Talk:Assigned Male

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Article Shitmouthing

Someone Please Help That Child

I hate this comic. I cannot stand it. If anyone wants a trans friendly person to tear this comic apart, let me know because I will HAPPILY do it. "I would assume this comic was maliciously designed to make the transgender community look like a bunch of brainless psychotics" is the most accurate way to present this comic.

Children should not act like that. I don't fucking care if the author is a shitty ass teacher who apparently has known kids like that- if I fucking know a kid who acts like they're seriously suffering, I don't make a goddamned comic normalizing it. That this is presented as a role model for children is revolting.

My kid is transgender. So am I, so is my partner. We're a very queer family, go figure. You know what my kid talks about all day? NOT GENDER. Science, baking, pokemon, diverse interests. Gender very, very rarely comes up. And if you're in a shitty situation where your kid is being bullied- find a way to get your kid out of that situation. OR at least freaking distract them. Holy hell, the child in "Assigned Male" LITERALLY cannot have a conversation without bringing up trans oppression. The comic brings this up.

There are so many freaking things a child can do that is not "spend every waking moment of the day obsessing over a single topic that makes you miserable". You can live in the most intolerant, awful place and the kid can still bake a goddamned plate of cookies or build a lego tower or play minecraft or for fucks sake do ANYTHING FUCKING ELSE.

I cannot stand how the trans community laps this bullshit up. Every trans person I know rallies around it like it's the best thing ever. She gets shared on the groups for transgender parents and groups for parents of trans kids and it's revolting.


Not Doing Something Makes It Permanent

All right, the comic has truly terribad writing and at best mediocre art, and I'm not going to defend it. I'm not writing this because of the comic, though.

The reviewer's life anecdote at the end is sick, and an illustration why psychological help should be the domain of people who are actually qualified for it. Word of advice: if you don't know what transgenderism is, don't give advice to people who may or may not be transgender. If they're confused, direct them to a competent psychiatrist; transgender gaatekeepers exist precisely for this sort of thing, to help them understand themselves and whether they'd feel regret about their transition later. Especially don't give unqualified advice if you don't understand the difference between gender identity and sexual orientation, and don't understand that someone can be attracted to a certain gender and still desire to be the same gender.

I say that as a lesbian transwoman who has happily transitioned and is enjoying her new life now, partly because I've never let myself be stopped by people like the reviewer, who given advice while having no idea what they're actually talking about. I honestly hope the person in question disregarded this harmful advice and either decided to transition after all, or decided not to transition for a more relatable, less bogus reason. If not, congratulations, you potentially ruined someone's life. - LucidFox (talk) 12:23, 19 January 2015 (UTC)

  • So, just to be clear: I potentially ruined someone's life forever by giving him advice not to make a permanent change to their body. He's potentially stuck spending the rest of his life entirely able to "transition" at any time because he had a polite conversation with strangers one time on the internet. Fantastic logic there. I'll never sleep again. :'( Maybe you should casually erase it while leaving a note that you were "removing a dead link" like you did with a comment you disliked in The Wotch. Because no one's going to notice you doing that. --SmashLampjaw (talk) 16:06, 19 January 2015 (UTC)
  • The point he was trying to make with this story is made regardless of me agreeing with it or not. Also, don't make malicious edits. If you have a problem with something just say so. Busey.png oddguy Busey.png 02:38, 20 January 2015 (UTC)
  • I don't think deciding to not get your dick chopped is a way to ruin your life. Like, you've got the thing in the first place, so why would keeping it make your life any worse? Looking at this from a logical standpoint on standards and quality: No matter the state of your life in the first place, making no change to said life cannot affect it. Therefore, if there are no changes to the status of your dick, there are no changes to the status of your life. It cannot be ruined or benefited, shit just stays the same. In other words, "if you don't do shit, shit don't happen." So yeah I really don't get how it could have ruined anyone's life. Izzus (talk) 07:42, 22 January 2015 (UTC)
  • I honestly don't get why people assume everything that exists now existed in the past. It really blows my mind. If someone had told a story about watching a friend die of AIDS in the 1990's, would it make sense to say they ruined their friend's life by not sending them to a doctor for antivirals that wouldn't exist for another decade? Time travelers need to check their privilege. --SmashLampjaw (talk) 20:11, 22 January 2015 (UTC)
  • Actually, it'd be more like somebody saying they ruined their friend's life by not sending them to a doctor for the cure which doesn't currently exist. The surgery is better than it used to be, but there's still some huge reasons other than the costs to skip the below-the-waist surgeries. Not to mention that, well, as much as I hate to say it, there was and is transphobia within the gay & lesbian community. (Yes, that comic is one that actually has a valid point, which it handles with all the skill of a butcher attempting delicate brain surgery... Nothing needs saying that badly.) Werhdnt (talk) 17:09, 26 January 2015 (UTC)
  • You may want to re-read my simile and compare it to LucidFox's original complaint. The story from my past occurred in the past, not the present. --SmashLampjaw (talk) 00:02, 27 January 2015 (UTC)
  • LucidFox's original complaint is worse than you gave the impression of; your advice is still quite good, especially as what you describe matches pretty well with cross-dressers who can get pretty offended if you confuse them with transsexuals. (If they count as transgender depends on how you define things.) More importantly to my point, I was trying to politely not mention that last I checked, if you lose your dick or didn't come with one, what you basically get is pretty much a meat packer... Getting it cut off is relatively permanent and makes my phantom one ache. Werhdnt (talk) 07:09, 28 January 2015 (UTC)

Complaints from TVTropers

I disagree strongly with the author's opinions on gender in the "Writing" section, and I think they underestimate how accepted the comic's opinions are with trans people. It may be better to focus on the comic's form instead of the content. The comic could be anti-Flat Earther or anti-homeopathy, and it wouldn't change the fact that the writing is a godawful fit for both a webcomic and the characters within it, as if someone drew a speech bubble around a college student's essay. The Sinfest review does a great job of pointing out everything wrong with the comic while shutting down the author's "you just hate my comic because you hate women" retorts, and without going into a debate about whether the patriarchy is real. Yourwaifuisshit (talk) 19:24, 29 August 2015 (UTC)

  • I can't think of any valid reason to avoid discussing a comic's content. I mean outside of not reviewing content unless it's in the comic. If the author hadn't written any words in it then, yeah, that'd be a good reason not to try to review them. As for guessed implications of how accepted something is, popularity of ideas is irrelevant to whether or not the writing of them is up for review. This isn't the Badly Thought Out Transgender Public Relations Wiki and it's certainly not Tumblr. --SmashLampjaw (talk) 23:57, 23 September 2015 (UTC)
  • I agree with the other guy. The entire writing section is trying to debunk the idea of gender identity and biological sex being separate concepts. It talks a bit about how the kids don't act like kids, but it definitely takes a back seat and it's the only complaint outside of the neologisms and the reactionary rhetoric.
  • The only thing your sweeping generalization could apply to was when I debunked the author's ridiculous stances that substitute perception for reality. She has a woman claiming being pregnant is peculiar because she identifies as a man. Biology doesn't give a damn how someone identifies; there is literally nothing strange about a woman being pregnant in spite of her gender identity. Pointing out reality isn't "rhetoric" just because you're determined to purge content that doesn't support your beliefs whenever you see it. Did you have a problem with prostate cancer not caring if Stephie identifies female? Because that's reality. Maybe it was the part where I contradicted the author's claim that heterosexual intercourse isn't what results in pregnancy? Because that's reality. The facts I brought up weren't opinions just because you disagree. Take your reactionary complaints to your safe space on tumblr. --SmashLampjaw (talk) 07:23, 25 February 2016 (UTC)

The Egomaniac Author Getting Harassed With Master-Level Transtrolling

I feel as though this review could use a makeover by someone who is not overtly hostile to the concept of "social justice". It's really not the boogeyman a lot of people make it out to be, and in railing against it this review at several points clashes against ideas that are actually important to the cause of transgender people being seen as who we really are. Stuff like making fun of new words, in ignorance of the fact that every last word in existence was invented at some point, or insisting that arbitrary biological labeling is as empirical as the actual facts that they represent and that therefore all trans women must be called "male" and accept that. This comic has plenty of bad to point out without going that extra step too far. The lead-in to this page insists that it's not meant to be hateful towards trans people, and that it's important to bash this comic because the comic itself misrepresents trans people, which it certainly does, and I can almost believe that this review was done fully in good faith, but mistakes have been made. --Nuggetemily (talk) 23:10, 15 March 2016 (EDT)

  • This review does not need to be watered down in the name of not possibly maybe undermining a social movement or avoiding potentially slightly bruising the feelings of some future reader. If those were not your concerns, please explain how it benefits our Wiki to rewrite the review in a more "neutral" tone. --SmashLampjaw (talk) 04:42, 16 March 2016 (UTC)
  • Oh no, not by any means neutral. The comic is bad, and it should be stated to be bad. But I feel it would be a lot better to say "This comic is bad because in supposedly trying to be aggressively supportive of trans people, it instead reinforces a lot of negative stereotypes about trans people such as 'trans children are totally controlling their parents and doctors' or 'trans people can't have so much as a simple conversational exchange (something like "nice weather we're having") without mentioning they're trans'." The linked TVTropes page does a pretty good job of pointing out these very serious and damaging flaws. Less good is to regurgitate the same garbage of any transphobe like "those aren't really words!" and "but my high school biology textbook said!!" It's kind of a weird balancing act because there's a lot of things you can say bad about the comic, and we already know that the author will respond to any and all criticism with "if you don't like it you're transphobic", but it is actually possible to go too far and actually make criticisms of this comic that are, also, transphobic. So, there's a lot of good in this review, but also parts that just sort of stick out to me as saying "I really need to make sure that anyone from Tumbler will feel bad when they read this and damn whoever gets caught in the crossfire," which I don't think is the point of reviewing bad webcomics. --Nuggetemily (talk) 14:53, 16 March 2016 (EDT)
  • Pointing out overt attempts to reframe things by inventing/redefining words isn't hatred of trans people, regardless of how it is taken. The history of fascism and censorship is littered with attempts to control people's thinking through trying to control their speech. If it is somehow acceptable to publicly demand people accept new words it's not somehow unacceptable to publicly reject them. That said, you still have not answered my question. In what way does it benefit our Wiki to edit the article into something more "neutral" towards the SJW crowd? --SmashLampjaw (talk) 00:40, 17 March 2016 (UTC)
  • My point was that it might be of benefit to have the webcomic reviewed by someone who actually knows what the heck they're talking about, and not some Reddit/4chan geek who still thinks "SJW" is a non-transparent way to dismiss people with societal concerns, and thinks that the natural evolution of language is the same as fascism and censorship. --Nuggetemily (talk) 21:11, 6 August 2016 (EDT)
  • lol internet. Telling us that we should change it because it's transphobic isn't gonna make us change it. The site is founded on free speech and all that. Free speech includes the protection of ignorance if you wanna look at the review that way. You're allowed to disagree, we welcome it, but you can't get us to change the review by telling us the author used words you don't like. Izzus (talk) 04:45, 7 August 2016 (UTC)
  • That's actually pretty fair. Too often whenever I see someone mention "free speech", it's followed by an implication of "for us but not for you". Your acceptance that my disagreement is appropriate is a welcome and refreshing change to that. But to make myself clear, it's not that the review is offensive and that bothers me--there's far worse shit all over the internet that I just turn my head away from because it's just too unbearable (and unproductive) to combat. The thing is, there's a lot of good reviews on this site, which focus on the actually bad parts of a webcomic, and not just the author's outdated ideas about trans people. My favorite is the one on The Wotch. I just figured, this review could be better. --Nuggetemily (talk) 19:17, 15 August 2016 (EDT)
  • Eh, there might be a little bias in the review but there's also a bunch of shit that could also be easily mistaken for bias. And your argument with Smash turned into ad hominem attacks. You're free to keep replying but I don't think you're gonna get much of anywhere if you keep going the way you are.


My advice is you gotta stick to the point. How would it make the review better. "Outdated ideas about trans people" isn't gonna cut it. Most of us are more likely to listen if you tell us how you would change the review and why the change would improve it. We have a section on our forum for that stuff but you can keep it here if you want, we don't really care where it's posted. Izzus (talk) 01:23, 19 August 2016 (UTC)
  • To be fair, I use "SJW" as a non-transparent term to let sane people know I'm discussing irrational human trash and their ludicrous, feels-based anti-logic. I'd also add that "knowing what you're talking about" means more than having memorized a bunch of unsupported guesswork based on sketchy references to studies that don't actually exist. I get that you probably think you're terribly well-informed, based on how much nonsense you've committed to memory or invented off the top of your head, but that hardly qualifies you as a recognized authority here. Why don't you do something productive and make your own review site and show me how it's done? That'll really put me in my place. Also... I can't help but notice you mentioned it would "be a benefit" again while willfully leaving out exactly how it will be a benefit to our wiki. Any hope you'll finally stop dodging that question? --SmashLampjaw (talk) 06:19, 7 August 2016 (UTC)
  • It may be possible to anti-virtue signal harder than you're doing right now, but you sure do make it difficult. "feels-based anti-logic" is always a classic. Here's a phrase you've probably heard before but never listen to: "lived experience." It's kind of the gold standard on knowing what the hell you're talking about. First-hand experience beats all. I noticed in another response you got all salty about how there's no way you could have ruined someone's life by telling them NOT to make a permanent change to their body, but what you don't realize is that if someone never changes, that's an example of permanence, too. It's pretty basic to ignore that just because it's taken for granted as the "default". But you take a lot of things for granted. Like your ability to just plain old not listen when I've answered your "benefit" question over and over--you just don't like my answer because it points out how you're bad, here, in what you wish would be your safest of safe spaces. --Nuggetemily (talk) 19:35, 15 August 2016 (EDT)
  • Oh look, another paragraph's worth of red herrings. You avoided the question every time by saying that it would be a benefit while omitting how. Putting a reply under something is not the same thing as having a response to it. Do you think it bothers me that anyone reading this page is seeing you dodging my question as if we're having an argument out loud and there's no written record of it? All that shows is that with days between replies you still can't come up with something more clever than the tactics of a 6 year old who thinks nothing is certain until you confess. On top of that, for someone trying to mock my intelligence, it doesn't speak well of you that in the months since you started this you still haven't even made up a non-seniscal benefit to our wiki for rewriting the article to be neutral to social justice. I appreciate that as someone probably on disability for emotional problems while the rest of us work for a living, you have a massive amount of free time you have until you inevitably die alone, but all you're doing right now is proving I was right to lock this article early on. So, you know, try to live with that. --SmashLampjaw (talk) 00:09, 17 August 2016 (UTC)
  • I'm sorry, was I supposed to be spending my every waking moment writing up each new response as if it were some kind of school assignment with a deadline? With that kind of expectation, I'm a little suspicious of your claim that you "work for a living"--not that it matters, since that's completely immaterial to whether you're right or wrong. Or is this the topic of your chats with coworkers around the water cooler? You must be really popular at the office. Anyways, if I haven't made myself entirely clear, maybe I can rephrase it for you yet again. You might just get it one of these times. There are multiple articles on this site about comics that deal with transgender issues. The good ones, which aren't written by you, point out how dumbly those comics end up undermining their own messages and being at the very least transphobic, if not also misogynist (two awful tastes that frequently come as a package). The articles accomplish this, without also injecting transphobia into them. Yours misses that last point, since you lack the nuance to understand what is and isn't a mockery of transgender people. You fit the common narrative: Grew up never having heard of trans people outside of a few stereotyping jokes about crossdressers (who typically aren't even trans), took only the most rudimentary biology courses required in high school, the ones that dumb down everything to a few bullet points for a quiz, internalized societal messages about how great you are(privilege, though I'm sure you roll your eyes at the word), and basically turned your mind into a bunker against new ideas. It's not unfamiliar to me. Growing up under the expectation of being a cis male was very similar. Only difference was, I'm actually trans and a woman. If it weren't for that motivation pushing me out of my shell, I might be agreeing with you 100% right now. I'd say that's a scary thought, but it's not really, it's just kind of weird and existential to think about who I might be if I weren't me. --Nuggetemily (talk) 3:40, 18 August 2016 (EDT)
  • I see I hit a nerve guessing you were a parasite. It didn't take much effort to pick up on that. I'd ask you if you understood why all of your guesses about me are falling flat while I can send you into a frenzy with part of a sentence, but we both know you couldn't answer it. Your problem is you're a closed-minded narcissist. How can you possibly hope to understand my point of view well enough to actually insult me when you've assigned me a list of traits from your standard-issue enemy profile? Regardless, you still haven't come up with an explanation of how it would benefit our wiki to rewrite the article to be more social justice friendly, beyond "it would be a benefit" or the ever-vague "it would be better" with the unspoken "because it would cater to me." Going to venture taking a shot at that, or should I just expect more misguided invective? --SmashLampjaw (talk) 00:23, 19 August 2016 (UTC)
  • I think the answer to your question is "It wouldn't be transphobic anymore, which means my personal opinions on the matter would be satisfied, rather than having some empirical base to ground my suggestions on." Izzus (talk) 07:20, 7 August 2016 (UTC)
  • Well it's not funny when you say it. Of course that's the answer. It's not like some future transcatlady (cattranslady?) who describes herself as "your trans enemy" is going to rewrite the review for our benefit. At best it'll be criticized for not doing enough to get the word out or something similarly idiotic. --SmashLampjaw (talk) 17:16, 7 August 2016 (UTC)
  • To me this exchange comes off as a tacit (or even explicit) admission that the goal here was less to criticize the bad points of this webcomic, and more to use it as a smokescreen to make it look okay when you wheeled out you transphobic arguments. But then, the rest of this exchange made that really obvious, too. It's kind of a bad situation for me, stuck in the middle like this, because we all know that with my viewpoint, if I were to make any complaint to the actual author of the comic, I'd be shut down just as hard (if not harder) with talk of how unspeakably transphobic I (a trans woman) am. The speculation about the comic being a poe really does ring true to me; any time I think about this comic I have to keep reminding myself that the author is in fact a trans woman, because my brain keeps jumping to the idea that she's just a clueless cisgender ally. --Nuggetemily (talk) 3:40, 18 August 2016 (EDT)
  • Making fun of the fact you refuse to admit this whole "it'd be a benefit" thing was nothing more than a ruse for you to get what you want somehow made you aware of anything other than what a transparent liar you are? Plus we get told once again you're a transwoman in case somehow anyone could have possibly missed it? Well shit, I'm definitely going to second-guess my evil master plan now to round your kind up into "work camps". There is this romantic notion you have of yourself as a crusader that just permeates your responses. I get that you want an excuse to feel good about yourself without having to accomplish anything, but defending people from an article most of them will never read by ineptly trying to bully someone isn't going to fly. You're a stranger demanding your feelings be put ahead of everyone else's because you're you. That's all that you are. Amazingly you still have not figured out that this isn't part of the internet where people cower for fear of being called bad things by a sacred cow of the social justice world. You've stumbled into the reality section of the internet. This article has no value towards some movement or agenda. Its value is as content on a review site of terrible comics. No amount of offense or saltiness coming from you will make this article, your feelings, or your fantasy crusade less worthless. --SmashLampjaw (talk) 00:23, 19 August 2016 (UTC)
  • Oh, sorry, her gloating moved off the page. I'll quote it here to dash her illusions she is a clever troll:

there’s this one really stupid wiki with this one particularly stupid article and it was written by a particularly stupid cishit

so what i’ve been doing basically all year is that i’ll put a criticism on the talk page, and the author of the article will come up with some stupid bullshit as to why he’s right, and then i’ll say something else, and again, he’ll almost immediately reply because he’s obsessive about insisting that his garbage critique is jewel-encrusted gold

so what i’ve been doing is i’ve been waiting several months between replies

so he thinks he’s gotten the last word in, but then, months later, he realizes

he’s never safe

i’ve dealt with his kind before. the knowledge that one ignoramus is going uncorrected, not such a bother. but obviously it bothers him because he always replies within the day. you can tell by the timestamps.

i do love torturing transphobes and i’m so glad this one guy in particular is making it oh-so-easy for me
By the way, genius, I reply quickly because I have an email notification on updates to this page because the only way for someone to request an update is via contacting an administrator. So... you know... I don't actually have to check to see if someone wrote something about it. --SmashLampjaw (talk) 17:26, 7 August 2016 (UTC)
  • You do realize that searching for my blog and looking for posts about this only serves to prove extra-hard just how bothered you are by the knowledge that you're dead wrong about your critique, right? Love and kisses, Nuggetemily (talk) 19:17, 15 August 2016 (EDT)
  • Google "Nuggetemily" some time and see how hard you are to find. I saw your post the same day you put it up; no searching required for that, either. Speaking of which, I completely buy your reaction and believe you're amused; I certainly don't believe you're embarrassed by your own stupidity being exposed and are grasping for straws. I mean it's not like you framed your inability to get changes made as trolling me once every few months, then blew that story by coming back a few days la- whoops. You screwed that up too. --SmashLampjaw (talk) 04:24, 16 August 2016 (UTC)
  • I figured your stalking would reveal exactly what actually went down there, but I guess you can claim plausible deniability when it suits you. For anyone else, someone else alerted me to the update, and the fact that my blog had been linked, and that I should respond. For whose benefit do you continually respond here? It doesn't surprise me that an email alerts you to updates--there's a checkbox for that right on the update page, and it even defaults to "on". But that doesn't require that you respond, that's a choice that you make. Anyways, googling "Nuggetemily" is also something that doesn't happen automatically--you chose to do that, because you wanted to. And it's not like I was counting on the page getting changed; already on this talk page when I first read this article were plenty of examples of your stubborn refusal to listen to any viewpoint that comes from a life experience not your own. Looking back, I know that my original post can be read that way, but all in all it's mostly just a complaint that this article lacks the same quality as other articles have. I guess doubling down on that is important to your ego to the point where even the mere suggestion to trim down the article to points of the webcomic that actually paint trans people as a whole in a bad light--the stated point of the article--is seen as, what was it again? Oh right, censorship and facism. Heck, the whole article could just be replaced with that one screencap of the lasergirlboy and it'd get the point across without any unnecessary bias seeping in. But I guess you'd rather have this article be a vehicle for that bias. It's just as well. There are other, actually good critiques of the comic out there. Shame that you can't keep up with the pack. --Nuggetemily (talk) 3:40, 18 August 2016 (EDT)
  • Now this is quite the double-standard. You get exposed as having a year-long harassment plan to make me feel unsafe (your words, not mine), but I'm somehow obsessive for taking less than 2 minutes to find your blog and save a copy of your admission that you came here under false pretenses? Come on, even you couldn't believe that was going to fly. You can try to imply there's something wrong with me for defending myself (a transparent bid on your part to get the last word so you can convince yourself you "won", by the way), but if it somehow speaks poorly of me to reply to direct challenges to my article, it speaks worse of you for endlessly replying on a site you don't even participate in. --SmashLampjaw (talk) 00:23, 19 August 2016 (UTC)
  • I'd like to apologize for some of the things I've said and done here. My arguments were incoherent in many places, and I feel that set a bad foundation for any decent conversation. That said, you have a few wrong ideas here. First, when I said "he's never safe", I did not mean to imply that you ought to fear for your life or the lives of your loved ones. Merely that you should not feel as though you can be transphobic without anyone saying anything about it. But having evolved a bit in the past, oh, let me see here, wow, five years, I don't really care about your transphobia. What I do care about is that throughout your review, you pretend to be on the side of some nebulous "good" trans woman, who apparently does things just-so, and therefore deserves to have her gender respected, unlike every other trans woman, who does not. That's garbage. And unless this site is a garbage dump, I think it would be improved by not having that aspect. Finally, I find it odd for you to claim that I do not participate on this site--is that not what I am doing right here, right now? --Nuggetemily (talk) 13:31, 26 July 2021 (EDT)
  • I would be so bold as to say that no, you haven't contributed much at all. Because usually around here, contributing means writing your own own reviews, or participating in the discussions of whether comics are good or bad (and thus needs reviews) on the forum. Additionaly, I am quite curious as to your definiton of "Just-so". Because as Smash wrote in the review, then he is indiferent to people's gender identity - the issue that he, and most of us here in the community, have with Sophie is how one-sided and militant her comics are in pushing its quite frankly disturbing propaganda. Tell you what, join us on the forum and we can talk about it there. I promise you that you we will at least listen to your arguments - though you'll have to accept that people might not agree with you, will try to debate you. --Webkilla (talk) 20:49, 26 July 2021 (UTC)

Actual Requests

Atomic Bomb

This webcomic should have the Atomic Bomb, Reviews with Creator Reactions (due to the author messing with the page) and Webcomics Created by a Giant Douche tags. An admin will have to add it since the page is locked.--Cryptek Szerasp (talk) 20:01, 14 April 2016 (UTC)

  • Atomic bomb and Giant Douche have to be argued for in this thread. As for Creator Reactions... we're not entirely sure the vandal was her. That's typically reserved for when they publicly attack the review or shoot us an email. Unless you're saying she posted something, in which case, I'd love to see it. --SmashLampjaw (talk) 01:19, 15 April 2016 (UTC)

Edit request

Could someone with permission to edit this article add a link to Assigned Male's section in Irregular Reactions? Itannoyedme (talk) 13:55, 2 July 2016 (UTC)

Typos

There are two small errors in the review that should be fixed. These are:

"'Invisibilizing' isn't a word and neither abbreviation is an acronym." -- English

"Abbreviation" is a shortened word, like "St." insteat of "Street". The correct word here would be "initalism".


...and...

-- Stephie, an 11 year old (who watched Silence of the Lambs}

You're closing that sentence with a brace instead of a bracket.


Sorry in advance for being a Grammar Nazi.

--FernandoLemon (talk) 17:55, 17 August 2016 (UTC)

  • Fixed, and thanks for catching those. --SmashLampjaw (talk) 02:57, 18 August 2016 (UTC)

feedback and nitpicking

hey. im trans. bad article. not a good comic either, but i definitely dont want this article to scare young trans people away from discovering their own identities. i used to spend a lot of time on this wiki when i was younger and im very glad i never saw anything like this, back when i was more impressionable. if your intentions towards the trans community are good, you did a poor job showing it. but i can help. if you want.

heres some problems, in order of appearance:

-header mentioning possible author reaction refers to author as "his/her." the phrasing of the message suggests the assumption that it IS her, making the male pronoun inappropriate at best, and at worst it can seem hateful right from word go.

-"stephie is an eleven-year-old boy who dresses and identifies as a girl." not the best way to say it. "stephie is an eleven-year-old transgender girl" is more correct and much more concise. either way, i dont think you have to explain what being transgender is.

-"child suddenly decides he's a different gender--" stick with female pronouns for stephie throughout, even if only for consistencys sake. its proper in more ways than one.

-"myrick, who is a girl who identifies as a boy." --> "myrick, who is a transgender boy." we know what it means.

-"cisnormativity" and "heteronormativity" are words. one google search away. plus, even if something isnt in the dictionary, it can be considered a "word" if its meaning is obvious. if you know what the root words "cisgender" and "normative" mean, you know what the word "cisnormativity" means.

-gender is separate from sex. common consensus in not only the transgender community, but the scientific community as well. part of the reason theres two different words for it-- two different concepts.

-"a heterosexual woman who identifies as a man, convoluting the description of their relationship with a man." awfully convoluted way to say "a transgender man."

-"the penis is male." not factually incorrect, but this is more of the same re: sex =/= gender. genitalia tend to be associated with sex chromosomes but are not inherently gendered. key word "inherently."

-"racism exists against white people." untrue. at the very least not under the same terms. at this point the article feels almost as soapboxy as the comic. do some more research.

-claiming being cisgender is "normal" is a negative value judgment towards being non-cis. this implies being non-cis is "abnormal," which is not appreciated. even though you can argue its based on the numbers, and while there are fewer openly trans people than cis people, there are better words to describe transness than "abnormal." these are the words you have chosen, and this is their meaning.

-"cissexist" and "trans-masculine" are words now that people know what they mean. you know that new words can enter into the language as necessary, right?

-if you can write something unrelated to the article in the author bio section, you can also write nothing at all.

-asking one trans person to justify your criticism for you misses the point of your argument, namely that a single voice cannot and should not speak for a whole community, especially one as diverse as ours (the transgender community.) not to say shes wrong. its not a good comic. but including this "blessing" as a footnote just seems unnecessary, and a cheap attempt at lending credibility to your opinions. if anything, it speaks to the fact that this article should have been written entirely by a trans person, because-- by and large-- they would know much better what to say.

ok bye. --Frogbones (talk) 10:45, 4 June 2017 (UTC)

  • The review was written because the webcomic is bad, not as a public service to the transgender community. I led with an explanation I wasn't writing the article to target the transgender community because there are a staggering number of retarded, white-knighting idiots out there, who would see an article about a transgender webcomic and immediately assume it was written solely because I'm transHitler and I want to put you all into transdeathcamps. Your criticisms of the article are mostly feelings-based; saying "a penis isn't male" or or that "racism doesn't exist against white people" are factually-inaccurate statements. You have to redefine "male" and "racism" to make that work. Saying that "normal" is an insult (regardless of how you dress up the word "insult") doesn't change the fact that the use of the word "normal" was entirely accurate to describe an aspect of the vast majority of the population. This review exists because the webcomic sucks; it's neither here to attack the transgender community nor to serve as a propaganda arm for it. I'm not rewriting it into a tumblr-friendly PSA. --SmashLampjaw (talk) 20:36, 4 June 2017 (UTC)
  • "feelings-based" criticisms are extremely appropriate here. youre not writing a journal of medicine-- god forbid, with how little research you seem to do-- youre writing an article on a wiki about bad webcomics. take yourself less seriously and stop pretending that ignorance and stubbornness make you in any way "neutral" or unbiased. --Frogbones (talk) 00:41, 5 June 2017 (UTC)
  • Allow me to rephrase. Your complaints were about how some of my factually-accurate remarks made you feel. I don't care if you dislike the word "normal" being used to describe normalcy, or "racism" being used to describe racism, instead of those words being relegated to only things that are special snowflake friendly. You also expressed this using "we" to make it seem like you were speaking on behalf of an entire community despite also saying one person can't do that. The only group you come off as representing are entitled people with the unjustified belief that we have to cater to your whims as long as you use shame. --SmashLampjaw (talk) 18:36, 5 June 2017 (UTC)
  • my points do serve to factually dispute your professed "truths," which they do perfectly well, even if they do coincide with my own feelings. understand that facts and feelings must work together to create reason. without feelings, facts are useless in a debate. either way, ive yet to see you cite any sources in the article or in this talk page to credibly support your assertions of "factual correctness." quoting "-SCIENCE SAID THIS" or "-RACISM KNOWS MY UNCLE" barely passes as humor, much less "proof." if you want me to, i can name a few actual sources of my own:
secondly, unless im missing something-- which i doubt, i read my original post about a half-dozen times-- my only use of "we" refers to "readers of this article," who know what being transgender is, and require no explanation. therefore, you can make no claim that referring to trans characters as "boy who identifies as girl" or "woman who identifies as man," etc., does anything but display ignorance at best and anti-transgender bias at worst. if you feel ashamed, thats fine, but thats not on me. i would rather you felt receptive and willing to admit your mistakes (which, honestly, most everyone has made these same ones at some point,) but ill accept making you feel "ashamed" too, i guess. --Frogbones (talk) 22:14, 7 June 2017 (UTC)
  • I'm literally floored by your claim "facts and feelings must work together to create reason. without feelings, facts are useless in a debate." Facts don't need to match feelings to be facts. Facts are facts. Reason is based on facts. Feelings are checmical stimuli that lead you to make stupid mistakes. Here's a perfect example:
    • Bias for or against someone based on their race is the very meaning of racism. Saying racism against white people doesn't count because of things some white people did at some point in history is exactly as racist as being afraid of all black people because one black man mugged you.
    • Feelings tell you be afraid. Facts tell you one man isn't his whole race. Feelings are bullshit; facts are facts.
    As for citing things, remind me again why I have to? You are trying to make the case for this article to be rewritten. It's on you to convince me the article needs to change. I don't have to convince you to allow me to keep this article as it stands now; it will continue to be as it is regardless of your dissatisfaction unless you make a case for changing it. Right now your case consists of idiotic posturing, contrarianism, and acting unjustifiably entitled to get your way because feelings. --SmashLampjaw (talk) 23:13, 7 June 2017 (UTC)
  • you misunderstand. factual correctness is just one part of sound reasoning, and it seems to me like youre 0 for 2. as for why you "have" to cite your claims: because theyre not even "facts" unless you do. are you really an administrator of this wiki with such little respect for proper writing? then again, maybe youre a perfect fit. dismissing contrary feedback as "contrarian" is telling, to say the least. dont waste your time writing another reply. theyre only getting worse.
get smart,
--Frogbones (talk) 02:33, 12 June 2017 (UTC)
  • You actually think you're winning something here? There's no winning on the internet. You're just making an ass of yourself by claiming "penises are male" or "racism is racism" are statements that requires citation. Seems to you I'm 0 for 2? Help me out here - what did I say, exactly, that gave you the impression I view you as an authority on how well I'm doing? Was it when I changed the article based on your baseless complaints? Because that didn't happen, genius. By the way, you're the second idiot to try to get the last word by giving me worthless advice in this talk thread. I'm not sure why you expected it to work better for you. --SmashLampjaw (talk) 06:20, 12 June 2017 (UTC)

Random

So who here likes fuckin bugs Sincerely, Bugfucker69

Agree Comic has flaws, but so does the review.

"transgender: denoting or relating to a person whose sense of personal identity and gender does not correspond with their birth sex."

Arya stark is a girl who pretends to be and dresses like a boy, Stephie is a transgender girl. The situation and descriptions refer to completely different scenarios. Agreeing with Frogbones here; just use the word transgender instead of those convoluted descriptions.

You spend more time attacking ideas than the flaws of the comic itself. True, many of the arguments made have flaws, but it's not relevant to this review to respond to each one the reviewer personally disagrees with. Also was totally not worth my time reading; regret reading the section.

On death threats: Those are fucking real, how dare you make fun of harassment. People are dying from transphobia.

Not trans, and I have many, many criticisms about the current trends with gender, but I think this article spent way more time promoting the reviewer's own views than reviewing the comic. What about some actual criticisms to the comic like poor character development, e.g. the sudden relevation that Stephie is autistic despite displaying no autistic traits the entire run of the comic? Or having talking heads/body actions completely irrelevant to the diaglogue most of the time?

Might I add that this review is now out-of-date? The artwork has improved (still some anatomical issues, but let's be real drawing people is hard), Stephie's dating a cis boy, and while the dialogue still isn't always believable, I would say a number of the comics and the scenarios that play out are pretty relatable experiences to the trans community. Occasionally, there are actual plots that happen too, and I think it's also important to separate the art the artist puts in her books and the art she does to spread awareness, which are not always the same. --sribbleinc

  • We already discussed most of this on the forums, but you failed to bring up death threats. I would counter: how dare *you* defend people faking death threats for money on the grounds that other people are actually get killed? As for an update, it's probably warranted, given that so much of the original comic appears to have vanished from the internet. How depressing that the copies I saved to circumvent tumblr's awful navigation breaking my links may be the only surviving material from the first 70 or 80 pages of this awful comic. --SmashLampjaw (talk) 09:17, 24 June 2018 (UTC)