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There is a phenomenon i notice in media but never hear named. Call it, "Representation As Inherently Problematic."
Examples: There are no mentally handicapped people or trans people on shows that are not specifically about these topics. The reasons for this for mental disabilities are fairly obvious: mental handicaps are considered intrinsically undignified. If you show a mentally handicapped person doing or saying something dumb on a show, this counts as mocking a protected group. Thus: total absence.
Similarly: If you have a trans person on a show you need to make it clear to the audience they are trans, which either requires it to be a plot point (making it a sort of Very Special Episode) or making the trans person not pass (which is undignified and thus opens the writers up to criticism.) Thus: total absence.
Similarly, morbid obesity is undignified, and the morbidly obese are close to being a protected class (being as it is a physical disability). Thus, having them on a show is undignified and opens up the writers to criticism. Thus: total absence.
Another example: land o' lakes mascot, a native American woman, gets criticism for being stereotypical, which is synonymous to being visually identifiable as a native american. So she was removed from the labeling.
Another: Dr. Seuss gets criticism for visually identifiable depiction of a Chinese villager; book gets pulled as a result.
A similar-feeling phenomenon is This Character Has Some Characteristics Of A Protected Group, Which Is Kinda Like Being A Standin For That Group, Making That Character's Poor Qualities A Direct Commentary On That Group. Examples: criticisms around Greedo and Jar Jar Binks being racist caricatures; criticisms of goblin representation in Harry Potter as being anti-semitic caricatures.
There are certainly trans characters in left-coded media. You just have a normal looking woman, have them say “oh btw I’m trans”, and then move on. Very easy way to score representation points without having to deal with questions of passing or other thorny trans issues.
FTM representation is even easier, as they tend to pass quite well in real life.
Got any examples? None spring to mind for me. Though you are right, "trans as informed attribute" would be a (ham handed) way around this.
Bridget from the video game series Guilty Gear is a recent high-profile example.
In earlier entries in the series from the 00s, he was a femboy whose androgyny was played for laughs. For the newest sequel, I surmise that the developers decided that his character was too politically fraught to be left as is, so they threw in a brief scene where he comes out as trans.
The interesting thing about Bridget is that under the logic of gender being a social construct I think you could argue he was already trans, and when he adopted a female gender identity in the latest game, that was actually him detransitioning. In the backstory, although he was always male, he had also been raised as a girl pretty much since birth. So his sex was male, but the gender he was assigned at birth was female.
The fact he identified as a man in earlier games meant that he was rejecting the gender he was assigned at birth, making him a transman. By going back on that and identifying as a woman again, he's detransitioning in order to embrace the gender he was assigned at birth. Sure he's biologically male, but if gender is purely a social construct then that shouldn't make a difference, right? He's returning to his original gender identity, so he's detransitioning. Trans people largely didn't seem to see it that way though and accepted him as mtf.
Some people who didn't like the change also pointed out that by adopting a female gender identity, rather than bravely going against the grain he was conforming to the expectations of his parents, who raised him as a girl, and society at large which frequently perceived and gendered him as female due to his name and appearance even when he was identifying as male. If it was supposed to be positive trans representation then I think perhaps it wasn't thought out all that well.
I think the most interesting interpretation is that Bridget has been groomed into being trans, personally. His parents can be considered a stand-in for the kind of hyper-progressive parents that desire a trans child as a progressive trophy. The reasoning given is different, but the actions and effects are the same. Goldlewis then doubles down on this grooming, resulting in what happens in the newest game; he gives in to the conditioning to please the adults around him, who are encouraging it.
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Another interesting thing about this all is that gender is evidently a fundamental ontological category in the progressive worldview. In the same sense that the immanentized progressive egregore thinks killing black people is worse than saying the N-word, it also thinks that belonging to a gender is more enduring, significant and definitional than being a human/Gear/intelligent beast/vampire/spiritual entity/ascended demon/robot/AI/shadow clone/hivemind/talking sword/whatever. You can move through several of those transient categories, but Gender is the stable inner Gnostic truth revealed to the soul, the underpinning of the self – as discussed by @IGI-111 and others.
Regarding Testament mentioned downthread:
Baka creator! Can't have that transhumanist crap in our not-Christian fighting game about posthuman beings. Every character should pick a flag, a hormone stack, and a side that could be conceivably covered by the selection of bathrooms in an American school.
…Androgyny is, within certain diagnostic methods at least, not some queer notion made obsolete by the modern gender theory, but the psychological opposite of agenderism, or perhaps simply orthogonal as far as nomenclature goes.
Laaame. Who cares about attractive sides and personality traits? Tells us your pronouns and what kind of sterilization you need.
Is transhumanism being downplayed against transgenderism among progressives? That seems to be what you imply here.
I think transhumanism is a progressive (in the classical non-partisan, capabilities-increasing sense) ideology/sensibility, and there can be transhumanist-friendly transgenderism, but as it stands those are incompatible paradigms, with the latter having been absorbed into political leftism that's basically a zero-sum game to redistribute finite and indeed actively diminished resources, in the same camp as degrowth ecologists and race baiters. More to the point, transhumanism has another, also somewhat Gnostic notion of the self, e.g. see me here:
For now, the question to check is «would you be okay with a pill that magically restores sex-typical gender perception and orientation and other phenotypic aspects, or would you vehemently reject it and indeed try to prohibit it».
I'll hopefully expound on that at some point or we'll talk with @self_made_human and @TheDag and others and figure it out together.
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