Yeah, I am jumping in here to say that I'm kind of disappointed.
Page one, WWWolf asks people please not to be egregiously transphobic, as the issue is not what is between Wu's legs, but whether her words and behavior are lulzy.
So the entire thread is full of people calling Wu "Wuman," wow such clever; simply referring to her as "him," even though she has apparently had both top and bottom surgery; criticizing her for having had bottom surgery, and what is apparently a "fake" vagina; noted transphobes like Ivan Komarov come flocking in and Rika comparisons get thrown around, even though Rika is orders of magnitude dumber than anybody who can compile the most basic code.
The liquid diet? Fair play; she brought it up herself and it is weird. However, she is not inventing odd pronouns like "Vadeself." She is using the good old standard "she," which doesn't seem to me terribly hard to use. Attacking her character designs, gameplay, Tweets, and so on? Totally fair; these are things she's put into the world to be examined. But it seriously seems to me as if there is a large slice of the forums with whom Wu simply. cannot. win. because she is trans. And that is something that makes the forums uncomfortable to use sometimes.
What do I want done about it, Null will probably ask? Fuck-all, on an admin level. I'm not calling for the thread to be locked. It would just be interesting if people examined the reasons why they need to fling shit at identities, rather than actions. On another thread, Vade is being justly ripped apart for their freakish lack of empathy. But it seems to have taken Wu's dog dying for people to exhibit any themselves. Being genuinely, not-just-because-of-manga trans is a concept that now has documentation in neuroscience, and it is -- having witnessed people in their struggles to be accepted as their target identity, to live full-time as their target gender without getting the shit beaten out of them, to get an uninterrupted flow of hormones when working abroad and thus having to carry around a giant folder of medical documentation -- a fucking difficult way to have to live. Why yes, with medical science as it is, a neovagina has to be maintained -- as Jessica Sideways unfortunately found out. To me, that's deserving of a bit of empathy. It is an extra difficulty that I, as a cis woman, don't have, and it's part of why some trans people don't have the surgery Wu apparently had, in which case they're derided as "traps" and the Admiral Ackbar meme goes around for the billionth time.
Wu is, as the XKCD cartoon famously points out, wrong on the Internet. In the old LJ entry quoted above, for example, she forgets that gay men also have an increased risk of violence. (However, she's not completely wrong about difficulties between gay men and women, but that's a different textwall for a different time.) Stay on target, Porkins. Stick to her copying the Mass Effect dialogue system. That's laughable and annoying. Her gender identity? Do some of you even know what dysphoria is? Even OPL kind of does, in that he is -- source: Marvin -- made miserable by having a dick. And unfortunately for him, he will never get his wish to be a woman. OPL has a very weird take on what being a woman entails, but some of his rage at blue arms is undoubtedly misdircted rage at having to live with genitals that make him depressed.
Wu's diet is lulzy. Her character designs look like Bratz dolls. She may not be 100% correct on issues affecting gamers. Is it too much to ask to stick to her being wrong on the Internet? She's not making ridiculous OPL claims about having a "soul vagina" or Vade claims about being a "Scoutgender." Is it actually not even possible to say, "Okay, I don't find her attractive and would not have sex with her, insert ugliness meme here" without staking your claim to the argument that being trans, ordinary trans, like not a fennec nature god, is in itself lulzy? Because that position gives the arguer zero high ground to point out Wu's ableism in using a picture of an autistic kid to visually convey "overreacting." And that is uncool and worthy of mockery. The thread seems to argue, in general, that what she says and does is mock-worthy enough in itself. It gives me a sad that people are still not just willing to shrug and concede her woman status. It's not like being a woman is always a prize, despite what WanderingVag keeps saying in the incel threads, so it just seems odd to me that people won't give her that much consideration and just go right to pointing out that her character designs resemble the kind of doll you wouldn't buy your innocent little daughter.
