Supergirl - Season Four

Trans women are women. This is not up for debate.

 

Never in doubt.

Identifying as female doesn't change your genetics.

But identifying as female is enough to get these powers,

So the powers do not have to follow a cis female line, and do not have to correspond to cis female genetics only.

And those are the rules.

 

According to what rules? When trans people say they identify as a gender, most cis people don’t really understand that. It’s not like it’s some choice like identifying as a particular fan of something or some other group. I’ve noticed that it tends to be dismissed and even used at a way to mock. It’s something far deeper and has been there since early childhood. There’s scientific proof that trans women’s brains are identical to cis women’s and that’s even before going on hormones. Her power is based on dreaming and dreaming occurs in the brain. So since she was born with a female brain, she was able to have those powers passed down.

 

I meant the rules for how her powers were passed down, not the rules for what is trans. Sorry for the lack of clarity.

The article you had me read months ago said that after a few hundred autopsies, that trans women brains were different from cis men brains uniformly in the same way, and that trans men brains are different from cis women brains uniformly in the same way.

Which makes Transgender people genetically unique from Cis people, which I took to be gospel, because I trust you.

Googling shows a few studies between 2013 and 2018 that have MRI machines comparing how Cis vs Trans brains think, and it suggests similarities, so I guess that's true as well, which is new information to me.

(back to comic books)

How a brain works as an adult has little impact on a fetus the size of a grain of rice, or earlier when the sperm smashes into the egg, which is when Nia acquired these powers, because her parents DNA mixed (to make her) specifically one way with dream powers and not a trillion trillion other ways.

After today, I really don't think these super powers have anything to do with Naltorian genetics anymore because Nia's human and male father talked to the ghost of his dead wife in a dream, after earlier Nia's mum Isabel was realizing that it was her other daughter (Nia) who had the dream powers because she was having a dream conversation with Nia, when that's something only a dream girl can do.

Two new theories,

1. All prophetic dreams are given to dreamgirls by time travelling ghosts.

2. Nia doesn't have Naltorian dream powers, from her mother, she has Human dream powers from her father.

 

A possible analogy in terms of "rules" would be to the Green Lantern Corps. We've never had any explicited non-cis Lanterns AFAIK, but certainly we've had male female and other, alive and dead, organic and inorganic, humaniod and non-humanoid.... we've even had one or two avowed criminals (Jack T Chance being probably the best known).

The only real "rules" appear to psychological: you have to be "sentient" (in the Star definition, which is really sapient), a strong willpower, and "have the ability overcome great fear".

Perhaps the "Dreamer" powers work similarly, they look for an appropriate "female mind" (which statistically would have mostly been found in a female-at-birth body) rather than birth genetics being a factor?

 

Way back they said "once in a generation many of our women can dream the future" which is a weird way to phase any thing.

Tonight it's clarified that each female line has one dream girl per total collective spawning... Of course is this total spawning just from a dream girl, or a dream girl and her sisters and cousins as well who are latent or recessive?

If so then there is obviously an intelligence behind this, tapping dreamgirls, that there can be such a strict conservation of dream girls that dozens of women who share a grandparent or great grand parent are restricted to one dream girl per family per generation, especially when a few of those women might have had four great grand mothers who were dream girls from four different family lines.

Nia can't have children.

If an intelligence is handing out this power (I'm serious about the time travelling ghosts.) Then to maintain legacy even one of Nia's adopted children will get dream girl powers if the future needs saving.

 

I don't think it's that she suddenly hates aliens, more that she has a problem with more powerful people lording it over less powerful ones. Since J'onn is now a non-combatant and a pacifist, and since Brainy is more of a brain guy, I guess she's less concerned about their potential abuse of power.

I didn't quite realize it until last night, but you're exactly right -- the Dreamer powers are a function of the brain, and the genes and hormones that determine the gender of the brain are distinct from the ones that determine the anatomy of the body, so it should be the brain's identity that matters to whether she gets the powers. As well as to who she is as a person, which is why her sister was so wrong and cruel to say she was "not even a real woman." Of course she's a real woman, and her powers prove it.

I wish I could find the article I read recently that explained the complexity of how sex and gender are determined -- it sounds like some people here could benefit from reading it. As I recall, the gist of it is that there's no single global M/F switch, but multiple genes and hormones that influence toward maleness and others that influence toward femaleness, and it's the balance of the two that determines where you end up, which is why it's not just male or female but a whole spectrum of intermediate possibilities; and that the way the balance works out in the brain can be different from how it works out in the genitals or in the body as a whole, because there are different genes at play in the brain than elsewhere.

 

Alright. Maeve was full of herself. She's kind of like a heir to an huge inheritance who spends her childhood preparing and planning what to do with the inheritance, and talks about it as if it's some kind of familial manifest destiny...

So the mom's an alien who lived on other world. Did she have technology from her world that might account for the fact Nia got it....?

 

Well, since Nia was initially misidentified as male, Maeve and her parents mistakenly assumed that Maeve was the only daughter in the family and thus the only potential candidate for the power. Even when Nia transitioned, for all that her family tried to be accepting and understanding, clearly that ingrained preconception that Maeve was the only candidate for the powers remained. It's intriguing how deftly they're incorporating the fantasy element to tell a nuanced story about trans issues, to highlight how hard it can be for even well-meaning people to shake off preconceptions about gender.

As Awesome Possum and I just covered above, it doesn't need to be accounted for. Nia's brain was female from birth, regardless of the original outward appearance of her body. That's how transgenderism works. Nia and Maeve were both Isabel's daughters, so they were both equally likely to get the power.

 

I'm not sure you are really addressing my point about Maeve. Even if she was a only child, she was still full of herself.

the mom (I forgot the name already) didn't seem that surprised, and that concerned that Maeve wasn't exhibiting the dreams.... I suspect a part of her knew it was Nia.

 

Have we seen enough of it to actually be a cliche?

It's pretty much been a case of showing how the Russians are testing supergirlsky to see how strong she is and has only amounted to a few minutes of screen time.

 

I'm just saying she can't entirely be blamed, because as far as she knew as a child, she was guaranteed to receive the powers, so it was actually a very smart thing to do to study and prepare for using them. I'm not going to condemn someone for pursuing a calling with dedication and enthusiasm. Her real failing was not understanding transgenderism enough to realize that Nia was as much Isabel's daughter as she was.

I think they're Kaznians, or at least they're Russians operating in Kaznia. And the Supergirl clone is apparently being referred to behind the scenes as "Red Daughter," since she's inspired by the Superman: Red Son Elseworlds graphic novel.

 

^I'm not talking about her studying. I'm talking about how she was talking about what she believed was in her future. I thought her attitude were offputting even if she was right.

 

Whatever it is that makes trans people trans seems to happen in the womb, so she was always meant to have those powers just like she was always female.

That seemed more like her contacting him beyond the grave, not him having powers.

Or it could be the entire point of the episode that she got the powers because she was a female in her family. There doesn’t have to be a special exception or mental gymnastics to justify something that anyone who knows a trans person will tell you.

 

She's in Kaznia, not Russia.

Which today I learned, first showed up in the Superman Animated Series.

 

https://globalnews.ca/news/4223342/transgender-brain-scan-research/

Research has shown that the brain of a transgender person can match the gender they identify with.

 

Saw that last night.

How you think, isn't the same as what you think with.

 

If the powers are dreams, then they're probably connected to the brain.

 

What is that even supposed to mean? Your mind is your brain, you think the way you do because your brain works the way it does. It you hit your head hard enough, you’ll even think somewhat differently.

 

Focused magnetic resonance imaging shows your brain on a monitor. It reflects the measurement of electron activity and blood flow. A tech shows you dozens of pictures that evoke strong emotions like puppies or murder. On the monitor different parts of your brain are shown to glow depending on what part of your brain is reacting to the stimulus.

How cis men and cis women react is different.

The study shows that cis men and trans men react similar, and that cis women and trans women react similar, when confronted with identical stimulus.

That's how you think.

Brain architecture is different.

Cis women and Cis men have different brains.

The shape and of a trans male brain may be superficially more similar to a cis male brain, but this study, despite that, says that a trans male brain thinks more like a cis female brain, and a trans female brain thinks more like a cis female brain, when suggests (proves) that gender is independent of biology.

Although that article you gave me about autopsied transender brains, said that Trans brains were a third, and fourth type of brain dissimilar from cis female and cis male.