I grew up in a world that is still trying to wrap its brain around the concept of gender fluidity and what it meant to be transgender. At the time, almost every depiction of a transgender person served as a punchline.
Comics were a way for me to escape reality and experience the joys and struggles of others for a change. And for someone struggling with identity issues, I found myself reading A LOT. Without understanding why, I attracted Marvel’s women – She-Hulk, Black Widow, Scarlet Witch … I could see myself in these heroes, despite the world telling me I could not.
When I got to college, there were even more heroes I could relate to. Women like America Chavez, Anya Corazon and Kamala Khan. But it would be years before I found a character I could identify with so much that it helped me come to terms with the weight of the gender dysphoria I had been carrying for over 20 years.
In 2016, I packed my whole life and moved halfway across the country to New York City. Despite being away from everything I knew as home, I had it all: the dream job, in the dream city, with a partner I was sure I would marry. But something still felt … off.
Around the same time, Tom King and Gabriel Hernandez Walta had an ongoing cartoon called VISION (2015). In it, the titular synthezoid Avenger moves to the suburbs, creating a family to better humanize itself, including a set of twins, his son Vin and daughter Vivian.
I looked at Viv and her story almost immediately. She was a synthezoid, programmed to be a sixteen-year-old girl. She even had specific instructions on what to wear and how to behave. But in her mind, she and her brother Vin were just normal teenagers. Viv was quickly confronted with the reality of her differences when she started high school. She was greeted with glances, questions and the whispers of her peers. It was not lost on me that the other students, teachers, and parents did not perceive her as a girl, but rather an android who was trying to “pass” as one.