just reflexively recoil from it and try to mandate it out of existence.
We live in a world where people like Caitlyn Jenner and Milo Yiannopolous are real, actual, living human beings. It’s not only just blatantly untrue to say things like “Rich people can’t have been abused as kids” or “Privileged people who hurt others have never experienced oppression in their lives” or “Cops don’t get to be queer”, it’s dangerous.
People who happen to share an identity with you are not automatically safe. Victims are not automatically good and virtuous. Oppression and abuse and trauma don’t automatically teach people how to be caring and compassionate. You cannot use in-group/out-group to determine morality. “Our group, right or wrong” is literally authoritarian ideology. When your entire concept of moral virtue relies on degree of victimhood, you are incredibly vulnerable to predators who will weaponize their pain and marginalization in order to hurt others, and when you refuse to even engage with fictional representations of that very real phenomenon, you cut yourself off from learning what it might look like and make yourselves vulnerable.
The people who say these things always demand that everyone else ‘think critically’. But when they say that, what they mean is ‘agree with what I’m saying.’ Well, I’m asking them to think critically right now. I’m asking them to think about what they are implying when they say that privileged people can’t be abused, that privileged people can’t have experienced oppression on any axis, that experiencing oppression makes you incapable of perpetrating it, that being a victim means you are good and noble and worthy of sympathy and if you aren’t good and noble and worthy of sympathy then you aren’t really a victim.
Like, we’re talking about this in context of things people say about characters on a podcast. The fictional characters don’t really matter. They’re not real and they don’t have feelings. The attitudes that underpin these sorts of thoughts, though, don’t only get applied to fictional characters. They are attitudes that stem from the beliefs and values that you carry into your real world interactions, and they scare me.
Because when you peel back the surface of those statements, what you get is victim-blaming, authoritarian ideology, conservative ideology, mob mentality, and a complete refusal to accept nuance or engage with concepts that you personally find unpleasant or anxiety-inducing. And that set of traits makes you very vulnerable to being preyed on and very vulnerable to, yourself, becoming a toxic and predatory person, all while being utterly convinced of your own righteousness.
