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it’s very funny to me that there’s been all these attempts to put trans side characters into superhero comics to validate our existence/be teaching tools when post-genosha emma frost has been there for 19 years. what morrison did to her is astoundingly overlooked to this day.
i dug into the surface level semiotics of it a few years ago, but after thinking it through a lot more, that interpretation of morrison era emma frost is a lot messier, more dangerous, and vital than i gave it credit for. https://womenwriteaboutcomics.com/2016/03/diamonds-rough-problematic-faves-coincidentally-women/
shot (the invisibles), chaser (new x-men). fanny's (who is trans) backwards dialogue reads "do you think if i dress as you, king mob will want to fuck me, darling?" this is just astounding stuff, as brilliant as it is dangerous.
both of these scenes are grappling with the notion that trans women are counterfeits of cis women: fanny confronting her insecurity by wondering whether she would have to immitate robin to get mob to sleep with her and jean embodying cis female sexual jealousy of trans women.
there's another layer to the invisibles scene as mob is explicitly a projection of morrison himself, so he could also be musing about his own sexuality there. such are always the dynamics of men writing women, but it's particularly heightened for the invisibles.
mob and fanny are implied to have sex later without any impersonation involved, and of course scott and emma stay together after jean dies.
men coming to terms with trans femininity is a central theme of the invisibles while jean's arc is an extremely volatile depiction of cis women's anxieties about being replaced by trans women. what a fascinating example of how thematically polarized those two comics were.
who knows how explicitly intentional it was in new x-men but i am so intimately acquainted with morrison on trans issues in that era that i've even seen the disinfo tv episode about trans porn that he showed up in, so it's definitely in there somewhere.
readings like these are very slippery and there's always a question of whether you're just trying to assert dominance over something you love, but i honestly believe that there's a startling clarity and utility to exploring the idea of post-genosha emma frost as a trans allegory.
i also just have absolutely no fear or anxiety about embracing her. it’s impolitic of me to say that the way emma’s holding her free hand here is evidence of her transness but i’m saying it anyway. it may not be your transness but it *is* mine and i own it.
i get how fraught saying something like that, or really this entire thread is but i was a teen in the 90s who constantly tried to assert myself as feminine and was violently dismissed as “gay.” so i stand my ground on it these days.
i closed out that wwac piece by saying “i love emma frost because she’s every lie you tell about me,” which is one hell of a statement to sit with four years later, thinking about how my trans identity has evolved in the interim.
in conclusion
