Magic the Gathering and LGBT Representation

I was a huge Magic the Gathering player. I own hundreds of cards, made multiple decks, and continue to play, although less frequently, with my friends. When I lived in London, I would stop by Forbidden Planet everyday on the way home from work to pick up a new booster pack. Looking back, it’s sad and scary how much money I spent on these cards, especially given my current post-college grad money position. Magic the Gathering allowed me to enter a world filled with badass warriors, dragons, magic, dimension hoping, and innumerable different creatures. Not only that, it gave me, though the card game itself, an agency and role to play in this well-crafted (if not always well-written) world. Yet over the past few years, I've grown away from Magic the Gathering, mostly due to lack of time and money. Yet Magic the Gathering, along with the fantasy it created and the community it fostered for me in the real world, will always hold a place in my heart.

Sooooooooo many Magic cards.....

 So when I logged online one day a few months ago to find that Magic the Gathering become a talking point, I was surprised and interested. I was even more surprised to learn that the issue was one that was near and dear to my heart. Magic the Gathering had introduced a their first transgendered character in the form of “Alesha, Who Smiles at Death.”

As a transwoman myself, I was extremely interested in this new character. I’m always down for more LGBT representation, especially when I myself consider myself a part of the B and the T. The fact that she was in an epic fantasy world, a genre that has historically ignored women, was even more interesting. While Magic The Gathering has always had strong female characters and women have appeared as strong characters in mainstream epic fantasy, such as Lord of the Rings’ Eowyn, Dragonlance’s Bloodmoon or Kitiara, and Aria or Daenerys in Game of Thrones, they typically are side characters who compliment or are even completely separate from their male counterparts’ separate, and usually more important, quest (See Tolkein’s totally male Fellowship of the Ring or completely male filled The Hobbit). So I decided to take a look at Alesha and see how they would tackle trans issues in an epic fantasy world. What I found surprised me.

What I found most important and most surprising is that Alesha’s transgendered background is almost completely a non-issue. Here is a passage from her story and the revealing of her transgendered origins at the age of 16:

She had been so different – only sixteen, a boy in everyone’s eyes but her own, about to choose and declare her name before the khan and all the Mardu.

The khan had walked among the warriors, hearing the tales of their glorious deeds. One by one, they declared their new war names, and each time, the khan shouted the names for all to hear. Each time, the horde shouted the name as one, shaking the earth.

Then the khan came to Alesha. She stood before him, snakes coiling in the pit of her stomach, and told how she had slain her first dragon. The khan nodded and asked her name.

“Alesha,” she said, as loudly as she could. Just Alesha, her grandmother’s name.

“Alesha!” the khan shouted, without a moment’s pause.

And the whole gathered horde shouted “Alesha!” in reply. The warriors of the Mardu shouted her name.

In that moment, if anyone had told her that in three years’ time she would be khan, she just might have dared to believe it.

After this section, Alesha’s transgendered nature becomes a non-issue. She is female and that is that. The understated way in which she is introduced is refreshing. Many times with characters who represent LGBT, the characters become simply that; representations. Nothing more or less. A gay character becomes singularly characterized by their one trait-they are gay. They sometimes have less personality outside of that single fact or, at the very least, much of their character development stems from their sexuality or gender identity.

Also, she's just damn cool

While many lesbian and gay characters are starting to avoid this trope (see Mitchell and Cameron in Modern Family as good example) many Bisexual and Transgendered characters still face this. Take a look at Laverine Cox’s character in Orange is the New Black or Jeffrey Tambor’s award winning turn in Transparent. Much has been made recently of these two transgendered characters in the mainstream, and rightly so. It’s extremely gratifying transgendered issues, specifically transwomen issues, are being showcased in a way that is catching the attention of the mainstream. However, for both of these characters, much of their character arcs revolve around their transgenderism, especially at first.

This also occurs much of the time with bisexual characters, where being bisexual becomes a main focus of their stories. I can only think of a handful of characters such as Prince Oberyn Martell in Game of Thrones, Captain Jack Harkness in Doctor Who, or Bo in Lost Girl who are bisexual and rarely, if ever, had arcs that specifically dealt with the fact that “oh, I’m bisexual.” For these characters, they love who they love. There almost always are important character arcs revolving around their relationships, but rarely does gender matter. That is how an LGBT character should be written.

Bisexual characters like Lost Girl's Bo are extremely important for LGBT representation

 As a bisexual transwoman myself, being transgendered and bisexual is an important part of my identity. There is no getting around that. But it is not all who I am and why I sometimes don’t bother to say that I am transgendered. I am by no means hiding, but I also wish for others to see me as more then just a transgendered person. There is much more to my personality and many more struggles that I face other then being transgendered.

I am not saying to completely disregard transgendered or bisexual issues in mainstream culture. In fact, I think characters found in works like Orange is the New Black and Transparent are incredibly important to begin a national/worldwide understanding of what transgendered people go though.  However, sometimes its nice to see a character who can be transgendered or bisexual but also be so much more then those singular identities, much like complex human beings in real life. Now it’s time for me to go build a Magic the Gathering deck around “Alesha, Who Smiles at Death.” Excuse me, I got money to spend.

(A small sidenote that I wished to bring up in this article but couldn’t find a good place to fit it. There as been little to no transmen representation in mainstream media, which is extremely disappointing. While transmen face very similar issues to transwomen, they also face very different struggles from their female counterparts. Their stories also deserve to be told and deserve a place in the current transgendered discussion. It’s sad and disappointing how often they are overlooked. This deserves an article of it’s own and probably will get one from me, but I wanted to at least mention it here.)