Transgender Headcanons

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About

Transgender Headcanons refers to a series of fan theories depicting fictional characters as transgender. Mostly found on Tumblr, those theories have been criticized and mocked due the tendency of their creators to confirm the theories as part of the character's canon, even if there is a lack of support for the theory from the character's source material.

Origin

Though the exact origin of these theories is unknown, it's believed that a precursor can be found on "Transstuck," a fanfiction and fanart trend featuring characters from the webcomic Homestuck as transgender individuals.^[12]

Spread

Since their first appearances, trans headcanons have risen in popularity on the microblogging network Tumblr,^[7]^[10] where some single topic blogs about them have been created.^[3]^[4]^[5]^[6] Some popular characters featured on trans headcanons include Danny Fenton from the cartoon series Danny Phantom, ^[9] Dipper Pines from the cartoon series Gravity Falls ^[8] and Link from the video game series The Legend of Zelda. ^[11]

Criticism

These theories have been heavily criticized by various communities, including the transgender one, due the tendency of their creators to consider them as canon. In addition, critics have derided theory creators as being intolerant of criticism; they have also disagreed with the casting of transgenderism as a simple character trait, rather than a gender identity. On December 9th, 2014, on the subreddit TumblrInAction, user extrabullshitaccount published a link to a Tumblr post where user otterplotter mocked a transgender user who felt uncomfortable with a trans headcanon featuring the character Fenris from the video game Dragon Age. The post received over 300 points (97% upvoted) and over 200 comments in the following 9 months.^[2]

Samus Is A Transgender Woman

On September 1st, 2015, Brianna Wu and Ellen McGrody published an article titled "Metroid’s Samus Aran is a Transgender Woman. Deal With It." on the feminist pop culture news website The Mary Sue.^[1] Both authors claimed that Samus Aran from the Metroid series is a male-to-female transgender woman, using developer comments and instruction booklet excerpts as sources.

Within 24 hours, the article had 2000+ comments and made Samus trend on Twitter with almost 4,000 tweets in one day.^[13] Criticism of the article focused on the author's lack of sources and mistranslations. An anonymous user on Wikipedia began editing the Wikipedia article for Samus Aran to include references to transgenderism, and claiming those who were reverting the edits were "Gamergators" and "transmisogynists." This user was quickly blocked and the article locked.