hey! before anything else, i’d like to address some terminology in your ask! non-x is phrasing used almost exclusively to other the people you’re talking about. that’s not necessarily a bad thing, like i’ll use it in sentences like “as we’re centering disabled voices, non-disabled people are welcome to listen but should keep silent”, whereas the similar sentiment “abled people need to shut the fuck up” is putting the focus on the ableds themselves.
there are people who are nonbinary or have other genders who may not necessarily identify as trans, and non-cis may be a useful term in that case (i’m not actually sure if there’s another preferred term), but i’m trans. i identify, very openly, as trans. calling my trans perspective “non-cis” does nothing but refuse to name my experience and to center your own identity and experiences even when explicitly asking after mine.
anyway, now we’ve got that down! i’m assuming that since you’re primarily a comics blog, you’re asking about loki in 616, as opposed to loki in the trashcan fire disaster that is magnus chase & the gods of asgard, or loki in american gods, or loki in myths, or anything else. i have a lot of opinions about all of these things, but we’ll stick to 616.
loki in marvel comics is a trans girl/transfemme. there you go! i said it. i mean, i’ve said it before, and literally used the url @transgirlloki for a while, but that’s where i stand. genderfluid is a pretty common reading, and i understand where it’s coming from: al ewing, who wrote agent of asgard, pretty much explicitly said she was. so why do i disagree?
1. because the genderfluid shapeshifter trope is transphobic [x]. ewing’s got the same weird preoccupation every other cis writer has with making the shapeshifters genderfluid, because it’s like y’all are incapable of imagining someone not identifying in a way you consider “in line” with their genitalia. shapeshifter genderfluidity is not trans representation, in fact if anything it is such a cisnormative perspective it’s the antithesis thereof.
2. loki has been written as a trans girl and with themes associated solely with transfemininity for years before the concept of genderfluidity ever came up in association with her. specifically, the “lady loki” arc post-ragnarok is a trans villain plotline so deeply entrenched in transmisogynistic rhetoric it looks like it came straight out of transsexual empire or the scum manifesto. here’s “sappho by surgery”, feel free to compare it to comics, tell me i’m fucking wrong [x].
all transsexuals rape women’s bodies by reducing the real female form to an artifact, appropriating this body for themselves.
— janice raymond, transsexual empire
the male spends his life attempting to complete himself, to become female. he attempts to do this by constantly seeking out, fraternizing with and trying to live through an fuse with the female, and by claiming as his own all female characteristics
— valerie solanas, SCUM manifesto
additionally, after ewing was done with agent of asgard, a-force happened. that’s the one where @evilmarguerite and @gwillow decided that it would be appropriate to have the one trans girl on an all-women team (outfitted in a look nearly identical to the same outfit she had when she stole sif’s body, which i’m sure was absolutely not at all intentional) betray them—including her own family—for power. it’s a terrible comic but at least they wrote her as trans again, i guess, lmao, which leads into…
3. when comics wants us to like loki she’s genderfluid, when it wants us to hate her she’s a trans girl. i’m a spiteful person and i absolutely refuse to play along, especially when genderfluidity is, again, a reimagining of an already established queer identity for the purpose of making her more palatable to cis audiences. so nah, fuck that noise, they made their bed when they wrote her with every bit of transmisogynistic queercoding they could fucking muster, and now they get to lie in it.
4. even if i was going to respect the genderfluid interpretation, which as we’ve established i have no intention of doing, as far as i know there’s not even any lines in canon that suggest it over her being a trans girl or nb transfemme. like, i don’t have my transcripts pulled up or anything, but what we have are lines like “i’m always myself” (which if anything suggests a static identity over genderfluidity, if you’re reading it from an actual trans perspective and not in the lens of bullshit cisnormative shapeshifting)… old!loki constantly using feminine terms when talking about loki in agent of asgard… “my son [thor], my daughter [angela], and my child who is both” from original sin, which can’t conclusively prove anything one way or another seeing as transness is for many cis people a discrete gender in and of itself, where there are men, women, and then the transsexuals. i definitely do not go into a marvel comic expecting odin to know how to respectfully refer to his trans kid, and i said i wasn’t gonna touch on myths so i won’t, but those also can and probably should be taken into account, and i’d argue that given historical and linguistic context they very strongly support loki never being a man.
so, yeah, that’s where i’m at. tl;dr loki’s a trans girl.
I apologize for using ‘non-cis.’ I’m really bad with names and nouns. Not pronouns, just word nouns. Talking in general. I point a lot when talking in person.
Anyways, I couldn’t figure out words, and I couldn’t remember if it was you or the other person I followed around the same time who wasn’t always comfortable with being called trans.
I’ll be more careful in the future.
I really do appreciate your thoughts and that you took the time to respond (and would love to hear your perspective on mythological Loki).
kiragecko 