Demon Knights and Reading While Trans

I've written a little bit about DC's New 52, and my skepticism about it as a long-term strategy, as well my decision to choose some titles to really dig into from issue one.

One of those titles is Demon Knights.

Admittedly, at least three quarters of my decision to give it a go was the fact that Paul Cornell is writing it. I enjoy his work -- first exposure via Doctor Who, then a couple of novels, and now comics -- and he's the sort of writer who is at least aware enough socially to try and write things that defy (or at least avoid) a lot of the outright stereotypes that comics and many things genre tend to get a bad rep for.

And then I read the first issue, and saw this new iteration of Shining Knight and I was positively hooked. I mean, this is a character who visually pops, who taunts people in Old Welsh, and is a heroic, immortal badass. That the character's gender is presented as ambiguous right out of the gate -- Ystin uses masculine pronouns, though many of the characters express doubt on this point -- doesn't hurt either.

Basically, it was nice to see someone like that on the page -- and by that I mean someone I can identify with as a transgender man who knows that a significant portion of the population still denies that my identity is valid -- even if the other characters' reactions were consistently a bit insensitive.

(Note: I should hasten that their reactions are consistent with their characters, and with the presumed attitudes of the setting. I mean, really. Point me to a moment when Vandal Savage has a sense of decorum.)

The fourth and fifth issues, though, have been difficult reading for me. It's like everyone has given up on referring to Ystin in the masculine mode, even when they could reasonably be within earshot. It's all female pronouns all the time at this point. I read it and I ache.

To be fair, Cornell hasn't really addressed this deeply from Ystin's point of view within the text -- the nearest we get is a comment in a vision in which Ystin is said to have "two natures," which could mean a great many things -- but the way the story is constructed it really does read as a trans narrative to me.

If it is, there's a part of me that really loves the deftness here of Ystin's identity not matching others' expectations, and that the character continues on without apology even when others refuse to treat that identity as genuine. I love that this character could easily be gender variant without that being the point of the character.

But oh, the way everyone just dismisses that identity at every opportunity makes me ache. It's a think I remember hurting back in the days people didn't consistently read me as male, and it's the kind of cruelty I fear a lot even now. As a reader, I want better for Ystin, even though I know the essentialist paradigm that the other characters subscribe to probably can't allow it.

And, of course, I think I have a lot of hope bound up in this not necessarily being the Grant Morrison Ystina character, who looks so very much like the Demon Knights Ystin.

I mean, okay, I know that could happen. I am trying to be prepared for it. But right now, I'm clinging to this very queer character as a queer character. And yeah, while it would be nice for some of that queerness to be made explicit in the text eventually -- it makes it harder for it to be taken away later -- the ambiguity feels very real in the sense that even now the world isn't really prepared for people whose gender doesn't conform to expectations.

Seeing someone as powerful as the Shining Knight experiencing that is such an interesting thing for me, even when Jason Blood and the others disappoint me. I so rarely get to go, "Oh! I know that feeling!" with stories in that way that it's exciting, even if it's an unpleasant emotion.

It's not empowering, but it is like meeting a fellow traveler. And really, who doesn't want a fellow traveler with a flying horse?

This post has been mirrored from Christian A. Young's Dimlight Archive. To see it in its original format, visit dimlightarchive.com