Role & Identity

The most important evidence in favor of the essential femininity of contestedly female characters such as Astolfo or Gwyndolin is the fact that the overwhelming majority of pornography drawn of such characters shows them in female roles. Being penetrated, being came upon, being bound, the phallus penetrates them alongside as women, as opposed to them being cuckolded or performing the phallus’ role as the male role is in pornography. While a similar dynamic can be argued for characters commonly drawn homosexual, this appears in heterosexual settings, with the entire impetus of the “are traps gay?” meme being the internal confusion but pre-existing acceptance of this possibility of biologically male characters being in the female role.

The attempted claim on these characters does not accept this, but instead seeks to force the characters into the singular descriptive of “trans”, with the implication being that the characters in question, if submitted beneath a battery of questioning by psychiatric authorities, could come out the other end with a legitimated identity, “trans”. For the more anarchist-inclined, the psychiatrist is outsourced but the discourse remains the same, where there is a singular, atemporal, diagnostic adjective which applies to the individual in the same manner as race, the “identity” that has become the word of the century. For this discourse, the identity reigns supreme, especially about so-called “role” of gender, which is supposed to be disregarded while identity is upheld.

That “role” is being resisted is the proof of the emptiness of common feminist trans doctrine. The assumption that identity can exist without role implies that identity precedes role, but such a thing is not the case - role precedes and creates identity. Gender must be recreated everyday and is recreated everyday, in tiny interactions. The meanings of ones appearance, gait, interests, habits, body type, etc, all work within a system of meaning which creates the position that one fits into. This creation of the position is the role-mechanism and from this mechanism comes the gender identity which comes to exist to refer to the created/performed role.

The stake on certain characters as “trans” who are indeed important for trans discourse for reasons of their androgyny or gender transitioning is meaningless. As gender exists only in context, the willful transformation of gender such as through transition requires the manipulation, creation, and performance of and within context. One moves into a different context than they were destined to in their body, but they still move into a context. This context determines the identity, which exists regardless of whether the character can be fit into the narrow psychiatric definition of “transgender”, as in the case of male characters who have been interpreted time and time again as fitting into the woman’s context.