Thread by @AlexandraErin

Ancillary thread spilling off my Discworld one gave me a shot of perspective on something I've always felt and couldn't put into words why until now:

Bugs Bunny dressing up as a woman to fool men never feels like the typical "man in dress" transphobic pantomime farce to me.

I mean, right on the face of it, it's a stock transphobic comedy trope: man in dress coming onto presumed straight man, fooling him for antagonistic purposes, sometimes to the point of a wedding.

I think the reason it doesn't feel the same to my (and I'm not arguing with anyone who doesn't like it or has a stock rule of "cis guys in dresses for a joke is always transphobic and I'm never down with that"; that's entirely valid) is... well, that'll be in the next tweet now.

If I didn't restrict replies I'd already have three people telling me "He's literally a cartoon so of course it's not transphobic." but I can immediately picture Peter Griffin in a wedding dress in a cutaway scene and it's definitely transphobic.

Anyway. I think it's a combination of three things. One is that his design is not itself gendered; if you put a female rabbit of his cartoon type next to him, you have to add gender markers to her. So visually it's less "man dresses up as woman" and more "rabbit dressed as human"

And since clothing, accessories, and other cosmetic touches are gendered then of course he can assume the gender of whatever he puts on.

Second is the Marx Bros. MO: Bugs Bunny may be a stinker, but he's rarely the aggressor. He's not preying on Sam or Elmer, he's defending himself from armed attackers. So it's not predatory on his part, and the angry response to the deception is pre-existing hostility...

...so it feels less like a trans panic scene playing out and more just one more step in the hunter-hunted scenario.

And then the third is maybe just a rephrase of the first, but he just... goes for it. Goes all in on it. There's no ashamed masculinity. It's obviously funny to him (or else he wouldn't do it) but the joke to him isn't that he's a male rabbit wearing a skirt.

Right, this wasn't one of my three reasons, which are more about surface level reactions than concrete analysis, but it's true.

Bugs is a comic trickster figure, mercurial and fluid by nature. He takes on whatever attributes the gag requires.

https://twitter.com/UnlikelyLass/status/1421534134074318856

Like, he can put on a wig, a tux, and an attitude and walk into the Hollywood Bowl and be accepted immediately on sight by professional concert musicians as Leopold Stokowski, superstar conductor.

And I think from a combination of his essentially ungendered design and his absolute commitment to the bit, whatever the bit may be... but that's not fundamentally different from him becoming a Southern belle or a widowed heiress or whatever else.

I think for most cis creators and particularly ones who are trying to be funny, "Never put a guy in a dress" is a good enough general guideline for avoiding a lot of bad stuff you might not think of in a million years. I don't recommend it.

And the more that you immediately run to, "We put him in a dress! That's classic comic hijinks!" as the easy and proven way to get laughs, the less you should be doing it (but probably the less you'll care).

There was no Wabbit Loki in the void because the TVA has never caught him.

https://twitter.com/jurijuri/status/1421536115165700105

But I think Bugs Bunny does it well. I think Bugs Bunny pulls it off.

I need to read Chuck Jones's books sometime.

https://twitter.com/RosieQParker/status/1421533813113491466

Chuck Jones wasn't thinking about queer representation when he wrote Bugs Bunny, but he also wasn't aping the British Men In Ill-Fitting Dresses panto drag stuff, and I know he did *deeply* think about the topic of cartoon characters and how they present themselves to the world.

The comments attributed to him in that thread remind me of the Duck Amuck discourse, which is a cartoon at its core about testing the limits of Daffy Duckness - at what point does Daffy Duck stop being recognizable as himself?