Discussion Main / TransgenderFetishization

It is if you word the problem as "All trans people are superhumanly sexy".

The core of this trope is the idea that Trans women are inherently sexual objects. That doesn't have any positive form.

I helped make the trope, so I’m aware of what its core was originally meant to be.

You’re misunderstanding what “positive discrimination” means in this context.

Positive discrimination does not mean “a good thing”. It means a value assigned to a character which superficially seems like a good thing, but is taken to such an extreme that it becomes problematic in its own right, and dehumanizes the character.

That is EXACTLY what this trope is. At least in some contexts.

I wouldn't call being fetishized superficially a good thing. Look at the page image. Also lots of implications that this trope can be a good thing. Thats YMMV at best.

What ABOUT the page image? Poison (the bottom character) is incredibly popular in trans communities. Again, I helped PICK the image, so what's your point? At present, Poison seems to be a case of Mexicans Love Speedy Gonzales; a stereotype of a specific group which is (for one reason or another) actually popular with that group.

Also, YMMV is when we're troping opinions in the examples themselves, not explaining the cultural implications of the trope in the description.

And the point isn't what YOU consider superficially good. The point is that someone who doesn't know any better would THINK it was good, and that some individuals might make the best of it. You keep making the mistake of thinking that giving something the definition of "positive discrimination" is calling it objectively good. It is NOT.

Because we're going in circles, I'm going to summarize the issues with your argument in two ways.

1. You believe that just because the trope Positive Discrimination has "positive" in the name that it's supposed to be seen as good. As I keep repeatedly saying, that is not true. Read the description of the trope.

2. You are disregarding the golden rule of Tropes Are Tools. Tropes, even if they are historically negative or call attention to a "flaw" in a work, cannot be treated as inherently bad on this wiki. We must portray the trope itself as neutral, and only trope any negatives if those negatives are evident in the work itself.

The page image shows a trans person as some purely sexual object. Positive discrimination is something thats usually intended to be a positive portrayal of the group in question. I doubt anyone on this pagelist was thinking about a positive portrayal of trans people when they were making the character. We don't call uncle tomfoolery positive discrimination. How is this different?

Also source on the "poison is popular in the trans community"?

I didn't mean the page type when I said YMMV, BTW.

No, the page image shows a trans character with a sexual design and sexually-charged move names. You personally describe that as "an object" (personally, I would agree with that description). But, the picture itself is neutral.

Also, in this case, it doesn't matter what the author was thinking when they made the character. We aren't troping their feelings towards transpeople, only the characteristics of the character herself.

Also, here's your source, as well as a quote from said source:

However, as I said, this trope is not inherently positive, either. Here's another article which quotes the same person above, as well as an opposing opinion.

Emphasis mine on that last part, because that illustrates EXACTLY the point I'm talking about.

I wouldn't call "she's flawed, but she's representation" huge popularity. Positive discrimination is something that seems like it would make someone really cool and admirable, but turns them into a pedestaled object defined solely by how much better they are then the non-minority characters. "When the Token Minority and/or Token Female character can do no wrong. They will never bumble or make a mistake, even in a show where the majority of the cast does. They will be much smarter and have more common sense than average, they have more knowledge and skill than they have any reason to possess given their professional background, and they will definitely be of superior moral character." Positive discrimination is demeaning through worship. How does this describe fetishization and the tendency to always put trans* people into demeaning fanservicy roles?

See, again, YOU are calling it "demeaning". You continuously use loaded language to stifle any actual attempt at communication.

I'm done with this. Go to Ask The Tropers from here on out.

That isn't what the descriptions in some of them say.

For example, this one:

• Kuranosuke of Princess Jellyfish is a beautiful male who crossdresses as a beautiful female to great effect because he likes to, leading to boatloads of Fanservice, shirtless and nude scenes, fetish fuel, and inspiring crushes in both males and females.

As I said, I'm not familiar with any of these works, but the way many of the examples are written, they seem to count. I left the Utena one alone because that one was more obviously not an example.

Also, I'd like to point out that the basic principle of the trope is hypersexualization. The trans character being more sexualized than other characters is just ONE way (and, probably, the most obvious way) to do it. Hypersexualization, however, is the main point of the trope.

Regardless, though, mass-deletions without an edit reason are bad form. There's no sure way to tell such an edit apart from vandalism or trolling.

The examples written for those characters are very misleading. Neither of those characters are hypersexualized in any way. There is no fanservice of them nor are they framed in a sexual manner. That's why I removed them.

Please understand our position, though. If you had said that from the beginning, I probably wouldn't have objected. But mass-deleting a bunch of examples with no edit reason looks suspicious, especially when the examples appear to be valid.

At the moment, all we have to go on is your word versus that of the original troper(s) who posted them. So when I get time, I'll invite those tropers here to discuss the entry or, if they don't show up, this could be a matter for Is This An Example?

But this trope isn’t about them being “hot”. It’s about them being fetishized (sometimes above and beyond most other characters in a work).

Examples that use RL trans people in a show or part of a work of fiction to seem hotter than cis people are fine, or even trans people who build their careers on being more sexual/raunchy than the norm are fine, but just listings of random hot trans people are not.

I understand where you're coming from, but one thing you have to remember is that how TV Tropes categorizes or names something is for the purposes of making the wiki accessible. While there is a difference between crossdressing and transgender identity, we are troping what the overall popular perception is, not necessarily the accurate truth.

Thus, for the purposes of the wiki and the trope, I'd say that a crossdressing character is an example.

The other thing that you have to remember is that we are covering how things are handled in media (primarily in fiction), not how they actually work in Real Life. In fiction, all those fine distinctions don't, for the most part exist.

We also aren't prescriptive, we're descriptive. How it should be, in the best of all possible worlds, is not what we catalog. We want how it is presented (or in the case of Dead Horse Tropes, Discredited Tropes, and tropes that have fallen into disuse,) how it was presented.

Gender non-conforming is way too broad a category. Many of the examples listed here include romantic relationships between cis gendered gay men. How is a cis gay man that prefers to bottom during sex Trans? Pederasty in Ancient Greece didn't involve cross-dressing or living as women. It was practiced between a masculine adult man and a masculine adolescent boy there was no gender ambiguity there. Edo era Japan allowed more freedom of gender expression for adolescent boys but they were still considered to be and expected to grow up and become masculine men. Onnagata are the only edge case here. They were cis male actors trained to play female roles in order to prevent prostitution amongst Kabuki actors, not to titillate cis men. Some onnagata could have been closet trans women, but most weren't. This page regularly confuses top/bottom romantic relationships between gay and bi men with straight men fetishizing Trans women.

Okay, seems I need to explain again.

Ancient Greece had transfetishism.... Just not in a form we would recognize. Transfetishism was common enough to be written about, at the very least and, in a curious reversal, prostitutes at the time tended to dress in "male-coded" clothing. The argument was that this signified they were out the social description of "women".

While Onnagata were specifically picked to play roles of women onstage, many of them became highly sought-after courtesans offstage.

The thing you have to remember is that this trope is a broad stereotype, assigned by heteronormatives or fetishists towards anyone outside of a strict gender binary. The stereotype isn't specific on purpose. Transphobes don't know or care if there's a difference between a very effeminate man or a Crossdresser or a Drag Queen—the very act of acknowledging differences between those persons means adding nuance to gender, which they generally see as black-and-white. The more they can group them into one category, the better. Thus, this trope is broad because that's how broad the stereotype is.

If you define trans fetishism as a stereotype held about people outside the gender binary. Then the Ancient Greece and Japan examples still don't apply. The examples you provided are of crossdressers existing in ancient greece nothing on that page was about crossdressers being perceived or portrayed as hypersexual or a sexual fetish. The prostitutes clothing signified that they were outside the 'normal' 'social' role for women because they were prostitutes. Not that they were considered something other than women.

The onnagata examples you provided were of gay men engaging in romantic relationships with other gay men.

"The onnagata Matsushima Han'ya, who retired from the stage in 1686, age twenty, was famous for the elegant style of his love letters to other boys. Boys could not resist the love letters sent to them by the master of martial arts Maruo Kan'emon."

This is clearly an example of gay men engaging in romantic relationships with other gay men. None of these men are confused about whether or not the onnagata were women or men let alone fetishizing them. You are projecting that confusion onto them. You are literally claiming that romantic relationships between gay people is the same thing as straight men fetishizing trans women.

Alright, you might have a point on the Ancient Greece example. But I still think you're wrong about the Onnagata

Not only were the Onnagata themselves often courtesans (they didn't work as "gay men" available to other men, but stayed in their womanly guise) but they became SO popular that women of the era started to emulate them.

Furthermore, despite being fetishized in that manner, not all onnagata identified as gay men. In fact, it was said that the most successful onnagata of the time needed to invoke a sexual desire in heterosexual men that said, unconsciously, "If only there were women like this." The entire success of the occupation relied upon blurring the lines between the feminine and the masculine in a way that took all of the good of both with none of the bad.

Agreed with cutting the Greeks, that doesn't count.

Disagreeing with the cut of Onnagata. That's certainly a classical example.

Well, according to Ask The Tropers, they've been suspended anyway for agenda-based editing.

I did like some additions they made, and you guys seem to agree that the Greeks don't count, so I'll go ahead and make the edits.