I Will Never Understand Why There Are So Many Transphobes And Homophobes In The Fandom When The Game

I will never understand why there are so many transphobes and homophobes in the fandom when the game is so unashamedly queer. It promotes a message of acceptance, and you literally need to help form Gay (RG01 and RG02) and Lesbian (Undyne and Alphys) relationships to get the best ending, and that's not mentioning queer-coded characters like Mad Mew Mew.

Yes, the 4channers were awful and they persist in misgendering me, while simultaneously complaining I don't post anymore, with zero self awareness.

4chan harassment alone isn't why I left. This is.

It's the transphobia.

I have been in the fandom since 2015. I have been arguing with transphobes in the fandom since 2015. I have been making write ups about why it's important not to misgender the - yes, fictional - characters since 2015, because of the complete lack of caring it communicates to real nonbinary people.

Last year, I wrote a post that got 7000 notes and is currently pinned to the Deltarune subreddit. I poured my heart out about what the nonbinary characters meant to me and why they were important.

It was argued over, I was mocked for it, I included personal details about my family situation and my difficulty coming out, I was mocked for it.

I wrote it because I believed it mattered. Because for eight years, the constant comment when mentioning the pronouns of these characters has been: Who cares?

At any point since 2015, Toby could have saved the transgender people in the fandom the trouble of having to "prove" the characters were nonbinary by saying something.

Last year, Legends of Localization comes out - thoroughly reviewed by Toby - and calls Frisk, Monster Kid, and Napstablook "ambiguous", designed to have an unclear gender.

You can see in the collage of screenshots how the transphobes in the fandom took that. One delightful individual was so triumphant over the victory, they put the statement in their Reddit subtitle.

So each time this individual posts to the Undertale subreddit, people will see this quote, carried around like a trophy with all the pride of a dog with a rotting pelt in its mouth. That's how much it meant to the transphobes in the fandom. They're delighted by having this quote to throw back in the faces of transgender fans.

Because who cares? The majority of the fandom isn't transgender, or on tumblr. It's easy for them not to care about transgender people.

You can block block block as many people as you want (I had thousands blocked here) but you can't curate your way out of transphobia. It isn't possible.

Because the majority of the fandom is on Reddit, or YouTube, or Twitter, and they, quite vocally, do not care about transgender people.

Some people may recall that I stopped posting to the Deltarune subreddit after the mods decided to filter all posts containing the word "nonbinary" without telling anyone.

The mods stopped filtering the word after I posted this and apologized, but the point was made: people in the greater fandom think the word "nonbinary" is a dangerous, impolite word, one that only invokes argument and therefore should not be used.

So I stopped posting on the Deltarune and Undertale subreddits. I never made YouTube or Twitter content. I set my blog to only allow people with Tumblr accounts to view it. I turned off all asks, anonymous or otherwise. I blocked thousands of people. It did not work. Transgender people can't curate (read: quarantine) our way out of transphobia.

Years of this, of transgender fans of the series getting attacked for trying to claim and fight for nonbinary representation in the series, and "ambiguous" is the language Toby signed off on.

If the characters are meant to be nonbinary representation, the last eight years has proven that this needs to be stated outright, or the onus of "proving" it falls on the vastly outnumbered transgender fans in the fandom - something that we have never been able to do without being profusely harassed for it until we shut our mouths.

If the characters were only ever meant to be ambiguous for the sake of "freedom of interpretation", then this should have been communicated with seriousness and respect to the transgender fans of the series years ago, not as a throwaway line in a translation book. (and to be clear, this is not at all the author's fault - Toby corrected and reviewed the language used)

This is why I left and why I'm never coming back, no matter what happens next. I have had enough of the transphobia in the fandom, and I have no way of fighting back anymore.

Transphobes in the fandom want the work and the passion of nonbinary people but won't even use a pronoun to show the basest level of respect and humanity for us.

I'm watching our rights being taken away day by day, and people like this just want me to keep producing my worthless little game theory posts.

Trans people don't owe you our "content" or our passion, particularly not when we produce it for free in the face of eight years of a deeply transphobic audience that we are expected to either beg for the most basic respect or to turn our heads down and hide away from so they can continue either hating us or pretending we don't exist or that that part of us doesn't matter.

"Who cares?"

When people ask this in response to talking about being nonbinary or respecting pronouns, they know transgender people care.

What they're saying is, who cares about transgender people?

For this reason, I'm requesting people not archive anything I've written, though I know I can't enforce this. That includes the Character Analysis and the "(Characters) are nonbinary why it matters" post, which I wrote in such profoundly naive good faith. For every "who cares" I have received over eight years of being transgender in this fandom.

If my identity as a nonbinary person doesn't matter, if nonbinary people don't exist, then neither does the content I made which they feel so entitled to, even while misgendering me.

I can't even think about this series without becoming angry and miserable anymore. That is the lasting, final impression the art has had on me. I can't think about it or the characters without remembering how little transgender people matter to most of the world. I've had to completely cut it out my life. There's no rage as potent as the helpless one. "Who cares?" I can't make people care.

You can't have the creations and art and "content" made by transgender people and our destruction at the same time. And maybe you can't prevent our destruction either, but you sure as hell can use a damn pronoun.