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Culture War Roundup for the week of July 8, 2024

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It seems somewhere like autogynophilia. There's definitely people who suddenly have Revelations about their gender -- even in trans communities, 'cracking the egg' is a metaphor for a reason, and before the 2010s people with long histories of gender stuff realizing that it's even a category -- but just as AGP-as-a-theory is more than 'some trans people get off on dressing up at some point', ROGD-as-a-theory is more than 'some people become trans rapidly'.

Exactly what it is, well, that's harder to nail down: there's no ROGD-Blanchard or ROGD-Bailey, even pointed to literally Bailey gets you kinda vague mutterisms (about cults, because he's nothing if not unpersuasive). That people who come out as trans in younger generations tend to have a lot of other trans people in their social circles and either did not have or obfuscated a lot of gender stuff before identifying publicly as trans is pretty uncontroversial; that they're doing it because of those social circles is really hard to measure and the data is messy; that it's just a phase for a large portion and they'd be happier not transitioning or likely to detransition (which not all ROGD advocates are suggesting!) may not even be measurable in a perfect world.

that it's even a category

I have no idea what point this comic is trying to make. Unrelatedly, I absolutely hate how this CAD-adjacent muck is the default art style for all Western webcomics. Cyanide and Happiness is unironically more expressive and aesthetically pleasing than this.

El Goonish Shive is a long (loooooong)-running transformation and especially gender-transformation comic. The character on the right has spent a little over a year in-universe and around twelve years real-world being declared Just That Girly and having access to a magical (well, alien magic science) transformation gun regularly used to change gender. This was a bit of a Genre in that era of the internet, complete with sometimes not-exactly-kosher-by-modern-progressive-standard jokes. Unlike most of that Genre, the same comic has continued mostly uninterrupted for the whole time.

The timeline for the comic is weird and kinda alternate universe, but it's probably set somewhere between 2005 and 2012, with a world mostly like ours, but where magic is weakly available. While there are a lot of other bigger questions that the availability of magic set up, though, that alien magic science transformation gun is a little unusual in-setting for having both extreme reliability, mass production, and having some real-world uses, without being especially dangerous in terms of side effects or weaponization. (The gun itself can make disguises, but a stripped down version that just changes primary and secondary gender traits can be produced in minutes.)

Which produces a problem because it's something the character basically never considered, even as the author was increasingly getting bombarded with questions about why he wasn't actively working toward it, because after the first decade of a gender transformation comic you tend to pick up a trans fanbase, and the comic as a whole was and remains pretty unusual for almost everybody being mostly sane, reasonable, and compassionate.

The explanation that people didn't realize that was a possibility handles at least part of that, albeit by making the question suddenly relevant. And, indeed, the author didn't know, back in 2003 (cw: bad art).

((The character on the left is a lab experiment who escaped after a superpowered nutjob who may or may not have been a competing test subject took over the lab, but there's plot reasons she has surface-level familiarity with the topic.))

Ok, but I'm even more confused now than I was before.