"Trans men have male privilege."

These are the responses I got when I posted a roommate search as a trans guy.

(EDIT- forgot to add this special one)

*

Last time I moved in with someone who didn't know I was trans, once they found out things gradually started getting weird. We got into an argument because they didn't think a trans guy should wear what I was wearing one day. One of them started shoving me around until I was on the ground, right next to the stairs. Then as I was trying to move out he kept blocking my path and chasing me around the parking lot. So yeah, I'm gonna let someone know before I move in that I'm trans.

And they had the gall to self-insert with Mike and say, “Hey guys—imagine an ending where she didn’t die! Imagine an ending where she was finally free after a lifetime of being imprisoned and in hiding!” Oh, but even in this hypothetical “good” ending, her brown sister still dies. Of course.

They very lazily resolved Jane’s fear that she was a monster, and then had her call the next generation of innocent abused children like her “more monsters” which was entirely out of character.

The children who did get their happy ending were “normal” and shoe-horned into the final season.

We talk about the Will Byers humiliation ritual… what about the Jane Hopper humiliation ritual?

After a fight in which her boyfriend triggered memories of her abuser (while too busy focussing on his “relationship” problems with his platonic bestie) he brings her cold eggos and refuses to apologise for not being supportive of her struggles. He makes it about him. He calls her ridiculous. She begs for him to verbalise his affection for her—write it even—and is then thrown into another prison where she is re-traumatised by her abuser, only for said boyfriend to chauffeur her away after days of homoromantic heart to hearts with his best friend.

They had her wear a fucking collar. Her abuser was the one to unlock it. They didn’t even let her remove her own literal and metaphorical shackles.

Mike professes to her while kneeling at a fucking pizza dough freezer as she’s being choked out. No eye contact. No intimacy. Because his gay best friend reminded him to. She never even gets to respond to this monologue in the canon series, because I guess her feelings don’t actually matter.

Even in her final moments before death, her character was reduced to her love story with the boy who found her in the woods and kept her in his basement. And he still couldn’t say “I love you” back for some reason.

She was never free. She went from being trapped in the lab, to being hidden in Mike’s basement, to being hidden in Hopper’s cabin. She got in trouble and yelled at for leaving these confined spaces and doing normal teenage things. The only exception was when she made herself useful to them by using her powers, endangering herself, and often to the point of physical exhaustion.

Her father figure supposedly learned to allow her more freedom at the end of season 3, but he returns to being over-protective, angry and condescending at the beginning of season 5, undoing all character development.

And we’re expected to thank these men for “taking care of her” all these years, when everything she ever accomplished was no thanks to them but to her own merit, her own desire to do good, her own zest for a life and freedom she never got to have.

Was she… really just used as a tool to help Hopper process his daughter’s death? Was she used as plot armour to ensure our characters could survive the supernatural antagonists? Was she used to give Mike Wheeler something to do other than play games in his basement?