Trans Peter Parker Study

Hello! And thank you so much for following me or visiting this blog!

As you may have already noticed, I’m doing a thesis, and to complete it, I need as many people as possible to answer this survey on transidentity in fandoms. I would be forever grateful if you could answer it and share it !

Hope you all have a nice day,

“alright guys, let’s wrap this up, it’s a school night.”

Also Trans!Spider-man is a great headcanon!!

Ow, Peter thought, struggling to make his way up the sheer face of the building, all the while ignore the bleeding cut on his side. The last time I snuck in like this was the night Ned found out. He was trying to distract himself in any way he could, so that he wouldn’t fall of the building, or something. He didn’t actually know if that would be possible.

“Karen, would it be possible for me to fall off the building?” he asked, though he was afraid of the answer.

“In your current state, you are not likely to fall off the building,” she replied in that crisp robot voice she had.

Peter couldn’t suppress the eye roll. ‘Not likely’ was not the answer he had been hoping for. “Thanks, Karen,” he said dryly.

johnny storm takes blockers for several years and starts testosterone at around 15, and he has a flat enough chest where he doesn’t even really need top surgery. so by the time he gets his powers and gets famous from them at around age 19, he is never misgendered because he looks and acts so stereotypically male and nobody has ever known he was anything else, besides the fantastic four. and he never bothers to correct people when they assume he’s a cis guy because he doesn’t feel like it’s anyone’s business but his own. truthfully he feels bad. if he came out as trans then he could probably really help the lgbt+ community, show them that if he can be a hero then so can they. he knows this. but he just isn’t ready.

Me, the local non binary, adding to the trans Spider-Man hcs. 

-Figured out he was trans early on and started presenting as male very quickly. -Was smart enough to not wear a binder under his homemade Spidey suit. Wore a pretty snug sports bra instead. 

-Tony didn’t know he was trans, so this dummy wore his binder under the new suit. Fighting Captain fucking America 

-Iron dad found out and nearly strangled him, because “I told you not to do anything I would do." 

-Tony immediately spends like 3 days straight, making a fight safe binder that expands so he can breathe and swing w/o sacrificing his flatness. He makes like 3. A tan one, a black one and a spider print one.

-Basically so they replace his old ones, so he doesn’t have to change his binder when he puts on the suit. 

-Def goes to pride as Spider-Man, def has a giant trans flag cape 

-Iron Dad def starts paying for Pete’s college to May can focus on paying for Pete’s T 

-She wanted to fight him cause he was being super generous. The college thing was a compromise 

-As soon as he qualifies, Tony pays for Pete’s top surgery, because the binders are all high tech and shit but they’re not perfect. 

-Everyone’s wondering why Spiderman was missing for a week and Tony makes like a,string of announcement tweets. 

-"Spiderman is out of commission this week while he recovers from surgery" 

-"I would like to clarify that Spiderman was not injured, nor was his life in any danger" 

-"I wasn’t gonna say so without his permission but Spiderman has cleared me to announce, as a way to minimize your fears, that he has successfully recovered from Top surgery. You go Spiderman." 

-Honestly, Iron Dad is the best dad. 

 -Ned tweets about the whole thing from Pete’s pov but somehow people don’t figure it out, cause people are dumb. 

-MJ is a super supportive Partner. Like holy fuck. Lots of compliments. Lets face it, Peter is v handsome 

- More parades. 

 - Spidey fan mail from Trans and NonB kids. They always make him smile.

 -KAREN IS HIS DEADNAME AND NO ONE CAN CONVINCE ME OTHERWISE 

- MJ draws him shirtless a lot, not because she’s like fetishy or something but like after his Top surgery he’s always taking his shirt off. At least at home. 

-"Draw me pretty MJ” “Go fuck yourself.” (joking ofc) 

-Flash is like the only one that cares he’s trans. Literally everyone else has no probs with it. They use his proper pronouns and everything. (Even Flash really has no prob with it tbh, he just thinks that being an ass makes him look cool) 

-I see all these HC about Pete having the worst periods and being like, bed ridden for 5 days. But like, with his healing factor I bet he’d have a pretty average period. Maybe some backache but MJ is good at massages. 

-The worst part about his periods are the dysphoria but being called Spider-Man legit helps a lot. Plus, you know, MJ is the best partner ever. (See: “You’re the most handsome boy I’ve met, fuckwad” “Thanks MJ”) 

-Tried to cut his hair short on his own when he was younger. It was a deeeesaster. But the stylist did a great job fixing it into the stylish mop it is now. 

-Before he came out to Ben and May he started binding with bandages like a moron. -Ben figured it out pretty quickly and nearly smacked Pete upside the head for being dumb and putting his health at risk. 

-Buys him a binder the next day. 

-His legal name change comes after Ben is killed to he takes Benjamin as his middle name. Such a sweetheart.

 Okay, I’m done.

 (not my gif)

(This ask is so nice omg)
This kinda turned into Peter/Ned/Michelle headcanons my bad, if it’s not what you were wanting I can try again!

damn u right!! but okay- I’ve actually been meaning to talk about my trans Steve headcanon for quite some time now, so I’m just gonna info-dump a bunch of trans history and MCU interpretations right here. SO:

First of all, the setup of Steve Rogers as a short, scrawny boy who’s bullied and beat up all the time fits easily with how a trans man in the 1940s might have lived. This scene from Captain America: The First Avenger (2011) honestly looks like that cliche trans art trope where it’s like: “trans person looks in the mirror and their reflection is the right gender”. you know the one.

Later in that same scene, Bucky outright says that the reason he thinks Steve is joining the war is to “prove himself.” You could totally interpret this as Steve trying to shove himself into the absolute most masculine role in his society in order to reaffirm his own gender identity. 

Bucky is also incredibly worried about the consequences Steve will face if he is “discovered falsifying enlistment documents”. If you headcanon Steve as a trans man, this adds new depth to the stakes. Instead of lying about his respiratory issues and hometown, Steve would be lying about his sex assigned at birth. Which, given the state of the US in 1943, would’ve had even harsher punishment.

It’s also interesting that Dr. Abraham Erskine (the man who accepts Steve into the military) is a German scientist. In the early 1900s, the Germans were at the forefront of medical treatment for trans people. The first clinic to treat transgender people (Magnus Hirschfeld’s ‘Institute for Sexology’) opened in Germany in 1919. But as the Nazis came to power in the 1930s, many of the German scientists at this clinic migrated to the US to treat the trans people here. 

Steve is recruited by Dr. Abraham Erskine in 1943, which would be congruent with the time the German scientists from the ‘Institute for Sexology’ immigrated to the US. So, to clarify: a German-American doctor spends his life researching and creating a serum that instantly masculinized Steve via intra-muscular injection. I would like to point out that for trans men, testosterone is administered the same way. Also, this timeline just so happens to line up with a key point in the history of transgender medical treatment. Huh. Interesting.

In addition, the following quote by Dr. Abraham Erskine can easily lend itself to a discussion on transmasculinity:

“…the strong man who has known power all his life, may lose respect for that power, but a weak man knows the value of strength, and knows… compassion.”

and– hey, I just wanna point out the… interesting parallel… between the flag pole scene in Captain America: The First Avenger (2011)

and the arrow scene in Mulan (1998)

…like wow… okay. there’s actually a lot of parallels between these two movies, (except in Mulan the protagonist enters the ‘male’ gender role out of necessity whereas Steve does so by desire, differentiating between a cross-dresser and a trans man) but I won’t go there today. nope.

Then the introduction of Peggy Carter leads Steve to question his existing perceptions of gender roles. He admits that “I guess I just don’t know why you’d join the army if you were… a woman” which, under this trans interpretation, could be Steve projecting his own relationship with gendered aspirations onto Peggy.

And god, that’s not even delving into how easily his ‘transformation sequence’ could fall into a trans narrative.

In the second act of the film when a woman hits on him, Steve responds with visible discomfort. When he first realizes that she’s hitting on him, his immediate reaction is to cover his chest.

The First Avenger mentions Steve’s lack of romantic/sexual experience many times throughout the film. Steve passes it off as ‘not having found the right partner yet’ but hypothetically– if he were a trans man, that could be another reason for his fear of sexual intimacy. If he’s #stealth and passing as male, then any form of sexual intimacy could risk his reputation and his ability to remain in the military. 

Oh, and did I mention? Statistically speaking, approximately 20% of the US transgender population serves (or has served) in the military. This is over double the rate of the cisgender population. So, tbh, it’s not unrealistic to have a trans character so adamant about enlistment, patriotism, or military life.