Frankly, idk! I’m physically disabled myself and idk entirely how I feel about transablility as a concept because I haven’t done all that much research into it. I don’t think people should pretend to have disabilities they don’t have (i.e pretending to be blind), but body integrity dysphoria is a real thing that people experience and if they want to pursue surgery or something to make themselves happier, that’s their right. As long as they aren’t trying to claim that they can speak on disability issues they don’t actually deal with, they aren’t materially harming disabled people and it doesn’t matter how I personally feel about them. And I don’t think a lot of people who identify as transabled are doing so out of malice, so I think any sort of position on transablility should keep in mind that it is an expression of people’s real feelings and struggles and they shouldn’t be demonized for those feelings. It seems like an issue that needs to be handled with compassion and understanding and not blind anger.
Here’s the thing: I don’t see how this actually hurts anyone.
For one, this is exactly what I saw people say about nonbinary people all throughout my childhood. I saw people complain that all NB identities online where “cloudgender” and “stargender”, or that people would say they were “trans out of spite”, and point at that and say how those people weren’t really trans, and in fact, they made the real transgenders look bad. And all that accomplished was bullying kids online and making me repress my own weird identity for years because I internalized that gender had to make sense to cis people to be valid. So I’m not going to take “well, teens on tumblr act weird about it!” as a reason why this concept is intrinsically harmful. I’m extremely mentally ill, I’m physically disabled and it has fucked up my life, and I don’t see how someone making cutesy flags on their personal tumblr to express their personal feelings is hurting me. Again, the people who this are most likely expressing their real feelings, and I don’t see how shaming them for having those feelings is helpful. Weird people online are not responsible for or even really able to impact the wider system of ableism and sanism.
If someone has dysphoria over their body, and it distresses them, I’m not going to tell them they are an awful person for having those feelings or expressing them or seeking to alleviate them. I can imagine how distressing and lonely that feels, and how comforting it can be to know you aren’t the only person to experience something strange and upsetting. I’m not gonna begrudge people for forming a community and making language to describe themselves. Especially given the potential for self-harm; if people feel strongly enough about their desire to be disabled that they would harm themselves, then from a harm reduction standpoint, the best thing to do is listen to them about their needs and provide them with support.
The biggest forces of ableism in my life are not being able to work, my city being extremely inaccessible, the ableist medical system, and both internalized ableism and ableism from abled people in my life. I have bigger issues to worry about than people making flags online about wanting to be paraplegic. They do not impact me or my life.
And these people are humans, not cardboard cuttouts without emotions. When they are doing things, they aren’t acting out of malice, they are expressing themselves. Even if making flags and terms online was materially harmful, seeing as these are feelings that they are not choosing to have, I see the best response as being education and conversation that leads to mutual understanding. I see transabled people, including the weird cringy tumblr ones, as people expressing their struggles and desires and experiences. I’ve been too hurt by people mocking weird identities they don’t understand and insisting people expressing their struggles are personally responsible for systemic issues to turn around and do the same thing to another group, just because I don’t understand them or they make me uncomfortable. Disabled and mentally ill people have so many bigger issues to deal with- bullying transabled people is much easier than dealing with those issues, and it gives us a feeling of control or like we are able to do something, but all it does is cause more suffering.
a long long time ago – in a galaxy far away – I thought I was transabled. I always preferred BIID as a label though. I thought I shouldn’t have 20/20 vision and that there was something wrong with the way I see. But my optometrist disagreed with me because I could figure out the chart thing. – turns out I have an astigmatism but that’s not the point.
I never told a soul about this, just did a few little things that seemed quirky but made me feel better – wearing an eye patch for a while.
I actually entered a study on BIID out of a university in Nova Scotia to try and be a data point.. But between the initial interview in 2016 and the follow up interview in 2019 I discovered my autism and transness. Suddenly I wasn’t transabled anymore.
Turns out I do see weird but its not my eyes, its my processing speed. Turns out wanting your boobs chopped off from the day they started growing is a trans thing.
As a result of my history of BIID I fully accept people who say they have it. Even if it is a result of something else they have but have not been diagnosed/accommodated for. If you have a chronic nerve issue with your right knee, maybe it feels ‘broken’ in some way where you conclude that it isn’t supposed to be there but no doctor has ever taken your pain seriously. I fully believe that people have BIID and are transabled, and I think it is a failure on the part of the medical community.
It was the best of times, it was the blurst of times. Kids who grew up in the 90s manga boom werenât old enough to get scanners and the like, so the first webcomics were Newspaper comics based on nerdy things.
Like General Protection Fault, which was an even nerdier version of Dilbert.Â
And, of course, 1999â˛s Penny Arcade. Penny Arcadeâs success would inspire a million âtwo dudes on a couch playing video gamesâ clones.
A dude saw Penny Arcade and convinced his artist friend to make a comic with him. He wanted a standard 4-panel comic just like in the newspaper. But his friend was a huge weeb, and wanted to have four vertical panels like in Japanese 4koma comics. So they found a compromise format and started a comic in 2000.
Megatokyo had a lot of video game jokes early on, but quickly morphed into being about anime stuff, which happened to be pretty popular. In lieu of video game jokes, it introduced some light sex humor, a woman with huge boobs who wanted to fuck the gamer dude, and a sentient android that everyone accepted as normal because it was a silly comic and a lot of early-2000s internet humor tended towards randomness.
So you had these two really popular webcomics with elements that had obvious appeal: Dudes on a couch playing video games, sexy chicks with huge boobs who wanted to bang the MC, robots, and a weird square format that happened to be easier to read at lower resolutions. But could these elements be combined? One man dared to dream they could. And in 2002 he made his dream a reality
Given what a joke itâs rightfully since become, I feel the need to emphasize that CAD was one of the big early webcomics, and helped inspire itâs own share of imitators. Itâs probably fair to say that it was more influential than even Penny Arcade, in that it had more elements that could be slavishly copied and passed around.
(If you ever wondered why it took so long for anyone in Questionable Content to acknowledge the weirdness of all the robots, itâs because random unexplained robots were really popular in webcomics in the early 2000s)
Meanwhile, it its own little isolated corner of the internet, Bob and George was popularizing âsprite comicsâ, a genre that consisted of itself,8-Bit Theater the next year, and a trillion shitty comics not worth mentioning. These were less influential than the Penny Arcade ==> Megatokyo ==> CAD ==> Questionable Content progression, but even this early the tiny webcomic scene was start to grow and split. Questionable Content was much more grounded than other webcomics at the time, and itâs rom-com plot was a big step away from the gag-a-day strips, but its influence was dulled because a bunch of other comics were starting to spring up. In the early 2000s, everyone was reading the same things because there were so few comics worth your time, but by the mid-2000s you were starting to see some quality.Â
You were also starting to see people getting serious about monetization. Scott McCloudâs dream of selling your comics for ten cents a pop and making bank in volume had crashed into the twin peaks of âmost comics are also good and theyâre freeâ and âcredit cards charge fees, idiotâ. Some of the better, more respected comics started joining together into one site with all of them that you needed to pay to access, kind of like how Slipshine works now except without the porn.Â
This didnât work out financially, and it also meant that the best webcomics of the mid-2000s like Digger and Narbonic had really small audiences because you couldnât read them without paying a fee first. Advertising was less useless then than it is now, but times were tough for the webcomics business in the pre-Patreon days. But some webcomics realized that they could find a profitable niche by appealing to new audiences. Instead of the straight white boys who made up the general webcomics audience, theyâd reach out to a new demographic:
Perverts!Â
And, more specifically,Â
Furries!Â
Because furries really wanted furry content, and they were willing to pay for it. Pay a lot for it. Furry cheesecake comics prospered, and even though they didnât have mainstream success, they were pulling it the big bucks compared to your average video game comic. People were starting to realize that 1000 hardcore fans was better than 100,000 casual fans, and a lot of comics started searching for a niche. (This is kind of related to webcomics becoming more progressive/inclusive a bit later, but thatâs a whole ânother essay that Iâm not the one to write)
These webcomics were pretty tame PG-13 stuff like youâd see in the shounen manga its creators were fans of, with nary a nipple to be seen, and a lot of them would die out in favor of straight-up porn.
In the late 2000s, art students realized that making a webcomic was a great way to build a portfolio, and we were hit with the Great Boom Of Webcomics By People Who Can Actually Draw. In 2003, that TwoKinds art was not only acceptable, it was top-tier for a free comic
By 2006 it was not the top tier
By 2008 it was no longer acceptable.Â
The world of webcomics became flooded with high-quality work by actual artists whoâd gone to school and everything. The first generation of webcomics creators no longer ruled as the comics everyone read. Doctor Fun, the first-ever webcomic, ended in 2006. So did Narbonic and Mac Hall. Applegeeks, one of the most successful PA clones, ended in 2010 alongside 8-Bit Theater. Ctrl+Alt+Delete ended and rebooted to the interest of no one.Â
While in 2001, a bad artist could build a following just by updating regularly and slowly improving, that became a lot harder to do as the Bush Administration ended. There were too many brilliant artists making great content for someone to break onto the scene with simple art or sprites. And one day a lot of people gave up on ever being able to make a successful webcomic if their panels didnât look like a magic the gathering card.
And it just so happened that that day, the 13th of April 2009, was a young manâs birthdayâŚ
