Riddle me this, Batman! What's more annoying than a "trans girl lesbian" superhero?
“I kind of want to be alone right now,” I say without looking up.
“Oh man, I am so disappointed about that,” says a voice I know, and I look up and wilt. Crap. I totally forgot. “I was really looking forward to meeting the first transgender superhero.”
Kinetiq sits with their arms crossed on the table in front of them and their lips pressed tight.
An
enby superhero, of course!
Kinetiq is genderqueer, a nonbinary person who is neither male nor female.
In other words, a really bad liar.
They’ve got their long black hair shaved like a horse’s mane, and their Kevlar vest is strapped down tight over a chest binder. Their arms are bare except for a pair of fingerless gloves.
I love that April Daniels is doing the "I won't even mention the character's actual sex (which isn't real) because it's not relevant!" thing, but throws in the chest-binder so we know Kinetiq is actually a chick.
“Oh shit.”
“Hell yeah, ‘oh shit,’” they say.
“I forgot, I’m sorry.” I’d promised them that when I went on The Late Show that I’d mention that I wasn’t the first transgender superhero, as a lot of cis people seem to think I am. I’m just the most famous. In fact, trans people who get superpowers are way more likely to become superheroes than cis people who get powers, because we tend to already be alienated from mainstream society, so the sacrifices of being a hero mean less to us.
Bahahahaha. Yeah, sure, Danny, the most pathologically fragile people on Earth are most suited to a calling where you get the shit kicked out of you by superpowered psychopaths. Also, being a superhero in this world means being a well paid government asset and celebrity.
“Oh, well then, I guess that’s all okay,” says Kinetiq. “Or, wait. No, it’s not. At all.”
“I’m sorry. Really.”
“I don’t care about your apology, Dreadnought. I care about the oxygen you keep sucking out of the room. We were finally getting somewhere, and then you come in and bigfoot the whole movement!”
You can't say April Daniels doesn't realistically depict one aspect of the trans experience: stupid tranny infighting.
“It’s not my fault that the press is interested in me,” I mutter.
“No, but it is your fault that you don’t use your platform to increase visibility for the rest of us!”
“Look, I know I screwed up, but I am really not in the mood for this right now.”
“That’s a real tragedy.” They hold a hand up to their ear. “You hear that? My heart is breaking.”
I close the catalog. “Last year one of my best friends was possessed by her supervillain mother and forced to murder half the Legion. Now the survivors all hate each other and the fallout from this just got plopped in my lap. So, if you’re done, kindly piss off for now.”
Kinetiq sits back, seems suddenly unsure what to do with their hands, and settles for folding them. “Oh. Sorry.”
There is no fucking way Kinetiq didn't already know Danny actually has real fucking problems this time around already.
I met Kinetiq in combat. They’re a stringer operating out of California’s Bay Area, a freelance superhero without a steady municipal contract like the one I have with New Port.
What exactly does being a "freelance superhero" mean? Like, as boring as Danny's deal is, I get it, the city pays her a stipend in exchange for making supervillains fuck off. Does Kinetiq carry around a portable card-reader and charge people for rescues? Do towns rent her by the hour?
They were only thirteen when their parents drove them to run away from home.
I refuse to believe this was because of "transphobia." I'm sure young TIM and TIF kids still sometimes get driven out of their homes because of prejudice, but like fuck does it happen to "AFAB non-binaries." The worst they have to deal with is their parents using actual singular pronouns for them while texting to their godmother about how they're concerned that them binding is cutting off their breathing. Assuming they even bind, and their "gender identity" isn't just a shitty haircut.
Six years later, they flit from job to job as needed, and barely make enough to cover their bystander insurance premiums.
Bystander insurance makes sense, but probably as something that, well,
bystanders buy. You'd think superheroes would enjoy something like qualified immunity.
We met when I went down to California to help put down a rampage by Mr. Armageddon, a three-hundred-foot-tall nuclear psychopath who breathes fire. The fight covered a twisting loop of destruction about two hundred miles long and lasted for thirty-nine hours. It was an interesting day.
When it was over, the press mobbed me as usual and acted like Kinetiq hadn’t even been there, even though they’d been fighting Mr. Armageddon for longer than I had. I was too tired to realize what was happening, just started answering questions the way I always do, and in the process made it look like I agreed that it was all my fight. Kinetiq has been trying to get trans capes to go mainstream for years, and to make nonbinary trans people in the cape community visible to the outside world. I basically stomped on that effort by accident.
Here we witness one of the tensions of the TRA movement. Many of the more... abstract gender-specials resent relatively straightforward types like Danny for "hogging the spotlight" from them. But the thing is, the idea of a "girl trapped in a boy's body" while bullshit, is still a lot more coherent and marketable than "I'm a spiritually superior type of human, identical to a member of my natal sex in every way except I come with a special set of sacralised pronouns." It's somewhat related to how these days TRAs trash "trans-medicalism" while cynically deploying trans-medicalist arguments in the media when they want to cut-up kids.
Being genderqueer is hard.
Yeah, being beloved by every major media outlet and half the political establishment, without any expectation of actually changing how you live or present is
hard.
Being Iranian-American is hard.
I'd argue being Iranian-Iranian is a lot harder, especially when you're "AFAB" but go off.
Being a superhero without a steady paying gig is also hard.
How common are superhuman in this universe that any decently powered one isn't immediately snapped up? And again, how does she get paid? Do the villains she fights drop credits? Wait, that was how Calamity got paid.
Kinetiq had been swimming upstream for years to be all of those at the same time, and the credit for what should have been their big breakthrough, their first headlining victory, ended up getting handed to me by default. Why? Because I’m a pretty white girl with an easy-to-understand narrative.
Most Iranian people wouldn't even fail the paper-bag test. Though, I suppose Kinetiq's parents being Iranian would make them shunning her make more sense, if a bit ironic given how Iran tends to handle gay dudes.
Given how hard I accidentally screwed them, they’re remarkably friendly.
I doubt Daniels would be nearly so deferential to a female enby in real life.
A speaker in the ceiling crackles to life. “The first assembly for business is starting in the Kirby Room in five minutes. Once again, the first assembly for business is starting in the Kirby Room in five minutes.”
Bit of a basic-bitch shout-out, though now I'm wondering, was Jack Kirby still a famous comic book artist and writer in this world, or did he somehow get involved in superhero stuff for real? Side-note, I kind of want to do a thing where Alex Ross is the go-to portrait artist for actual superheroes. Danny invites Kinetiq to the meeting.
“What’s up with the business meeting?” says Kinetiq, pulling up next to me in the air. Their hands are pointed backwards, palms splayed open and light bursting forth from their fingers. “Those things are so boring!”
Maybe this is why you don't have a contract, Kinetiq. Either that, or the other superheroes don't want to catch your 90s Comic-Book Dyslexia.
We pass out of the show floor and take a hard left through the hallways. The ceilings around here are all extra high to accommodate people who can fly. “If this goes the way I want it to, I might be able to get you a municipal contract.”
That sure gets their attention. They look over sharply and then say, “Maybe I don’t want your handout.”
Said no gender-special ever.
“Are you ready?”
“Yes,” I say.
“Good,” says Cecilia, all business. “Graywytch is in there. Be on point.”
“What? She’s the on-call this week, she’s not supposed to leave New Port!”
“Well, she did. I’ll be sure to mention it next time we can screw her at a hearing, but right now I think she’s going to try and steal our thunder. Be ready for it.”
Graywytch wasn't actually all that much of a presence in the first book besides ending the stupid charade with the Tozers. That is not the case here.
Right. Sure thing.” My guts knot up. Graywytch is the last member standing of the Legion Pacifica, the only one not killed or wounded or forced to quit in shame. Since most of the Legion was destroyed, she’s been living alone in their tower, not helping me protect New Port at all. I only see her at the monthly City Council meetings where I make my reports about everything I do for the city. She justifies her continued paycheck by making all sorts of freighted allusions to supernatural threats that she has protected us from. I know a few magic users, and none of them have seen any evidence of her actually doing anything, but tell that to her friends on the Council. They think the sun rises because she tells it to.
"Freighted?" Does she ship her allusions by truck or rail? I think this is the superhero equivalent of declaring you never liked
Harry Potter and telling everyone to go read
Animorphs. "Oh yeah, Graywytch is actually a lay-about who's defrauding the city government, trust me bro, all my witches hate Terf-Witch."
Also, the tranny oppression fantasy: Danny is both famous and beloved, heir to the legacy of the greatest superheroes ever, and also the city won't take her word over a chick who's been lazing about her apartment for over a year.
The crowd in here is one of the strangest ever assembled. There’s a woman whose head is a purple flaming skull. There’s a man made of ice, his body moving in creaking jerks. A minotaur is having a quiet argument with a glob of protoplasm holding itself in the rough shape of a person. And then, of course, there are the costumes: capes and masks, bodygloves and trench coats, and other, more exotic garments. A woman with fiber-optic hair turns when someone calls her name and accidentally pokes the man next to her in the eye with the pommel of the katana strapped to her back.
I bet all
these people could tell Danny something about "body dysphoria." That's actually another reason capeshit is probably kind of a shit genre for trans stuff. Capeshit tends to posit that people can, to some extent, adjust to transformations so extreme, they don't even qualify as organic life anymore. Trans stuff meanwhile, posits it's possible for normal puberty to be a terminal illness. Okay, so does
X-Men, but that's usually a bit more justified.
There’s a man who appears to be made entirely out of muscle, and he’s wearing a vest that seems to be exclusively made of pouches, a look I thought had gone out of style all the way back in the ’90s.
Who wants to be Daniels gets most of his cape-knowledge from Linkara videos?
The moderators sit behind a table facing the crowd. Thunderbolt, the Californian heavyweight, is one judge. Maybe I can get him to sign a print of that team photo of Northern Union’s last mission, the one where he debuted his new pressure suit for missions in outer space. The other judge is the Patriot, who fronts Empire City’s Algonquin Guard.
"Algonquin Guard?" Are they a Native American group? Even if so, Empire City is
probably meant to be New York, and from what little I've read, the Algonquin
warred with the Iroquois Confederacy who actually lived there. Man, all of Daniels' names are shit, but somehow his team names are the worst.
In deference to being indoors, he has taken off his enchanted steel helmet—supposedly a genuine World War II paratrooper helmet that is possessed by the spirit of Liberty Herself—and placed it in front of him.
I want you to remember stuff like this helmet backstory for later.
“The floor recognizes Graywytch,” says the Patriot. Somebody in the back of the room loudly boos, and her lawyer elbows her in the side.
Graywytch steps up on stage. She’s basically all the worst parts of ’90s goth thrown in a blender. Billowing black robes, a raven sitting on her shoulder, pale face, and dark eyes. And, oh yeah, she’s a trans-hating bigot who outed me as a superhero to my parents, which caused them to kick me out of the house with nothing but my cape and a cell phone. At one point she wanted to strip me of my powers and give them to someone she decided was more deserving—someone who wasn’t transgender.
Still not as based as Teach.
When Utopia killed or wounded most of the Legion, Graywytch took it as an opportunity to try to remake the Legion in her own image. Doc is still technically a reserve member and managed to halt that plan through some bylaw shenanigans that gave her a veto on any new members, but Graywytch hasn’t stopped trying to convince the City Council to revoke my contract every chance she gets. She’s basically the worst person I know who isn’t a supervillain. (And to be honest, I’d rather hang out with Utopia, who, I remind you, is a genocidal psychopath.)
Yeah, that sounds like something a troon would say. "Yeah, Utopia did try to enslave all mankind, shot off my best friend's arm, and forced my other dear friend to kill and maim her friends, some of the world's greatest superheroes, but Graywytch is
mean."
Now, Graywytch did threaten to murder Danny, which is shitty, but apparently even the author forgot about that.
“Thank you, Patriot,” says Graywytch. “As you know, the Legion Pacifica remains inoperable due to a lack of members to establish a quorum. Without a quorum, no decisions can be made, and thus the Legion and its assets have been placed into receivership. Due to concerns about the qualities of some of the prospective recruits—” Here, she looks directly at me over the heads of the crowd. I flip her off. “I have exercised my member’s veto to prevent any new members from joining. However, given the ongoing threats to New Port and the Pacific Northwest of the United States in general, I find that I must bow to inevitability and lift my veto. I will be accepting applications for new members starting at the end of the month. Thank you.”
Trying to rebuild her super-team, what a monster!
Without another word, she turns and walks away from the podium. With a dagger pulled from her robes, she cuts a hole in the air, and through it I can see Victory Park in New Port. Graywytch steps through the portal and it seals behind her with a shimmer like a heat mirage. The crowd erupts in chatter, instant speculation on what the new Legion lineup will be. A seat in the Legion is a career-maker. Almost any unaffiliated whitecape would want the job.
My heart clenches with anxiety. I turn to Cecilia. “She can’t do that, right? Doc’s put a block in.” Doc is a reserve member, along with Magma. She told me that this kind of thing wouldn’t be possible. If Graywytch has her way, she’ll stock the Legion with flunkies who are just as bad as she is.
Who cares? You're fucking Dreadnought! I'm pretty sure any team you join will
be the new Legion. One of the reasons Chlorophyll was so eager to get Danny onboard was because Dreadnought helped justify their budget! Think about it. What would make a superhero team prestigious in-universe? Its members. Most of the Legion was wiped out. The only members left are Graywytch and Doc, the latter of whom was technically the one who got the rest of the team killed and crippled! Any new Legion would have very little continuity with the original team.
Is it a geography thing? Is the Pacific Northwest the centre of super-nonsense for some reason?
“My understanding is that no, she can’t. But she may think she’ll get away with it, or more likely, she’s got a lawyer of her own who thinks he can win if it goes to arbitration.” Cecilia’s lips are pressed thin.
“What are we going to do?”
“We’re going ahead with the plan. Make your announcement, but be sure to let people know that Doctor Impossible is still pressing her veto against new members as well. We’ve got contracts in hand; Graywytch can only offer a messy fight. I think most capes will find that what we’re offering is the better deal.”
It doesn't help that, as a reader, I am not in the least bit invested in the future of the Legion Pacifica as a group. This feels like a grand allegory for all the feminist subreddits getting taken over by men.
“The floor recognizes Professor Gothic,” says the Patriot.
Patriot better be ninety years old like Captain America, because there's no way the name "Patriot" wouldn't have been taken decades ago.
ank you,” says Gothic in a German-inflected baritone. “I have completed the latest round of the metahuman population survey, and the results are…concerning. The metahuman population growth continues to accelerate, but this is not news. What is news is that the growth curve has recently left a linear curve and has become, to early appearances at least, exponential.” There’s a ripple of murmuring through the crowd. Gothic waits for it to subside before proceeding.
“Should this growth continue its current pattern, as much as 7% of the human population could have superpowers by the end of the decade. By the middle of this century, that number could be as high as 41%.”
....41%
Is Daniels screwing with us? And how many fucking superhumans are there that they could make up 7% of the human race in under a decade? That's almost as many supers as there are diabetics.
“Unless this trend reverses itself, I project that the entire human species will have superpowers by the year 2100 at the latest.”
Fucking
lit.
