why do you view Dick Grayson as a trans woman? I might just be reading the wrong comics but I'm not super seeing the interpretation. It's obviously cool if you just have a trans version of Dick Grayson because you like it and trans women are cool, I'm just curious if you have any text that supports that or a run of Dick you see specifically as a trans woman above others.
well first off let me say - I don't ever have a Single Headcanon for a character, that's just not how I approach fandom. I'm a multishipper and I like to play the what-if game! which is an approach that has served me well in comics fandom where there sometimes isn't even one true Canon never mind one true Headcanon.
basically I just think it's a compelling direction for dick's character! dick is someone whose life is defined by layers of identity and performance and who has spent a lot of her life* falling into roles defined by other people, railing against them, trying to escape them, and then discovering that her escape was actually just another set of expectations. see: the transition from Robin to Nightwing, team lead; see: all the times she's played Batman and been objectively miserable doing so. also a character who is frequently self-sacrificing to the point of suicidality and who is given to fits of furious emotional self-sabotage in arguments (see the entirety of Murderer/Fugitive and every Dickroy argument ever put to paper but especially Outsiders '03.) ALSO a character with intense bouts of self-doubt and feelings of inadequacy. I don't it's a tremendous leap to say that there might be something beyond just the vigilante roles that she is trying to escape. you can read that in different ways, obviously - bruce's influence, various formative traumas - but the role of "Man" is also one that looms pretty large over anyone's life, and that you might try to escape in various ways if you didn't think transition was an option for you. like I don't think dick is even consciously closeted for years she's busy! and also she's not thinking about it. (sometimes not thinking about it really hard creates its own large and heavy weight that you are always consciously not thinking about.)
plus there's all of dick's struggles in relationships, which are of course partly vigilante lifestyle problems and partly dating people who are echoes of Bruce "emotional constipation" Wayne. but also you could read Dick's scrambling for the nearest "time to Be A Man And Husband" script when things start to get rocky, regardless of whether proposing makes sense for the relationship, as the actions of someone who is going through the motions of what she thinks she's meant to do and not what actually feels comfortable for her. it's really difficult to date when you are hiding from yourself!
and - this is just a little thing - but she grows a beard every time she becomes completely miserable and isolated and I like to read that as semi-unconscious self-sabotage via induced dysphoria. she doesn't feel like she deserves to look the way she wants to!
but no, this isn't coming from any particular run. because my mental conception of when dick finally lets the gender realization crash over her is some time after Bruce comes back from the dead, my comics evidence for this is just sort of. all of post-crisis comics. if you read enough comics about an often miserable man who swings back and forth along the pendulum of hypermasculinity depending on when the comic was written, it only makes sense to consider that dick might be trying on different masculinities and finding none of them a particularly comfortable fit. (relatable! I did the same thing with attempting to be a woman!) and then to consider that perhaps this miserable man might not be a man at all.
also on the "this is an interesting character direction side" I think it would create an extremely delicious tension in her relationship with Bruce for reasons I've talked about before. and it would do meaty things to her relationships with Donna and Kory, but especially Donna, who might I think have some complicated feelings about why Dick hadn't come to her with this earlier and what it means to be a Wonder Twin when Dick is no longer her male mirror. Donna has so many identity issues already! she would love gaining a sister and be nothing but supportive and lovely and welcoming. But she might have some private feelings about how to differentiate herself when she's already wrestled in the past with feeling like she didn't really have an identity of her own.
and of course it's fun to think about the potential fallout with the rest of the robins if the first one comes out as trans. both in Character ways and also in fun silly ways a la Tim trying to source gray market estradiol to beat Jason to the transition punch. consider also Damian, whose life has now been shaped by two very different very strong women.
plus I love Dick and as much as I like to turn on the blorbo blender 2000 I also do like to imagine a happy ending. and I think late-in-life transition is one of the happiest endings you can get. especially for a character who has experienced so much loss of agency over her body and mind, to get to remake herself in her own image that way? oh it's just euphoric. I think it would feel like flying, all the time.
this is so many paragraphs to boil down to mostly yeah I just think she's neat! come play in the space with me 🫴 let's rotate gorgeous middle-aged gearhead dyke dick grayson together.
*using she here since this post is about Dick as a trans woman, but like I said it's not the only reading I have for the character. so if you see me posting about Dick with male pronouns elsewhere I'm multi-track drifting.
turnnoffyourmind
kianamaiart
tangentwithtanner
pixelskylines
kaledo-art
prguitarman
discoholicmusic
