I think the best way to handle gender in the comics is to let women continue taking over the majority of the writing for female characters while quietly brushing anything Furman wrote about female characters under the rug and never speak of it again.

 

Ignoring Furman is boring, and you can't resolve the anxiety around Spotlight Arcee by simply deferring to women, because women also disagree about which aspects of femininity are somehow natural and spontaneous and which are the result of violently imposed gender roles.

 

What I mean is that the interpretation of some evil hatred connotation towards women/transgenders is what doesn't exist. It's a story that uses a controversial springboard for an interesting character study, which leads to it being much more awkward than it should have been, and 5 times more controversial than the gender debate in the first place.

This is solid truth, and also that we can't fall back on human archetypes so much. Cybertronians aren't human, and can't be expected to act/match up to humans 100% of the time.

 

I vaguely remember most of the people having a problem with the arcee story were the feminists that claimed Arcee's portrayal was an insult to women. How they saw that, I'll never understand. From the word go, I saw it as a violation of person in an intimate way, and said person reacting violently because of said violation. Granted, I'm not great with "subtext".

 

So currently does Arcee believe that she was always meant to be in her form? That her change was destiny?

Because I was browsing the YMMV of Tv tropes RiD, I came across a quote from Arcee from issue 52 saying ""I'm what I was always meant to be." But doesn't that contradict her Spotlight? If that quote is referencing her gender, does it mean that the forced change was meant to happen to her? Or that she wanted to become "female" before the experiment? If so seems like a dumb retcon.

Then again I am not up to date on RiD therefore haven't ready the comic. Maybe I am mistaking the context.

And for those who want to further ignore the content in her spotlight comic, I think that is a mistake.

Yes Arcee experienced a horrible event, and yes it was at a time in which no normal fembots were allowed into IDW (if they had been allowed, then Arcee could have entered IDW normally). But those events that Arcee experienced has shaped her in various ways that retconing it or completely ignoring it further down the line would be foolish.

As GoLion mentioned above "the feminists that claimed Arcee's portrayal was an insult to women."

I personally don't see how it is an insult to women.

Lets reverse the situation with Arcee. Arcee was born into the world as a fembot, she is put through a horrible experiment in which a "male" bot is left. The new "he" despises his look and the changes that were forced on her. This reverse gender change doesn't make the story an insult to men. Instead it is adding some realism to how someone would react if someone changed their body without permission. If someone forced artificial limbs/parts on me, me hating the new me does not mean this scenario is an insult to cyborgs.

 

I wish they'd explore gender less. They've made a complete hash of it so far, grossly conflating gender with sex. The more that's said about it in the comics, the more painful it gets. Almost everything in the comic screams "two binary sexes" for the Cybertronians, which might have been progressive to portray back in the '80s, but we're moving away from that view of gender now, so it's so disappointing to see Transformers tackle gender in a way that introduces nothing new or thought-provoking about gender, and only serves to reinforce gender norms and gender stereotypes. It's not even in keeping with a modern understanding of gender identity. To me it's been regressive and boring.

Showing genderless characters would actually be more progressive. Instead we get, "Look! A man-robot! And a lady-robot! And the lady robots look like Barbie dipped in metal! Woo, isn't this a unique take on gender?".

Pass.

 

Attempting to do so would be threading a very thin needle. Potentially doable, but tricky as heck.

 

No, transformers isn't the franchise for a treatise on gender politics.

 

This. I'm all for exploration of gender if and when it can be done intelligently, even provocatively, but it's not really a subject to just blunder about with, or incorporate in an off-hand way as progressive/feminist signposting. The female characters we have have largely been parachuted into the story and been used more as indicators of writerly and corporate intention, rather than as characters, and the groundwork for any exploration of gender fluidity is poor to say the least - female Transformers are literally depicted as a kind of subrace, and resolving that explicitly racial identity with our understanding of gender in the human world would be difficult and messy, and probably not very interesting.

 

Sounds like some pretty awful writing to take the most famous female autobot and say she used to be a man.
If they were going to do that I'd say use one of the more generic male characters become female.
It really smells like some male writer trying to be "progressive" but imo it's just a modifier - good in video games, bad in character based writing with rare exception.

 

I've thought about this and...
there's just one way this can go.. and still make sense.

the presence of different genders within a species require a evolutionary reason.
Hot spots have not been active for long (well waiting to find out more about those)
TF haven't had 'newborn' for... well.. yes.. AGES>
ipso facto, windblade will be soon falling in love with some decepticon or arcee and sidewipe will be needing to find ... a room.
it has to boil down to reproduction,... the traditional,less abstruse evolutionary meaning to gender difference. no?

besides, reproduction could well have been Jihaxus's goal in making Arcee, since by the time he made her hot spots were prolly inactive.
This of course doesn't explain the presence of the camiens (and the numerous females there) nor why after that colony left why no more 'female' bots were made/born.

Also a traditional way of reproducing would reduce the racial issues caused by the method of construction/birth of sparks.

 

Oh Gawd no. This is a terrible idea D: sorry I know your heart was probably in the right place but just no. To introduce females only to pair them off for baby making would be a giant step backwards.

Also some of your facts are a little off. The hotspots were still active when Jihaxus experimented on Arcee. The Dinobot oneshot showed an ignited hotspot on Cybertron so hotspots are coming back. Females are not exclusive to Caminus(they appear on other colonies) Cybertron is the odd one out in that regard and it's an intriguing mystery.

 

mhh im not arguing culture, or stereotypes, I'm talking biology, and 'pair them off for baby making' is a rather bleak perspective on a perpetuating life cycle that transcends our species and something we have in common with even.. dinosaurs. Considering women as baby producing machines is a sterotype you see (negatively; granted) and add to the discussion it doesn't however address how 'evolution' has decided to 'solve' that specific issue.

I did mention hot spots was a tbd issue.

Isn't Arcee 'made' by Jihaxus AFTER he came back from the dead universe? which is post functionalism (sentinel prime era)? Weren't hotspots dead or dying by then?

Even if hotspots are coming back, wouldn't the time lapsed so far have functioned as an evolutionary 'push'?

And finally, wouldn't abstracting females from reproduction (or rather remove the significance of genders <whichever, so as in 2, not 1> given by reproduction) make them more/or solely subject to their prettiness, something usually associated with male dominated audiences (like fan service)?

 

Didn't Solus Prime leave Cybertron for the colonies and that's why Cybertron born femmes are functionally extinct?

 

It's true Solus Prime left Cybertron with the Titan Caminus and, for whatever reason, female TF's vanished. But the Primes in IDW were not gods of any description and Solus Prime was not responsible for the creation of female Transformers. Females appear on other colonies, not just Caminus.

At the moment we have no idea why Cybertron stopped producing certain types of Transformers.

 

no

 

I think an issue with forced gender change in fiction is that it is often used for humor/sexual/fetish reasons. You can sure find plenty of manga, etc, in which gender change is not used for serious/good works of fiction. While other forms of forced transformation like species change (Beauty and the Beast, vampirism, etc) or other changes such as becoming a cyborg, have a better chance of dealing with the seriousness of the situation and following themes such as "what makes you you" or "holding onto your humanity", "don't give into the darkness" etc.

Could you name a rare exception in which forced gender change did not bring down a good quality story and was taken seriously?

And also what is Arcee's present view of her forced change? How does her quote from issue 52, """I'm what I was always meant to be" relate? Is it a retcon, perhaps she always wanted to be female? Or is that referencing her sane autobot self? Always meant to be a good "person"?

Speaking of Gender and transformers, I wish we got a "female" transformer in IDW that had a more masculine appearance. Im not a fan of Windblade super feminine form. She shouldn't have "breasts". What Arcee has in front (with some "male" bots also having) would have been fine.

If Windblade got a new form in the future, less feminine would be nice.

It's as if Windblades appearance kept hitting us on the head saying "SHE NEEDS A VERY FEMININE APPEARENCE"

I wonder what the reaction would be if Windblade had been more masculine looking then Arcee.

 

Who says she was a genderless 'male' before Jhiaxus? Just because Adam and Eve had no concept of nakedness before Eve ate the apple doesn't mean that they both weren't naked beforehand. I believe the same happened to Arcee with Jhiaxus being the apple in the analogy. Cybertronians had no concept of gender but that doesn't mean Arcee wasn't always female. No physical gender reassignment took place, just "you thought you were like everyone else on the planet, well you actually aren't and never were".

Gender still doesn't exist to Cybertronians. Gender is a label and nothing deeper. We call Optimus Prime male because he sounds and acts like a human male. We call Arcee female because she sounds and acts like a human female. But they actually aren't male and female in the biological way we are. The only difference being is what makes Arcee be labelled as female as opposed to being labelled as male. Jhiaxus saw this difference though and sought to introduce gender labelling. In the Cybertronian language, there would only have been one word for "he/she", "him/her", but upon Arcee's realisation of being different, Cybertronians also started using male/female labels.

What was Arcee like before Jhiaxus? I would have her written to be the same as she was in the 80s cartoon, stereotypically female to the reader but gender specific labels would be avoided being used when referring to her if such a story was ever told. Her complete change of personality due to Jhiaxus.

 

I sense a retcon cop out.

She secretly was always "female", never disliked her new form and bots calling her "her".

No horror happening to her body.

Have you read the spotlight?

 

Mantra, from the Ultraverse. An entire comic series dealing with it, and it didn't get thrown from that track til the Marvel buyout and the godawful Black Semptember stuff.

Something ELSE that Gobots got right. Smallfoot didn't look physically female. At all. None of the female Gobots did. And nobody made a deal about them being there in the first place. THIS is how it should be handled.