Thread by @lisaquestions

Okay so @/StopTweetingMia recently tweeted a criticism of Futurama's transphobia and transmisogyny, and people showed up to deploy the everlasting favorite "it was a different time" canard. This assumes some weird stuff, like the idea that people have to learn over and over again

that they should find out what a demographic is like before writing about them. As if, back in 2011 no one understood this about trans people. Which is weird, because Neil Gaiman understood this in 1991 when he started the "A Game of You" storyline in Sandman. It's true that what

he wrote didn't appeal to a lot of trans people, but he did in fact consult trans people like @RozKaveney. The story covers trans fears (post mortem deadnaming, cruel exclusion) while showing that Thessaly's goddess is a transmisogynist twit, Death has no issues with transness.

I still have a lot of mixed feelings about A Game of You, but it shows that in fact people knew long before Futurama that it's possible to at least *try* to be sensitive to a marginalized group's needs and how to consult them directly before writing a completely uninformed story

that simply trashes trans people. This was 12 years before the Futurama episode "Bend Her" and 18 years before Family Guy's "Quagmire's Dad." People handled Christine Jorgensen fairly respectfully in 1952, although sensationalized as a novelty.

A few years later coverage of Christine's life shifted to transmisogyny - misgendering, treating her as "freakish," etc. That is, a deliberate choice to shift to attacking her and other tran people instead of trying to understand.

"They were a product of their time" is a nonsensical defense. Every time you care to look at, there were always people who knew better, who didn't support the awful things others were doing. When these awful things become the accepted norm, it's not because people were just

passively ignorant and didn't know any better. It's because these views and beliefs were deliberately disseminated and in many cases backed up by the law - such as the decision to allow slavery to continue in the newly formed United States and to give slave owners greater power

with the 3/5ths compromise. The so-called "founding fathers" *knew* that slavery contradicted the ideals they wanted the United States to embody, but they allowed it anyway. They *knew better*. These things aren't just passively like that until someone "fixes it" but rather

actively maintained and enforced through the status quo.

(broke @StopTweetingMia's @ in the first tweet so she wouldn't be spammed but I don't want to be like talking about her excellent tweets and have her not know)

Forgot to add that all these "they didn't know better" arguments actively elide the perspectives and knowledge of people in the affected groups. If you justify slavery with "Well they didn't understand it was wrong to do chattel slavery back then" you exclude the enslaved people

from that consideration, as well as the many many people who opposed chattel slavery. If you say that "people didn't know better in 2003 than to make a horribly transmisogynist episode of Futurama" you're excluding the fact that trans people had been working on acceptance for

decades and at the time we definitely knew better. The argument simply disappears us as inconvenient to the "product of their time" narrative that's strictly meant to shut down any critical discussion of everything from bad representation to outright genocide. It's bad faith.

And like everyone has different views on how to approach this stuff and whether to forgive or when and it's all valid. Except when it's denial that it matters at all. I agree with Shadi (although I'm more a case by case basis)

https://twitter.com/shadipetosky/status/1317217917344256000

Also, critique of past work can get results in the present.

https://twitter.com/ninehydras/status/1317151430520709120

Since someone's already tried to yell at me about mentioning A Game of You, I clearly said it's not widely loved. My point was that Gaiman did in fact ask trans people for advice on writing this story, showing that asking trans people before 2011 was not in fact unthinkable.

But also hiring trans people, such as Rachel Pollack's run on Doom Patrol.