idk if this exists already but I would love to hear the thesis on why transfem isaac. as a baseline i agree but i love your upp thoughts and would love to hear the rational behind it!!
I have talked about it some (here and if you search trans on my blog you'll find me talking about it) but I have been wanting to write up a proper post about it so thank you for giving me a reason to do that!
First and foremost, while there is textual support for a trans reading of Isaac, IMO it is specifically for a postcanon reading of trans Isaac, i.e. she doesn't allow herself to realize (or maybe genuinely doesn't realize at all) that she is a woman until a fair bit after canon. I also think it would specifically require her getting out of Deadwood, given the role the town plays in her story as a prison/grave (another post I am slowly working on.) I'm gonna focus specifically on that postcanon, out-of-Deadwood reading in this ask, because it's the basic framework I'm operating from every time I talk about trans Isaac, even if I'm talking about an au that contradicts those two main points.
Getting into it, let's look at moments in canon that made me go "hm. Interesting."
The first time we meet Isaac's parents is also where I first got the idea. Now obviously, Isaac's parents like Norah because she, as I've said before, is every adult's favorite child. She's the quiet, polite, straight-A's girl next door who never gets in trouble, daughter of the town doctors, everyone who knows her loves her, yadda yadda yadda. Of course every parent wishes their child was like Norah (because they don't see or don't care about the crippling anxiety that comes with, but that's besides the point.) And of course Isaac, who is keenly aware of all the ways she's a disappointment to her parents, is also aware of this fact. She says as much:
And while that is obviously meant more about Norah's reputation, I (not yet obsessed with Isaac on this first watchthrough) joked to myself, "what, a girl?"
Anyways. That was the beginning of the end, for me. That joke did not leave my brain and rapidly became a personal truth.
Then we got to her being locked in her room and her window being screwed shut. I really don't have a lot of explanation for why this one pinged my trans radar, because it's much stronger as an extrapolation/foreshadowing of what the shtriga did to her and how that parallels her father's abuse in general, but two things can be true. And to me, it reminded me of the stories of locking women in attics when they get hysterical, or older fairy tales of locking princesses in towers. Maybe this is just because I was rereading my fairy tale book at the time, but the connection was forged in my brain and has not been unmade since.
And soon after that was the first attack from the shtriga. I've already talked here about the ways that parallels or outright is sexual assault. Now, obviously sexual assault is not at all a women-exclusive experience, and the shtriga is specifically intended as a metaphor for predatory priests and altar/choir boys, but the specific angle of infecting victims to later feed from what he implanted in them reminded me—well, I'll be honest, it also felt a bit like a "pregnancy as parasitism" horror metaphor, just coming a bit more from the side than we usually see. The second encounter was kind of a repeat of previous themes also—the sexual assault of the cockroaches swarming her, the locking her up in the coffin paralleling the window being screwed shut, et cetera.
But more importantly, that second encounter secured Isaac's role in these stories as the sacrifice. This post by @/mourning-at-night really sums up the ways Isaac's role carries over between seasons, and this post by @/isabel-opaque perfectly sums up the parallels between Isaac and Mrs. Abrahams in particular, the ways they are both used to perpetuate Caleb Abrahams's insane agenda. Just like how Isaac's father wishes he was Norah and is trying to force her to act like it, Caleb is forcing Isaac into this role that has been cast for a woman before—and not just once, but twice! The first human sacrifice in the Witch of Heidendorf story was a young girl.
(And again, with this second sacrifice, we have a sort of pregnancy metaphor—Isaac is literally supposed to be carved open in order for another man's son to be brought to life. It's not that I think pregnancy metaphors never apply to men, but IMO for a transfem Isaac reading, you can very much add this to the pile of evidence.)
Lastly, there's the way Isaac parallels Norah in particular. In DisRes, we have them both being the only ones to confront the shtriga on their own, and both of them being sent by Will into extreme danger, and both of them nearly dying/needing hospitalization (even if Isaac never actually gets it), and while the Fleetwood and Brook parents don't actually act the same in the slightest, both Isaac and Norah have similar anxieties about how they will be treated in response to their actions throughout the campaign. Then in Empty Graves, we have even more explicit Isaac-Norah parallels; the phone calls to the Wisp household that leads to car rides with their fathers into the forest, the way Norah's bout of madness traps her in a kind of coffin, both of them losing their fathers. It's not accidental, either; Bizly created both the car ride scenarios to be so similar that Norah/Milo commented on the parallels, and he created the bout of madness that imitated the coffin experience.
So, to look at what we have so far, there's a joke I made to myself and then a lot of Isaac paralleling traditionally/explicitly female roles in horror. Not a ton to go on; there's absolutely more, though. Welcome to the kind-of-self-projection section. Let's talk about how Isaac came to Deadwood, and the dynamic she has with several NPCs in this show.
I speak from personal experience when I say that there is nothing like completely uprooting your life at a formative age to make you realize some things about yourself. It definitely goes harder for Isaac than it did for me, because in my "moving away from everything I love and care about" story, I was the one who chose to do it, and it was the best choice I ever made, and I would do it again in a heartbeat. And it was still super fucking hard and caused a lot of turbulence in my life! But it also knocked a lot of shit loose in my head in a way that finally cracked my egg. Isaac had basically no control in this scenario; the things getting knocked loose by this move are both a lot more unwieldy and a lot less likely to get handled any time soon.
Next we have. Her parents. HOO BOY. I've talked about my thoughts on her family relationships specifically as relates to her being trans quite often (look here or here for actual posts and not just rants in the tags.)
Starting with her mother... this is actually the one where I have the most self-projection/self-recognition for a queer and specifically a trans reading. Isaac and her mother still care deeply about each other, but don't know how to talk to each other. Her mom outright says "I feel like I can't say no [to you]" and Isaac makes promises only to immediately break them and the gap between them, despite the way they're trying to reach each other, is at the moment insurmountable. This specific loss of communication feels exactly how I withdrew from my mother and she failed to understand me when I was first figuring out all the trans stuff about myself. (We're good now.)
Then there's her father. Isaac very obviously worries more about her father's perception of her more than her mother's; in part, I'm sure, because her father is much more actively dangerous than her mother, but also because she is supposed to be like her father. She's supposed to be a reliable man of the house and do masculine things like sports and fixing cars and, y'know, be a boy, and... she does some of it, but not that well. Certainly not enough for her father's expectations of a son, which again she is aware of and constantly apologizing for while also struggling to figure out how to bridge that gap between her actions and his expectations with zero support from his end, as we see in these two snippets of the conversation in the car:
And that dissonance again is implied to have started here in Deadwood, after Isaac's life was completely uprooted and let some things fall loose in her head. Adding the weight of her father's eternal disappointment is both going to break more things loose and also prevent them from being discovered for quite a while—but we'll get to that later.
Her relationship to her father also IMO parallels her relationship to the church/God in particular, which is another aspect of her life that I think is deeply entangled with her being trans. Isaac doesn't want to go to church/choir anymore but I don't think it's that she's no longer religious; to me, it reads more as her distantly recognizing that the church is dangerous to who she really is (you cannot convince me that Deadwood is a terribly accepting town. That place sucks) and trying to protect herself. The same way she frequently runs from her father by hanging out at Will's or going on runs, she has started running from the church, despite canonically (I think) still believing in God.
Lastly for the character relationships I want to bring up two small moments in DisRes that I think about a lot. First is the way she greets Janice in the convenience store but does not at all follow through on the vibe that "what's up, beautiful" establishes. Charlie even jokes that "[Isaac] is never looking for something out of it, that's the problem," which on later watchthroughs pinged in my brain as performative masculinity/heterosexuality. She flirts with Janice not to get anywhere with it, but to prop up her masculinity, and she can't even make herself do more than a surface-level pass at it. The second moment is the canon bi panic at the church window; it's very natural for questioning sexuality, in my experience, to segue into questioning gender as well.
The very last canon thing I need to address is her hair. I want to preface: I am NOT a person who thinks long hair on a guy automatically means queer. But Isaac's hair is consistently used against her by the antagonists in both campaigns—quite literally used to pin her in place and manhandle her into various secondary locations and predicaments—and the fact that she doesn't cut it rings very loudly to me as it being something she can't make herself do, as I talked about in here and here.
So to summarize again, now that we've kind of reached the end of the stuff in canon that made me go "huh," we have:
-multiple parallels with the only canonically female pc
-multiple parallels with traditional/established female roles in horror
-multiple parallels with my trans experience in particular
-consistent themes of being the only queer kid in a traditional christian family/church/town
-canon sexuality questionings/realizations and traits that undermine her masculinity to a degree that can't really be set aside
Which you might look at and say, wow, that's kind of a lot! And it is, but also a lot of it is not explicitly indicative of transness. But when I look at it, I see her being trans as a stepping stone for going beyond what canon says and into reader interpretation, and the fact that it's there for so many things about Isaac makes it not just a conclusion, but a very logical one to reach.
So the last thing, then, is: why postcanon?
Well, for starters, Deadwood is a place anathema to change. The shtriga preyed on the populace for over a century and nothing happened to stop him. No one looks for missing children. Deadwood is, to quote Isaac, "as dead as ever." This is a town that will crush you to death socially, emotionally, or possibly literally for trying to improve your life like that.
This is paralleled by Isaac's family and in particular her father. James Brooks's opinion overshadows nearly everything Isaac thinks about herself. She thinks she's a bad kid because her father thinks she is a bad kid. She thinks she is a disappointment because her father thinks she is a disappointment. She gets mad at herself for making mistakes because her father gets mad at her for making mistakes. There is no room for her to address being trans in this house. There is perhaps not even room for her to look at being trans in this house. And then her father and her sister die and the oppressive weight of her father's judgment is replaced by the oppressive weight of overwhelming grief and needing to care for her mother. There is no room in this house for a girl to discover she is a girl!!!
So she has to get out of Deadwood to discover herself. Except by then it's not going to be easy, at all, to address things she's spent minimum four years repressing with all her might, particularly things that are so tied up in her abuse. I was talking with a friend about this yesterday but one thing about being an abused kid is that it's kind of embarrassing to grapple with. If you bring it up you're making a fuss and that's embarrassing and if it happens it's probably your fault and that's embarrassing and if you're a bad kid to begin with and you complain about your dad locking you in your room? Well that's just embarrassing.
But you can't be embarrassed about transitioning. You can be insecure and pessimistic and hate the in-between results but you can't be embarrassed. Transitioning of your own volition and desire requires a base level of truth and confidence that denies embarrassment on a foundational level. It requires control over your self, sometimes for the first time in your life. And Isaac desperately needs something she's in control of, after having her life ripped away and brought to Deadwood where she only had three friends who saw the things she did and a family that stopped loving her and then even that was all ripped away too. She needs something she can control, and I think she needs something she can't hide the way she never tells anyone about her abuse.
She's already got so much trans coding/implications going on that it's again the logical conclusion to me: an Isaac who lives and escapes Deadwood and heals as much as she can is one who cracks her egg and transitions. And inversely, an Isaac who acts on her trans coding/implications and transitions is one who lives to escape Deadwood and heals as much as she can.
