Marvel presents a new transgender superhero Shela Sexton aka Escapade in connection with the upcoming Pride month.
The young hero has the ability to “instantaneously switch physical locations with another person or trade any specific physical or abstract attributes such as possessions, organisational status, skills, superhuman powers, and even situation.”
That might come in handy given the challenges trans youth is facing these days.
She has also a sidekick called Morgan Red – who is also trans. They will appear in Marvel’s Voices: Pride #1 this June.
It was really important to me to have a whole community of trans mutants in this comic – not just Shela and Morgan, but others. (And then it turned out writer Grace Freud had already created some wonderful characters in her comic in the same issue.) I wanted it to be super clear that being a mutant is not a metaphor for being trans, and vice versa.
I think that Shela has experienced some rejection because of her transness, but she’s also found an amazing community that supports her and lifts her up, and this has changed how she thinks about being a hero for sure. She wants to be there for everybody who’s been left behind, and she wants to help people feel like they can belong and be seen and loved. That was something I really hope everyone reading this comic, especially young trans people, take away from it.
I’m really annoyed with the internet woobification of batman 2022’s riddler because it fully misses the point of the entire movie to almost concerning degree
Ok. So. Basically what it comes down to is that The Batman (2022)’s Riddler is a fairly obvious (at least to me) stand-in for the very real-world phenomena of young white men who feel isolated and personally victimized by society, who turn to the internet to feel less alone, and who are preyed upon by domestic hate groups who validate and weaponize their feelings and turn them into genuine white supremacists and neo-nazis and armed insurgents who march on Washington DC to violently protest democracy. Initially, the Riddler targets the corrupt, using the internet as a means to further spread his rhetoric to disconnected white men like him, but by the end of the movie he’s bombing flood walls and sending militarized followers to assassinate Bella Réal, a young black mayoral candidate who wishes to bring real systemic change to Gotham. This reveals the truth and the hypocrisy of his mission, which is that he’s not really trying to effect change—he’s lashing out and tearing down a world that he feels has victimized him, personally, and he’s doing this while trying to pull others into his violence. He’s a normal looking guy, with a normal job. A nobody. Someone who could be anyone, who could be someone you know, and meanwhile he’s online encouraging paramilitary violence and committing acts of domestic terrorism. This is how hate groups function in real life. It’s not a subtle allegory. The fact that a truly alarming proportion of internet fandom has, after seeing this movie, managed to miss the very obvious messaging and choose to reduce him to just a funny little guy who has a crush on Batman and just wants a little attention is, frankly, concerning to me because of what it means for peoples’ ability recognize hate group recruitment in real life.
They need to make an americano psycho about these specific types of young professionals
saying that the secret to making your work parties fun is “alcohol and name tags” is like saying the secret to your spaghetti sauce is salt and a dash of pepper
The way how not a single movement in this wasn’t staged…
Oh! That’s my old boss, Nick Gray. He’s the founder and former CEO of Museum Hack, now teambuilding.com. He’s a complete and utter sociopath who underpaid me and everyone else I worked with and enabled his absolutely awful chief of staff now CEO/co-owner of the company to abuse everyone who worked for her. He, like the name of the company implies, is a complete hack. He started it with the seed money he got from his parents in order to get him far away from their legit aviation tech company, and then quit when he got bored. He’s also lowkey racist and misogynist and profited off of the illusion of being progressive. During my tenure at the company, he hired zero (0) people of color.
You know what, even IF trans girls were universally better at sports than cis girls, they should still be allowed to play on their high school sports teams because the mental health and well-being of trans kids, the social support kids get from sports, and the societal benefit of basic inclusion and normalization of trans kids are more important than who wins a volleyball game or whatever
I didn’t realize that girls got a say, or universally agreed on, who got to be on their sports teams. I wish I’d known this when I was 12– I’d have voted out Molly, who violated my boundaries by being a bitch
