There's such potential for a trans episode for the Simpsons, because we know that Springfield has tendencies to Puritanism, torch-wielding and fickle changes. The town could get het up about a trans bogeyman then realise it doesn't affect them and switch the chaos off in a flash.
Kids can adjust to things easily. Bart might make a friend who reveals that they’re trans and quickly understands, invites them over to play, and is eventually put in the position to explain to his parents. Homer could become an advocate for a trans coworker when he realizes how weird it makes him feel to share a restroom with a trans woman.
@@LowellMorgan Sounds like a better spin on the Mapple episode's general plot. Maybe Lisa becomes friends with the trans kid because she too doesn't feel understood?
Yes, I did say thirty decades in the first few minutes and somehow I missed this through all 3 editing passes. I meant to say three decades/thirty years but you can clearly see why I failed an English degree. I hope this doesnt effect anybodys enjoyment of the video or ability to listen to the essay.
If you hadn't said anything, I probably would have assumed you did it as a joke. Like "Boy, the Simpsons. Sure does feel like they've been around for over 300 years." And you'd have been right. XD
I have a prominent adam's apple and I get transphobic comments about it even though I'm literally a cis woman (not that the comments would ever be justified, but I think it shows how deeply the transphobic paranoia goes). I assume these types of cheap jokes in shows like this are partially to blame
I kinda don't mind mcbabe, because she doesn't have a joke on her transness and she's just a hot woman who doesn't really like people knowing she's trans and would rather be seen as just a woman.
The fact that the best trans rep in the Simpsons revolves around a collectable trading card from decades ago is still pretty disappointing tbh. McBabe is living her best life though.
She really could have been a fascinating character. An already famous male actor who transitions into a woman and continues to not only get roles, but be the romantic female lead in an action movie? That's fucking awesome! Such a shame they wasted it for a one time "joke" on a trading card.
The messed up thing about the marriage ep is that we have no idea how Leslie identifies before their outing. Like, if they really were trans, then Marge would've spent the entire ep misgendering them before publicly outing and humiliating them in front of the entire town - acts of violence that are portrayed as valorous 🤦🏾♀️
Some insight into who to blame: I've worked on two shows that had legacy hires from The Simpsons. There is a culture of 90's suburban dad garage comedy that never got weeded out. Anyone with a resume long enough to include old episodes of The Simpsons are the same artists and writers who get uncomfortable if you criticize the police or mention they/them pronouns. They stick around in the industry and the folks who make them uncomfortable get cut instead.
I thought boomers were actually going to retire though. That was the one good thing about most of them, they were supposed to leave the workforce eventually 😢
@@WhatWouldLubitschDonot in today's economy, which is ironic because they made America what it is: a capitalistic hell hole with no workers' rights, no vacation days, and if you miss a single second of work you're fired and thrown into the street. I fucking hate this country when will Europe nuke us already
Ironic that the show itself has constantly made fun of cops, wonder if those guys you mentioned weren't involved in those gags or didn't understand it was mocking them
@@NightmareLyra i think their concept of Cops being Incompetent has less to do with structural racism and more about dunking general police incompetence in stuff like solving crimes or mismanagement of priorities. Police as a concept to them just isn’t “done right” or done by the right, effective people. The concern is more about getting arbitrary parking tickets from a cop who’s trying to meet arbitrary quotas and having to pay $200 than minorities getting shot to death over the same thing.
9:03 I don't get why this would even be called a "deep voice" - it's just one of the default female voices the Simpsons used for hundreds of background characters over the years.
I got confused for a second because I have this in the background, heard “this woman character has a deep voice and people thought she was trans” and then heard the not at all deep voice of John Oliver. Then had that cleared up when I heard Tress MacNeil.
I'm guessing the McBabe thing is a reference to Caroline Cossey, a trans model and actress who was in a Bond film before being outed by the Murdoch press. McBain is kind of a pastiche of a buch of film franchises, including Bond.
Ms. Pommelhorst seems like a p clear reference to Steve Dain, PE teacher from California who in the late 70s transitioned during a medical leave. there was a new superintendent when he returned and he was ousted from the school district. he won a lawsuit against the school but it tooks years before he could find work teaching again. he was a mentor to a lot of bay area trans men in the 80s, including Lou Sullivan.
On the "who to blame" thing, it's not the definite answer, but Sam Simon specifically forbade women from writing for The Simpsons (Patty and Selma were conceived as caricatures of his own sisters-in-law), and there were no women with a writing credit* for almost a decade. Some writers would infamously hand in the first drafts of the scripts having completely forgotten to write in Lisa or Marge.
*Oh, clarification/correction: there were no women allowed in the writers' room staff. Mimi Pond, who wrote the script for the first episode that aired (not the first produced, though, that's a long story), only got to do it cos Matt Groening asked his cartoonist friends if they wanted to write scripts for season one, and she said yes. From an interview with The Independent: "I was never invited to be on staff, and I never knew why for the longest time," she recalled. "No one ever called me or explained to me or apologized or anything. And it wasn’t until years later that I found out that Sam Simon, who was the showrunner, didn’t want any women around because he was going through a divorce."
I would also want to add Ian-Maxtone Graham. This Simpsons writer not only went on the team to write on the show not knowing anything about what made the classic Simpsons special but was also against women writing on the show because "The Simpsons wasn't made for women". But it's a sitcom based on a family, so nice failed attempt to excuse being a misogynist.
Screw Sam Simon for sure but also I was under the impression that he wasn't much involved with the show after the second season (iirc he was a jerk for a lot of other reasons and most of the other writers didn't like him lol) so there's def other people to blame.
7:18 for trans gags, I remember a Golden Girls episode that had a trans gag (Strange Bedfellows). There was a character, married with kids, who was said to be having an affair with Blanche who Blanche only saw as a friend, and it was ruining his running for a political spot in local politics. Sophie had a feeling that "something is up with him" but she didnt know what. At the end of the episode, Blanche tells him to come clean about them not having an affair, and he does, but he also says hes trans and says his birth name (a little ehh but this is an episode from 1987). Theres no uproar about it, but Sophie says "I knew it" and the joke was "I knew he was Italian!" And that was it (besides Rose being Rose and asking how it worked, and how the penis wouldve been made for him) They dont misgender the guy, they dont deadname him after his birthname comes out. It wasnt too bad of representation for its time. Interesting to see, though, as he was likely the first openly trans character on TV in the USA
The Golden Girls could definitely be simultaneously ahead of its time and of its time. There's what you described, and then the jokes about Dorothy's sibling/Sophia's other child, Phil. Was Phil a crossdresser or a trans woman? Who knows.
@@bleh55 It shouldn't be too surprising. The pilot episode had a fifth cast member , their gay house keeper. But it was determine sophie better filled that spot and even in the pilot she was given many of his lines. They had many gay people on the writing staff. Speaking of sophie, Estelle Getty was a huge gay advocate especially in regards to HIV/Aids. She got her break by staring on broadway in Harvey Fierstein's Torch song trilogy and maintained a strong connection to the community after that. After caring for a co-star & her nephew when they were dying from AIDS she even opened a Hospice specifically for AIDS patients. Although i disagree with your idea of Blanche's treatment. She was a sexual older woman yes but she had no shame in that and the show had a general theme of sex positivity.
I was 10 when the Judge Constance Harm episode aired and despite the other character's reactions, the nonchalant way she says it stuck with me. As a little egg who watched a ton of Judge Judy, I thought it was really cool that someone in a position of authority could be trans. Of course, looking back on it, it's clear the writers were just making fun of the real life person by making her trans, which sucks. But as a dumb kid, it meant something to me.
I also saw a lot of, in my mind, positive or neutral queer media representation as a kid that in retrospect was intended as anything but. Children must have a magical way of repairing the cultural artifacts handed to them by adults who went out of their way to screw it all up 😂
when i was 11 i watched the gay marriage episode with my siblings and while they thought the episode was funny, it always made me feel...odd. like i was being ridiculed. at the time i felt dumb for feeling uncomfortable about the episode, like "why does this make me upset? am i just homophobic? why does someone pretending to be the opposite gender to trick people make me so uncomfortable?".
I feel seen here. My siblings and I used to bingewatch the Simpsons on weekends growing up (bc my dad had apparently mass-pirated them lmao) and watching that episode always felt like a car crash to me. I'd always feel oddly compelled to it but feel uncomfortable every time I thought about the episode. I'm transmasc now lol
We weren't educated about these matters now we know better. At least there's comfort that without the teachings we still felt something was off in the message.
The marrying episode could have 100% of went with Veronica being a cis woman with just "masculine traits" and showing how transphobia affects cis women too
The Simpsons may be bad in this respect, but at least they are not outwardly hostile, like The Big Bang Theory. The amount of “jokes” about LGBT people in there is insane.
@@HiBuddyyyyyy honestly It wouldnt be bad at least for me the show sucks but I dont mind watching it because my mom used to watch it and I basically grew up watching the big bang theory its still is a bad show but like I guess Im used to it
I could see an episode where Lisa is writing an essay about women she admires and looks around to see a woman that fits the bill. Except in recounting her life story, the woman reveals that she's trans and Lisa has to wrestle with that. But it ultimately ends with Lisa recognizing the woman as the woman that she is?
@@LowellMorgan Your entire premise is preachy, if you have to force a trans episode or bring in a new trans character then you're always going to be doing it wrong. There's no representation of transness in Simpsons so too bad, move on
@@Scooterbeerrun how would it be forced? nobody is exactly holding a gun to the creators head. we are just being hypothetical and spitballing ideas. instead of whining at us to get over it how abt YOU get over the existence or desire for more trans representation media directly reflects society and transness is a reality of our society whether you like that or not. media like the simpsons can change and do a better job of reflecting that just like any other form of media. at worst it could harm trans people. doesn’t sound like it’ll affect you that much past wanting to stay sheltered (and in that case maybe just don’t interact with media)
It's incredible that a kids show like Rocko Modern life sequel has better Trans representation than any 'adult' show which keep pushing the 'trans are tricking us!' narrative
Yeah, they really ought to go for the more accurate 'cis attention whores are tricking us by pretending to be trans, because they know no one is allowed to call them out' narrative. Dylan Mulvaney could guest star!
honestly Lilly I think you'd have to go back 25 to 30 years to get to a time when the Simpsons were "Americas favourite family". by 20 years ago, 2003, the show was already well passed it's prime.
I feel like although this episode wasn't meant to be against trans individuals, the whole sub-plot about Veronica being a man didn't really have to exist at all. They could have just let Patty happily marry her girlfriend and end it with Marge accepting her for who she was. But I guess the writers love seeing Patty and Selma fail at love and marriage :/.
Mhm. Not only that, but it served as a demoralizing message that trans people can never be in gay/lesbian relationships because of who they were born as, which is just…dumb.
Marge comes out looking much more virtuous this way because she 1. has to put aside her delight in getting back at her sister 2. reinforce her sister's sexual identity It's a far more compelling story than what you think should have happened
They could have made the episode much better and not transphobic. What if, when Marge discovers Veronica's "secret", or perhaps when she reveals it in front of all the wedding attendees, we switch perspective? We get to learn how Veronica and Patty met each other. Veronica was Not masquerading as a woman to win at sports - she was performing as one, either in a drag show or something else, because she liked the thought of dressing and performing as a woman, for fun, and maybe get some money out of it. Meets Patty while dressed as a woman. They hit it off, they have great chemistry, they go out, it's great! Veronica feels loved. However, she knows Patty is a lesbian, and if she found out Veronica is a "man" she would dump her and hate her. Veronica is convinced she is not trans! It just feels nice to dress like this, and be seen like this, and it's nice to date Patty! As time goes on, she begins to doubt this, but she's not certain. Fast forward to the wedding. Marge outs Veronica. Everyone is shocked. Veronica feels exposed and humiliated - this is her worst nightmare. People begin to question her and she's not sure what to say. Due to all the pressure and hostility from the crowd, she says she is a man, and apologizes for "fooling" Patty. Says she still loves her, but Patty rejects her. Everyone claps. Veronica is devastated. She goes home, alone. Grieving, confused, hurt. Later, she gets ready in the morning. She goes to put on clothes - both her masculine and feminine clothes are out. She hesitates. The "ruse" is up. She's no longer with Patty. She doesn't have to "pretend" anymore. She puts on the feminine clothes. She realizes she likes looking like this. She likes being percieved as a woman. She likes thinking of herself as a woman. Even with Patty out of the picture! Veronica is not doing it for her anymore, she's doing it for herself! Later on, Patty and Veronica run into each other. Patty is surprised Veronica is still dressed as a woman. They start talking. Veronica ends up revealing all this to Patty, and thanks her for her role in helping Veronica find herself. Patty is touched. After this, either A: Patty asks if they can get back together or B: Patty happily accepts Veronica as a close female friend.
@@magallanesagustin4952 That's how transphobes see all trans women tho. Guys dressing as women to take women's spaces, manipulate them, endanger them even. When fiction repeatedly portrays the "ohoho dude dressed as a woman fooling everyone, getting their sports medals, tricking lesbians, etc etc" it adds fuel to the fire. Transphobes will point at these potrayals and go "See? That's what YOU are like. Not a real woman! Just a guy in a dress!" Of course if someone really wants to be a bigot they don't need any reason but we still shouldn't perpetuate harmful stereotypes.
@@magallanesagustin4952 because the episode is basically just transphobic rhetoric. Transphobes think that being trans is not real. They think it is crossdressing to get some evil goal. This last sentence is both an explanation of allot of transphobic thinking and basically a synopsis of the story(If you take away the "They think" part).
the "new wood in the shop class" was actually sort of funny, its possible to make trans jokes without punching down, and i feel like if given the right team of writers the simpsons could make a trans episode that is, at the very least, non offensive
Sure, but it felt to me like the only reason to even have that character make the announcement was to have Nelson make that joke. Which I guess is why they didn't follow through on making the masculine coach a trans man.
A very interesting look as dysphoria is in the recent Jumanji movies with Dwayne Johnson, due to Jack Black's character Shelley. A very feminine girl irl picks him as her character because she thinks Shelley is a woman, not realising that its short for Sheldon, and after initially being freaked out by being a short dumpy man all of a sudden, she quickly becomes comfortable as him. In real life she is still a cis girl, but by the second movie she's just as comfortable in shelleys body as she is in her own.
I've thought about this sort of thing before and while it could be bad in disregarding dysphoria, it could also actually kinda make sense, dysphoria often is like microaggressions, the build up type of pain that forms complexes, so when it's new and short term and they haven't grown up with it or anything like that, the novelty might tide them through, especially when there's other aspects like the context being as wild as the whole new body, and the body being not hers in every other way and not just in a gender incongruence way.. At least that's how it could be? Honestly this isn't something we can guess as of now and everyone is different, so you could also apply the case by case thing to it. And also I may be digging too hard as well. But it's an interesting topic that suffers because we don't know enough about it and not enough people are asking those types of questions? Idk. Sorry about this messy ramble
@@reedsylvier5250 I think I'm making the connection because it's got similar vibes to the protagonist of .hack//sign who gets trapped as their avatar for an extended period of time and forgets who she is in the real world, so when asked later on who she is in reality she states that "Obviously I'm a boy..." because she's been one for months by this point. It's not strictly a queer situation and not 1-to-1 for actual dysphoria, but it's a situation that's interesting to explore as a person in these stories internalises how they percieve themselves so completely that it might as well be their own body.
Completely unrelated, but it would be nice to see a background character who shows up looking as their agab, but over the course of a season just starts looking more and more like their real gender, and looking happier and happier
I think what's so wild about the lack of a trans character is that there's a REALLY obvious plot they could use. Lisa's had so many eposodes where she gets swept up about a personal or political philosophy, meets a respectable adult, and comes to an ephipany over it. What if after viewing an example of misogyny at school or elsewhere, she comes home to Bart being annoying, Homer being Typical Homer, and her hardworking and competent stay-at-home Mom managing things by herself, which all compounds into a frustration towards men as a whole. She's young, she's falling down the rabbithole of "a woman-only world would be so much more utopian," perhaps not in such blatant and unsubtle terms, and in the third act, she gets to know a trans character. Maybe a new classmate or teacher introduced in the first act. This character could be a trans man, nonbinary, genderfluid, I think there's a ton of ways to approach it. Someone who makes Lisa think about gender in a way she never has before. A trans man character could express to her how feminity felt suffocating, while a nonbinary or genderfluid character could reflect that the world isn't as black and white as she was beginning to believe. I think a trans woman character could work as well, but for this scenario, ideas that don't have tinges of transphobia struggle to come to mind. I wouldn't call this episode idea perfect by any means, and that is kind of intentional. I wanted to give an example of positive trans representation that could've aired at numerous times across the series' long run. It also leans heavy on like, "cisgender education," but that's sort of the theme of the show, a "normal family" learning things. My goal wasn't to write the best trans representation ever, but to point out how easily the Simpsons could have addressed this topic.
Idk I kinda feel like Lisa wouldn't start an episode being transphobic, she's pretty much the morality pet of the show and she tends to have more progressive opinions. Also she's my favourite character so it'd make me feel bad. I think giving Marge this role would make a bit more sense, maybe Lisa gets a new boyfriend and the Simpsons invite him to eat. The boy mentions that he's trans and everyone is fine with it, except Marge. She pretends she's fine with it but she accidentally misgenders him or asks Lisa quesions like "are you sure you want to be with someone like that?" I feel Marge could benefit from a story like that, in the episode Moaning Lisa (one of my personal favourites) we learn that her mother instilled a very toxic attitude within her. That attitude being to push down all her negative emotions until she's almost walking on them, she even tells Lisa this thinking it's good advice although she does learn her lesson later on in the episode. I feel maybe there could be a scene where Marge says something like "look I want to be supportive, I just don't understand this whole trans thing" and the trans guy says something similar about how bad his previous years were. He had to push down his feelings too, which would make Marge remember her childhood. This is just what I'd personally like to see, I feel the other family members wouldn't work as well too. Homer's already had episodes where he's bigotted but changes in the end and I feel Bart wouldn't care if someone's trans at all. Your comment's really good though and a nice idea, it's just that I feel the Lisa I know wouldn't be a bigot
@@usermcskull4713 Oh, I didn't really mean that Lisa would be transphobic in the episode. My mention of transphobia was like, "if a trans woman's existence is a counterargument to hating men, that inherently calls her a man," which is why I mentioned straying away from it. I envision it more like, Lisa is outright unaware / only vaguely aware of what it means to be trans, and has unconscious ideas about gender being binary, and this trans character lets her see gender in a new way. I didn't mean to describe her as being a transphobe, just a child who's never thought about transness before. She starts to think about gender as fiercely binary, then has a revelation through meeting someone who's "broken" that binary, and is a happy, respectable figure despite it. With that said, I LOVE your idea of Marge being the focus and finding out she can personally relate to trans people. I'd love to watch episode, I think it'd be really sweet
@@navi5661 i definitely read it this way!! i think that'd be rlly interesting . you mentioned about 'cisgender education' but that often seems to revolve around a character being transphobic and then a trans person coming in to patiently Educate them, and that kind of didactic approach is hard to make work in comedy as well as perpetrating the whole 'triggered' stereotype even if well meaning. whereas having a trans character kind of open lisa's mind or reframe gender in a more positive sense would be so refreshing !!
Agree with this approach, especially with a trans man since there’s so little trans men/masc rep in media. Since whenever there’s a trans character they’re nearly always trans women and idk , just feels a little bit like trans men are shoved in the shadows.
One of the most upsetting themes in the Simpsons is a sometimes explicit hatred for the mentally disabled. The most upsetting episode for me is the one where Bart gets put in Special Ed where the Special Ed students are portrayed as goofy and childish and Bart expresses disgust and anguish over having to share a classroom with them. Even Lisa can't stand being around mentally disabled people and expresses disgust when Ralph, a mean-spirited stereotype of a mentally disabled child, shows romantic interest in her.
you know i'm ashamed to admit I laughed at all of those as a kid (as someone neurodivergent, even), but you're absolutely right. It's pretty damn ableist.
the show is never mean spirited to Ralph though. if you're referring to I Love Lisa, Lisa is kinda made out to be in the wrong throughout that episode, with Bart rubbing it in in the episode's most famous scene. also Ralph is not mean spirited whatsoever, he's cute and a fan favourite, and often considered one of the purest and most likeable characters on the show.
The special ed episode was so nearly there too, because it points out that the teacher is patronising and the children are being treated like idiots. All of the kids are in there for reasons that could be easily supported with just an altered approach to teaching (not knowing cursive, pyromania, brain injury...being Canadian? lol), but instead they've all been put out of the way under the guise of helping. Bart even calls it out at one point. That part in isolation is a decent commentary on how the education system basically writes off children who fall behind even slightly due to lack of resources, training and time for staff or the system demanding a strict structure that forces struggling children to drown. Problem is, the kids are also made part of the joke (if not the main part of the joke) to try and make Bart look "better than this," when in reality they all were. A really quick shift in focus would fix it. I will not stand for Ralph slander in this house though, he's one of the better characters in the show and deserves the world.
@@AllyGatorAnimator I think the problem is you and the original commenter are both seemingly missing the joke of that scene. the kids aren't a mean spirited joke, the joke is how Bart, a normal kid who just behaves wrong, is being put with a kid who starts fires, a kid who doesn't remember how they got there, and a guy from Canada. I feel you're both looking too much into it from a critical lens when it's just a joke in an episode of The Simpsons, more so the original commenter. like, Bart doesn't even not want to be around them, it's the fact they're doing something so basic. they're also not mentally disabled, which is also the joke.
@@thebasedgodmax1163 Oh no I got what they were doing, I even listed the examples you stated in your own comment when I talked about what the joke was going for, I was just acknowledging how it can also be perceived as negative by them also being part of the joke (namely them going along with it gleefully, which they did so Bart could be the straight man). It's not deliberately offensive or something that could never fly today, just a bit clunky with hindsight and so possible to take the wrong way. I get how it came across as complaining though, I do love to over-analyse for fun. No harm intended.
in between this video and the family guy one, i was able to finally start testosterone. i can't explain how reassuring it is to be able to watch content from people like me, especially about trans issues. thank you for all your wonderful content :)
Here's a couple of groaners that have always stuck with me: in one old episode (I think from the 90's, and I can't really recall the context), there's like a TV ad for some get-rich-quick money guru on his bikini girl drenched yacht saying something like "I bought this yacht cheap at a government auction, and all these beautiful women? They used to be men!" That's always thrown me into a rage. In one treehouse of horror, a witch comes along when the whole town's in Halloween fancy dress in the town square, and transforms them all into the costumes they're wearing. Disco Stu proclaims "oh! Disco Stu wishes he'd gone as Marilyn McCoo!" I've actually always felt that was kinda sweet lol
Yeah, I remember the one with money-savings guru Chuck Garabedian. Thirty Minutes over Tokyo, final episode of season 10. It's a shame, because aside from that awful joke, that character was sort of knocking the jokes out of the park. A moment prior, he said he got his suit for cheap because Roy Cohn died in it.
Yeah, that joke was bad and its so easy to write it better. It could've been like, "All of those beautiful women? They're my cousins!" There, still gets the character's cheapness and can get the gross out reaction from the audience.
I feel like a character who really doesn't get talked about in terms of that fourth category of representation is Ms. Secondopinionson (yes, that's her real name) from Moral Orel, which has been getting a lot of popularity as of late afaik. She has a very deep voice that she changes to be high to talk on the phone with and openly discusses not having children due to her infertility. It really isn't much representation from the show, and it really feels like scraps, but considering the time period the show came out in, her coding is refreshing to see and the characters (besides her little half brother because he's generally a shithead because spoilers) respect her for her voice and how she presents herself, especially her father. Queer portrayal in Moral Orel is honestly pretty ahead of its time, and the characters really feel human despite being made out of clay! Anyway, TL;DR: Ms. Secondopinionson is underappreciated for everything she does and she deserves better.
I feel if the show had run for longer we probably would have gotten more from her (a trans person in a heavily Christian town sounds ripe for commentary) but, well, ya know
@@ashikjaman1940 Yeah, super unfortunate! If I could go back in time to convince Mike Lazzo to have kept it running for the full five seasons, I totally would. As a trans person, I would have loved to see an in-depth conversation about being trans in a town like Moralton if they got around to it! I would have loved for them to explore her relationship with her dad, Joe, and Nurse Bendy as well. I want to know her story, dammit!
Whoa... I never even considered that the "There's Something About Marrying" episode could have, in an alternate universe, had a trans positive twist at the end. That really would have redeemed the episode.
I'm a trans person whos watched basically every episode of the simpsons excluding the newest seasons (its some sort of fixation for me lol) and all I remember of 'trans representation' is smithers buying estrogen which stood out as absurd
I had completely forgotten about the gay marriage episode, and I'm glad that I had. Just seeing that scene at the altar gave me terrible dysphoria. No responsible trans woman would ever let things get so far without having said something, and there is no cis man who would do that at all outside of a bad plot on a sitcom. Or maybe that idiot who played at being trans and got kicked out of multiple L.A. Fitness locations.
Realizing watching the simpsons recently that Veronica was probably one of the characters that made me not realize i was trans was a hard pill to swallow but i'm glad you made this video!
"Made me not realize I was trans"? But aren't you trans? Are you saying the character caused delay in you realizing you were trans? Sorry this comment is really confusing >_>
The major interest of The Simpsons these days is that it's pretty much the only franchise that's lasted so long in its original form that it's had to reckon with certain choices it made early on that are now looked at much more poorly with how society has changed. And somehow it still hasn't done anything with the trans issue.
The stuff with Smithers "becoming Wanda" reminds me of Matt Baume's video on the show "Soap", which had a character, Jodie Dallas, who was definitely gay, but also may or may not have been trans too? The show, from what I can tell, kind of treats being gay and being trans as the same thing, because the writers were mostly cishet, and cishet people sometimes conflate all forms of queerness as being the same thing. Again. Matt explains it way better in his video, but what "The Simpsons" does with Smithers sounds similar to what "Soap" did with Jodie. Edit: also, it's pronounced "Matt Graining", not "Groaning". ok, pet peeve time over lol.
And Malloy has the emphasis on the second syllable (pronounced more like M’loy), not the first. But names are unintuitive. We can give grace if someone just doesn’t know ^_^
2 months later but I wouldn't mind Smithers coming out as trans, they made enough gags on that and actually doing it might be the right twist for him. The future episodes are not canon so who cares about them? Make the Smiths into Wands and hire trans people so that the episode is actually accurate.
True! Much more wholesome. Don’t even get me started on how Marge was always so downtrodden - I haven’t watched Simpsons in a while, so maybe she gets to follow her dreams a bit more.
@@azzyjeffs the guy who wrote Bojack horseman wrote a great poem about Marge's sad life you can find it by searching "does Marge have friends" oof it's sad
33:10 heck, American Dad has loads of trans or trans-adjacent characters who get gender related stories etc. One of my favourite trans characters is a hooker that one of Stan's workmates falls in love with while fully aware of her being trans. They still make transphobic jokes, but they balance it surprisingly well against real, human moments and decent, grounded representation. And that's another fox product, so it just can't be Fox's fault just from that evidence alone.
I think it's worth mentioning how the episode title "something about marrying" is likely a reference to the disgustingly cruel reality show "There's something about Miriam", which I am sure you have all heard of
Huh. I thought it was a reference to that movie There's Something About Mary. Cuz a lot of Simpsons episodes named themselves after movies even if the plot has nothing related to that particular movie. Eg:Blame It On Lisa,A Fish Called Selma,The Parent Rap
@@carybeweary7209 Read the synopsis of There's Something About Miriam and you'll immediately see why it's definitely referencing that. It's pretty yikes. 😬
i mean... i guess it's kind of a clever joke? we can just be thankful that that character was ACTUALLY a man, not someone who identified as a woman, ig...
i had trans thoughts since early childhood, and i saw an episode about patty's marriage when i was a kid. it scared me so much, especially the wedding scene itself, and i was so ashamed about the fact i wanted to "pretend to be something that i'm not". i was sure that my feelings are basically the same as Veronica's (it was the only ""trans"" character that i ever saw) and after people will find out that i'm "tricking" them, they will deservingly hate me more than anything lol. for a very long time, people finding out that i'm not cis, was the biggest fear of my life lol
Lol, Rowling has just never had an original thought and is just riffing off myths that long predate her (be that dragons, magical schools or trans women being threats)
The Simpsons constantly manages to do like 3 steps back for every good step, and every good step is in the very early seasons and then decimated in the later ones.
for sure! i’m subbing, i don’t see enough ppl doing trans lens analysis of cartoons… i was worried i was gonna have to do it myself when i’m hardly a powerhouse 😂
do't forget that one episode where a side gag was abe simpson being locked out of the house while the family was on vacation and desperately crying out about his medication, and the episode ends with abe with long blonde hair and visible breasts and saying smething like "I TOLD you i needed my medication!" I have no idea where that falls into anything but it certain is SOMETHING
The most transphobic joke I remember from The Simpsons outside of the ones you talked about was that bit in "Thirty Minutes Over Tokyo" with the guy talking about "squeezing every penny". He brags about getting his suit cheap because someone died in it and his yacht cheap because it smells like cat pee, which the audience is impressed by, but the "punchline" is that the beautiful women around him in the photo are trans (phrased as "used to be men" of course) and the audience reacts in disgust. Glad to know you think we're grosser than corpse suits and piss yachts _The Simpsons..._
16:43 lol, this joke went totally over the Latin Spanish dub :(( because she says "it reminds me of when I was little", I was always confused on why Snake asked that or why Homer and Marge looked at each other, now I understand why Dx what a shame...
The word "transgender" or trans and i think even "transition" is not used in any of the appearances of these trans "characters" in the Simpsons. It's always "used to be a dude", "i think his name is mama shabooboo now", "hormone injections", "she-males", "he-she" The concept of trans-ness doesnt really seem to be a thing. It's more an incorporation of some of the peripheral concepts of it into a kind of "gender-bend" gag repreated in several ways
Verônica's episode always made me so sad as a kid to watch, and it took me until adulthood to understand why. I can't even imagine being a trans kid/teen and watch it. The Simpsons is the oldest show of its format on TV, it's a bit shocking that they never ever ever had a single episode about a trans person, especially after an episode like "Homer's Phobia".
30:45 not only is that not a good representation of a trans woman, that isn't even a timeskip or a transwoman. That is from an episode where Bart meets his ,dopplegangers, and when coming across his adult doppleganger, he happens to be married to a woman who looks like Millhouse. That isn't even Millhouse, that is just a woman we never see again.
Na sweetie. I need that South Park video quickly because we need to talk about how Garrison is literally every negative stereotype about LGBTQ people possible through the years and I whole heartedly believe they are a big reason for transphobia we see now.
Love you pointing out the problem with headcanons near the start. As somneone who comes from an RP background (forum/message board RP, video game RP and TTRPG for the last 20+ years), I've definitely encounted it non stop. I understand the need for certain headcanons when it comes to seeking out representation in something that might not otherwise give you it, but the big problem for me stems- as you point out- from the fact that so often it plays into stereotypes. It's a problem overall when characters are coded specific ways to get around censors and the like, but when I hear "oh i headcanon he's gay because he's feminine and likes creative arts" or "she's definitely a lesbian because she's muscled/short hair/masculine" it's like... is this not just us playing into the stereotypes we're trying to shirk at this point? That is to say... headcanon what you wanna headcanon, but it does give me pause in my own thoughts sometimes.
This is super important! It's always worth looking deeper into ourselves and our thought process behind things like headcanoning. But it's also important to remember that a not insignificant amount of people in the lgbt community DO fall into those stereotypes and it's okay for them to do so. If someone who is naturally an effeminate, flamboyant gay man sees himself in a character and headcanons them to be gay solely because of said character's effeminate and flamboyant behavior, that's totally valid. Obviously I'm not saying we shouldn't be careful and consider WHY we headcanon what we do, and try not to fall into stereotyping! We absolutely should. Growth and learning and introspection are always important and this is absolutely a thought process worth dissecting. I'm just saying nuanced thought and context behind why other people might think [insert character] is [insert headcanon] is also important. :)
I've had this same thought for years. Every time I hear about a fandom that has widely embraced a queer interpretation of a character based on them not falling into the most rigid standards of heteronormativity, it honestly makes it a little harder for me to ever want to talk about that show/movie/book/whatever with another person. Like, if I meet a fellow fan of [insert show here], does that person also hold such regressive ideas of masculine/feminine identity? Would I want to be friends with someone who does? Even though, obviously, such super-fans are a minority, and the ones writing queer-themed fan-fic are an even smaller minority, it just makes me a little concerned when people who like the same thing I like, and who like queer representation like I do, also hold such outdated views.
Butch lesbians and fem gay guys exist in real life wtf are you talking about? Do you think we should only have masc gay men and feminine lesbians? Isn't this basically pandering to straight audiences and enforcing gender roles?
@@ethansloan I think so long as people are aware of the stereotypes they're applying, it's okay to have a little fun. I myself enjoy a little bit of queer shipping and the like (although honestly it's been a long time since I've consumed media that doesn't already have the representation I desire), it's when fans don't see the potential harm behind feminine = gay male etc, and claim anyone questioning it are homophobic. Although I honestly tend to find that's a really small minority and is often just very young queer teens who maybe haven't quite fiound their footing yet. I for sure had plenty of dumb and wild ideas when I was in my teens/late 20s that I roll my eyes at now :P It was also just a lot more common in the superwholock era imo, when shows were purposefully queerbaiting constantly. For me the bigger issue lied in the fact I mostly encountered media and fandoms via RP, which is by it's very natura a collabrative experience. The problem was that sometimes you'd get folk inserting their stereotyped headcanons into the characters they were playing- which is like, fine whatever- but due to the nature of RP, if you played with them or alongside them, you had to interact and acknowledge the headcanon. Basically forced to play along with their headcanon without agreeing with it. Usually just avoided those players tbh. (sorry for the text wall)
One thing I want to know is --- did the Simpsons ever get around to someone taking the cherries out of chocolate-covered cherries and replacing them with mayonaise?
I remember another inconsequential one-off joke, being in episode 16 of season 20 (yes I looked up which season just to make sure) where Moe goes to get his height surgically reduced, and right before going under, Dr. Nick says something like "When you wake up, you'll be a whole new woman", followed by the music teacher walking in, way shorter than before, and angry, implying that Nick got the procedures mixed up and that the music teacher is trans
It's pretty obvious given the show runners over the years that this show was created & run by nerdy cis, heterosexual men who barely understand women, let alone gender. The common consensus seems to be that in the Simpsons Universe trans people don't really exist, as they're either devious men, or gay dudes who really like fashion. Will the show ever get more inclusive writing? Uh, well... what did the Simpsons fandom do when the show runners, producers & studio tried to correct the micro- & not-so-microaggressions concerning race & racism? Yeah, it turns out they prefer racism. Let's face it, it sadly doesn't make dollar sense to feature trans characters on this show in anything other than a punch line, or a way to elevate more "privileged" minorities. Tbh, this show has always failed at representation, and continues to do so. Much like John Waters, we're simply & sometimes literally window dressing & gags. We probably won't save you from ravenous reindeer with our kitschy toy robots and softball witticisms rife with gay stereotypes. Point of fact, most qu**rs I know couldn't be bothered & why blame us? But hey, we had to live off scraps then, but not now. Simpsons is very much a product of its time, in that it has generally failed the LGBTQIA+ communities.
Just wanted to mention; Helen Lovejoy is actually also one of those "trans but mentioned just once and not brought up again" characters herself. It was mentioned in the season 20 episode that becomes a weird movie parody of Saw. Just thought I'd bring that up since you called the character cis
The real Jim's video on Helen lovejoy bought it up This priest says I remember when they were helen -surname- And then says they remember her being Harold-surname- or something like that Assuming that's what they're on about
"family guy represented trans people better than the simpsons" and PROVE IT thereafter as such is a miserable experience to watch, i cant imagine what it felt when you researched it
The stereotype of trans people being stern is I think in part rooted in the way that a lot of cis folk's first experience actually with someone trans is being told off after we did something shitty, and it being exaggerated out into what 'they're all' like
Great video! One you missed was Helen Lovejoy. Another throw away joke where someone says “I remember when she was Helen Shwarzbound, matter of fact I remember when she was Harold Shwarzbound”
There is one joke that you could consider a trans positive one, in one episode Krusty's trying to advertise a new burger named the "LGBTQBLT" which he thinks LGBT+ people would buy. Sideshow Mel calls this offensive and says Krusty has more ex wives than restaurant chains. Now this isn't directly trans affirming, it's about lgbt+ people in general but it is at least trans affirming in a way
Regarding the Ms/Mr Pommelhorst bit, it's such a small thing, but the joke Nelson makes is actually funny and not overtly transphobic? Like, as a trans guy, it's the kinda joke my trans friends and I would make about each other if one of us got phalloplasty. We could argue that it's insensitive for Nelson to make such a joke about one of his teachers, but the joke doesn't rely on dehumanizing or belittling the coach in any way, it simply acknowledges the reality of (what the writers assume) Pommelhorst will be doing during their leave of absence. Again, it's a really small thing, but I can appreciate it.
There is one more episode you missed from what I can remember. It was a in the episode "Revenge is a Dish Best Served Three Times", where Bart is Batman and all the Simpsons chracters are playing characters in the Batman story. I haven't seen it since I was a kid, but I remember that it was a short gag about Lenny, who was thought to be Poison Ivy (I think), and was attcked for that reason, but it was then revealed that Lenny wasn't Poison Ivy, but, and I quote, "a transvestite".
There was another throw away joke where during the "Thirty Minutes Over Tokyo" episode where the Mega-Savings Seminar where the joke was the models were cheaper because they were trans and you hear disgusted moans from the audience. Or, when Krusty the Clown was running for office and when talking about paying a prostitute Burns mentioned that Krusty could write it off as a fact finding mission and Krusty said he found out the prostitute was a man. Both awful
That Krusty episode I watched recently probably for the first time in at least a decade I forgot all about that joke and for a minute was shocked that they mentioned a politician being caught in the scandal with a Russian prostitute in 2002 But then they HAD to throw in the bigoted punchline for zero reason😔
"There's Something About Marrying" has haunted me since I first saw it as a queer (at the time, lesbian) teen. The phrase "Just because you're a lesbian, doesn't mean you're less of a bein'!" still echoes in my brain to this day. Absolutely ghoulish stuff.
The fact that they’re even referencing “There’s Something About Miriam”, a reality dating show about a trans woman looking for love with a bunch of men who don’t know her “secret” and how much they exploited her just says so much about The Simpsons’ attitude toward trans people
They aren't, it's a reference to There's Something About Mary. A film in which a guy lies about himself to get with a woman same as is done in the episode. The show you are talking about riffs off of that
The gym teacher will be back as a man "next year," but the Simpsons _will never have a next year._ Bart has been a 10 year old since the 1980s. There is no next year in this universe. And any other trans character exists in a flash forward to some possible future, meaning the Simpsons will accept trans people "some day," but, importantly, _never today._
Great video, I knew it would talk about the lesbian episode. The thing is, from what I've heard, the "man pretending to be a woman" was actually referencing an actual trans woman athlete so... That episode stings even more imo 😢
I thought the Simpsons staff writers had more or less outed themselves as white, straight libertarians after the "The Problem with Apu" movie and their oddball non-apology? Regardless, the show was propping up the status quo at least as far back as when I stopped watching around 1996.
So, the only trans reference which sticks in my memory from the Simpsons is a throw-away gag from Season 10 episode 23: Mega Savings - a self help con artist talks about how he "squeezed every penny" saving money. His first example is gesturing to a photo of him on a yacht with several bikini babes, and his savings was due to the boat smelling like cat pee and the women "used to be men" to the unspecified disgust of the audience.
Always excited when a new video is posted. This one is just as well thought out, researched, and constructed as the others. Thank you for your insights.
I think what also needs to be said is that by not including a trans person outside of a shitty gag that they cannot even commit to, The Simpsons is saying it doesn't condone or want to show trans people. It it's been this long, it's intentional. Transphobia was clearly kind of baked into the show early and since Matt has shown little growth in how he considers trans people across his creations, I think we can say in some way that The Simpsons is transphobic, or unwilling to acknowledge the humanity of a whole group of people outside of a bad joke.
I still remember, with all too much clarity, the gag in which the MENSA group in renaissance garb are mistaken for "sh*m*les." That was the point for me when the Simpson felt outright hostile.
Unfortunately that word pops up a few times throughout seasons 10-14 but then stops. Mostly a product of the time when that word was being used alot. Times change and over thirty years the show changes.
@@dylanshadowstar9779 I saw it when it first came out, and it still felt gross. It was that time when the most prominent trans rep was either through chat shows or internet porn.
4:10 I KNEW this was about Mass Effect before you even ended that sentence, and I'm ecstatic; I have a _LOT_ of thoughts about the Asari and would love to hear your take.
I actually found a clip from the simpsons mentioning that Homer had a cousin that became a woman, it only lasted a few seconds and I only found it while scrolling through shorts recently
I think there could be one way they could do a trans episode (if they excluded the whole Veronica plot). What if they did an episode where one close friend or family member of the Simpsons reveals they are in a hetero relationship with someone who is really transgender? One of the Simpsons family members (maybe Homer or Marge) judge by stereotypical gender traits and try to stop the wedding between them because they think they are *"tricking them"* into marriage. But then, the character reveals that they *do know* that they are transgender and obviously they still love them, regardless of what they are. The character who tried to stop the wedding starts to feel bad because of what they did and accepts the character and their transgender lover to be happy together as husband and wife.
The only close relation i can think of that could work would be Flanders? most of the single characters are so pathetic at love lives that it would inherently be a joke.
I noticed you said Mass Effect and had to throw my two cents in. Yes, you might say Asari are 'no they aren't really gay', but you do have to look at the greater context. Bioware has been putting queer characters in their games before it was cool, or even really acceptable, and fought an uphill battle doing so. So if you're going to bring up Mass Effect, please look into the other bioware games as well. Such as KOTOR, or even Dragon Age. Thank you for reading.
Dragon Age II will always be my favorite just because rivalmance option for Fenris hit me like a TRUCK and honestly I'm still not sure if I prefer his dynamics as a rivalmance with a red mage or a romance with a purple rogue. DA2 is the game where I ate SO GOOD, I'm sorry to Zevran who was amazing for my Wardens and the first romance option I fell onto by pure accident because I liked the funny smartarse and my snippy male mage had a lot of fun dragging the assassin everywhere. The broody elf just won me over from every angle. Shout outs to the people who took a year before finding out about how Zevran can turn on you in Denerim, I literally just kept befriending him and half my wardens chose his romance, he's a very sassy character and I always do his DA2 sidequest. (occasionally I also pursue the threesome with him and Isabella that's related to that sidequest, gotta love that they were NOT afraid to make Zevran and Isabella the way they are. (Also a shout out to Bioware writing the DA2 romances so that they work regardless of gender and there's little implications on "who's the top" when it's m/m, which also works with not making an m/f pairing default to man tops, woman sub. They let YOU paint those parts yourself and I appreciate that so much.) Also also, just, _Anders_ . Also also also, Dorian is still one of my favorite parts of DAI, his whole... THING. He literally tackled the whole "parent trying to do conversion therapy" issue as part of his sidequest and backstory, and no game has had the balls to talk about that before (or since, as far as I can tell). Bioware may have skirted around with the Asari thing, but it's certainly hit the ground RUNNING too (I can only speak for Dragon Age, that's what I've played too much.)
Bioware has been one of the few who I trust when it comes to this just because how they have it feeling like a natural part of every day life. Pretty much everything else I see as pandering.
I never watched the Simpsons until recently, so I had no idea about "There's Something About Marrying." There's so many ways they could have made it NOT transphobic, at the bare minimum giving Marge a moment to learn and be better, but instead she was seen as the hero for saving her sister from marrying a man. They've had nearly 18 years since then to provide trans representation that was more than just a gag and yet they have nothing to show for it. It's extremely disappointing to say the least, having to grasp at hints or look for confirmation outside of the actual show instead of just...portraying it within said show is still a problem.
It occurs to me that Brunella Pommelhorst could've been a funny character if our initial assumption as the audience was that she was a trans *woman,* and the show then poked fun at us, the audience, for leaping to conclusions or being ignorant and confused about the difference between trans men and trans women. As it is, yeah, the joke unfortunately invokes a current-day TERF trope to an uncomfy degree. Humor is indeed about inverted or violated expectations, but can we just once make fun of the people who hamstrung themselves by having small-minded or silly expectations in the first place, and not the people who are violating those other people's expectations by just innocently living their lives?
They haven’t been great with trans issues but there is a throw away line from Tod Flanders that I really related to when I was young, “I’m jealous of girls because they get to wear dresses.” It’s not good but I’ve always remembered it.
finally someone talks about the blatant transphobia in "There's Something About Marrying!" I wanted to add my own episode that I see as trans-adjacent: "Girls Just Want to Have Sums." it's basically the same level of "wow, there is nothing remotely trans about this character, and yet they use this to be incredibly transphobic." the t-slur and the h/s slur are both used during the episode (wonderful...) and it relies heavily on the gender binary, what with the kids being sorted into separate boys' and girls' schools. plus, it is really heavy on the gender essentialism of "oh boys tough and girls soft" to the point that Lisa, being in drag to get a better education from the boys' school, finds herself becoming accidentally violent. it is reminiscent of the TERF talking point that "little girls are being transed to get ahead in life!!!" and I feel like it was *trying* to be like "girls can do anything boys can do!" but. the math class at the girls' school was about "what do numbers feel like to you?" rather than a standard math class, which was found at the boys' school. which clearly shows that they think that being a boy will get you further in STEM subjects. it's a very...interesting one for sure! oh, and a funny little tidbit from the same episode (I hope I didn't get my directions mixed up in remembering this): Principal Skinner divides the school into "girls on the left, boys on the right" at an assembly. but they arrange themselves as girls on STAGE left and boys on STAGE right. meaning, from the kids' perspective, all the girls go to the boys' side and the boys go to the girls'. if I didn't get my left and right mixed up and this really did happen, it was just an animation error, but my non-binary self found it funny upon rewatch. the kids in Springfield say fuck your gender binary
I had an older half-brother that used to send us VHS tapes of recorded Simpsons episodes when I was a kid so I've memorized a bunch of them verbatim, and once I realized I was trans every so often I'll go through an episode in my mind out of nostalgia and just go "oh...oh no"
Also, i think classic era marge would never be this biggoted, or vindictive, (especially for her sisters whom she vehemently defends almost too a fault) We see in Homersphobia how much she defends John, and how downright progressive her and lis are especially compared to homer. But even in the sake of Homers Enemy they changed homers ideology for the sake of the plot and that worked as homer havung homophobic views and being vindictive works well for his character as he us very prone to jealousy and toxicity. But homer has also been very okay with other gay characters prior too Homers phobia. But I think marge being that vindictive and homophobic and transphobic is insane too me. Its also insane for a show that is fairly progressive for the 90s (especially on Fox) covering topics like Vegetarianism, homosexuality, and gun violence and Matt Groening being more socialist leaning
Helen Lovejoy is sometimes thought to be trans, being mentioned to be trans by an old friend, her first appearance being at the age of 10, having possibly (socially) transitioned as a child, and helping her cousin with the transition. Its not great representation but also no idea why this was omitted.
To quote wiki Simpsons “The Parson tells Reverend Timothy Lovejoy that he "remember[s] when [Helen Lovejoy] was Helen Schwartzbaum. In fact, I remember when she was Harold Schwartzbaum."[72] This is highly questionable, however, due to her and Tim having a daughter together,[73] as well as a flashback clearly depicting Helen as a young girl.”
So! Just mentioning, Helen Lovejoy herself has a joke about how a friend of Timothy "remembers when she was Harold" arguably making her the best trans rep... depressingly enough. Also, that's not Bart and Milhouse, they're dopplegangers that come up in Double Double Boy in Trouble. That aside this is still a great video. Canonically dubious as it may be, the McBabe card was news to me. A lot of those cards on side characters keep being more interesting than anything they get on the show. Does suck how badly they handle trans issues though. I mean, there's not only a few canon queer characters but a lot that could definitely be interpreted as at least "not entirely straight" like Chief Wiggum, Barney, Burns, Homer, Helen and a *lot* of others. Then again, outside of Lisa, Marge and Shauna (a oversexualized teen *and* a predator, gross all around) they can't even help being shitty to the *cis* girls and women, so trans women probably stand no chance... Also even fanworks fall flat. Almost never see any of those future-headcanon drawings make Martin trans. Cowards tbh.
Ironically, the Simpsons *didn’t* do it
Simpsons didn't, Simpsons didn't.
@@amesstarline5482 this made me audibly gafaw
Nice Larry pfp. I see you're also a jester of culture.
ive never seen anyone with a three stooges pfp, nice
awesome pfp
Lily's out here being a trans Simpson to make up for the show's failings, what an icon
I love ths comment so much
How does it make up for the show's failings?
@@magallanesagustin4952 it's a joke
What a clown*
@@magallanesagustin4952 pst, you got heavily ratio'd
There's such potential for a trans episode for the Simpsons, because we know that Springfield has tendencies to Puritanism, torch-wielding and fickle changes. The town could get het up about a trans bogeyman then realise it doesn't affect them and switch the chaos off in a flash.
Kids can adjust to things easily. Bart might make a friend who reveals that they’re trans and quickly understands, invites them over to play, and is eventually put in the position to explain to his parents. Homer could become an advocate for a trans coworker when he realizes how weird it makes him feel to share a restroom with a trans woman.
@@LowellMorgan yes yes yes
@@LowellMorgan Sounds like a better spin on the Mapple episode's general plot. Maybe Lisa becomes friends with the trans kid because she too doesn't feel understood?
Yep, like they did with the immigration episode about the bear
@@amesstarline5482 would also be a great chance to introduce a friend character for Lisa. Because she should have a friend.
Yes, I did say thirty decades in the first few minutes and somehow I missed this through all 3 editing passes. I meant to say three decades/thirty years but you can clearly see why I failed an English degree. I hope this doesnt effect anybodys enjoyment of the video or ability to listen to the essay.
Girl you got ya tooth out and slammed through this anyway, we can forgive a slip of the tongue.
Nah I found it quite cute actually 😊
If you hadn't said anything, I probably would have assumed you did it as a joke. Like "Boy, the Simpsons. Sure does feel like they've been around for over 300 years." And you'd have been right. XD
We all know Simpsons will be still running for 300 years. AI technology will create the episodes from writing, to animation, to voice acting.
I mean it feels like it's been on for that long.
I have a prominent adam's apple and I get transphobic comments about it even though I'm literally a cis woman (not that the comments would ever be justified, but I think it shows how deeply the transphobic paranoia goes). I assume these types of cheap jokes in shows like this are partially to blame
I am a trans woman and I just straight up DON'T have any visible adam's apple at all-
This happened a lot to my mother too. Funnily enough mine is less visible than hers, and I am trans.
yeah I'm a trans guy I've always had a visible adam's apple even before t
bigotry hurts everyone in the end
I have a very strong jaw line and get the same question. It’s gross how some people feel entitled to ask practical strangers this
I kinda don't mind mcbabe, because she doesn't have a joke on her transness and she's just a hot woman who doesn't really like people knowing she's trans and would rather be seen as just a woman.
The fact that the best trans rep in the Simpsons revolves around a collectable trading card from decades ago is still pretty disappointing tbh.
McBabe is living her best life though.
@@Minihood31770 agreed.
WE DEMAND THE RETURN OF MCBABE (with tasteful textually canonical transness please and thank you)
Honestly if the current simpsons writers want to write a good episode centering around trans people, it would be to bring back mcbabe imo
She really could have been a fascinating character. An already famous male actor who transitions into a woman and continues to not only get roles, but be the romantic female lead in an action movie? That's fucking awesome! Such a shame they wasted it for a one time "joke" on a trading card.
The messed up thing about the marriage ep is that we have no idea how Leslie identifies before their outing. Like, if they really were trans, then Marge would've spent the entire ep misgendering them before publicly outing and humiliating them in front of the entire town - acts of violence that are portrayed as valorous 🤦🏾♀️
Some insight into who to blame: I've worked on two shows that had legacy hires from The Simpsons. There is a culture of 90's suburban dad garage comedy that never got weeded out. Anyone with a resume long enough to include old episodes of The Simpsons are the same artists and writers who get uncomfortable if you criticize the police or mention they/them pronouns. They stick around in the industry and the folks who make them uncomfortable get cut instead.
I thought boomers were actually going to retire though. That was the one good thing about most of them, they were supposed to leave the workforce eventually 😢
@@WhatWouldLubitschDonot in today's economy, which is ironic because they made America what it is: a capitalistic hell hole with no workers' rights, no vacation days, and if you miss a single second of work you're fired and thrown into the street. I fucking hate this country when will Europe nuke us already
@@WhatWouldLubitschDo Cannot happen soon enough.
Ironic that the show itself has constantly made fun of cops, wonder if those guys you mentioned weren't involved in those gags or didn't understand it was mocking them
@@NightmareLyra i think their concept of Cops being Incompetent has less to do with structural racism and more about dunking general police incompetence in stuff like solving crimes or mismanagement of priorities. Police as a concept to them just isn’t “done right” or done by the right, effective people.
The concern is more about getting arbitrary parking tickets from a cop who’s trying to meet arbitrary quotas and having to pay $200 than minorities getting shot to death over the same thing.
9:03 I don't get why this would even be called a "deep voice" - it's just one of the default female voices the Simpsons used for hundreds of background characters over the years.
Yeah and she's voiced by a cis woman too. That's Tress McNeille.
I got confused for a second because I have this in the background, heard “this woman character has a deep voice and people thought she was trans” and then heard the not at all deep voice of John Oliver. Then had that cleared up when I heard Tress MacNeil.
I'm guessing the McBabe thing is a reference to Caroline Cossey, a trans model and actress who was in a Bond film before being outed by the Murdoch press. McBain is kind of a pastiche of a buch of film franchises, including Bond.
Caroline Cossey is such a badass, idk how I'd handle being outed like that
Ah, the most depressing answer.
Ms. Pommelhorst seems like a p clear reference to Steve Dain, PE teacher from California who in the late 70s transitioned during a medical leave. there was a new superintendent when he returned and he was ousted from the school district. he won a lawsuit against the school but it tooks years before he could find work teaching again. he was a mentor to a lot of bay area trans men in the 80s, including Lou Sullivan.
On the "who to blame" thing, it's not the definite answer, but Sam Simon specifically forbade women from writing for The Simpsons (Patty and Selma were conceived as caricatures of his own sisters-in-law), and there were no women with a writing credit* for almost a decade. Some writers would infamously hand in the first drafts of the scripts having completely forgotten to write in Lisa or Marge.
Oh God
*Oh, clarification/correction: there were no women allowed in the writers' room staff. Mimi Pond, who wrote the script for the first episode that aired (not the first produced, though, that's a long story), only got to do it cos Matt Groening asked his cartoonist friends if they wanted to write scripts for season one, and she said yes.
From an interview with The Independent:
"I was never invited to be on staff, and I never knew why for the longest time," she recalled. "No one ever called me or explained to me or apologized or anything. And it wasn’t until years later that I found out that Sam Simon, who was the showrunner, didn’t want any women around because he was going through a divorce."
So the Simpsons is a misogynistic show as well.
I would also want to add Ian-Maxtone Graham. This Simpsons writer not only went on the team to write on the show not knowing anything about what made the classic Simpsons special but was also against women writing on the show because "The Simpsons wasn't made for women". But it's a sitcom based on a family, so nice failed attempt to excuse being a misogynist.
Screw Sam Simon for sure but also I was under the impression that he wasn't much involved with the show after the second season (iirc he was a jerk for a lot of other reasons and most of the other writers didn't like him lol) so there's def other people to blame.
7:18 for trans gags, I remember a Golden Girls episode that had a trans gag (Strange Bedfellows). There was a character, married with kids, who was said to be having an affair with Blanche who Blanche only saw as a friend, and it was ruining his running for a political spot in local politics. Sophie had a feeling that "something is up with him" but she didnt know what.
At the end of the episode, Blanche tells him to come clean about them not having an affair, and he does, but he also says hes trans and says his birth name (a little ehh but this is an episode from 1987). Theres no uproar about it, but Sophie says "I knew it" and the joke was "I knew he was Italian!" And that was it (besides Rose being Rose and asking how it worked, and how the penis wouldve been made for him)
They dont misgender the guy, they dont deadname him after his birthname comes out. It wasnt too bad of representation for its time. Interesting to see, though, as he was likely the first openly trans character on TV in the USA
The Golden Girls could definitely be simultaneously ahead of its time and of its time. There's what you described, and then the jokes about Dorothy's sibling/Sophia's other child, Phil. Was Phil a crossdresser or a trans woman? Who knows.
i never knew about that! i used to love watching that show with my grandma
@@bleh55 It shouldn't be too surprising. The pilot episode had a fifth cast member , their gay house keeper. But it was determine sophie better filled that spot and even in the pilot she was given many of his lines. They had many gay people on the writing staff.
Speaking of sophie, Estelle Getty was a huge gay advocate especially in regards to HIV/Aids. She got her break by staring on broadway in Harvey Fierstein's Torch song trilogy and maintained a strong connection to the community after that. After caring for a co-star & her nephew when they were dying from AIDS she even opened a Hospice specifically for AIDS patients.
Although i disagree with your idea of Blanche's treatment. She was a sexual older woman yes but she had no shame in that and the show had a general theme of sex positivity.
God I love Golden Girls
Society: "Ok FINE I'm A TRANS GENDER!!!! "
the golden girls: ok
I was 10 when the Judge Constance Harm episode aired and despite the other character's reactions, the nonchalant way she says it stuck with me. As a little egg who watched a ton of Judge Judy, I thought it was really cool that someone in a position of authority could be trans. Of course, looking back on it, it's clear the writers were just making fun of the real life person by making her trans, which sucks. But as a dumb kid, it meant something to me.
I also saw a lot of, in my mind, positive or neutral queer media representation as a kid that in retrospect was intended as anything but. Children must have a magical way of repairing the cultural artifacts handed to them by adults who went out of their way to screw it all up 😂
@What would Lubitsch do ? Right? A part of me wishes I could go back to seeing things that way, but I know it's better to see the truth.
Oh my same though
"Haha she's so angry all the time because she's secretly a boy."
I love Matt but his boomer shows when trans themes show up.
@@WhatWouldLubitschDo well said!
when i was 11 i watched the gay marriage episode with my siblings and while they thought the episode was funny, it always made me feel...odd. like i was being ridiculed.
at the time i felt dumb for feeling uncomfortable about the episode, like "why does this make me upset? am i just homophobic? why does someone pretending to be the opposite gender to trick people make me so uncomfortable?".
Oh my god. I had the exact same experience down to being 11 and I was about to make basically the same comment.
oh lord i see your profile picture brother.. realness
I feel seen here. My siblings and I used to bingewatch the Simpsons on weekends growing up (bc my dad had apparently mass-pirated them lmao) and watching that episode always felt like a car crash to me. I'd always feel oddly compelled to it but feel uncomfortable every time I thought about the episode. I'm transmasc now lol
We weren't educated about these matters now we know better. At least there's comfort that without the teachings we still felt something was off in the message.
same
The marrying episode could have 100% of went with Veronica being a cis woman with just "masculine traits" and showing how transphobia affects cis women too
That would have been leagues above season 16 simpsons writing
I can’t wait for Homer to be like: “MERGE THERE’S TRANS PEOPLE ON MY IPAD MERGE!”, and then Marge is like,”Mmmmm Homie trans people Homie hmmmm…”
Same
And then Bart comes in and goes "I'm Bartha now" because they don't understand that we can pick a name that isn't just some variation on our deadname
i already know this guy watches oneyplays
The Simpsons may be bad in this respect, but at least they are not outwardly hostile, like The Big Bang Theory. The amount of “jokes” about LGBT people in there is insane.
I hope Lily does a video on the Big Bang theory but that also requires watching all of the series and I wouldn’t want to wish that on someone.
So basically the bar is so low it's in hell. Lol.
I will never understand the appeal of Big Bang Theory
@@HiBuddyyyyyy honestly It wouldnt be bad at least for me the show sucks but I dont mind watching it because my mom used to watch it and I basically grew up watching the big bang theory its still is a bad show but like I guess Im used to it
That'd be so good, with you there, I'd love to hear Lily talk about how bad TBBT is but I wouldn't want someone to have to sit through all of it.
If you do write the episode, please have Lisa learn by asking a trans person about something instead of having Lisa tell someone else.
Lisa in the simpsons is almost honestly worse than brian in family guy. She's such a self righteous, narcissistic jackass.
I could see an episode where Lisa is writing an essay about women she admires and looks around to see a woman that fits the bill. Except in recounting her life story, the woman reveals that she's trans and Lisa has to wrestle with that. But it ultimately ends with Lisa recognizing the woman as the woman that she is?
@@Ipsolus it sounds preachy as a pitch but as a 22-minute episode it could be good.
@@LowellMorgan Your entire premise is preachy, if you have to force a trans episode or bring in a new trans character then you're always going to be doing it wrong. There's no representation of transness in Simpsons so too bad, move on
@@Scooterbeerrun how would it be forced? nobody is exactly holding a gun to the creators head. we are just being hypothetical and spitballing ideas. instead of whining at us to get over it how abt YOU get over the existence or desire for more trans representation
media directly reflects society and transness is a reality of our society whether you like that or not. media like the simpsons can change and do a better job of reflecting that just like any other form of media. at worst it could harm trans people. doesn’t sound like it’ll affect you that much past wanting to stay sheltered (and in that case maybe just don’t interact with media)
It really *does* feel like The Simpsons has been airing for thirty decades
It's incredible that a kids show like Rocko Modern life sequel has better Trans representation than any 'adult' show which keep pushing the 'trans are tricking us!' narrative
Honestly frfr
You mean Mr bighead son who's running gag is being a disapointment to his father? He moved just on from cartooning to something more topical
Yeah, they really ought to go for the more accurate 'cis attention whores are tricking us by pretending to be trans, because they know no one is allowed to call them out' narrative. Dylan Mulvaney could guest star!
Actually, Big Mouth not only did an amazing Trans episode, but thir Trans character is the best Trans representation I have seen in a while
@@leavemealone802 Why do you capitalize it?
honestly Lilly I think you'd have to go back 25 to 30 years to get to a time when the Simpsons were "Americas favourite family". by 20 years ago, 2003, the show was already well passed it's prime.
I think like 1989-99 was it for them. Pretty beloved til like season 9 or 10
I feel like although this episode wasn't meant to be against trans individuals, the whole sub-plot about Veronica being a man didn't really have to exist at all. They could have just let Patty happily marry her girlfriend and end it with Marge accepting her for who she was. But I guess the writers love seeing Patty and Selma fail at love and marriage :/.
Mhm. Not only that, but it served as a demoralizing message that trans people can never be in gay/lesbian relationships because of who they were born as, which is just…dumb.
Marge disgusted me with how she treated her sister in that episode. I also didn't like the way she treated Lisa when Lisa became a Buddhist.
Marge comes out looking much more virtuous this way because she 1. has to put aside her delight in getting back at her sister 2. reinforce her sister's sexual identity
It's a far more compelling story than what you think should have happened
They could have made the episode much better and not transphobic.
What if, when Marge discovers Veronica's "secret", or perhaps when she reveals it in front of all the wedding attendees, we switch perspective? We get to learn how Veronica and Patty met each other. Veronica was Not masquerading as a woman to win at sports - she was performing as one, either in a drag show or something else, because she liked the thought of dressing and performing as a woman, for fun, and maybe get some money out of it. Meets Patty while dressed as a woman. They hit it off, they have great chemistry, they go out, it's great! Veronica feels loved. However, she knows Patty is a lesbian, and if she found out Veronica is a "man" she would dump her and hate her. Veronica is convinced she is not trans! It just feels nice to dress like this, and be seen like this, and it's nice to date Patty! As time goes on, she begins to doubt this, but she's not certain. Fast forward to the wedding. Marge outs Veronica. Everyone is shocked. Veronica feels exposed and humiliated - this is her worst nightmare. People begin to question her and she's not sure what to say. Due to all the pressure and hostility from the crowd, she says she is a man, and apologizes for "fooling" Patty. Says she still loves her, but Patty rejects her. Everyone claps. Veronica is devastated. She goes home, alone. Grieving, confused, hurt.
Later, she gets ready in the morning. She goes to put on clothes - both her masculine and feminine clothes are out. She hesitates. The "ruse" is up. She's no longer with Patty. She doesn't have to "pretend" anymore.
She puts on the feminine clothes.
She realizes she likes looking like this. She likes being percieved as a woman. She likes thinking of herself as a woman. Even with Patty out of the picture! Veronica is not doing it for her anymore, she's doing it for herself!
Later on, Patty and Veronica run into each other. Patty is surprised Veronica is still dressed as a woman. They start talking. Veronica ends up revealing all this to Patty, and thanks her for her role in helping Veronica find herself. Patty is touched.
After this, either A: Patty asks if they can get back together or B: Patty happily accepts Veronica as a close female friend.
That’s a huge improvement on a premise that gives almost nothing to work with. If you become a tv showrunner, please let us know!
This would have been sweet 😔
So... How is the episode transphobic? "Veronica" isn't even supposed to be a trans woman, it's just a cross dressing guy.
@@magallanesagustin4952 That's how transphobes see all trans women tho. Guys dressing as women to take women's spaces, manipulate them, endanger them even. When fiction repeatedly portrays the "ohoho dude dressed as a woman fooling everyone, getting their sports medals, tricking lesbians, etc etc" it adds fuel to the fire. Transphobes will point at these potrayals and go "See? That's what YOU are like. Not a real woman! Just a guy in a dress!" Of course if someone really wants to be a bigot they don't need any reason but we still shouldn't perpetuate harmful stereotypes.
@@magallanesagustin4952 because the episode is basically just transphobic rhetoric. Transphobes think that being trans is not real. They think it is crossdressing to get some evil goal. This last sentence is both an explanation of allot of transphobic thinking and basically a synopsis of the story(If you take away the "They think" part).
the "new wood in the shop class" was actually sort of funny, its possible to make trans jokes without punching down, and i feel like if given the right team of writers the simpsons could make a trans episode that is, at the very least, non offensive
Sure, but it felt to me like the only reason to even have that character make the announcement was to have Nelson make that joke. Which I guess is why they didn't follow through on making the masculine coach a trans man.
A very interesting look as dysphoria is in the recent Jumanji movies with Dwayne Johnson, due to Jack Black's character Shelley. A very feminine girl irl picks him as her character because she thinks Shelley is a woman, not realising that its short for Sheldon, and after initially being freaked out by being a short dumpy man all of a
sudden, she quickly becomes comfortable as him. In real life she is still a cis girl, but by the second movie she's just as comfortable in shelleys body as she is in her own.
thats not dysphoria
I've thought about this sort of thing before and while it could be bad in disregarding dysphoria, it could also actually kinda make sense, dysphoria often is like microaggressions, the build up type of pain that forms complexes, so when it's new and short term and they haven't grown up with it or anything like that, the novelty might tide them through, especially when there's other aspects like the context being as wild as the whole new body, and the body being not hers in every other way and not just in a gender incongruence way..
At least that's how it could be? Honestly this isn't something we can guess as of now and everyone is different, so you could also apply the case by case thing to it. And also I may be digging too hard as well. But it's an interesting topic that suffers because we don't know enough about it and not enough people are asking those types of questions? Idk. Sorry about this messy ramble
@@reedsylvier5250 I think I'm making the connection because it's got similar vibes to the protagonist of .hack//sign who gets trapped as their avatar for an extended period of time and forgets who she is in the real world, so when asked later on who she is in reality she states that "Obviously I'm a boy..." because she's been one for months by this point. It's not strictly a queer situation and not 1-to-1 for actual dysphoria, but it's a situation that's interesting to explore as a person in these stories internalises how they percieve themselves so completely that it might as well be their own body.
Completely unrelated, but it would be nice to see a background character who shows up looking as their agab, but over the course of a season just starts looking more and more like their real gender, and looking happier and happier
I think what's so wild about the lack of a trans character is that there's a REALLY obvious plot they could use. Lisa's had so many eposodes where she gets swept up about a personal or political philosophy, meets a respectable adult, and comes to an ephipany over it. What if after viewing an example of misogyny at school or elsewhere, she comes home to Bart being annoying, Homer being Typical Homer, and her hardworking and competent stay-at-home Mom managing things by herself, which all compounds into a frustration towards men as a whole.
She's young, she's falling down the rabbithole of "a woman-only world would be so much more utopian," perhaps not in such blatant and unsubtle terms, and in the third act, she gets to know a trans character. Maybe a new classmate or teacher introduced in the first act.
This character could be a trans man, nonbinary, genderfluid, I think there's a ton of ways to approach it. Someone who makes Lisa think about gender in a way she never has before. A trans man character could express to her how feminity felt suffocating, while a nonbinary or genderfluid character could reflect that the world isn't as black and white as she was beginning to believe. I think a trans woman character could work as well, but for this scenario, ideas that don't have tinges of transphobia struggle to come to mind.
I wouldn't call this episode idea perfect by any means, and that is kind of intentional. I wanted to give an example of positive trans representation that could've aired at numerous times across the series' long run. It also leans heavy on like, "cisgender education," but that's sort of the theme of the show, a "normal family" learning things. My goal wasn't to write the best trans representation ever, but to point out how easily the Simpsons could have addressed this topic.
Idk I kinda feel like Lisa wouldn't start an episode being transphobic, she's pretty much the morality pet of the show and she tends to have more progressive opinions. Also she's my favourite character so it'd make me feel bad.
I think giving Marge this role would make a bit more sense, maybe Lisa gets a new boyfriend and the Simpsons invite him to eat.
The boy mentions that he's trans and everyone is fine with it, except Marge. She pretends she's fine with it but she accidentally misgenders him or asks Lisa quesions like "are you sure you want to be with someone like that?"
I feel Marge could benefit from a story like that, in the episode Moaning Lisa (one of my personal favourites) we learn that her mother instilled a very toxic attitude within her.
That attitude being to push down all her negative emotions until she's almost walking on them, she even tells Lisa this thinking it's good advice although she does learn her lesson later on in the episode.
I feel maybe there could be a scene where Marge says something like "look I want to be supportive, I just don't understand this whole trans thing" and the trans guy says something similar about how bad his previous years were.
He had to push down his feelings too, which would make Marge remember her childhood.
This is just what I'd personally like to see, I feel the other family members wouldn't work as well too.
Homer's already had episodes where he's bigotted but changes in the end and I feel Bart wouldn't care if someone's trans at all.
Your comment's really good though and a nice idea, it's just that I feel the Lisa I know wouldn't be a bigot
@@usermcskull4713 Oh, I didn't really mean that Lisa would be transphobic in the episode. My mention of transphobia was like, "if a trans woman's existence is a counterargument to hating men, that inherently calls her a man," which is why I mentioned straying away from it.
I envision it more like, Lisa is outright unaware / only vaguely aware of what it means to be trans, and has unconscious ideas about gender being binary, and this trans character lets her see gender in a new way.
I didn't mean to describe her as being a transphobe, just a child who's never thought about transness before. She starts to think about gender as fiercely binary, then has a revelation through meeting someone who's "broken" that binary, and is a happy, respectable figure despite it.
With that said, I LOVE your idea of Marge being the focus and finding out she can personally relate to trans people. I'd love to watch episode, I think it'd be really sweet
'Lisa goes full terf when Bart starts exploring their gender. TV-M'
@@navi5661 i definitely read it this way!! i think that'd be rlly interesting . you mentioned about 'cisgender education' but that often seems to revolve around a character being transphobic and then a trans person coming in to patiently Educate them, and that kind of didactic approach is hard to make work in comedy as well as perpetrating the whole 'triggered' stereotype even if well meaning. whereas having a trans character kind of open lisa's mind or reframe gender in a more positive sense would be so refreshing !!
Agree with this approach, especially with a trans man since there’s so little trans men/masc rep in media. Since whenever there’s a trans character they’re nearly always trans women and idk , just feels a little bit like trans men are shoved in the shadows.
One of the most upsetting themes in the Simpsons is a sometimes explicit hatred for the mentally disabled. The most upsetting episode for me is the one where Bart gets put in Special Ed where the Special Ed students are portrayed as goofy and childish and Bart expresses disgust and anguish over having to share a classroom with them. Even Lisa can't stand being around mentally disabled people and expresses disgust when Ralph, a mean-spirited stereotype of a mentally disabled child, shows romantic interest in her.
you know i'm ashamed to admit I laughed at all of those as a kid (as someone neurodivergent, even), but you're absolutely right. It's pretty damn ableist.
the show is never mean spirited to Ralph though. if you're referring to I Love Lisa, Lisa is kinda made out to be in the wrong throughout that episode, with Bart rubbing it in in the episode's most famous scene. also Ralph is not mean spirited whatsoever, he's cute and a fan favourite, and often considered one of the purest and most likeable characters on the show.
The special ed episode was so nearly there too, because it points out that the teacher is patronising and the children are being treated like idiots. All of the kids are in there for reasons that could be easily supported with just an altered approach to teaching (not knowing cursive, pyromania, brain injury...being Canadian? lol), but instead they've all been put out of the way under the guise of helping. Bart even calls it out at one point.
That part in isolation is a decent commentary on how the education system basically writes off children who fall behind even slightly due to lack of resources, training and time for staff or the system demanding a strict structure that forces struggling children to drown.
Problem is, the kids are also made part of the joke (if not the main part of the joke) to try and make Bart look "better than this," when in reality they all were. A really quick shift in focus would fix it.
I will not stand for Ralph slander in this house though, he's one of the better characters in the show and deserves the world.
@@AllyGatorAnimator I think the problem is you and the original commenter are both seemingly missing the joke of that scene. the kids aren't a mean spirited joke, the joke is how Bart, a normal kid who just behaves wrong, is being put with a kid who starts fires, a kid who doesn't remember how they got there, and a guy from Canada. I feel you're both looking too much into it from a critical lens when it's just a joke in an episode of The Simpsons, more so the original commenter. like, Bart doesn't even not want to be around them, it's the fact they're doing something so basic. they're also not mentally disabled, which is also the joke.
@@thebasedgodmax1163 Oh no I got what they were doing, I even listed the examples you stated in your own comment when I talked about what the joke was going for, I was just acknowledging how it can also be perceived as negative by them also being part of the joke (namely them going along with it gleefully, which they did so Bart could be the straight man).
It's not deliberately offensive or something that could never fly today, just a bit clunky with hindsight and so possible to take the wrong way.
I get how it came across as complaining though, I do love to over-analyse for fun. No harm intended.
Oof I forgot how bad “there’s something about marrying” was 😬
No you didn't. You just didn't have a problem until having a problem became trendy.
@@twistedtrailerparktales2126 Nah even as a kid I may not have not known who trans people are but I did have a feeling something was off with the ep
in between this video and the family guy one, i was able to finally start testosterone. i can't explain how reassuring it is to be able to watch content from people like me, especially about trans issues. thank you for all your wonderful content :)
Best of luck on your T journey! ❤❤❤❤❤
Congratulations!!!
Grats on getting on T, bro! And speaking as a trans woman: Good luck with the horney. Shit's INTENSE.
Congrats!
congratulations!!! :D
Here's a couple of groaners that have always stuck with me: in one old episode (I think from the 90's, and I can't really recall the context), there's like a TV ad for some get-rich-quick money guru on his bikini girl drenched yacht saying something like "I bought this yacht cheap at a government auction, and all these beautiful women? They used to be men!" That's always thrown me into a rage. In one treehouse of horror, a witch comes along when the whole town's in Halloween fancy dress in the town square, and transforms them all into the costumes they're wearing. Disco Stu proclaims "oh! Disco Stu wishes he'd gone as Marilyn McCoo!" I've actually always felt that was kinda sweet lol
Yeah, I remember the one with money-savings guru Chuck Garabedian. Thirty Minutes over Tokyo, final episode of season 10. It's a shame, because aside from that awful joke, that character was sort of knocking the jokes out of the park. A moment prior, he said he got his suit for cheap because Roy Cohn died in it.
Yeah, that joke was bad and its so easy to write it better.
It could've been like, "All of those beautiful women? They're my cousins!" There, still gets the character's cheapness and can get the gross out reaction from the audience.
I feel like a character who really doesn't get talked about in terms of that fourth category of representation is Ms. Secondopinionson (yes, that's her real name) from Moral Orel, which has been getting a lot of popularity as of late afaik. She has a very deep voice that she changes to be high to talk on the phone with and openly discusses not having children due to her infertility. It really isn't much representation from the show, and it really feels like scraps, but considering the time period the show came out in, her coding is refreshing to see and the characters (besides her little half brother because he's generally a shithead because spoilers) respect her for her voice and how she presents herself, especially her father. Queer portrayal in Moral Orel is honestly pretty ahead of its time, and the characters really feel human despite being made out of clay!
Anyway, TL;DR: Ms. Secondopinionson is underappreciated for everything she does and she deserves better.
I feel if the show had run for longer we probably would have gotten more from her (a trans person in a heavily Christian town sounds ripe for commentary) but, well, ya know
@@ashikjaman1940 Yeah, super unfortunate! If I could go back in time to convince Mike Lazzo to have kept it running for the full five seasons, I totally would. As a trans person, I would have loved to see an in-depth conversation about being trans in a town like Moralton if they got around to it! I would have loved for them to explore her relationship with her dad, Joe, and Nurse Bendy as well. I want to know her story, dammit!
That whole show was way ahead of its time.
I was literally just watching moral orel whaaattt
Whoa... I never even considered that the "There's Something About Marrying" episode could have, in an alternate universe, had a trans positive twist at the end. That really would have redeemed the episode.
I'm a trans person whos watched basically every episode of the simpsons excluding the newest seasons (its some sort of fixation for me lol) and all I remember of 'trans representation' is smithers buying estrogen which stood out as absurd
2:10 TFW you forget Simpsons has been running since 1693, George Washington talked about his fondness for The Simpsons when growing up.
I was thinking the same joke lmao
I had completely forgotten about the gay marriage episode, and I'm glad that I had. Just seeing that scene at the altar gave me terrible dysphoria. No responsible trans woman would ever let things get so far without having said something, and there is no cis man who would do that at all outside of a bad plot on a sitcom. Or maybe that idiot who played at being trans and got kicked out of multiple L.A. Fitness locations.
No real trans person would get dysphoria from a character that isn't trans
Actually, most of us get it that way! @@Scooterbeerrun
@@darlalathan6143then your diagnosis is liar not trans
But lily, you are a simpson.
oh fugg
Exactly! Why hasn't she done anything about this as a Simpson herself?
The real Simpsons were the friends we made along the way
Realizing watching the simpsons recently that Veronica was probably one of the characters that made me not realize i was trans was a hard pill to swallow but i'm glad you made this video!
"Made me not realize I was trans"? But aren't you trans? Are you saying the character caused delay in you realizing you were trans? Sorry this comment is really confusing >_>
@Spunney I think it's in reference to going further into the closet bc the episode had a lot of negative stereotypes they didn't relate to
The major interest of The Simpsons these days is that it's pretty much the only franchise that's lasted so long in its original form that it's had to reckon with certain choices it made early on that are now looked at much more poorly with how society has changed. And somehow it still hasn't done anything with the trans issue.
Simpsons is just Funko Pop in show form now
The stuff with Smithers "becoming Wanda" reminds me of Matt Baume's video on the show "Soap", which had a character, Jodie Dallas, who was definitely gay, but also may or may not have been trans too? The show, from what I can tell, kind of treats being gay and being trans as the same thing, because the writers were mostly cishet, and cishet people sometimes conflate all forms of queerness as being the same thing.
Again. Matt explains it way better in his video, but what "The Simpsons" does with Smithers sounds similar to what "Soap" did with Jodie.
Edit: also, it's pronounced "Matt Graining", not "Groaning". ok, pet peeve time over lol.
And Malloy has the emphasis on the second syllable (pronounced more like M’loy), not the first. But names are unintuitive. We can give grace if someone just doesn’t know ^_^
2 months later but I wouldn't mind Smithers coming out as trans, they made enough gags on that and actually doing it might be the right twist for him. The future episodes are not canon so who cares about them? Make the Smiths into Wands and hire trans people so that the episode is actually accurate.
@@Nortarachangesi was gonna bring that too lmao you gotta get that rhyme in there
Can't believe the Simpsons has been running for thirty decades already. Time really flies.
Found your channel recently, one of my new favorites.
The Belchers and Tobins are way cooler families, ngl
True! Much more wholesome.
Don’t even get me started on how Marge was always so downtrodden - I haven’t watched Simpsons in a while, so maybe she gets to follow her dreams a bit more.
@@azzyjeffs nope, still downtrodden, but now she's also more openly bigoted and bitter, in a way that we're clearly meant to identify with.
Yes, love the Belchers and Tobins
@@azzyjeffs the guy who wrote Bojack horseman wrote a great poem about Marge's sad life you can find it by searching "does Marge have friends" oof it's sad
the belchers are the most blatantly queer family on adult animated television
"To be clear, I do not like Ru Paul"
Oh my God I'm so happy to not be alone on this
All I know is that Ru was selling the no-no book, and I don't want to know more. That alone is a no for me
33:10 heck, American Dad has loads of trans or trans-adjacent characters who get gender related stories etc. One of my favourite trans characters is a hooker that one of Stan's workmates falls in love with while fully aware of her being trans. They still make transphobic jokes, but they balance it surprisingly well against real, human moments and decent, grounded representation. And that's another fox product, so it just can't be Fox's fault just from that evidence alone.
I think it's worth mentioning how the episode title "something about marrying" is likely a reference to the disgustingly cruel reality show "There's something about Miriam", which I am sure you have all heard of
Huh. I thought it was a reference to that movie There's Something About Mary. Cuz a lot of Simpsons episodes named themselves after movies even if the plot has nothing related to that particular movie. Eg:Blame It On Lisa,A Fish Called Selma,The Parent Rap
@@carybeweary7209 Read the synopsis of There's Something About Miriam and you'll immediately see why it's definitely referencing that. It's pretty yikes. 😬
@@Animefan8050 OOOOHH
😧
That's really cruel
And since the show came out the same year as the episode,y'all are probably 100% correct
i mean...
i guess it's kind of a clever joke?
we can just be thankful that that character was ACTUALLY a man, not someone who identified as a woman, ig...
@@samthedystopianrat1945 hell nah. That shit's fucked
i had trans thoughts since early childhood, and i saw an episode about patty's marriage when i was a kid. it scared me so much, especially the wedding scene itself, and i was so ashamed about the fact i wanted to "pretend to be something that i'm not". i was sure that my feelings are basically the same as Veronica's (it was the only ""trans"" character that i ever saw) and after people will find out that i'm "tricking" them, they will deservingly hate me more than anything lol. for a very long time, people finding out that i'm not cis, was the biggest fear of my life lol
You talking about South Park is gonna look like the Pepe Silvia room.
Was "There's something about marrying" LITERALLY written by jk Rowling?!?! I literally gasped when I heard the ending
Lol, Rowling has just never had an original thought and is just riffing off myths that long predate her (be that dragons, magical schools or trans women being threats)
The Simpsons constantly manages to do like 3 steps back for every good step, and every good step is in the very early seasons and then decimated in the later ones.
I'm astonished by how fast you crank out this videos. For sure the hardest working woman on TH-cam.
totally! i’m very grateful for all her work
for sure! i’m subbing, i don’t see enough ppl doing trans lens analysis of cartoons… i was worried i was gonna have to do it myself when i’m hardly a powerhouse 😂
*man
@@patrickst_ar patrick star
Lmaooo “woman”
do't forget that one episode where a side gag was abe simpson being locked out of the house while the family was on vacation and desperately crying out about his medication, and the episode ends with abe with long blonde hair and visible breasts and saying smething like "I TOLD you i needed my medication!"
I have no idea where that falls into anything but it certain is SOMETHING
The most transphobic joke I remember from The Simpsons outside of the ones you talked about was that bit in "Thirty Minutes Over Tokyo" with the guy talking about "squeezing every penny". He brags about getting his suit cheap because someone died in it and his yacht cheap because it smells like cat pee, which the audience is impressed by, but the "punchline" is that the beautiful women around him in the photo are trans (phrased as "used to be men" of course) and the audience reacts in disgust. Glad to know you think we're grosser than corpse suits and piss yachts _The Simpsons..._
16:43 lol, this joke went totally over the Latin Spanish dub :(( because she says "it reminds me of when I was little", I was always confused on why Snake asked that or why Homer and Marge looked at each other, now I understand why Dx what a shame...
The word "transgender" or trans and i think even "transition" is not used in any of the appearances of these trans "characters" in the Simpsons.
It's always "used to be a dude", "i think his name is mama shabooboo now", "hormone injections", "she-males", "he-she"
The concept of trans-ness doesnt really seem to be a thing. It's more an incorporation of some of the peripheral concepts of it into a kind of "gender-bend" gag repreated in several ways
Verônica's episode always made me so sad as a kid to watch, and it took me until adulthood to understand why. I can't even imagine being a trans kid/teen and watch it.
The Simpsons is the oldest show of its format on TV, it's a bit shocking that they never ever ever had a single episode about a trans person, especially after an episode like "Homer's Phobia".
30:45 not only is that not a good representation of a trans woman, that isn't even a timeskip or a transwoman. That is from an episode where Bart meets his ,dopplegangers, and when coming across his adult doppleganger, he happens to be married to a woman who looks like Millhouse. That isn't even Millhouse, that is just a woman we never see again.
Na sweetie. I need that South Park video quickly because we need to talk about how Garrison is literally every negative stereotype about LGBTQ people possible through the years and I whole heartedly believe they are a big reason for transphobia we see now.
Love you pointing out the problem with headcanons near the start. As somneone who comes from an RP background (forum/message board RP, video game RP and TTRPG for the last 20+ years), I've definitely encounted it non stop. I understand the need for certain headcanons when it comes to seeking out representation in something that might not otherwise give you it, but the big problem for me stems- as you point out- from the fact that so often it plays into stereotypes. It's a problem overall when characters are coded specific ways to get around censors and the like, but when I hear "oh i headcanon he's gay because he's feminine and likes creative arts" or "she's definitely a lesbian because she's muscled/short hair/masculine" it's like... is this not just us playing into the stereotypes we're trying to shirk at this point?
That is to say... headcanon what you wanna headcanon, but it does give me pause in my own thoughts sometimes.
This is super important! It's always worth looking deeper into ourselves and our thought process behind things like headcanoning. But it's also important to remember that a not insignificant amount of people in the lgbt community DO fall into those stereotypes and it's okay for them to do so. If someone who is naturally an effeminate, flamboyant gay man sees himself in a character and headcanons them to be gay solely because of said character's effeminate and flamboyant behavior, that's totally valid.
Obviously I'm not saying we shouldn't be careful and consider WHY we headcanon what we do, and try not to fall into stereotyping! We absolutely should. Growth and learning and introspection are always important and this is absolutely a thought process worth dissecting. I'm just saying nuanced thought and context behind why other people might think [insert character] is [insert headcanon] is also important. :)
I've had this same thought for years. Every time I hear about a fandom that has widely embraced a queer interpretation of a character based on them not falling into the most rigid standards of heteronormativity, it honestly makes it a little harder for me to ever want to talk about that show/movie/book/whatever with another person. Like, if I meet a fellow fan of [insert show here], does that person also hold such regressive ideas of masculine/feminine identity? Would I want to be friends with someone who does? Even though, obviously, such super-fans are a minority, and the ones writing queer-themed fan-fic are an even smaller minority, it just makes me a little concerned when people who like the same thing I like, and who like queer representation like I do, also hold such outdated views.
Butch lesbians and fem gay guys exist in real life wtf are you talking about? Do you think we should only have masc gay men and feminine lesbians? Isn't this basically pandering to straight audiences and enforcing gender roles?
@@ethansloan I think so long as people are aware of the stereotypes they're applying, it's okay to have a little fun. I myself enjoy a little bit of queer shipping and the like (although honestly it's been a long time since I've consumed media that doesn't already have the representation I desire), it's when fans don't see the potential harm behind feminine = gay male etc, and claim anyone questioning it are homophobic. Although I honestly tend to find that's a really small minority and is often just very young queer teens who maybe haven't quite fiound their footing yet. I for sure had plenty of dumb and wild ideas when I was in my teens/late 20s that I roll my eyes at now :P It was also just a lot more common in the superwholock era imo, when shows were purposefully queerbaiting constantly.
For me the bigger issue lied in the fact I mostly encountered media and fandoms via RP, which is by it's very natura a collabrative experience. The problem was that sometimes you'd get folk inserting their stereotyped headcanons into the characters they were playing- which is like, fine whatever- but due to the nature of RP, if you played with them or alongside them, you had to interact and acknowledge the headcanon. Basically forced to play along with their headcanon without agreeing with it. Usually just avoided those players tbh.
(sorry for the text wall)
@@Spamhard Never apologize for a text wall
I absolutely hate that episode where the woman Patty was about to marry turned out to be a straight man. Big TERF energy.
One thing I want to know is --- did the Simpsons ever get around to someone taking the cherries out of chocolate-covered cherries and replacing them with mayonaise?
I remember another inconsequential one-off joke, being in episode 16 of season 20 (yes I looked up which season just to make sure) where Moe goes to get his height surgically reduced, and right before going under, Dr. Nick says something like "When you wake up, you'll be a whole new woman", followed by the music teacher walking in, way shorter than before, and angry, implying that Nick got the procedures mixed up and that the music teacher is trans
It's pretty obvious given the show runners over the years that this show was created & run by nerdy cis, heterosexual men who barely understand women, let alone gender. The common consensus seems to be that in the Simpsons Universe trans people don't really exist, as they're either devious men, or gay dudes who really like fashion. Will the show ever get more inclusive writing? Uh, well... what did the Simpsons fandom do when the show runners, producers & studio tried to correct the micro- & not-so-microaggressions concerning race & racism? Yeah, it turns out they prefer racism.
Let's face it, it sadly doesn't make dollar sense to feature trans characters on this show in anything other than a punch line, or a way to elevate more "privileged" minorities. Tbh, this show has always failed at representation, and continues to do so. Much like John Waters, we're simply & sometimes literally window dressing & gags. We probably won't save you from ravenous reindeer with our kitschy toy robots and softball witticisms rife with gay stereotypes. Point of fact, most qu**rs I know couldn't be bothered & why blame us? But hey, we had to live off scraps then, but not now. Simpsons is very much a product of its time, in that it has generally failed the LGBTQIA+ communities.
Just wanted to mention; Helen Lovejoy is actually also one of those "trans but mentioned just once and not brought up again" characters herself. It was mentioned in the season 20 episode that becomes a weird movie parody of Saw. Just thought I'd bring that up since you called the character cis
can you elaborate on the comment?
The real Jim's video on Helen lovejoy bought it up
This priest says I remember when they were helen -surname-
And then says they remember her being Harold-surname- or something like that
Assuming that's what they're on about
"family guy represented trans people better than the simpsons" and PROVE IT thereafter as such is a miserable experience to watch, i cant imagine what it felt when you researched it
The stereotype of trans people being stern is I think in part rooted in the way that a lot of cis folk's first experience actually with someone trans is being told off after we did something shitty, and it being exaggerated out into what 'they're all' like
Great video! One you missed was Helen Lovejoy. Another throw away joke where someone says “I remember when she was Helen Shwarzbound, matter of fact I remember when she was Harold Shwarzbound”
There is one joke that you could consider a trans positive one, in one episode Krusty's trying to advertise a new burger named the "LGBTQBLT" which he thinks LGBT+ people would buy.
Sideshow Mel calls this offensive and says Krusty has more ex wives than restaurant chains.
Now this isn't directly trans affirming, it's about lgbt+ people in general but it is at least trans affirming in a way
Regarding the Ms/Mr Pommelhorst bit, it's such a small thing, but the joke Nelson makes is actually funny and not overtly transphobic? Like, as a trans guy, it's the kinda joke my trans friends and I would make about each other if one of us got phalloplasty. We could argue that it's insensitive for Nelson to make such a joke about one of his teachers, but the joke doesn't rely on dehumanizing or belittling the coach in any way, it simply acknowledges the reality of (what the writers assume) Pommelhorst will be doing during their leave of absence. Again, it's a really small thing, but I can appreciate it.
There is one more episode you missed from what I can remember. It was a in the episode "Revenge is a Dish Best Served Three Times", where Bart is Batman and all the Simpsons chracters are playing characters in the Batman story. I haven't seen it since I was a kid, but I remember that it was a short gag about Lenny, who was thought to be Poison Ivy (I think), and was attcked for that reason, but it was then revealed that Lenny wasn't Poison Ivy, but, and I quote, "a transvestite".
Lily referencing previous videos is literally "Simpson Did It"
This is such a great series of videos. Very clear and comprehensive.
There was another throw away joke where during the "Thirty Minutes Over Tokyo" episode where the Mega-Savings Seminar where the joke was the models were cheaper because they were trans and you hear disgusted moans from the audience.
Or, when Krusty the Clown was running for office and when talking about paying a prostitute Burns mentioned that Krusty could write it off as a fact finding mission and Krusty said he found out the prostitute was a man.
Both awful
That Krusty episode I watched recently probably for the first time in at least a decade
I forgot all about that joke and for a minute was shocked that they mentioned a politician being caught in the scandal with a Russian prostitute in 2002
But then they HAD to throw in the bigoted punchline for zero reason😔
"There's Something About Marrying" has haunted me since I first saw it as a queer (at the time, lesbian) teen. The phrase "Just because you're a lesbian, doesn't mean you're less of a bein'!" still echoes in my brain to this day. Absolutely ghoulish stuff.
The fact that they’re even referencing “There’s Something About Miriam”, a reality dating show about a trans woman looking for love with a bunch of men who don’t know her “secret” and how much they exploited her just says so much about The Simpsons’ attitude toward trans people
They aren't, it's a reference to There's Something About Mary. A film in which a guy lies about himself to get with a woman same as is done in the episode. The show you are talking about riffs off of that
@@Scooterbeerrun I believe the episode is both referencing something about Mary and something about Miriam
@@blueizumi possible but doubtful given the latter is an obscure British show that only had six episodes.
I'd never heard of it for instance.
The gym teacher will be back as a man "next year," but the Simpsons _will never have a next year._ Bart has been a 10 year old since the 1980s. There is no next year in this universe. And any other trans character exists in a flash forward to some possible future, meaning the Simpsons will accept trans people "some day," but, importantly, _never today._
Great video, I knew it would talk about the lesbian episode. The thing is, from what I've heard, the "man pretending to be a woman" was actually referencing an actual trans woman athlete so... That episode stings even more imo 😢
Look if nintendo could hire someone who's last name is bowser, surely they can have someone who's last name is simpson
We're a punchline for them. That's it. (says the person who is old enough to have watched the Simpsons at the beginning, but stopped years ago.)
I thought the Simpsons staff writers had more or less outed themselves as white, straight libertarians after the "The Problem with Apu" movie and their oddball non-apology? Regardless, the show was propping up the status quo at least as far back as when I stopped watching around 1996.
So, the only trans reference which sticks in my memory from the Simpsons is a throw-away gag from Season 10 episode 23: Mega Savings - a self help con artist talks about how he "squeezed every penny" saving money. His first example is gesturing to a photo of him on a yacht with several bikini babes, and his savings was due to the boat smelling like cat pee and the women "used to be men" to the unspecified disgust of the audience.
Always excited when a new video is posted. This one is just as well thought out, researched, and constructed as the others. Thank you for your insights.
The whole "women can't have an adams apple" thing is funny to me because my mother, who is a CIS WOMAN, literally had one.
I think what also needs to be said is that by not including a trans person outside of a shitty gag that they cannot even commit to, The Simpsons is saying it doesn't condone or want to show trans people. It it's been this long, it's intentional. Transphobia was clearly kind of baked into the show early and since Matt has shown little growth in how he considers trans people across his creations, I think we can say in some way that The Simpsons is transphobic, or unwilling to acknowledge the humanity of a whole group of people outside of a bad joke.
I can't believe it. We've done it. We've found the one episode The Simpsons hasn't done yet!
I still remember, with all too much clarity, the gag in which the MENSA group in renaissance garb are mistaken for "sh*m*les." That was the point for me when the Simpson felt outright hostile.
Unfortunately that word pops up a few times throughout seasons 10-14 but then stops. Mostly a product of the time when that word was being used alot. Times change and over thirty years the show changes.
@@dylanshadowstar9779 I saw it when it first came out, and it still felt gross. It was that time when the most prominent trans rep was either through chat shows or internet porn.
4:10 I KNEW this was about Mass Effect before you even ended that sentence, and I'm ecstatic; I have a _LOT_ of thoughts about the Asari and would love to hear your take.
I actually found a clip from the simpsons mentioning that Homer had a cousin that became a woman, it only lasted a few seconds and I only found it while scrolling through shorts recently
I think there could be one way they could do a trans episode (if they excluded the whole Veronica plot). What if they did an episode where one close friend or family member of the Simpsons reveals they are in a hetero relationship with someone who is really transgender?
One of the Simpsons family members (maybe Homer or Marge) judge by stereotypical gender traits and try to stop the wedding between them because they think they are *"tricking them"* into marriage. But then, the character reveals that they *do know* that they are transgender and obviously they still love them, regardless of what they are.
The character who tried to stop the wedding starts to feel bad because of what they did and accepts the character and their transgender lover to be happy together as husband and wife.
The only close relation i can think of that could work would be Flanders? most of the single characters are so pathetic at love lives that it would inherently be a joke.
Whoa I wasn't expecting this to be ready yet! I hope you're not still dealing with too much tooth pain.
I noticed you said Mass Effect and had to throw my two cents in. Yes, you might say Asari are 'no they aren't really gay', but you do have to look at the greater context. Bioware has been putting queer characters in their games before it was cool, or even really acceptable, and fought an uphill battle doing so.
So if you're going to bring up Mass Effect, please look into the other bioware games as well. Such as KOTOR, or even Dragon Age. Thank you for reading.
Dragon Age II will always be my favorite just because rivalmance option for Fenris hit me like a TRUCK and honestly I'm still not sure if I prefer his dynamics as a rivalmance with a red mage or a romance with a purple rogue. DA2 is the game where I ate SO GOOD, I'm sorry to Zevran who was amazing for my Wardens and the first romance option I fell onto by pure accident because I liked the funny smartarse and my snippy male mage had a lot of fun dragging the assassin everywhere. The broody elf just won me over from every angle.
Shout outs to the people who took a year before finding out about how Zevran can turn on you in Denerim, I literally just kept befriending him and half my wardens chose his romance, he's a very sassy character and I always do his DA2 sidequest. (occasionally I also pursue the threesome with him and Isabella that's related to that sidequest, gotta love that they were NOT afraid to make Zevran and Isabella the way they are.
(Also a shout out to Bioware writing the DA2 romances so that they work regardless of gender and there's little implications on "who's the top" when it's m/m, which also works with not making an m/f pairing default to man tops, woman sub. They let YOU paint those parts yourself and I appreciate that so much.)
Also also, just, _Anders_ .
Also also also, Dorian is still one of my favorite parts of DAI, his whole... THING. He literally tackled the whole "parent trying to do conversion therapy" issue as part of his sidequest and backstory, and no game has had the balls to talk about that before (or since, as far as I can tell).
Bioware may have skirted around with the Asari thing, but it's certainly hit the ground RUNNING too (I can only speak for Dragon Age, that's what I've played too much.)
Bioware has been one of the few who I trust when it comes to this just because how they have it feeling like a natural part of every day life. Pretty much everything else I see as pandering.
I never watched the Simpsons until recently, so I had no idea about "There's Something About Marrying." There's so many ways they could have made it NOT transphobic, at the bare minimum giving Marge a moment to learn and be better, but instead she was seen as the hero for saving her sister from marrying a man. They've had nearly 18 years since then to provide trans representation that was more than just a gag and yet they have nothing to show for it.
It's extremely disappointing to say the least, having to grasp at hints or look for confirmation outside of the actual show instead of just...portraying it within said show is still a problem.
It occurs to me that Brunella Pommelhorst could've been a funny character if our initial assumption as the audience was that she was a trans *woman,* and the show then poked fun at us, the audience, for leaping to conclusions or being ignorant and confused about the difference between trans men and trans women. As it is, yeah, the joke unfortunately invokes a current-day TERF trope to an uncomfy degree.
Humor is indeed about inverted or violated expectations, but can we just once make fun of the people who hamstrung themselves by having small-minded or silly expectations in the first place, and not the people who are violating those other people's expectations by just innocently living their lives?
Honestly that joke kinda feels like one they would do
@@usermcskull4713 , it feels like a multi-layered joke they would've done in the old days, yes.
Should include the good place (Janet) the Orville for the alien/robots/supernatural beings in this future video.
Potentially also, a counter of Raine Whispers. A Witch, and in general, the Owl House's witches being effectively 'humans' in role.
It's sad that the only canon trans character in Shera 2018 was revealed after the show ended.
@@falconeshield which character? haven’t heard of this
@@StellarRetribution I believe they're talking about Perfuma, who was indeed confirmed as trans outside of the show.
They haven’t been great with trans issues but there is a throw away line from Tod Flanders that I really related to when I was young, “I’m jealous of girls because they get to wear dresses.” It’s not good but I’ve always remembered it.
finally someone talks about the blatant transphobia in "There's Something About Marrying!" I wanted to add my own episode that I see as trans-adjacent: "Girls Just Want to Have Sums." it's basically the same level of "wow, there is nothing remotely trans about this character, and yet they use this to be incredibly transphobic." the t-slur and the h/s slur are both used during the episode (wonderful...) and it relies heavily on the gender binary, what with the kids being sorted into separate boys' and girls' schools. plus, it is really heavy on the gender essentialism of "oh boys tough and girls soft" to the point that Lisa, being in drag to get a better education from the boys' school, finds herself becoming accidentally violent. it is reminiscent of the TERF talking point that "little girls are being transed to get ahead in life!!!" and I feel like it was *trying* to be like "girls can do anything boys can do!" but. the math class at the girls' school was about "what do numbers feel like to you?" rather than a standard math class, which was found at the boys' school. which clearly shows that they think that being a boy will get you further in STEM subjects. it's a very...interesting one for sure!
oh, and a funny little tidbit from the same episode (I hope I didn't get my directions mixed up in remembering this): Principal Skinner divides the school into "girls on the left, boys on the right" at an assembly. but they arrange themselves as girls on STAGE left and boys on STAGE right. meaning, from the kids' perspective, all the girls go to the boys' side and the boys go to the girls'. if I didn't get my left and right mixed up and this really did happen, it was just an animation error, but my non-binary self found it funny upon rewatch. the kids in Springfield say fuck your gender binary
I had an older half-brother that used to send us VHS tapes of recorded Simpsons episodes when I was a kid so I've memorized a bunch of them verbatim, and once I realized I was trans every so often I'll go through an episode in my mind out of nostalgia and just go "oh...oh no"
Also, i think classic era marge would never be this biggoted, or vindictive, (especially for her sisters whom she vehemently defends almost too a fault) We see in Homersphobia how much she defends John, and how downright progressive her and lis are especially compared to homer. But even in the sake of Homers Enemy they changed homers ideology for the sake of the plot and that worked as homer havung homophobic views and being vindictive works well for his character as he us very prone to jealousy and toxicity. But homer has also been very okay with other gay characters prior too Homers phobia. But I think marge being that vindictive and homophobic and transphobic is insane too me. Its also insane for a show that is fairly progressive for the 90s (especially on Fox) covering topics like Vegetarianism, homosexuality, and gun violence and Matt Groening being more socialist leaning
Helen Lovejoy is sometimes thought to be trans, being mentioned to be trans by an old friend, her first appearance being at the age of 10, having possibly (socially) transitioned as a child, and helping her cousin with the transition. Its not great representation but also no idea why this was omitted.
Because it's basically just a fan theory. It's a really interesting and fun fan theory, but it's pretty doubtful that it's deliberate representation
To quote wiki Simpsons “The Parson tells Reverend Timothy Lovejoy that he "remember[s] when [Helen Lovejoy] was Helen Schwartzbaum. In fact, I remember when she was Harold Schwartzbaum."[72] This is highly questionable, however, due to her and Tim having a daughter together,[73] as well as a flashback clearly depicting Helen as a young girl.”
So! Just mentioning, Helen Lovejoy herself has a joke about how a friend of Timothy "remembers when she was Harold" arguably making her the best trans rep... depressingly enough. Also, that's not Bart and Milhouse, they're dopplegangers that come up in Double Double Boy in Trouble. That aside this is still a great video. Canonically dubious as it may be, the McBabe card was news to me. A lot of those cards on side characters keep being more interesting than anything they get on the show.
Does suck how badly they handle trans issues though. I mean, there's not only a few canon queer characters but a lot that could definitely be interpreted as at least "not entirely straight" like Chief Wiggum, Barney, Burns, Homer, Helen and a *lot* of others. Then again, outside of Lisa, Marge and Shauna (a oversexualized teen *and* a predator, gross all around) they can't even help being shitty to the *cis* girls and women, so trans women probably stand no chance...
Also even fanworks fall flat. Almost never see any of those future-headcanon drawings make Martin trans. Cowards tbh.
On AO3, i actually did see an AU-fic where Lisa was a trans girl, so there is that out there!