Transformer Alt Modes as a metaphor for Self-Determination?

[KingSwoop]

What are your thoughts on the idea that (some, obviously) transformers use alt-mode selection as a form of self-expression or self-determination?
I can think of 3 notable examples:

First, in Beast Wars, it's implied the original crews chose (compatible?) alt local alt modes for their power, speed, flight, etc. Given we later learn the beast mode comes with something of a mind that influences the cybertronian's mind (not to mention Tigatron and Inferno's unique origins), it's unreasonable to think that some transformers might choose an alt mode not only to let them to "do more" but to change who they are.

Second, and less substantive I think, in the live action franchise(s?), Bumblebee and now Mirage seem capable of changing alt modes often, so their choosing to stick with one default might be a matter of self-expression. I've never been a fan of freely changing alt modes like this... if you can be anything, why not be what the situation needs? How about a tank? A jet? A dinosaur? (IDW did something like this in a possible future, as I recall),

Third, Earthspark (I've only seen the DVD, so I might be behind), one of the original Terrans sets out to choose his own alt mode, and this can be seen as a form of self-determination - "I determine what I transform into," yadda yadda.

Earthspark is, I think, the most overly, intentionally inclusive transformers series out there. The war is over, and there are autobot and decepticon "good guys" (although as far as I've watched, only decepticon bad guys...). Our POV family is of mixed racial heritage and adopt aliens as children. And Nightshade has personal pronouns. I'm not sure what that means for a cybertronian (this isn't IDW Arcee territory, surely), but this is clearly meant to be a nod to human beings who draw a distinction between biological sex and "gender," where "gender" seems to refer to social constructs, often stereotypes, regarding biological sex. (For example, a biological female might identify as "male gender" if she enjoys stereotypically male activities, or if she was sexually attracted to (stereotypical?) biological females, etc.) As I understand it, one might choose to use pronouns in this way to help convey some fact about themselves, or who they want to be. (I might be way off base here, I've never really understood the utility of using alternate pronouns, stereotypes are inherently inaccurate, while one's biological sex has practical, real-world implications for healthcare.)

A cybertronian choosing their alt mode could easily be seen as a similar, but perhaps more straightforward (and less confusing?) way of saying something about yourself. If you choose a plane, you're saying you're a thrill seeker. If you choose a boat, an explorer. If you choose a red car... well...

I'm not sure this metaphor works in practice; transformers are usually born as fully formed "adults" (for better or worse), and unless one waits to explore before taking an alt mode, then it seems one's alt mode might not say much about the person. Aristotle says moral responsibility requires awareness and control, and even if a newborn cybertronian had control, I'm not sure they have much in the way of awareness. Maybe the cybertronian half could be instinctive (if there were naturally occurring things to scan?), but unless they also had an instinctive or preprogrammed understanding of the alt mode options (and/or their social contexts), maybe they wouldn't exert much awareness.

That said, I could see a character choosing an alt mode for aesthetic appeal; maybe Sideswipe might look at a Lamborghini and recognize it's function... but he might also just look at it, vaguely understand "car go vroom vroom" but appreciate it's aesthetic appeal. "I want to be aesthetically pleasing" would be saying something... for a species that changes their appearance.

In any case, if transformers were able to freely change their form on a whim, your current alt mode might not say much about you. But if choosing an alt mode is usually a one-time deal, then you might be stuck as a Transmetal 2 Dragon for quite some time...

 

[Copper Bezel]

I actually think this is a really interesting topic and the kind of thing I think Transformers is uniquely positioned to play with, though it almost never has with the exclusion of IDW phase 2. But as a transfemme person (more specifically nonbinary with feminine pronouns) I can clarify some of this more mundane real-world stuff:

Earthspark is, I think, the most overly, intentionally inclusive transformers series out there. The war is over, and there are autobot and decepticon "good guys" (although as far as I've watched, only decepticon bad guys...). Our POV family is of mixed racial heritage and adopt aliens as children. And Nightshade has personal pronouns. I'm not sure what that means for a cybertronian (this isn't IDW Arcee territory, surely), but this is clearly meant to be a nod to human beings who draw a distinction between biological sex and "gender," where "gender" seems to refer to social constructs, often stereotypes, regarding biological sex. (For example, a biological female might identify as "male gender" if she enjoys stereotypically male activities, or if she was sexually attracted to (stereotypical?) biological females, etc.) As I understand it, one might choose to use pronouns in this way to help convey some fact about themselves, or who they want to be. (I might be way off base here, I've never really understood the utility of using alternate pronouns, stereotypes are inherently inaccurate, while one's biological sex has practical, real-world implications for healthcare.)

First of all, everyone has personal pronouns, saying that someone "has pronouns" is a joke phrasing that refers to someone having a gender identity other than the one associated with their assigned sex at birth, usually nonbinary rather than binary trans. The term "personal pronoun" is a grammar textbook term and includes "he", "she", and "they", but also "you" and "it". The "personal" is in contrast to other grammatical types, like demonstrative pronouns ("this/that/those"). It's not a new term to this century or the last and wasn't coined in context of gender identity. "Neopronouns" is a gender identity coinage that refers to the now mostly dead xe/xir fad and similar.

Anyway, I would say that your last sentence actually sums up most of the issue for a lot of us. Genders are massive stereotype clusters that come with a lot of inbuilt expectations, and I promise you that if you've never transgressed gender norms in a way that made people around you feel slightly awkward, you have only ever been consciously aware of the very tip of that iceberg. Swap genders around at random in a piece of fiction, and readers' reactions to how characters behave will change - yours, mine, everyone's, the programming is invisible to us until we have reason to challenge any given particular assumption, and many still remain even if you've read the studies that can pick them out in a psych department lab. But stereotypes are clusters of traits, and sometimes they actually do describe clusters that frequently occur in life, possibly as a self-fulfilling prophecy in many cases. If we were all really worried exclusively about the inaccuracy of gender stereotype clusters, then everyone, trans and cis alike, would be equally insisting on only ever using gender-neutral ones, in precisely the same way that we've already moved to using gender-neutral vocational titles almost exclusively over the last half century. In practice, though, it's a much more honest self-identification to simply choose the cluster or lack thereof we actually each identify with.

The medical thing is likely something you've heard repeated because, you know, I think you might be aware there are some vocal people out there who don't very much like us not playing along, and have a variety of rather shaky rationales for why we ought to, but rest assured that we're all quite aware of our various biological sexual characteristics, more so than most cis people, and medical institutions are quite capable of keeping records of them as well, in fact being among the very least likely to suffer any confusion by the matter. I would love to make that a more effusively positive endorsement, but I did recently have a scheduling discussion with a receptionist who asked if I was "still going by" my actual personal name that's included in all of said documentation alongside my legal one (as opposed to a neutral "you go by [blank], correct?"). These assumptions, they do run deep.

In any case, grammatical gender in pronouns in Proto Indo-European language wasn't invented for the purposes of modern medicine, the category is and has always been a social one. Social categories that still carry a lot of meaning and help to define our identities even when the fit isn't quite perfect. I think it's human nature to scan in an existing model but paint it in our own colors.

 

[KingSwoop]

I.
Thank you for the reply and the clarifications. My background is in analytic philosophy, so if you'll indulge me, I'd like to follow up on a few of your points.

First, of course you're right "has pronouns" is technically incorrect, but was (I thought) a good way of drawing attention to the issue. That said, I'd push back against the idea that each of us has personal pronouns; rather I think it makes sense to say that (normally?) personal pronouns are descriptive. The question is what they describe about you, linguistically.

Second, regarding intolerance, there's no sugar coating this: Culpable ignorance and tribalism are bad. Sometimes people choose to act immorally, while other times people do so accidentally. Resolving confusion can help to say the latter group.

Pretheoretically, I wouldn't draw a distinction between sex and gender, such that they describe the same things about you, your biological sex. Before the concept of DNA, I think "biological sex" referred to sexual expression, but for a few hundred years now we've probably understood it as referencing genetics (at least in a professional context). In both cases, most humans are biologically male or female, with a few expression and/or genetic exceptions which have real world implications.

You contend that gender has always been socially descriptive, rather than biologically so. However, there are many social concepts associated with "male" and "female" and any given person might reasonably possess a mix. Suppose someone, Alex, was 40% stereotypically male and 50% stereotypically female, with an extra 10% of being their own thing. Would we say Alex is gender-female, gender-neutral, or do they have multiple genders; She/Alex is good at sewing and He/Alex is good at football? The latter feels like "too many" genders, the former seems too reductive. Also, I'm predisposed to think stereotypes are, at best, helpful generalizations, but they're often used as means to marginalize and discriminate. If gender is based on such stereotypes, I worry it might be more problematic than advantageous.

However, there are practical, real world issues regarding biological sex; at least (i) medically and (ii) procreatively. I'd also throw (iii) sexually in there; this is to say that the sexual expression (what reproductive organs your body expresses) is often a determining factor for many people.

For me, the question at hand is whether there is practical linguistic value in drawing a distinction between biological sex and gender when both use much of the same terminology (male/female). I understand, however, that for others it's a matter of self-expression and carries meaningful linguistic content, even if I'm "out of the loop" on what much of that content is!

II.
Back to transformers; IDW 1.0, about midway through, shoehorned an interesting exploration of alt mode determinism into the fiction. This was a largely negative, freedom undermining position.

However, given much contemporary transformers fiction involves transformers being able to take new alt modes (with varying degrees of ease), I think there's room to tell positive stories here.

For example, at least as far as I've watched, Nightshade's choice of pronouns seems odd and out of place (she's newborn, but apparently has a greater understanding of language and human? culture than I do), but if she chose to take a bird alt mode "to fly" this might easily signal she wants freedom. (Of course, she's newborn, so yearning for freedom sans oppression would also be odd.)

 

[Copper Bezel]

I.
Thank you for the reply and the clarifications. My background is in analytic philosophy, so if you'll indulge me, I'd like to follow up on a few of your points.

That's going to be less useful than asking questions or doing some reading up. I don't doubt that philosophical arguments are sometimes an efficient way to engage with a topic you don't really understand, conscripting your interlocutor to work it out for you, but I don't have much patience for philosophy myself, and as you might suppose, a lot of bad faith engagements are premised similarly at the outset, so I find myself wary to invest readily. And you might find yourself building quite an apparatus on top of false assumptions, as you are beginning to do with this next bit.

First, of course you're right "has pronouns" is technically incorrect, but was (I thought) a good way of drawing attention to the issue. That said, I'd push back against the idea that each of us has personal pronouns; rather I think it makes sense to say that (normally?) personal pronouns are descriptive. The question is what they describe about you, linguistically.

So, you're just misunderstanding my correction here, I didn't make a philosophical case for a definition or something, there's nothing to "push back" on. "Personal pronoun" is a term in grammar with a defined meaning. The "personal" does not refer to anyone's personal preference - strictly speaking, it doesn't even refer exclusively to "persons" except by analogy, because "it" is a personal pronoun that also happens to be inanimate. If you try to use a technical term to mean something unrelated, you're only going to confuse anyone you're talking to. The class of pronouns that seem to bother you are the third-person animate personal pronouns, as well as their possessive counterparts (which is not interchangeable with the set of personal pronouns) but specifically within a very particular usage context.

What I think you mean to distinguish is pronoun preference, right? The fact of someone's identifying with a gender, thus a pronoun being associated with personal identity? And when you say that personal pronouns are "normally" assigned descriptively, you mean that they are "normally" describing anatomical sex characteristics? Thus you'd say that only a person who does not identify with their assigned gender "has" pronoun preference? If that's what you're assuming here, then the obvious counterexample is that a cis person can readily be mistaken for the opposite sex, and many individuals would not simply consider that a mistake, but take offense, indicating a clear preferential attachment.

Anyway, as I imagine you're gathering, saying someone "has pronouns" is not in fact a good way of drawing attention to any particular issue, and as I said it's an established joke phrase that isn't really free to be imparted with a new meaning any more than "personal pronoun" is. A good way of identifying that a character identifies as nonbinary, or as a man, or whatnot, is simply saying that they identify as that thing. It is unwise to step into a subject of which you admit you understand little and assume that you've broken the code and found better terminology than what's commonly in use.

You contend that gender has always been socially descriptive, rather than biologically so. However, there are many social concepts associated with "male" and "female" and any given person might reasonably possess a mix. Suppose someone, Alex, was 40% stereotypically male and 50% stereotypically female, with an extra 10% of being their own thing. Would we say Alex is gender-female, gender-neutral, or do they have multiple genders; She/Alex is good at sewing and He/Alex is good at football? The latter feels like "too many" genders, the former seems too reductive.

We don't have to say anything, we can ask Alex.

Also, I'm predisposed to think stereotypes are, at best, helpful generalizations, but they're often used as means to marginalize and discriminate. If gender is based on such stereotypes, I worry it might be more problematic than advantageous.

And the word "stereotype" predisposes a negative connotation. Consider "genre" in music, which is treated neutrally despite the potential for harmful and discriminatory stereotypes in specific cases. But the potential for (the incidentally cognate) "gender" to be wrapped up in discriminatory power structures is well understood. That isn't a trans issue, though, and making it one is undue scrutiny, privileging the unquestioned naturalness of gender as expressed in the other 99%. You might only think of it when someone states their pronoun preference, but if anything, that only makes potential hazards more pernicious in all the other circumstances you don't. Everyone is participating in gender whether they're consciously aware of it or not. If you are simply suspicious of the value of gender, you should be equally suspect of all of those pronouns in all cases.

However, there are practical, real world issues regarding biological sex; at least (i) medically and (ii) procreatively. I'd also throw (iii) sexually in there; this is to say that the sexual expression (what reproductive organs your body expresses) is often a determining factor for many people.

Pronouns and apparel are applicable to at best one of those things. We do not pepper our every social interaction with medical and procreative information about ourselves - generally that's considered something to be avoided, in fact. You cannot explain the pervasiveness of gendered language and clothing by an intent to share those things publicly, and the means for sharing them privately when needed are readily at hand by less ambiguous means. Out of that list, only sex has a chance of explaining anything anything about gender (it is undeniable that we are all horny monkeys wagging our genitals in each other's faces and anything else is a social pretense, and that "fashion" and "sexual display" are in fact related concepts.)

For me, the question at hand is whether there is practical linguistic value in drawing a distinction between biological sex and gender when both use much of the same terminology (male/female). I understand, however, that for others it's a matter of self-expression and carries meaningful linguistic content, even if I'm "out of the loop" on what much of that content is!

Well, first, it's not the same terminology, man / woman is not male / female, that's kinda the whole point, insofar as referring to male and female humans isn't already a weird and reductive thing to do.

But I can't resolve those two statements really. You say the "question at hand" (which, I mean, it only is in the sense that it was raised, being suspicious of trans people isn't a necessary part of the question of Transformer alt modes and identity) is whether there is an expressive value in something, and in the next sentence you say that there manifestly is. Like, you qualify the second part to other people, but you don't qualify the first part to yourself. Asked and answered, I guess?

And "practical" or "valuable" or not, you like everyone else are communicating and receiving information relating to gender whether consciously or otherwise because you're a human in society. We're all susceptible to the same stereotypes. Claiming otherwise is the same as saying "I don't see race." The intellectually curious thing would be to seek to understand the information that's being communicated there.

 

[Copper Bezel]

Back to transformers; IDW 1.0, about midway through, shoehorned an interesting exploration of alt mode determinism into the fiction. This was a largely negative, freedom undermining position.

However, given much contemporary transformers fiction involves transformers being able to take new alt modes (with varying degrees of ease), I think there's room to tell positive stories here.

For example, at least as far as I've watched, Nightshade's choice of pronouns seems odd and out of place (she's newborn, but apparently has a greater understanding of language and human? culture than I do), but if she chose to take a bird alt mode "to fly" this might easily signal she wants freedom. (Of course, she's newborn, so yearning for freedom sans oppression would also be odd.)

Okay, are you using the wrong pronouns deliberately here? Kind of important to my assessment of that good faith angle.

But yeah, there is absolutely nothing unusual about Nightshade being aware of their own gender fresh from activation, literally every other Transformer ever introduced with their first coming online has also done so. They didn't have to teach Airrazor about pronouns when she came out of the pod, and then she killed a guy.

I think it only goes so far to say that a character's identity is reflected in their alt mode if there isn't any limitation, contrast, or conflict. As a matter of expectations of how the fiction communicates characters to the audience, we expect that associations we hold with a particular vehicle or animal reflect personality traits of the character, and that's certainly present in every iteration of the Transformers franchise (one would need to work very deliberately to prevent doing so.) Fast cars tend to have personality traits we associate with people who drive fast cars. Even in G1 there's some exploration of variation on that formula (the fact that Sunstreaker is the car a guy like Sunstreaker is in love with makes him vain; Silverbolt is a Concorde but afraid of heights.) Largely though, it's just the kinds of associations we expect from anthropomorphism - owls are wise and cats are superior and whatever else, the writers just riffing on and delivering the expected associations that make the alt mode concordant with the character.

There's also a bit less of it early on, since the first round of Transformers characters were the result of giving comic book writers some cars and making characters out of them. You can maybe see why they made a minivan the tough guy, but would they have chosen to make the tough guy a minivan unprompted? Probably not.

I think Animated is interesting (it often is) for how much it leans into the vehicles - there's none of the conflict of IDW functionalism, but it's actually equally deterministic and on the opposite end of the spectrum from RotB, because very few characters seem capable of taking a disguise form significantly different from the vehicle form they were forged into, and for the ones that can take on a very different alt mode, we're shown that it's exceptional, like Blackarachnia's mutation, Megatron's Allspark-powered recreation, and whatever happened to Blitzwing. That means Bumblebee is still a small, maneuverable car even when we flash back to his formative years, and he takes pride in being what he is, the way a dedicated athlete takes pride in their body. The alt mode is as much an expression of themselves and their abilities as the robot mode is.

But if you really wanted to make alt mode relate deeply to identity, I think you'd need to have some conflict or contrast involved, though not necessarily on the level of Functionalism. It'd have to go beyond simply having an appearance that implies something, and that something turning out to be accurate. The obvious thing of course is the trans allegory, the character who feels they're being locked into a mold by the alt mode they were built with but can't easily just go out and change it. Maybe they wish they could fly or drive fast but can't, or they're the big truck that hates taking up two parking spaces but is tough enough to protect their friends because of it, etc. Maybe it's more of an occupational thing, and they wish they could be a sport yacht but accept on some level that Cybertron needs a gunboat more.

 

[KingSwoop]

Thank you for the follow up!

We don't have to say anything, we can ask Alex.

I understand this is a common way in which people who draw a distinction between gender and sex talk, but I don't think it makes sense.

I think you're going for a form of gender subjectivism, but I think this common way of talking about gender subjectivism is devoid of content.

To illustrate this, consider simple subjectivism, the moral theory that morality is relative to the speaker. Alice says "Adultery is immoral." Carol says "Adultery is moral." If simple subjectivism is true, neither say anything about adultery; instead Alice really says "I disapprove of adultery" while Carol says "I approve of adultery." But now suppose that YOU want to decide whether to commit adultery or not; on this view neither Alice nor Carol have said anything to help you make a decision. Alice might like apples, and Carol carrots, but their personal preferences can't tell you what you favorite food is; the same is true of morality if simple subjectivism is true.

However, despite the flaws of simple subjectivism, both Alice and Carol can LIE about their approval. For example, suppose Alice really approves of adultery, but understands there is a social stigma against the practice. She might say "I disapprove of adultery" even thought this is false.

Alex can lie or tell the truth just like the rest of us.
Alex can say "I am biologically male." This is either true or false, and has linguistic content.
However, suppose Alex said "I am gender male.." Presumably, Alex is trying to tell us something. The question at hand is what.

For those that do not draw a distinction between gender and sex, Alex saying "I am biologically male" and "I am gender male" express the same thing. This isn't surprising; in most languages there are multiple ways of expressing the same concept.

I'm open to the possibility that there is linguistic value, moral value, or some other value in drawing a distinction between sex and gender. The problem with the view that gender refers to stereotypes is twofold - (1) stereotypes are usually not helpful, and (2) there are multiple stereotypes.

Maybe Alex might say "I'm like a girl because I'm good at sewing and I'm like a boy because I'm good at football." The problem here is that Alex can express the same facts about Alex without reference to stereotypical gender, "I'm good at sewing and football." Gender-as-an-analogy references stereotypes about sex, but if Alex is telling us about Alex, why do so in such a roundabout way?

And the word "stereotype" predisposes a negative connotation. Consider "genre" in music, which is treated neutrally despite the potential for harmful and discriminatory stereotypes in specific cases. But the potential for (the incidentally cognate) "gender" to be wrapped up in discriminatory power structures is well understood.

I like this analogy.

A music genre can tell you about themes, tends, etc. within the group. To say something is "Rock and Roll" tells you something interesting and categorical about the piece of music.

However there are lot of genres of music, and only two "normal" genders - M/F, which... reference(?) biological sex indirectly by being associated with stereotypes about or social conventions associated with members of that sex. Again, though, Alex highlights a problem, as Alex is 40% column A and 50% column B. If everything's country and rock and roll... then those descriptions don't tell us anything meaningful, do they?

KingSwoop said:
However, there are practical, real world issues regarding biological sex; at least (i) medically and (ii) procreatively. I'd also throw (iii) sexually in there; this is to say that the sexual expression (what reproductive organs your body expresses) is often a determining factor for many people.

Pronouns and apparel are applicable to at best one of those things. We do not pepper our every social interaction with medical and procreative information about ourselves - generally that's considered something to be avoided, in fact. You cannot explain the pervasiveness of gendered language and clothing by an intent to share those things publicly, and the means for sharing them privately when needed are readily at hand by less ambiguous means. Out of that list, only sex has a chance of explaining anything anything about gender (it is undeniable that we are all horny monkeys wagging our genitals in each other's faces and anything else is a social pretense, and that "fashion" and "sexual display" are in fact related concepts.)

You raise an interesting point but we don't pepper our every social interaction with gender information about ourselves either, do we?

Take Alex. Presumably Alex doesn't go around saying "I'm biologically male," or "I'm gendered male," but he might reasonably say "I'm good at football." However, if Alex is in an emergency and goes to the hospital, the doctors might check Alex's ID or medical information to see what his biological sex is. This is often medically relevant.
If Alex's good friend, Carol, is looking for a sperm donor, he might tell her his biological sex (maybe Carol's absent minded and doesn't remember the biological sexes of her friends?). Finally, Alex is Christian and believes that one should only engage in sexual activity if one is open to procreation (IE, no casual sex). In this context, Alex needs to make sure his sexual partner is of the opposite gender to allow the possibility of procreation.

In any case, we don't disagree on the existence of, or scope of, biological sex.

You contend that these practical, real world issues can't explain the pervasiveness of gendered language. But gendered language is often arbitrary and unhelpful; many languages uses gender language to refer to objects, "la biblioteca" et. al. The French aren't saying all libraries are biologically women, but what would it mean to say that all libraries are gendered female? I'm open to the possibility of gender expressing something, but language is public. If gendered libraries means something, it's odd I don't know. Maybe its not a secret and I'm just a fool, but in absence of evidence to the contrary, the convention of using female pronouns to refer to libraries carries no contemporary linguistic meaning.

KingSwoop said:
Back to transformers; IDW 1.0, about midway through, shoehorned an interesting exploration of alt mode determinism into the fiction. This was a largely negative, freedom undermining position.

However, given much contemporary transformers fiction involves transformers being able to take new alt modes (with varying degrees of ease), I think there's room to tell positive stories here.

For example, at least as far as I've watched, Nightshade's choice of pronouns seems odd and out of place (she's newborn, but apparently has a greater understanding of language and human? culture than I do), but if she chose to take a bird alt mode "to fly" this might easily signal she wants freedom. (Of course, she's newborn, so yearning for freedom sans oppression would also be odd.)

Okay, are you using the wrong pronouns deliberately here? Kind of important to my assessment of that good faith angle.

Believe it or not, this was accidental!

Part of the problem might be that "they" is plural, and whatever Nightshade is... there's only one Nightshade. The bigger problem, though, is I'm used to "him" and "her." It's taken a lot of proofreading to get anywhere close to right in this post; pre-theoretically I don't draw a distinction between sex and gender, so endeavoring to do so in this post has been taxing.

But I think this highlights a good point; many people do not draw a distinction between gender and sex, so this is one more thing to keep track of in talking about someone/something. I know that might not seem like much, but in practice adding a level of complexity to a system is a substantive drawback and one needs to weight the pros and cons of doing so.

Also remember that language is practical. Consider how many people call spiders "insects" or whales "fish"; these are technically wrong, but are sufficient for the practical, linguistic purposes of the speaker. However, if someone is aware of the distinctions, they tend to get it right even in casual speech. Most of us learned the difference between insects and arachnids, and that whales were mammals in grade school; indeed these were prominent examples to help highlight relevant distinctions.

Nightshade prefers the pronoun "them/they"; but this doesn't mean anything to me (other than expressing Nightshade's personal preferences). When Alex says "I'm good at football" or "I like rock and roll", those mean something - they tell me something about Alex. I don't know what Nightshade's preferences are supposed to tell me. I understand this is a narrative attempt at inclusion, but they've not explained to the viewer why Nightshade says this, or why it matters. It's not like a personality quirk, where Sideburn just chases after red cars or verbal tick like Warpath's "Bang! Zowey!" Nightshade means to express something about Nightshade... and I'm not sure what that means for humans but I'm especially not sure what that means for cybertronians!

Contrast this with, say, Will and Grace, which does a pretty good job of explaining homosexuality to someone who might not be familiar. "Biologically male Will is sexually attracted to other biological males. This is less common than heterosexuality, where one biological sex is attracted to the other. This leads to some strife with Grace, with whom he is good friends. Heterosexual Grace is (sometimes) receptive to a sexual, romantic relationship with Will, but Will is not open to the same relationship with Grace due to circumstances outside of his control. "

For all intents and purposes, Nightshade could just as easily have said "I'm Nightshade, and my shoe size is 70-W" or "I'm Nightshade and I would like you to pat your head and rub your stomach whenever you say my name." To be fair, I'm not really sure what a kids cartoon can do other than this... discussion of intuitive pronouns in IDW with regards to Arcee wasn't much more progressive than the UK's canonically creating Arcee to appeal to human feminists after all.

 

[Dekafox]

If I may inject a couple things here:

However there are lot of genres of music, and only two "normal" genders - M/F, which... reference(?) biological sex indirectly by being associated with stereotypes about or social conventions associated with members of that sex. Again, though, Alex highlights a problem, as Alex is 40% column A and 50% column B. If everything's country and rock and roll... then those descriptions don't tell us anything meaningful, do they?

Your analogy here actually points out the reasoning for classifying non-binary folk differently. If the "normal" genres are country and rock and roll, then how do you describe someone who's neither, or both to a large degree? The theoretical Alex here is 40% column A and 50% column B, so they don't fit neatly into either box. Trying to call them both all the time would get cumbersome, and calling them only one is inaccurate. Therefore a third box would make the most logical sense - and a third box could use a third label. Communication is hard if not everyone agrees on the definitions, so we need a term everyone can agree on. Newly created ones like Gazorninplatz never caught on, so someone looked back at what was used in the past and brought it forward. Jazz might be the best musical analogy perhaps here?

Because They actually has been in use to refer to people of unknown gender for centuries. A short summary can be read here, with citations at the end, just to show I have my receipts. https://www.scu.edu/media/offices/provost/writing-center/resources/Tips-Singular-Pronoun-They.pdf

In any case, we don't disagree on the existence of, or scope of, biological sex.

I do have some questions about this myself. You continue to describe someone as "biologically male" multiple times. But how do -you- define that? Think about your answer, then consider the following ways I can think of, and spoiler alert, do not seem to cover all cases:

1) By genitals - If this is true, where do you draw the line then? If a person calling themselves male, who was determined to be male at birth, then gets in an accident that castrates them, are they still biologically male? Or if they become a eunuch? Or if they voluntarily have surgery performed in that region? Similarly, if someone who considers themselves a woman, who was determined to be one at birth, has her ovaries removed, is she still female? And noen of this addresses intersex people, who may be born with both sets of genitals. If you claim they are one or the other by which set fully functions, then that bring us back to questioning if someone having their tubes or ovaries tied qualifies. Or even if you try to reduce it to simply "women give birth and all others are men" then any woman who is sterile would now be a man by that definition.

2) By genetics - There are documented cases of men with XX and women with XY, who were determined ot be those genders at birth, grew up as such, and even became parents. Again, I bring receipts: https://novonordiskfonden.dk/en/news/more-women-than-expected-are-genetically-men/. So this seems to rule out using this as an overall determiner as well,

3) By hormonal balance - Besides being the thing most easily adjusted, there are documented reports of women who have more testosterone than men - I don't have a link handy for this one, but as I recall for an example there was one woman who was disqualified from woman's sports after some rules were put in place to try to exclude transitioned woman form woman's sports - yet this woman in question was determined to be woman at borth and had lived her entire life as a woman. I've also heard form some transitioned woman on HRT that have yet to undergo surgery they get the same mood cycles, etc that those with an uturus get, just without the actual mess of a period.

Lastly, one factor that is not really considered is the brain structure itself. An article from the NIH on this: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8955456/
As we've already shown XX/XY genetics can be irrelevant, hormonal balance can be adjusted, as can the body, how would you now define whether someone is biologically male or female? And given the talk of how we normally don't broadcast that sort of thing in casual conversation, how can you tell that our figurative Alex isn't on early HRT, or had surgery of one sort of another, or simply has a "female" brain? And if you mix aspects of both, so they are not clearly one or the other, what reason do we not have to take them at their word?

This complication is where terms like "Assigned Male at Birth" and the like come from. A large majority don't have this disconnect and can cleanly be described as male or female, fair, but it's unfair to the ones that do have that disconnect to ignore it. We can't exactly go asking everyone's doctor in what aspect someone is male or female(and it'd be rude to do so anyway even if we could!) And when people can't land on an agreement of where the lines lay in the above, that's where we get disagreements, and arguments about who is male or female. And this also ignores those who are intersex. I may be getting off into the weeds, but wanted to provide some food for thought on how even biological sex can get very messy, before we even start factoring in gender and societal expectations.

That all said, I'd like to get back to Nightshade's case.

Nightshade prefers the pronoun "them/they"; but this doesn't mean anything to me (other than expressing Nightshade's personal preferences).

One thing to consider here is that Nightshade is a Cybertronian, not human. The English language is good at dragging other languages behind the corner and clubbing it over the head before rifling through its pockets for loose grammar, but there are still places where it has issues, especially in matters of translation. Now out of universe, it's obviously meant to show how they're non-binary like how Hashtag's a girl. In universe, it's very much like Jawbreaker's search for an alt mode. Just like cars or boats did not feel like a fit to Jawbreaker as an alt mode, neither he nor she felt like a proper translation to Nightshade, when trying to translate what they are to English. They/them was the closest thing to a fit in the English language, thus why they brought that up, the same way that Jawbreaker found his eventual alt mode(trying to be general to avoid spoilers) fit him better than any of the boxes the others found with their alt modes.

 

[Copper Bezel]

I understand this is a common way in which people who draw a distinction between gender and sex talk, but I don't think it makes sense.

I think you're going for a form of gender subjectivism, but I think this common way of talking about gender subjectivism is devoid of content.

I agree that a person can lie or be mistaken about a subjective fact. Perhaps I believe I dislike sugar cookies, but my tastes have changed since the last time I had one, and it is no longer true that if I tried a sugar cookie now, I would dislike it. We can take as given that I am not mistaken in identifying the cookie, and it's identical to the one I had last time, so the only reality I'm mistaken about is my subjective experience.

I would nonetheless largely take it at someone's word that they dislike sugar cookies. If I had my suspicions that they were wrong in this subjective assessment, it would nonetheless be more than a little rude to refer to them as "claiming to dislike sugar cookies". They're also under no obligation to provide evidence to me of this subjective assessment, such as a detailed explanation of their history interacting with sugar cookies. I can pressure them into trying a new, possibly different kind of sugar cookie, but the decision of whether to try it and the final assessment of whether or not they enjoyed it is still left to them. If their behavior is inconsistent with their stated preference and I'm finding empty tins of sugar cookies all over their apartment, perhaps I have grounds to suspect or confront them, but only in that scenario does their stated preference warrant some kind of external vetting.

Now just imagine a world where nearly everyone like sugar cookies, people who don't like sugar cookies are socially pressured from all sides to say they like them, there are churches dedicated to campaigns to disprove the existence of people who don't like sugar cookies, and 90% of people who like sugar cookies really seem not to understand the concept of what it would mean not to like sugar cookies. You start to take people at their word when they say so, yeah?

This is where it gets a bit real though, because philosophical diddly-doo isn't going to give you access to subjective content that isn't a part of your own subjective experience:

I'm open to the possibility that there is linguistic value, moral value, or some other value in drawing a distinction between sex and gender.

It's not capable of revealing to you what the experience of not liking a sugar cookie might be like, and thereby validating for you that people who say they don't like sugar cookies are expressing something with real subjective content. You can either take it as read that some people don't like sugar cookies and try not to force them on anyone yourself, but bracket the experience as something you just don't really have an analogous experiential framework to appreciate the subjective content of, or you can instead explore what they actually have to say about their subjective experience and look for analogs in your own subjective frame that allow you to appreciate it. Proving to you philosophically that other people have a subjective experience you don't, and we all aren't just lying to you, is a completely nonproductive approach.

I don't think it's as extreme a situation as that while we're describing this concrete subjective experience like the qualium of the color green, the average cis person is colorblind. But from conversations I've had like this one with individuals who tell me they don't have a subjective experience of gender, I'm also not sure that it's not an appropriate analogy. The big difference is, all of those people tend to behaviorally participate in gender all the same, so I don't know whether that's simply a learned and conditioned set of assigned conventions for them? This is where I'd need to flip the script and ask you about your own experience of gender, and try to understand how that expresses itself subjectively for you. Or your experience of, I suppose, conventions and performance associated with sex, the social constructs that I experience as gender but you don't have that category for.

(Dependence on these systems and categories and taking them so very seriously is much of why I'm suspicious of philosophy. There are an abundance of philosophical frameworks in the world, and the only things they all have in common are the features imposed on them by having to interface with the same reality at the output end. Any given person will happily go on applying the framework that works for them, until they encounter a logical contradiction involving something in reality that they concretely care about, and instead of acknowledging that a totalizing framework is and always was an incalculable problem, they just build a new framework or work some cheats into the existing one. Better in my opinion to assess the objective and subjective realities that exist in so much as we have access to them and what meanings they have to the parties concerned.)

You raise an interesting point but we don't pepper our every social interaction with gender information about ourselves either, do we?

We do in fact! We wear lipstick or skirts or don't, and we expect others to call us "he" or "she" more often than they call us by name, even in decidedly non-sexual contexts where we would patently deny the relevance of our genitals to the proceedings, like board meetings or classrooms. We do not do this for the sake of medical record-keeping. I hope you can see how spurious it really is to try to reduce all of that deliberate gender performance to something with practical value relating to genitals. I really think returning to your hypotheticals about medical or procreative contexts is a hard stretch, especially considering that those contexts are the ones in which we are already unambiguous in discussing genitals rather than gender. A new couple where someone's hoping to have kids doesn't only need to determine that their partner has the right parts, they have to have a serious conversation about that partner's own procreative goals and whether the partner has any medical history (hysterectomy etc.) that would preclude their chances.

I'm in the position of needing to prove to you that gender performance and gendered language has a value beyond grammatical gender of the sort that applies to inanimate objects in most languages, but I feel like we should at least be able to accept as a baseline that they're more related than the stuff you're raising having to do with the practical application of genitals. The gender of a person and the gender of the common noun for a wristwatch exist in the same conventional, social space and are used unconsciously in the same way as fundamental categories, and neither can be determined by objective study of the thing so categorized in a lab.

Wristwatches don't wear lipstick, but I understand that psychological studies comparing the priming effects of synonyms of opposite grammatical gender actually do find some clustering with conventionally masculine and feminine traits when people are asked to associate some adjectives with the respective nouns and the like. Taking a quick look, here's a piece from Frontiers for example. Now, I'm not going to make a case for the value of making wristwatches women and soup spoons men, but there is undeniably content. (The most obvious actual value of grammatical gender for common nouns is unrelated and non-semantic, it's just another layer of avoiding ambiguity. In English we can have a conversation about "he and she" without going back to the nouns if we happen to be talking about just one he and just one she, and it turns out that works out equally well for a watch and a spoon if your language is built that way. This purely grammatical gender just has a habit of bringing some semantic gender associations along for the ride unconsciously.)

 

[Copper Bezel]

Second time breaking the word limit, whee.

Part of the problem might be that "they" is plural, and whatever Nightshade is... there's only one Nightshade.

I'm going to belabor this point slightly, but because it's an often stated misconception, not because I'm badgering your own pronoun usage.

"They" is grammatically plural, in the way that "biblioteca" is grammatically feminine; it takes a plural verb rather than a singular. However, notice that my second paragraph in this post consistently refers to a single hypothetical individual of unknown or unspecified gender as "they". This is presently accepted usage even in formal contexts, but more importantly, it doesn't ring as marked usage to anyone's ear, it's the default. In the 90s, "playing the pronoun game" was slang for a speaker referring to a third party unknown to the listener as "they" to avoid revealing said party's gender, to disguise a romantic interest (either to avoid raising the possibility of a romantic interest if the speaker was straight and the unspecified party was of the opposite sex, or to avoid revealing the nature of said interest if the third party was of the same sex and the speaker was gay.) Similarly, in the 1990s to 2010s, when I got my formal English education and I'm guessing you did too, formal writing in education was in a transitional phase in which "they" was not the accepted usage for an individual of unknown or unspecified gender - the "default he" had recently been abandoned, "they" was the common usage in informal contexts, and we had "they" struck out on our papers to be replaced with the constructed phrase "he or she". So at no point in our respective lifetimes has "they" been exclusively semantically plural.

That's not to deny that it's a hard mental switch to flip, because it is. Learning to refer to a specified individual exclusively using they/them is precisely the same mental task that learning to use "he or she" instead of "them" for an unspecified person was. It also illustrates though that usage like this is not a high-minded philosophical concept, just habit (and habit's social expression, convention.)

Nightshade prefers the pronoun "them/they"; but this doesn't mean anything to me (other than expressing Nightshade's personal preferences). When Alex says "I'm good at football" or "I like rock and roll", those mean something - they tell me something about Alex. I don't know what Nightshade's preferences are supposed to tell me. I understand this is a narrative attempt at inclusion, but they've not explained to the viewer why Nightshade says this, or why it matters. It's not like a personality quirk, where Sideburn just chases after red cars or verbal tick like Warpath's "Bang! Zowey!" Nightshade means to express something about Nightshade... and I'm not sure what that means for humans but I'm especially not sure what that means for cybertronians!

Contrast this with, say, Will and Grace, which does a pretty good job of explaining homosexuality to someone who might not be familiar. "Biologically male Will is sexually attracted to other biological males. This is less common than heterosexuality, where one biological sex is attracted to the other. This leads to some strife with Grace, with whom he is good friends. Heterosexual Grace is (sometimes) receptive to a sexual, romantic relationship with Will, but Will is not open to the same relationship with Grace due to circumstances outside of his control. "

I think the question of how much responsibility a piece of fiction has to educate its audience about the identities it includes is another discussion entirely of at least equal complexity to this one. It suffices I think to say that nonbinary viewers don't need to have the concept explained to them, so the value in inclusivity is already achieved, and for any other viewer, whether they understand the concept or not, they're more likely than not to be impatient with the robot show taking out time to explain it to them.

To understand what a person using they/them pronouns does mean, such that it will mean something to you, might take exposure to more than one scene in a cartoon. But like ... does it really not mean anything to you? You came in positing Alex, who's 40% guy, 50% girl, and 10% Belgian. That's far from a perfect characterization, and we could nitpick for days if we wanted to get into the discursive weeds. But it's also not nothing. It's closer to what's intended to be communicated here than "nothing" is.

We are socially in a space now where most gender norms and expectations are suspect for various reasons. Feminine norms can be used to control and diminish women, masculine norms can deny men emotional support while helping to excuse abuse committed by them, either one can be used to misdirect emotional needs into destructive channels. We're a little suspicious of little girls wanting to be princesses and dismissive of little boys liking trucks (all while we nonetheless single out and make light of girls who like trucks and guys who like pretty balls.) And most of these gender role associations really are things we should stop encouraging so aggressively. And you can't solve it with pronouns, either - third-person personal pronouns aren't gendered in every language, for example Japanese, but Japan isn't somehow perfectly free as a society from all destructive and conservative gender norms.

But like ... most people still feel pride in something about themselves that they would think of as a manly or ladylike trait, right? I have X trait, I take pride in this trait, and the people I most strongly associate it with are largely individuals of Y gender?

There's also a distinction to be drawn between gender presentation and unconscious sex, because you might dress and act very feminine or very masculine on the one hand, and on the other have that in contrast to the gender of protagonist you more often find yourself identifying with in romcoms, or the gender of the group you think your elementary teacher should have assigned you to when they split up the girls and boys to do crafts or something. So identifying as a woman doesn't necessarily always track with being hyperfeminine or something, and they can sometimes just be reflections of different things about a person's identity, you can be cis or trans and also still be a really feminine guy or a really butch woman.

But even at that level of simplification, that someone is 40% guy, 50% girl, 10% Belgian, there's a lot more and better than nothing. Traditionally in the Western world, people have been expected to take the first-past-the-post majority, and Alex would call themselves a girl. There's a lot of voting systems out there, though. Sometimes, for some people, it's better to emphasize the plurality of party representation rather than a particular threshold vote.

I do have some questions about this myself. You continue to describe someone as "biologically male" multiple times. But how do -you- define that? Think about your answer, then consider the following ways I can think of, and spoiler alert, do not seem to cover all cases:

I'm going to be honest here, I wholly accept "I know it when I see it" as a definition of sex as related to perception of gender. In fact, the only context in which a simplistic binary determination of sex is useful without elaboration is in precisely the same context that it intersects with questions about gender. It is insufficient in a lab but manifestly close enough for government work (birth certificates do not contain charts.)

Edit: Or to put it another way, trans and/or nonbinary people and anyone who otherwise varies from the cis/binary norm are an exception to that broad cis/binary norm. People who are noticeably intersex are a further exception within that exception, and have to contend with norms that the rest of us non-intersex people as a whole, cis, trans, or indifferent, take for granted. I don't think it's appropriate for people who aren't intersex to use them as an illustration, they've got their own jive to deal with.

 

[Spin-Out]

@KingSwoop: why is optimus prime male? he's an alien robot. is there a narrative reason for him being male?

 

[Shadewing]

I would nonetheless largely take it at someone's word that they dislike sugar cookies. If I had my suspicions that they were wrong in this subjective assessment, it would nonetheless be more than a little rude to refer to them as "claiming to dislike sugar cookies". They're also under no obligation to provide evidence to me of this subjective assessment, such as a detailed explanation of their history interacting with sugar cookies. I can pressure them into trying a new, possibly different kind of sugar cookie, but the decision of whether to try it and the final assessment of whether or not they enjoyed it is still left to them. If their behavior is inconsistent with their stated preference and I'm finding empty tins of sugar cookies all over their apartment, perhaps I have grounds to suspect or confront them, but only in that scenario does their stated preference warrant some kind of external vetting.

Reminds me of how anytime a person seems to say "I don't like _(food item)_" The responce is almost always "Well, you've never tried MY _(food item)_" without fail.

 

[Copper Bezel]

I should qualify now since I'm looking at that again, because there was some handwringing in writing it - I know I did go on to immediately characterize why suspicion about someone's stated cookie preference does differ from suspicion about genders in terms of context and power. I felt that needed emphasizing once I'm saying that external evidence of a person's subjective experience on the basis of their behavior is a thing.

But to doubly emphasize the point:

External behavioral evidence also just doesn't meaningfully apply to someone's gender. Whatever you feel is evidence of a gender, it may not track with that person's experience anyway, they're even allowed to have been "wrong" and change their mind later, and there's no threshold where you get to know better than someone's self-identification and force them to eat the cookies. There are no cis cookie tins

 

[Dekafox]

I'm going to be honest here, I wholly accept "I know it when I see it" as a definition of sex as related to perception of gender. In fact, the only context in which a simplistic binary determination of sex is useful without elaboration is in precisely the same context that it intersects with questions about gender. It is insufficient in a lab but manifestly close enough for government work (birth certificates do not contain charts.)

Edit: Or to put it another way, trans and/or nonbinary people and anyone who otherwise varies from the cis/binary norm are an exception to that broad cis/binary norm. People who are noticeably intersex are a further exception within that exception, and have to contend with norms that the rest of us non-intersex people as a whole, cis, trans, or indifferent, take for granted. I don't think it's appropriate for people who aren't intersex to use them as an illustration, they've got their own jive to deal with.

Fair enough, that edit is kind of what I was trying to say in my summary at the end of that section. Given that there was some points being made around medical perspectives, I thought it might not hurt to consider that looking at everything from a medical perspective is in itself not as clearcut as was being proposed, and not necessarily helpful in these sorts of things. Intersex was mostly brought up as an additional reminder that biology can be messy and convoluted if we try to reduce everything to medical takes, even without allowing for how we've learned to manipulate our own bodies. My bad for overstepping there.

Frankly, despite any hand-wringing, you're phrasing things far more eloquently than my attempts, so I'm going to step back out of this discussion before I put my foot in my mouth(again, or a third time if I just did again).

 

[Copper Bezel]

Oh, I don't think you did, don't underestimate yourself, you're great! The last thing I want is to dominate conversation even more than I already am at like 5k words in XD

 

[KingSwoop]

If I may inject a couple things here:

Please do. I've been distracted, but I'll try to play catchup.

Your analogy here actually points out the reasoning for classifying non-binary folk differently. If the "normal" genres are country and rock and roll, then how do you describe someone who's neither, or both to a large degree? The theoretical Alex here is 40% column A and 50% column B, so they don't fit neatly into either box. Trying to call them both all the time would get cumbersome, and calling them only one is inaccurate. Therefore a third box would make the most logical sense - and a third box could use a third label. Communication is hard if not everyone agrees on the definitions, so we need a term everyone can agree on. Newly created ones like Gazorninplatz never caught on, so someone looked back at what was used in the past and brought it forward. Jazz might be the best musical analogy perhaps here?

The music analogy is interesting, but I'm inclined to think unhelpful.

As I noted earlier, I'm predisposed to think "sex" and "gender" pick out the same concepts. Much like we say "water" is H2O, I'm inclined to say "gender" refers to X and Y chromosomes, although one could make a compelling argument for sexual expression or perhaps "functional sexual expression." Sexuality and procreation are important to us, and I think it makes sense to discuss this, to build social frameworks to support sexuality, etc.

Because They actually has been in use to refer to people of unknown gender for centuries. A short summary can be read here, with citations at the end, just to show I have my receipts. https://www.scu.edu/media/offices/provost/writing-center/resources/Tips-Singular-Pronoun-They.pdf

Sure. Gender expression is usually fairly apparent, so there is no real call for a singular "vague" gender descriptor.

I do have some questions about this myself. You continue to describe someone as "biologically male" multiple times. But how do -you- define that? Think about your answer, then consider the following ways I can think of, and spoiler alert, do not seem to cover all cases:

As noted above, I'm inclined to think we're discussing DNA/Genetics.

However, it is conceivable to have functional genetic expression without the correct DNA (robots, aliens, or some really scifi stuff...), so one could make an argument that, say, a Christian Alex really only needs to know whether he can have functional procreative sex with a partner, not what their DNA is.

The problem with this stance is that in normal cases it's 1:1 with DNA, and only in the strange cases it's not. There are no functionally female, but genetically male, people out there, except perhaps Arnold Schwarzenegger in that one movie. There isn't a lot of mainstream science fiction exploring this either. All You Zombies comes to mind.

It strikes me that while most members of most sexually reproducing species fall into M or F, there's nothing wrong or strange about some who don't fall into either category, and strange cases can go undetected for a while so they might feel more comfortable identifying as their misclassification.

There will be some medical situations where someone who doesn't have "normal" male or female DNA may need to make this explicit to their physician, and this probably should be disclosed before reproduction when it comes with known medical risks, but I don't think these pose a problem to this common pre-theoretical use of the terms.

Lastly, one factor that is not really considered is the brain structure itself. An article from the NIH on this: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8955456/

This is interesting and may be medically relevant in some cases. I don't know of any cases/examples where this would be relevant though.

In any case, my understanding of "sex" is intimately tied to "sexual reproduction" through the functional inheritance of genetic material. I don't even know what "M or F brain structure" would be, other than correlation with M or F DNA, expression, or upbringing, and correlation isn't interesting to this kind of discussion (I think).

This complication is where terms like "Assigned Male at Birth" and the like come from.

Just because something is "labeled x" doesn't mean it's "x." If sex is determined by DNA, rather than expression, than looking at expression is a fallible way of determining sex.

Recognizing fallibility is not a bad thing. Enshrining misclassification as a classification, on the other hand, seems strange.

That all said, I'd like to get back to Nightshade's case.

One thing to consider here is that Nightshade is a Cybertronian, not human. The English language is good at dragging other languages behind the corner and clubbing it over the head before rifling through its pockets for loose grammar, but there are still places where it has issues, especially in matters of translation. Now out of universe, it's obviously meant to show how they're non-binary like how Hashtag's a girl. In universe, it's very much like Jawbreaker's search for an alt mode. Just like cars or boats did not feel like a fit to Jawbreaker as an alt mode, neither he nor she felt like a proper translation to Nightshade, when trying to translate what they are to English. They/them was the closest thing to a fit in the English language, thus why they brought that up, the same way that Jawbreaker found his eventual alt mode(trying to be general to avoid spoilers) fit him better than any of the boxes the others found with their alt modes.

This sounds plausible, but I'd argue it'd be a writing mistake for two reasons:

1) On this description, Nightshade's identifying as "they" is very different from a transgendered person's doing the same. It's not genuine representation so much as coincidence, and that's weird.

2) This theory puts a far greater emphasis on language than transformers cartoons aimed at kids ever have. If Nightshade's first thought was "My universal translator doesn't adequately express my thoughts about myself"; that's weird.

I think there's a simpler answer; the writers wanted representation without understanding what that would represent for their alien robot toys. If gender is sex, this is telling us something about cybertronian sexuality... which, believe me, I probably don't want to learn about in a cartoon like this, especially not arbitrarily from a baby transformer. If gender is social role or social stereotypes, then it coming from a baby is even weirder!

Then again, maybe it's the context that this is brought up that bothers me. It's not uncommon in fiction for "tomboy" little girls to be mistake for boys, especially by dense protagonists that will end up getting into some hijinks when this is revealed. (Uncle from Another World features a recent example of this) Of course, someone being called a different gender might make them angry, or frustrated, and that can carry some narrative weight. But here it comes out of nowhere. No other characters articulate their gender pronouns because they're "normal" and don't have to, but Nightshade is singled out as "abnormal" and has to make an apparently relevant linguistic choice... rather than getting to work saving her family. NIghtshade's like 30 seconds old, but what's Prime's excuse for humoring this? "Nightshade, I don't care about your pronouns, let's go save your siblings!" > "Nightshade, I've learned something new and valuable about you... oh, your siblings are dead, but at least I'll remember what pronouns to refer to you by."

One uncommon trope in fiction is for someone to introduce themselves atypically, to volunteer information about themselves that the audience didn't ask for. Someone might brag about their IQ score, royal lineage, measurements, net worth, etc. In almost all situations, these characters are meant to be ridiculed. Ex: "Sir Reginal the 3rd, 18th in line for the throne of England, nice to meet you." "Hi, my name is Adam, and my IQ is 135." By emphasizing something about themselves, rather than a mere introduction, they're telling the audience something - that they're jerks!

Is Nightshade supposed to be a jerk? No, of course not. But that they're focusing on language, rather than the situation, is not ideal.

One last thing - I don't know if this is meant to make Nightshade stand out from her peers. If cybertronian non-binary gender is meant to be representation; she's not supposed to. I didn't watch all of Bumblebee Adventure/RID, but Strongarm and Windblade are female and I don't recall anyone ever mentioning it or treating them differently. Indeed, I don't recall the female autobots in G1 being treated differently, except sometimes as very pg, toned down romantic partners. (I think the Girl who Loved Powerglide was more overtly romantic than even Elita 1...). But Nightshade does stand out, and I think they stand out in a way that a pre-existing, adult transformer who doesn't have to remind people how to refer to themselves wouldn't.

 

[Copper Bezel]

Please do. I've been distracted, but I'll try to play catchup.

I don't doubt you'll have plenty to say about my posts as well so I won't jump ahead and respond in detail to every point you're making on Dekafox's post as yet. For all that I've posted quite a lot of material in this thread, I'm not entirely convinced that we're getting to the point here. I do think it's even more clear now though that we can safely divide the thing you're interested in talking about and having trouble understanding into two boxes, one of which is what a nonbinary gender identity even means, and the other of which is minutiae of representing that thing in a fantasy story for children with an alien character. I think it's pretty clear that the second box is why this thread is in this particular forum, but it's impossible to treat it meaningfully without treating the first, first. I don't think we're at the stage where it makes sense to be talking about what's a writing mistake.

You're sort of speculating on why your subjective gut reaction is to find it really jarring (several pages of text on the internet jarring) for Nightshade to mention their pronouns here, and the simple answer is that it probably has a lot to do with your not being much exposed to non-robot people doing so and finding it conceptually anomalous when they do. The reason the writers put it front and center in the first dialogue opportunity probably has some relation with how you kinda still keep slipping into calling them "she" and "her" every other mention because you're unconsciously gendering (not sexing) them that way. And this:

I think there's a simpler answer; the writers wanted representation without understanding what that would represent for their alien robot toys.

Is right, because Transformers is not an esoteric speculative xenofiction about machine intelligences, and not just because it's for children or an IP brand. That kind of deep dive, serious speculative fiction has only the slimmest of niche audiences and still has to make shortcuts, because it requires alienating the writer and readers from any familiar framework of social meaning and building them from the ground up, like inventing a conlang but for the whole of a being's lived experience. Even the sheer fact that Transformers communicate with a spoken language and facial expressions makes it pretty clear, I think, that we're not talking about someone's genuine attempt to derive from first principles how a society of machine intelligences might look and behave.

Any explanation of what gender means for Transformers is going to be similar to a discussion of why they have almost any other human cultural or physical trait. We know the answer is simple, "relatability", and having the lexicon of traits to draw on to define distinct and comprehensible characters. Anything other answer why is just going to be a way to make the lore comport with those choices, it's a rationalization that always has to work backwards from the desired endpoint. Transformers, like all nonhuman fantasy fiction characters, are humans projected out onto something else; some of their distinctive features are the absence of particular human traits, but it still starts from a human template.

In the 90s and early 00s, there were loads of fans who thought that female Transformers were bad lore, because they took it for granted that Transformers looked like dudes, but introducing ones that looked like ladies instead made them ask why Transformers would have "gender". This conversation threatens to uncannily resemble that one, it's just a new gender calling the attention. We're not doomed to repeat past mistakes, though. Nightshade being nonbinary is exactly the same blatant exportation of human gender that every other Transformer receives.

 

[NovaSaber]

As I noted earlier, I'm predisposed to think "sex" and "gender" pick out the same concepts. Much like we say "water" is H2O, I'm inclined to say "gender" refers to X and Y chromosomes, although one could make a compelling argument for sexual expression or perhaps "functional sexual expression."

No, sex and gender are two different things that just have a sufficiently high correlation that people who want to think its simple have gotten away with conflating them.
Etymologically, the relevant definition of "gender" here is not an extremely old word, but it's older than most of us.

The only time "gender" is a true synonym for "sex" is in kids' media that has a dumb aversion to saying "sex" at all.

Sure. Gender expression is usually fairly apparent, so there is no real call for a singular "vague" gender descriptor.

Gender expression is so diverse that, unlike gender identity or biological sex (which are both bimodal, not binary), I don't think it's realistic to even call it bimodal. Hell, it's so culturally dependent that the same thing can be either "masculine" or "feminine" in different contexts.

As noted above, I'm inclined to think we're discussing DNA/Genetics.

You don't know my DNA. I don't know my DNA.
You probably don't know yours either, unless you've it analyzed for either medical or genealogical reasons.

However, it is conceivable to have functional genetic expression without the correct DNA (robots, aliens, or some really scifi stuff...), so one could make an argument that, say, a Christian Alex really only needs to know whether he can have functional procreative sex with a partner, not what their DNA is.

In no science fiction work that treats the matter even slightly realistically is it possible to have human-type sexual reproduction with an alien that doesn't determine its sexes the same way we do.
An XY male human actually does have a better chance of reproducing with an XY female human than with any species that doesn't use an XX/XY system.

The problem with this stance is that in normal cases it's 1:1 with DNA, and only in the strange cases it's not.

"Typical" and "atypical" would be better words than "normal" or "strange".
And the lowest estimate I've seen is 0.018%, which is still tens of thousands of people in the USA alone.

There are no functionally female, but genetically male, people out there, except perhaps Arnold Schwarzenegger in that one movie.

Androgen insensitivity syndrome - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

"In some cases, 46, XY females do form a vestigial uterus and have been able to gestate children. Such examples are rare and have required the use of an egg donor, hormone therapy, and IVF."

It strikes me that while most members of most sexually reproducing species fall into M or F

Lots of animals are hermaphroditic, and a fair number of species have both monosexed and hermaphroditic individuals.
Some fungi have thousands of sexes (I'm not really clear on how that works, though; pretty sure it's "reproduction is possible between any two different ones"?).

Also, if you're strictly defining sex by XX/XY chromosomes, that's pretty much just mammals.
Birds use a ZW/ZZ system that's the opposite (it's the female with two different chromosomes and the male with two of the same), some reptiles' sex depends on incubation temperature, and many fish change from one sex to the other during their adult life.

This is interesting and may be medically relevant in some cases. I don't know of any cases/examples where this would be relevant though.

In any case, my understanding of "sex" is intimately tied to "sexual reproduction" through the functional inheritance of genetic material. I don't even know what "M or F brain structure" would be, other than correlation with M or F DNA, expression, or upbringing, and correlation isn't interesting to this kind of discussion (I think).

I think the fact that it doesn't perfectly correlate with any other physical traits, or with upbringing, is the point.

The brain is where your thoughts and emotions are; it's more important to your identity than your reproductive organs, and certainly more directly important than your DNA.

Just because something is "labeled x" doesn't mean it's "x." If sex is determined by DNA, rather than expression, than looking at expression is a fallible way of determining sex.

Recognizing fallibility is not a bad thing. Enshrining misclassification as a classification, on the other hand, seems strange.

I think you're conflating two different meanings of "determine" there, with only the first one being what DNA actually does. DNA is what usually controls the actual defining criteria for sex.
And for trans people, it's not even a misclassification; their sex is what it looked like to the doctor who assumed from a glance, it's their gender that's different.

This sounds plausible, but I'd argue it'd be a writing mistake for two reasons:

1) On this description, Nightshade's identifying as "they" is very different from a transgendered person's doing the same. It's not genuine representation so much as coincidence, and that's weird.

Nightshade's not supposed to be transgender representation. They're nonbinary representation.

2) This theory puts a far greater emphasis on language than transformers cartoons aimed at kids ever have. If Nightshade's first thought was "My universal translator doesn't adequately express my thoughts about myself"; that's weird.

What translator? The Terrans were born on Earth with mental links to English-speaking children; English is their first language.

I think there's a simpler answer; the writers wanted representation without understanding what that would represent for their alien robot toys. If gender is sex, this is telling us something about cybertronian sexuality... which, believe me, I probably don't want to learn about in a cartoon like this, especially not arbitrarily from a baby transformer. If gender is social role or social stereotypes, then it coming from a baby is even weirder!

If they were a "baby" socially, sure, but the Terrans are basically "born" as the equivalent of...tweens, I guess?

Transformers in general are almost never mentally or socially "younger" than that, actually.
(And sometimes they're "born" as already seeming older than the "young" characters from the same series; in BW literally every character who came out of a stasis pod acted older than Cheetor, and for most part other characters treated them as such.)

No other characters articulate their gender pronouns because they're "normal" and don't have to, but Nightshade is singled out as "abnormal" and has to make an apparently relevant linguistic choice... rather than getting to work saving her family. NIghtshade's like 30 seconds old, but what's Prime's excuse for humoring this? "Nightshade, I don't care about your pronouns, let's go save your siblings!" > "Nightshade, I've learned something new and valuable about you... oh, your siblings are dead, but at least I'll remember what pronouns to refer to you by."

Optimus is the one who pauses mid-sentence where the expected next word would have been a pronoun.
And the explanation takes less time than would be lost to awkwardness if everyone kept trying to avoid pronouns.

One uncommon trope in fiction is for someone to introduce themselves atypically, to volunteer information about themselves that the audience didn't ask for. Someone might brag about their IQ score, royal lineage, measurements, net worth, etc. In almost all situations, these characters are meant to be ridiculed. Ex: "Sir Reginal the 3rd, 18th in line for the throne of England, nice to meet you." "Hi, my name is Adam, and my IQ is 135." By emphasizing something about themselves, rather than a mere introduction, they're telling the audience something - that they're jerks!

No, that's only true if the thing they're emphasizing is both bragging and irrelevant, or if they're saying it specifically to impress.
Introductions that are also infodumps were extremely common in 20th century comic books and aren't entirely uncommon in any sort of science fiction or fantasy. But the Marvel Transformers comic in particular had so many of them that TF Wiki is actually credited with coining the word for it, "introdump".
Regardless, Nighshade didn't even do that and in fact I think Nightshade's initial self-introduction contained less information than Hashtag or Jawbreaker's.

Is Nightshade supposed to be a jerk? No, of course not. But that they're focusing on language, rather than the situation, is not ideal.

Optimus implicitly asked and Mo answered. Nightshade only added clarification.

One last thing - I don't know if this is meant to make Nightshade stand out from her peers. If cybertronian non-binary gender is meant to be representation; she's not supposed to.

I mean, all the Terrans are pretty different from each other.
And Nighshade being nonbinary isn't really given more focus than anyone else's gender, outside of the times it's explicitly mentioned.

Indeed, I don't recall the female autobots in G1 being treated differently, except sometimes as very pg, toned down romantic partners.

Characters explicitly said they were "female" multiple times (including Zarak just identifying Arcee as "the female one"), and Nightshade being explicitly called nonbinary is really the only way you can say their gender is "treated differently", so...

If anything, Nightshade is more "normal" in-universe, because in G1 Shockwave says "Female Autobots? I thought they were extinct", actively calling attention to their rarity.

But Nightshade does stand out, and I think they stand out in a way that a pre-existing, adult transformer who doesn't have to remind people how to refer to themselves wouldn't.

The problem with implicit representation is, people can miss that it's there.
Great representation shouldn't be completely defined by being in the group(s) they represent, but good representation must be established to be in the group(s) they represent.

 

[Copper Bezel]

And Nighshade being nonbinary isn't really given more focus than anyone else's gender, outside of the times it's explicitly mentioned.

This one's historically unwinnable though. Whether it's conscious malice or not, people who don't understand an identity will say it shouldn't matter and why is this being shoved down our throats all the way down to the point at which it's a blink-and-you-miss-it inclusion, and then they'll say it shouldn't even be there if it's not important to the character or plot and is probably pandering tokenism and actually anti-inclusive if you really think about it. The ones who aren't consciously malicious never realize that the thing that makes it conspicuous to them isn't the presentation but, you know, the fact that it's an identity they don't understand. And that's not just gender and orientation stuff, people do it with Muslim characters.

 

[LordGigaIce]

What are your thoughts on the idea that (some, obviously) transformers use alt-mode selection as a form of self-expression or self-determination?

I prefer it over the idea of Functionism.
And I mean that in a meta sense.

Functionism as it was created- an in-universe social system where Cybertronians were placed into jobs/social classes based on alt mod, is a huge part of the fiction these days. Even in fiction where it's not explicitly named the idea that Megatron started the Decepticon uprising against some form of rigid social hierarchy that is in some way alt mode based seems like a staple of the fiction.

Thing is I'm not sure it holds up?

If we look at where this idea was REALLY explored, IDW's first continuity, we see that while Functionism mandates you must do the job your alt mod dictates we see that there aren't many limits on what alt mode you can have. Famously Rewind rejected getting a tank alt mode as sort of him "reclaiming" his identity as a data stick Cybertronian.
But if he COULD adopt a tank- or anything else- how is Functionism even a workable system of social control? Obviously the answer would be "well if you change your alt mode then the cops come and arrest you/perform Shadowplay on you/etc...." but that's not viable if you think about it for more then ten seconds.

Like if you look at human society... we as a species are very bad at classifying our own into classes and categories and using them as systems of control and oppression. But if we look at those systems well... they tend to be things you can't easily change. You can't change your skin colour, and it's very hard to claw your way out of poverty if it's been your family's state for generations. Race and social class, and often both at once, is a brutal system of social control we see in our world. But they're effective because people can't just stop being these things. A Black guy can't just become White, and a poor person needs A LOT of hard work and some lucky breaks to move beyond systemic poverty.

In Transformers continuities where Functionism is the primary system of social control used by the elites against the masses though... it just doesn't work. It would be like trying to classify humans into a class-based system based on t-shirt colour or haircut. Sure if Rewind tried to become a tank in the pre-War days the Functionists wouldn't like it... but what if EVERY data stick did that? It's such an easy and innate part of their species' makeup that I just don't see how any social system based on alt mode is workable as a system of control.

So with that out of the way I would much rather see alt modes explored a representations of characters' personalities, self-determination, etc... Maybe Optimus COULD take on a flight capable alt mode, but he just likes being a truck (and occasionally a dragon train).

 

[Destron D-69]

I'm fine with altmodes not being a thing that has any real regimented social need behind it at this point for tfs... in canon. That being said this is a very VERY long-lived species so it only stands to reason that many types of societies have risen and fallen by the wayside as time marched on. Functionalism, the Primes.... the war you name it it's all going to have had a hand in forming the basis for why and how characters have their modes... and even within large swaths of characters there can be different reasons for why they've kept or would change them given prompt to do so.

When Nova Prime was in charge... what your altmode was likely didn't make a big todo on your social standing as long as you were helping cyberform the galaxy lol...

Megatron's uprising ... if you can fight do it... would eventually evolve into something more in-line with what he started out fighting against (what with things like mass production seekers types as an example) but that's kinda the way tyranny goes.

you could do an entire run of a comic dealing with the individual Seekers and their identity struggles post war if you wanted... heck, do an episode of a show about Cliffjumper grousing about being red bumblebee

endless potential. but yeah, going forward... it should be a mix of things. I think