So. I promised a thread on Psylocke and Laura Kinney and how I identify with them as a trans woman. So here is that thread.

Let’s get into this. Trigger warnings for discussion of dysphoria, suicidal thoughts, and depression.

I came out when I was about 15-16 years old, but I knew I was trans as early as the age of 13. I figured it out while reading X-23 by @marjoriemliu and Sana Takeda. Specifically, the issues where Laura is in France with Gambit, Logan and Jubilee.

There’s an issue that opens with Laura self harming in a bathroom. She heals quickly, but she still does it anyways.

Laura has depression. That’s canon, and it always has been.

Laura is also trans. That isn’t canon, but it has been to me for a very, very long time. Here’s why

Laura is a clone of Wolverine. A man. A lot of people just take that fact and run with it as proof that one of them has to be trans (which, lbr, makes sense. Clones don’t just randomly get different chromosomes).

So either Logan is a trans man or Laura is a trans girl.

But as a 13 year old kid who hated her body and who hated the clothes she had to wear, I related to Laura very intensely. There’s another scene, about an issue later, where Laura is trying on clothing.

She doesn’t know how to choose clothes she likes.

About 3 years after I read that comic, I found myself in the exact same spot. People just handed me clothes. I wore what I was expected to wear. And in the immortal words of Jubilation Lee...

Clothes are part of your voice. You gotta love your voice.

So there’s Laura Kinney. Someone who was probably created with XY chromosomes, who had to learn how to find her own voice and style because she never had that chance before. Someone who hurt herself because of depression, which is a common symptom of gender dysphoria.

But then you have Psylocke. Like Laura (and like me) she was raised to be something she didn’t necessarily want to be.

They were made to be assassins. I was made to be a boy. Same difference, really.

When I was reading Fallen Angels earlier, I was struck by something in @bryanedwardhill ‘s dialogue.

People call Psylocke “Kwannon”, and she snaps at them to call her by her new name.

Effectively, Kwannon has become a deadname to her. Her name is Psylocke, because she chose it

The same thing applies to Laura, actually. She was labelled X-23 by her creators, just as Psylocke was labelled Kwannon. X-23 became Laura, and Kwannon became Psylocke.

They have deadnames, even if they aren’t canonically trans.

And I know that most (if not all) writers have never even considered that. I don’t expect them to. It’s unintentional. Psylocke even has a daughter, and there have been retcons to explain why Laura totally has XX chromosomes.

But that doesn’t mean much to me.

I connected to Laura Kinney as a 13 year old who was trying to find her voice, who was trying to escape the life I was trapped in, so I could become a regular teenage girl (which I did eventually become).

Likewise, I now find myself connecting to Psylocke as a 22 year old woman who still has to correct people on what my name is and how I’m not the person they used to know.

Canonically speaking, Laura Kinney and Psylocke are not trans.

But canon isn’t real. What’s real is how comics make us feel, and these two feel trans to me, whether they were intended to or not.

Oh, and btw there are still a grand total of ZERO transgender X-Men as 2019 comes to a close. Not a knock on any specific writers, but it’s a glaring lack of representation while trans rights are being debated publicly.

Someone should fix that.