Thread by @EveKeneinan

I suspect the Wheel of Time tv series is infected with trans ideology.

It may be a small point, but the first episode opens with Moiraine saying that the Dragon Reborn could be one of five children from the Two Rivers.

This makes no sense. The Dragon is male. He is always male. He will always be male. The Dragon is the avatar of maleness.

The Wheel of Time does reincarnate people, but it is *always* the same sex. Because “being a man” and “being a woman” in WoT is to have a connection to the Divine Source, which has a Yin-Yang male/female complementary structure. The connection is EXPLICIT in Aes Sedai & Asha'man.

Interestingly it *is* possible in Wheel of Time to have a sexed soul be in the wrong sexed body. But this is never a “mistake.” The Wheel doesn’t make mistakes. It is, the only times it happens, a deliberate perversion by the Dark One, bringing one of his minions back from death.

So, specifically, there are WoT characters that can be read as “trans.” They are explicitly understood as unnatural abominations wrought by the Evil One, having no natural birth, but using a stolen body, the soul of which has been torn free.

The Dark One seems to find it amusing to reincarnate the Forsaken Balthamel as a woman, likely because Balthemel was a serial rapist/abuser of women.

Making him the only “trans” character we know of.

I just saw a “pro trans in Wheel of Time” argument — which is to admit that souls are sexed, but to say that this makes no difference in those who don’t channel the One Power (and thus touch Saidar or Saidin + an argument from silence.

That is “we know of exactly *no* examples of trans people in the Wheel of Time universe (unless you count Balthamel/Agan’gar); THEREFORE they must be there.”

But this idea requires that the Wheel of Time makes mistakes, and it doesn’t seem to. Nor the Creator who created it.

Anything that goes wrong is due either to the Dark One’s influence or human evildoing.

It is unclear whether Wheel of Time’s Dark One is a creature of the Creator. He is clearly not an “evil opposite” to the (good) Creator — he is imprisoned, for one thing, having been imprisoned by the Creator.

Not unlike Satan being cast into hell.

The Wheel of Time’s “radical” view of sex essentialism could be happy story trope, inviting us to examine a world in which sex is real and essential and *matters* to every character.

Or they could wreck the story world in order to conform to contemporary gender prejudice.