Kyriethewitch

We can do some Marian backstory!!

Biggest thing of note: Marian, in her heyday, is basically the opposite of Sal. He’s underhanded but can’t throw a punch, she’s straightforward and will FUCK YOU UP. The shotgun is a recent addition, she used to favor a length of heavy metal chain and a set of brass knuckles.

She was the top dog of a large area for a long time, and her leadership wasn’t really benevolent OR cruel. For the most part, if you didn’t bother her or her girls, she didn’t bother you.

The issue was, of course, that she was recruiting her girls from the local settlements. They had a rule– once you worked for Marian, you were under her protection. This put a lot of local disputes into Marian’s hands, because she readily took in girls who wanted to get away from abusive families or other bad situations.

She had something she called a line in the sand, named after her only real rule for diplomatic encounters. She scratched a line in the dirt at the those meetings, and if you put one toe over that line, you were declaring a free-for-all on violence.

Jonathan Joss was an Indigenous, gay man who was murdered on the first day of Pride month as well as Indigenous History Month. He died protecting his trans husband. Homophobia and racism aren’t marks of the past, and this is a heart breaking reminder of that.

Advances in weaponry meant that, for the first time, men were coming home from war with literally half their faces blown off, on a regular basis. This was not only traumatic— there were cases of men cancelling engagements or being afraid to see their families, because of their disfigurements— but also caused problems with every day tasks like speaking and eating, in which your face plays a pretty key role.

Gillies arranged for a whole ward, and later a hospital, to be dedicated to the treatment of these men, and took steps to ensure that all soldiers who received these kinds of injuries on the battlefield would be sent to him directly. He developed methods for applying skin grafts so that larger portions of the face could be repaired.

He continued his work treating wounded soldiers throughout WW1 and WW2, and when both wars were ended— just in case he hadn't done enough to establish himself as a full on hero— he was then approached by a medical student named Michael Dillon, a trans man, and was able to use the same techniques he'd developed to reconstruct the penises of wounded soldiers to give him a phalloplasty. The first one ever performed on a trans man. He even diagnosed the guy with a condition to explain the frequent operations, so as to avoid outing him.

Dillon later wrote a book about trans-ness, which inspired Roberta Cowell, who became the first British transwoman to get a vaginoplasty, also performed by Gillies.