Editing Talk:535: It Might Be Cool

How many life sentences has the idiot had to commute?
And how long after they were given?

[[User:Weatherlawyer| I used Google News BEFORE it was clickbait]] ([[User talk:Weatherlawyer|talk]]) 19:01, 30 January 2015 (UTC)
:You're going to have to be more specific on which idiot you are referring to. Your comment is kind of a non sequitur. -Pennpenn [[Special:Contributions/108.162.250.162|108.162.250.162]] 01:55, 4 December 2015 (UTC)

Thank goodness, we all now know how transphobic this cartoon, and by extension Randall Munroe, is. Who says a woman has to menstruate, or have ovaries? [[Special:Contributions/172.69.43.243|172.69.43.243]] 12:10, 17 March 2024 (UTC)
:Not sure you can assert any of that, from the comic. You're reading too much into it. But, just so this statement isn't left hanging, I'll run through some obvious counter-arguments.
:Yes, trans-women currently cannot menstruate, etc. Yet I bet there are some who would want to, should medicine (or magic) be able to grant them that ability. Left-Cueball might well be imagining just such a hypothetical and technomagical situation where trans-ness isn't just a case of finding a sweet spot along the line of "passing/top-surgery/top-and-bottom-surgery" that you can happily reach, but extends all the way to total biological and corporeal sex-flip, internals and all. The series of comics have presented far more radical 'reality shifts' than that.
:This particular comic targets and parodies the swearing-in process, as referenced. The (wrong) words are not important, except that they are one non-sequitur of many possible ones, just because it needed something sufficiently out there and not really relevent to the situation, that fits the "not a conversation, but a ceremony-gone-off-script" format. If he'd gone with something like "how do I know that the red that I see is the red that you see?", you could argue he was colour-blind-ist, but still the joke is the same, and there's really no reason to believe Randall has transphobic tendencies by deliberate exclusion.
:Failure to be ''inclusive'' is harder to deal with. (By failing to have many (any?) non-white Cueballs, maybe it could be said that he's implicitly racist, but he's definitely not ''explicitly'' racist and has definitely included non-white real-life/externally-fictional characters with no reason to suspect malice. Just hasn't balanced things up, perhaps, in his standard homegrown 'cast of actors'. But, if he does, you just know that he'll be accused of being ''too woke'', by the kind of person who thinks 'being woke' is an insult.) Social failure, but not necessarily a personal flaw and attitudinal bias. That said, who knows how many 'female' characters are (without us knowing it, and no 'performative fuss' made to explain it) actually M2F-trans, and 'male' ones vice-versa?
:They're stick figures. They can have any biologies they need to have, including Infinite Wings! Arguably, Randall is sympathetically feminist, given the diverse roles he gives (apparent) female characters, but there's no reason at all to consider him a TERF. [[Special:Contributions/172.70.85.26|172.70.85.26]] 14:23, 17 March 2024 (UTC)
:Please let this be a troll post. Putting aside the fact that this is a 2009 comic certainly written without this angle as its focus, how is associating females with menstruation transphobic? If he said, "it would be cool to be a bird, but that flying thing is freaky", would you say he has something against penguins? This comic was clearly written to highlight Randall's quirky wandering line of thought and how it confounds people around him, not to define what a woman is. This is not malicious, and calling it ignorant is unfair - trans people weren't in the public consciousness in 2009, so it's not his fault for thinking of this angle when writing a short comic about, ALLOW ME TO REPEAT, a COMPLETELY UNRELATED TOPIC.[[Special:Contributions/172.71.26.217|172.71.26.217]] 15:13, 18 March 2024 (UTC)
:I'm all for inclusion, but not actively including isn't necessarily excluding. (To be clear, this is the same post is from the same guy as the one above. Why did my IP address change?) [[Special:Contributions/172.71.30.133|172.71.30.133]] 15:25, 18 March 2024 (UTC)