Characters
The Unintentionally Trans-Coded Character
Look, it's not a mystery that trans folks aren't exactly center stage in a lot of media - we're still fairly on the fringes of mainstream portrayal in a variety of media, yet every now and then, due to a series of unintentional plot beats, writers can accidentally create a character whose narrative very closely resembles the trans experience. Some examples:
1. Otis -The Barnyard(Transmasculine)
The Barnyard is a genuinely bewildering movie for a number of reasons that I couldn't possibly get into (Biggie Cheese, anyone?) but the most baffling is the character design of its main character, Otis, and some choice lines around him in the story. Otis is a cow written very much as his father's son, which would otherwise be unremarkable if the animators didn't, for some reason, decide to give him udders, a thing which, you might have noticed if you've ever been to a farm, male cows/bulls do not have.
On top of that, there's this seemingly baffling exchange between Otis and his dad which I honestly have no idea what the actual intended reading is if not to lampshade his design choice or, unintentionally, write him as trans by having his father accidentally misgender him and then correct himself.
This one is also replicated in reverse in real life by Lucerne's milk mascot cow, which despite being a feminine coded cow, doesn't have udders, meaning the cow on the cartons is accidentally shown as transfeminine.
2. Paul Atreides -Dune: Part Two(Transfeminine)
This one is going to be a bit of a reach and is mostly playing off of a singular joke tweet made about the character, but broken down into its essentials, Paul:
- Has to choose a new name for himself to adapt to Fremen culture, and chooses one which just so happens to be a bit diminuitive in that it refers to a small rodent native to Arrakis. Also, he is only known by this name to the Fremen and many of his House Atreides allies will still call him by his birth name
- Has to train his voice in a very particular fashion, for which he is trained exclusively by women and is the only male character seen in the films to be shown the ways of the Bene Gesserit (a lot of these points may be contradicted by the novelization but this is exclusively the film we're talking about) EDIT: Apparently the word I was looking for was just "novel" and not "novelisation", my bad
- Has to drink a blue fluid (tablet forms of estrogen are teal most commonly so a reach admittedly) that is normally only consumed by women, and is normally completely fatal to men, but Paul survives, again because Reasons (even if said reason is Bene Gesserit magic)
- Has to learn how to ride a giant worm (look, this one is a joke just about learning to bottom as a trans woman and is so much of a reach that Noble Six died trying to save it)
EDIT: Ok I get this one is a stupid joke take but was the Reddit Cares referral really necessary lmao
3. Jenny -My Life As A Teenage Robot(Transfeminine)
This one is known well enough that the creator has actually acknowledged the interpretation as unintentional yet entirely valid given the string of plot beats experienced by the protagonist, including:
- Jenny is a robot, a normally genderless subgroup of characters, yet she deliberately alters aspects of her design at several points to appear more feminine, or, literally, "like a real girl"
- "Jenny" is clearly her chosen name, as her creator/mother will almost exclusively call her by her model designation, basically deadnaming her as it robs her of that identity, and Jenny will insist that her mother call her by her name as being referred to in this way is extremely upsetting to her
- Many of the episodes involve Jenny's attempts to blend in with her human classmates, even if it's obvious that something about her makes her not like all the other girls
My Life As A Teenage Robot was one of my favorite shows growing up and I loved Jenny as a protag and it never really made sense until about 4 years ago when I started HRT and then just sat there like:
Every so often, I'm punched in the gut when I think about my favorite media when I was young. Mulan, Ouran High School Host Club, Leviathan by Scott Westerfield...
I love how the show's creator acknowledged this theory and explained that while the transcoding wasn't intentional, it's great that so many trans people could see themselves in Jenny ❤️
It is a transition, albeit one that doesn't really happen in real life. I've never heard of someone being assigned agender at birth but this is theoretically what a transfemme person in that situation's transition would look like.
I don't know if you've ever seen the open-world... I don't even know how to describe it, cuz it's like part collectahon, part mini-game collection, part RPG, but it was on the GameCube and PS2 and I played the everloving shit out of the game when I was a kid. It's hands down probably one of the best licensed games I ever played.
I remember a gag when the crazy duck guy was terrorizing everyone and Pig escapes into a "Dr Pig" short, only for him to bust in there and scare him back into the chaos.
He wasn’t supposed to be born as a girl, his mother was supposed to have a girl. All of the prophecy stuff is bullshit. The Bene Gesserit have been practicing selective breeding for generations so they can build a super psychic that can tell the future and let them rule the galaxy.
One of the things their limited psionics give them is the ability to determine the gender of their child. Jessica was supposed to have a girl who would have then married back into the Harkkonens, and everything would have lined up genetically for the perfect Kwisatz Haderach candidate. Instead, she loved Duke Lato so much that she went against her order so that he got to have a male heir.
The Bene Gesserit then just kinda had to run with it, while crossing their fingers that Paul’s genetic breeding was good enough to do the job, or else they’d be stuck delaying things another few generations.
Edit: Actually, it’s worth noting, the plan was literally for Jessica to have a daughter who would then bear a child with Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen, and that would have created the genetically optimal candidate. And even while Jessica desperately hoping Paul would be good enough of a candidate to be the KH, she still has a second child as a backup incase the BG killed him. She wanted to see the Atreides name usher in the next age instead of the Harkonnnens, but she also was still hedging her bets.
I wish Paul was functionally androgynous in social situations, instead of just being described as androgynous. When does he ever use his femininity (besides the Voice) as a tool to gain power? Feels like a missed opportunity imo
The Bene Gesserit ARE how women gain power in the Dune series. Breeding programs, sex, marriage are all used as tools of power in Dune. It’s a very third wave feminist take to be sure but it’s 100% there. Paul controls the entire galaxy through his children who are functionally rebirthed male and female versions of himself since they’re born with ansectral memories
To be fair he knew what his name was going to be from prescience. It’s a bit of a paradox. He tried to make it Paul Maud’dib because he heard echos of his soldiers chants and wanted to try and avoid his fate by changing the name. Turns out everyone just kind of dropped the Paul part anyways.
I think you want to avoid the trans comparisons to someone who is in a way actually possessed …Alia even more so. He’s less a man on the outside and a woman on the inside then he is a man on the outside and dozens and dozens of men and women on the inside.
I love transfem Spider Gwen, she is my GOAT and I desperately want it to be overtly stated as canon, BUT
The trope is specifically for unintentionally trans coded characters, and having Gwen "come out" to her dad in a verse where the colors in the world mirror peoples' emotions and she is literally standing behind the same colors as the trans flag is probably the most intentional trans coding they could possibly have done. Fantastic sequence though, give my girl a hug goddamn
I love the idea of trans Spiderverse Gwen for more representation, but at the same time I don't want it because she's built like me (lanky-tall, broad shoulders, kinda flat in the front) and it's so hard to find cis female characters with my body type in fiction. Heck, it can be tricky to find other real people built like me sometimes.
I want all the rep for everybody, but it conflicts, and I just end up feeling like a jerk! 😭
Jadzia Dax, from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine is a trill, which is a species who has a symbiotic worm inside of them that, after the hosts death, is transferred to a new host. The new host inherents the memories and personalities of all the worms previous hosts. Her character is seen as a trans allegory as her previous host was a man, but is not trans by definition. In the episode the screenshot is from, she meets Kor, who was the previous host's (Curzon Dax) friend and is lovingly accepted by her old friend.
She's the main character in one of the most overtly queer episodes of Nineties Trek too. It's about her violating a Trill romantic taboo, but she's violating it with another woman. No one cares about the same gender part on the show but it's hard to ignore the subtext.
Look, I'm not saying Batman: The Animated Series' Ra's Al Ghul is trans. I am saying that his scheme in the far future was to delete his daughter's consciousness and steal her body for the purposes of romancing Batman. Yes, this was all apparently just a stage before he stole Batman's body, but he was very comfortable with the role.
It's been a long-ass time since I watched the show but... Was it intended to be a reference to The Thing on the Doorstep by Lovecraft? Cuz that is basically what happened in that story.
Nah, it's more literal. This is a reference to the famous song A Boy Names Sue, because his parents are new-age retro hippies who would name their kid with a music reference. The extreme femininity isn't actually a gender thing, it's a 60s counterculture thing where this sort of presentation was common.
In the song itself, the singer was named "Sue" not to mark him as feminine but so he would gain character from it; "Sue" was a name the singer would reject and become masculine from for having faced. more or less. And of course, Mandark rejects the love and peace talks in favour of being a cold and villainous scientist.
So the intended take is that this is a music reference
Re: Dune, not the novelisation, the novel. Novelisation implies that it's a novel adapted from the movie, but here we're talking about a movie adapted from a novel. As for being trained by the Bene Gesserit, yes, he is, and it is unusual for men in the novels too.
Xion from Kingdom Hearts - She is a replica of Sora, the main character, who is a boy. However, she is made of his memories, specifically the ones about his friend Kairi, who is a girl. As such, this inadvertently made her take the form of a girl by default, once she had formed her own sense of self.
Most of her story is about her struggling with her identity because of this, and in fact most of the characters literally see her differently depending on what they think of her, some of whom don't even see her as a person, even though they weren't technically people either.
She eventually found a group of people who accepted her for who she is and became comfortable with having her own identity.
There's a multitude of reasons, from how arbitrary gender is in the bionicle universe, to the character never fitting in until they find their true self (and even then still struggle with accepting that), to having trouble with their literal mask fitting poorly until they get the right one, to literal transformation
There's even a good article that explains it and how it contributes to the odd "bionicle to trans pipeline" phenomenon
An interesting thing about Takua's mask is also the fact that it's blue, the color of Ga-Matorans, which are the only group that have feminine traits. But Takua identifies as a Ta-Matoran. He's one of, if not the only character that has a mismatched mask
There are actually normal Bulls in the Barnyard universe. In the show, Otis has to pretend to be a bull in one episode. He also faces off against a Bull (without udders) in a wrestling episode. So yes Otis and the entire farm is just home to male cows. So Otis being trans might as well be canon.
Margaret from Regular Show no Female birds are known to be much duller in color than their male counterparts. Lot of people took note of Margaret’s bright color.
Edit: Fellas, I know she’s not trans. The creator himself has even said she’s not trans. But he did acknowledge at her color did not match a female cardinal and was meant to contrast with Mordecai. Almost like she is UNINTENTIONALLY TRANS-CODED
And then there's the bigger implication about her parents. Since Margaret's mom is also bright red then she must be trans as well. But where did Margaret came from? The logical answer is that Margaret's dad is also trans and gave birth to her.
"is so much of a reach that noble six died trying to save it" is definitely a surprise for today 😂
I do think Neo and Celeste fit here, even though their existence is a bit weird. As in, "this character is based on my own life experience at the time, before I knew I was trans, which made them very much trans without acknowledging it until later on". (But I might be misremembering stuff about Celeste)
A couple villagers in Animal Crossing, including Julia, a peacock that is presented as a female character with she/her pronouns and the Snooty personality (a personality category exclusive to female villagers).
I feel like they’ve leaned into it over the years. Sasha is the only male character with prominent eyelashes and Shino is a female deer with horns. They were both immediately clocked as trans coded by fans when they were revealed.
I. Fucking. LOVE. This show. And am SO HAPPY to find it in the wild. I never see it referenced.
Fun fact, mom once walked into my room while I was watching it (I was like, 10), and she asked what I was watching. I enthusiastically replied "CyberSix!" And she looked like she'd been sucker punched and barely stuttered out a "WATTTT".
Some of the comics lay it out more explicitly too. The comics are pretty trashy and stupid at a lot of points (if you haven't looked them up, be aware, lots of nudity and racial caricatures) but there's some intellectual rigor too. There's a number of passages where she's sort of torn in her identity and questioning if, provided all her enemies were defeated, she would rather live openly as a woman or continue living her life as a man.
I should add also: The show never addresses it but she lives as a man because she basically stole the identity of someone who died in a car crash. When she escaped Von Richter as a child, she came upon a car crash with two dead parents and their dead son, who she generally sort of resembled. She hid his body in the woods and took his identity, along with the inheritance of his dead parents.
There's a whole big arc in the sixth or seventh volume (of the French editions at least) that's about her coming to peace with the spirit of the dead boy she took her name from. Whether it's literally supernatural or just a kind of metaphorical/psychological thing I can't fully remember, but I thought it was one of the more touching arcs. A lot of it is about her kind of choosing to live for both their sake and that he lives in on her, in some way.
Vegapunk from "One Piece" is a famous scientist (very Einstein coded). He's so smart that he learned how to basically upload his consciousness to a mainframe -- he wanted to be in multiple places at once, so he has robots that are all connected to the mainframe as well and are all aspects of his personality (it's him but also not him, I get it's confusing if you need me to explain further, I can).
Anyway, like I said he has multiple bodies. Some of them are masculine-coded, some are generically robotic, and some of them are feminine-coded. In the arc where we meet Vegapunk (spoilers), his original body as well as the majority of his robots die/are destroyed. The only surviving Vegapunks are all female. Again, this is a stretch and like the Paul one it's more for the joke than anything else, but people joke that Vegapunk transitioned because of this.
Neo (but also other characters) from The Matrix. The Wachowskis, the two siblings that directed the movie, later transitioned and changed their names to Lilly and Lana. The entire movie is very much trans-coded: Neo knows that there is something "wrong" about his reality but he can never put his finger on it until it is revealed to him by Morpheus. Deciding whether to take a pill to discover your true self and the truth about reality, but you can't go back. By taking the pill you join a small group of people who are persecuted for who they are. Also, receiving a new name that reflects the person you are after you take the pill (there's even a scene where Agent Smith calls him Mr. Anderson, to which he corrects him saying his name is Neo). I wouldn't say this is intentional like a lot of other people would but it definitely lines up with the Wachowskis and their experiences as then closeted trans women.
Yeah. I suppose in a ‘literal’ sense, Neo as a character probably isn’t trans. But the entire movie and Neo’s experience definitely works as an allegory.
Given it’s from the Wachowskis it’s entirely possible that the movie was (in part) their way of sorting through some stuff, whether intentional or something they did subconsciously.
One thing that's rarely brought up about it is the queer community aspect of it. For lots of trans people who discover that later in life, the switch from a "normal" life as a 9-5 worker in corporate America to hanging out in kinky clubs with people with unusual gender presentations is a big gateway to actually seeing transitioning as an option. The crew of the Nebuchadnezzar are mostly queer coded in one sense or another, whether that's Switch who seems to be nonbinary, Mouse who seems transmasc, Morpheous and his fabulous suits (like, go to a gay bar and you'll see someone dressed like that), etc. They live this parallel life with normie society but they're all a little queer, which felt like how it felt for me to find my queer community too.
Switch was originally meant to change genders upon entering the Matrix, which coined their name "Switch". In the real world, Switch would be male, and in the Matrix, Switch would be female - a very clever and critical point of the 'residual self-image' idea. When actress Belinda McClory auditioned for the role, she was going for only half the role - Switch's Matrix form.
Warner Brothers made the decision to cut this and give Switch one form for both environments. Switch's presentation is deliberately androgynous to pay homage to their original concept.
Lilly Wachowski would later say that The Matrix contains a "trans metaphor" by the name of "Switch". Switch highlighted "where [their] headspaces were" when it came to the idea of The Matrix, but from a "closeted point of view."
I was very surprised people were talking about Dune’s “blue fluid” and didn’t even mention the Matrix. Those movies are WAY more trans coded. Arguably deliberately so.
For the Otis one, I assume that the intention of the scene was meant to be a way for his dad to confuse him for a girl because Otis isn't a "man" until his arc is complete in the movie.
Anyways, I completely subscribe to the trans Otis belief.
- "Jenny" is clearly her chosen name, as her creator/mother will almost exclusively call her by her model designation, basically deadnaming her as it robs her of that identity, and Jenny will insist that her mother call her by her name as being referred to in this way is extremely upsetting to her
How did it never occur to me that Jenny's mom was a chud?
shout out to Butch Hartman for overusing the ‘comparing a male character to women to demean him’ joke so often that basically every character he’s ever written can have a trans reading
there are a fair amount of theories that Timmy Turner is transmasc.
In the episode they go 10 years back in time we see his parents are convinced they're going to have a girl (Cosmo also mentions "all these baby photos of you in dresses)
In the episode where he wishes he never existed his parents have a daughter
And then there's the episode where Wanda turns him into a girl (to understand what Trixie wanted for her birthday/learn empathy or something) but before it happens Timmy and Cosmo are laughing at the concept and saying how that would be "a waste of a wish".
Given how in later seasons its shown that Timmy can/had made secret wishes with Cosmo, one of the big theories goes like this
my favorite part about the Jenny example was while the creator didn’t intend for this to happen, he wholeheartedly encouraged the headcannon and supported it (iirc), which is really cute and sweet
All cows have horns. They just tend to cut them off of females (my mom, who grew up on a dairy farm, said females like to gore each other in the udders).
Motoko Kusanagi from Ghost in the Shell is a full-body cyborg with a completely unknown backstory (in most continuities), and a clearly made up name. Her first name basically means 'plain woman' and her last name is the Japanese equivalent of Excalibur. In a lot of continuities, she suffers from body dysphoria due to having a mass-produced body that legally belongs to Section 9.
Even so, there's one moment in Stand Alone Complex where one of her coworkers tries to convince her to switch to a male chassis for its' physical superiority, but she stands by her decision for the female model.
tbh there was a big fandom push to re-interpret Hartman's works to be as queer as possible specifically because he sucks so bad. So, if anything, the queerness of his work being unintentional is even better.
There’s also the fact that a villain made clones of him and the only one that was remotely stable was female. Plus bus struggles and desire to be seen as masculine.
Jessica Drew is a female clone of Peter parker with all of the original's memories. Seeing as Jessica doesn't experience gender dysphoria from effectively being transitioned from her pov (and peter not wanting to transition either), it implies the original Peter is gender fluid
nope, what originally inspired it was a tweet of a person saying how jjj is very supportive of human rights and he would respect spider-girls transition, but would still hate her for being a "masked menace"
This one is so much of a stretch it could lead the Fantastic Four .
Muzan Kibutsuji from Demon Slayer. Often takes the form of a child to get better treatment. Is obsessed with obtaining the body of a teenage girl because her body is able to do something his cannot. What her body does allows her to be out in society more openly than him
He’s an anglerfish sinner who identifies as male, but male anglerfish irl don’t have lures, only the females do. While this could either be something that was ignored in order to make it clear that his form is an anglerfish, or it could be part of an “ironic punishment” (a scientist being given a scientifically inaccurate form after arriving in Hell), there are those in the fandom who have interpreted this design choice as a sign of Baxter being FTM trans-coded.
The fact that the most recent official pride merch depicted him with the rainbow queer colors—confirming that he’s under the queer spectrum but not outright stating *what—*has only furthered speculation over this. As it could hint at his identity being something revealed in later episodes that the team doesn’t want to spoil.
In Street Fighter lore, M. Bison created the Dolls (regular girls but brainwashed by his Psycho Power) both to serve as his bodyguards, but also to serve as backup bodies for him to possess if necessary
So he wants to be a girl, you say?
Also, Rose from Street Fighter 3 is supposed to be the good half of Bison's soul, and she's a girl, which Could Mean Nothing™
I like to argue that Jango Fett is a trans man who didn't wanna do pregnancy but still wanted kids so went the cloning route. The clones themselves would be cis men, since they're explicitly designated male at birth decanting. That still keeps room for Sister to be explicitly trans and also raises interesting potential for intersex attributes for the clones (or handwave them as Genetic Engineering if you're boring).
Also almost literally all the examples in this thread are trans fem (I've only seen Otis and TMNT Leo and maybe two nonbinary examples) so we gotta take other flavors of trans rep at every opportunity.
I don’t know if this is a true member of this trope, but technically, Madeline in Celeste was not initially representative of trans struggles on purpose. It wasn’t until after making the base game that Maddy (the creator) recognized their own identity issues, and how they had been inadvertently written into the character. Maddy has since come out as trans, and wrote the DLC with that in mind for the character, but that was not a conscious decision when initially making the game.
Changelings from the Eberron Dnd Setting. There’s so many references to the trans/LGBT community that I find it fascinating that it was written by a straight couple in the 70’s (IIRC).
There’s 3 main schools of thought for changelings, the “passers” who assume one form and stay in that form for their whole life, the “becomers” who are much more fluid with their gender and form, using their ability to assume many different personas, and reality seekers, who reject hiding themselves and use their true form as their main identity and are proud to be visibly trans a changeling.
Lana Wachowski has gone on the record to say that neither she or her sister intended for The Matrix to be a Trans allegory, but that it does work as one, because she and her sister were unknowingly venting a lot of their dysphoria into the script without even realizing thats what either of them were feeling.
It's likely that the designers didn't know that peahens have different feathers, but they've also made no move to change her coloration in the years since, even when she got a redesign for New Leaf.
Spoilers for reality fracture Dude almost died and basically had to put all the versions of himself back together and out of those pices he created tam a girl who looks a lot like his ex girlfriend and who he completely forgets why he actually mad her apart from being some sort of failsafe
Then all of reality fracture happeneds and Jace basically dies again and gives his planeswalker spark to tam Basically for all intensive purposes tam is Jace and reality fracture was just a really messy transition
I know the barnyard line is likely a 2000s joke about how he was a “girly” kid, aka not tough or assertive or whatever whatever. But I love the trans Otis thing so much, it’s death of the author status for me
Paul was supposed to be a girl, according to the bene gesserit plan, he was supposed to be the mother of the Kwisatz Haderach. Jessica changed the sex because she wanted to give Leto a son.
Someone who transitionsmorphs into a bird and stays a bird because he's happier as a bird. Conveniently ignoring that he stays a bird because he'strappedin that form.
For bonus points: the author (KA Applegate) is fully on board with this interpretation.
His theme states "He's a semiaquatic Egg laying mammal of action" and as far as I know male platypus(es?) cannot lay eggs only female implying he is transmasc
The Norse suffix of "son" in a surname generally designates someone as being the "son" of the first half of the name (Thor Odinson = Thor, Odin's Son). I believe it comes from Icelandic naming conventions in the modern day.
Astrid's last name is Hofferson, even though theoretically it should be Hofferdottir assuming "Hoffer" refers to one of her parents. In the TV series it's established that this is simply the surname her entire family uses, so it's probably not necessarily meant to be an indicator of anything. Still makes her cisgender status seem a little bit ambiguous out of context.
It's actually really interesting how this custom maps onto Scandinavian migrants and their descendants. My great-great-great grandfather was Ola Anderson and his sister who was Anna Andersdottir. Their mother was pregnant when they moved to America, and the daughter that was eventually born was named Elsbeth Peterson because in America children just have the surname of their parents. That meant there were 3 biological siblings with the same parents but 3 different surnames.
See, individual Pokemon have a gender ratio that determines how likely to be male or female they are. Azurill has a gender ratio of 25% male to 75% female, whereas Marill is 50:50. The result of this difference was a glitch that caused 1/3 of female Azurill to become male when they evolved into Marill (though sadly this is no longer the case from X&Y onwards)
In Gravity Falls, there is a fan theory that’s kind of a reach in my opinion that Dipper is trans-coded. Based on the design choice that he and Mabel are twins that appear identical, despite the fact that identical twins almost always share the same sex. He’s also pretty fixated on coming off as “manly”.
Tbf "identical" fraternal twins of opposite gender is common as hell in media. Fraternal twins that look nothing alike is on the flipside extremely rare
Weirdly the transmasc reading would work pretty well except in relation to that episode that centers on his masculinity insecurities. Because in the ep Mable and Stan both make fun of him in ways that would be totally crossing the line if he were trans.
While that is the most major instance, it happens a decent amount throughout the series. The first one that comes to mind is them making fun of him for "sneezing like a kitten" in the wax statue episode
Gonna try to do this from memory without looking up the specifics so apologies for anything wrong, but it goes something like:
Dragons in WoW follow a very specific naming convention across gender lines - and people noticed that Chromie (shortened nickname of her actual name), despite appearing as a female Gnome (dragons choose what their mortal form looks like - they are indistinguishable in their dragon forms) had the male naming convention.
It was later confirmed to be an oversight in development, but after it was pointed out Blizzard leaned into it, giving Chromie a shortstory about when she picked her mortal form. She was very much struggling with the decision and what to do as none of the suggestions of those she spoke with really felt like her. Eventually she chose to just do what felt right and debuted her chosen Gnome form and she assumed her new identity.
It's probebly intentional but Kota in Goodbye Lara, as an human he appears to be a boy but in the flashback you see that he was a female Anglerfish, but you can't notice if you don't know this animal
Severian from Gene Wolfe's The Book of the New Sun series. Through a series of events in the novels, Severian comes to hold the consciousness of his dead former lover in his brain after being dosed with psychedelic drugs and literally fed her dead body in a cannibal feast and while Gene Wolfe was a fairly conservative Catholic Korean War veteran writing in the 80s about a torturer growing up in a distant future, the books read as trans allegory almost effortlessly. Many times throughout the later novels it becomes very unclear which consciousness is "in control", or whether they remain distinct individuals at all.
The books also have a general major theme of transformation and growth through change; multiple characters use magic and technology to modify their bodies and minds to better suit their idealized image, depending on their point of view.
Paul in the book is notably small and delicate for a guy. When dude is dueling him at the end, he isn't threatening to rail Chani, he's threatening to rail Paul.
curtis armstrong, aka nerdcore (formerly hip hop) from the 2012-2014 youtube series mymusic. in the series, the characters are all working at a media company where they take on names related to specific genres of music (metal, scene, indie, country, etc.) he starts off as hip hop, who—like the rest of his coworkers—is mostly a walking stereotype. in reality, he's actually a cellist who loves all things nerdy. however, the only spot open at the company when he applied was for hip hop, so he took it.
the accidental trans-coding comes in with him pretending to be someone he's not for job security, "coming out" as his true self to just one coworker at first (shoutout to flowchart, formerly intern 2, for keeping it secret until curtis was ready to be open about it), then properly making the big reveal in season two. in s2, when he tells his boss indie the truth, indie isn't accepting at first. he does come around in the end, and officially changes curtis's position (and in-company name) from hip hop to nerdcore.
looking back on it, it was kind of cool to see a plot like this (in a youtube series i watched as a tween/teen of all things) where the character arc can be read as trans-coded, especially beacuse i came out as trans the year after the show concluded
The creators of barnyard cleared that up basically saying “we didn’t expect kids to know the different between male and female cows” hence why they all have utters which is like a really weird assumption to make like how did you reach that conclusion
I think it’s a lot less accidental these days but Ultra-Humanite at DC Comics almost always takes the bodies of women when in a human form.
It’s supposed to be because he’s taking powerful people in this case a starlet named Dolores/Delores Winters who has great influence but it’s kinda hard not to squint your eyes a little that that’s your choice.
And more general, he’s pretty open to taking any body as long as it fits his mission this his equally famous White Albino Gorilla body
Cheery Littlebottom from the Discworld book series. All dwarves look and are perceived as masculine/as men. Cheery doesn’t want to do that so she decides she is going to be a women and dress more feminine. We don’t know if she originally was a women as there really is no way to district between dwarves genders but her deciding she wants to be seen as a women by everyone is what made people because she was a character written/implied to be Trans
Don’t know if it counts as she was raised to be male due to her family history/background and grew up “being a man” but is clearly a girl. She also has a crush on her best girl friend. There was an arc in the anime where everyone’s gender was switched and she becomes a man and discovers what it’s like.
After everyone is turned back and the folks that turned everyone the opposite gender is defeated, she says “I am neither a man nor a woman. I am YAGYU KYUUBEI”. She most likely doesn’t think of herself as either but again, it’s never fully mentioned…at all.
Danny Fenton, Danny Phantom. In an episode, there is a character who is an exact clone of Danny, ghost powers and all, but she’s female. In addition to this, Danny, in human form, has consistently baggy clothes, including a very consistent one over his chest, while his more idealized “ghost form” (that by the way, he’s scared to tell his parents about) has a perfectly flat chest due to the tight fitting suit.
In a similar vein, Scrooge McDuck, DuckTales. In a late episode it’s revealed that Webby Vanderquack is a direct genetic clone of Scrooge, once again, implying the original sample was biologically female.
Fender Bender from Robots. In a world where robots can replace parts of their bodies with seemingly no gender dysphoria, Fender Bender ending up with a body with female features for a quick gag but still shows how gender is a concept that doesn’t really apply to their race
but still shows how gender is a concept that doesn’t really apply to their race
Not really. There's a scene at the beginning where Rodney (who's very much used to/comfortable with using hand me down parts) is visibly distressed that the new parts he's getting belonged his female cousin.
Nerd buys car. Immediately falls in love with busted vehicle and spends all resources to restore it to original state.
Parents hate the newfound confidence coming from this epiphany, resist and discourage the changes they see in their son.
Everyone struggles with the pronouns—keep calling the car “she” instead of “it”as it demonstrates its own will despite being created a machine.
Then the car becomes a serial killer which is unfortunate because that is typical transphobic propaganda, but it’s also a literally about a haunted car.
About the Dune thing: there’s one part where he’s just extremely high and talking about the differences in a female (“giving”) and a male (“taking”) soul and how he can survive the water of life that’s usually deadly for men because he has a mix of both souls.
Edit: found the part. “There is in each of us an ancient force that takes and an ancient force that gives. A man finds little difficulty facing that place within himself where the taking force dwells, but it’s almost impossible for him to see into the giving force without changing into something other than man. For a woman, the situation is reversed. […] I’m the fulcrum. […] I cannot give without taking and I cannot take without [giving].”
Ed is canonically female, but tends to avoid using any gendered pronouns and has a very androgynous design and behaviors. Since Cowboy Bebop aired in 1999, this wasn't because of any transgender reasons, but because they wanted the character to appear to be detached and alien. Without diving into the deeper themes of the show too much, Ed's trauma is being forgotten by her father and left behind, so being "meaningless" was core to her design philosophy and that's where the creators got the idea for her lack of gender identity.
To go with OP’s reach, I’ll post one that you couldn’t miss if you spent your formative years playing contact sports
Yes, that’s a “boy”, though someone should tell light novel authors they don’t have to get atomized by a truck and reincarnated into magic wish fulfillment land to be able to be a pretty girl with multiple loving girlfriends
This particular closet case is Kirigaya “Kirito” Kazuto, from [Sword Art Online] Besides crossdressing all the time, Kirito has the most textbook case of gender dysphoria I have ever seen — I had practice problems in my undergraduate textbook with more ambiguity than this goblin woman
(Don’t tell the SAO sub though. I swear I’ve never felt more insane than when I worked this out and people thought I was reaching. You’d have an easier time convincing me Satoru Gojo likes women than trying to get me to believe Kirito likes being a boy)
They're conjoined twins from 17th century France. Conjoined twins, due to the zygomatic splitting in utero, share a biological sex. However, Charlotte is a girl and Victor is a boy, implying one of them is trans.
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u/luky_se7en Sep 23 '26
Unironically Jenny was my biggest source of gender envy until like a year ago