Bridget (GG Strive) gender

blindVigil said:

Technically, nothing's been decided yet. Until evazion makes a call, the status quo will be maintained, and the discussion will remain open for as long as people feel like chiming in. We're not still tagging her as a boy because we've decided we're not going to do anything about it, we're just doing it because we were already doing it. You don't start changing things before the discussion is over, right?

Read the last part of my reply. <3

This may be a temporary fix, but until then it's clear that they want us to tag 1boy. But that begs the question about other trans characters who are canon, but that's a fight for another day.

sadodere said:

Read the last part of my reply. <3

This may be a temporary fix, but until then it's clear that they want us to tag 1boy. But that begs the question about other trans characters who are canon, but that's a fight for another day.

It's not up to you to decide if the rest of us can continue to argue about this if we choose. We can and will continue to "beat this dead horse" for as long as we have the patience to do so.

If you're not going to be productive in this thread, please stop replying to it.

blindVigil said:

It's not up to you to decide if the rest of us can continue to argue about this if we choose. We can and will continue to "beat this dead horse" for as long as we have the patience to do so.

If you're not going to be productive in this thread, please atop replying to it.

I know that, and I was talking to that specific user who was being weird about "catering to specific sides" in this thread. I'm only picking up on what NNT said in the wiki for transgender (https://danbooru.donmai.us/wiki_pages/transgender.html ).

Love how you only reply to me still. This thread isn't about our stupid argument, so stop holding a bias and clogging up the replies here. I wasn't talking to you.

I only wrote that description to reflect what was in the previous wiki for what is now gender transitioning, and to not leave that page empty. Don't take it for a statement on this topic.

nonamethanks said:

I only wrote that description to reflect what was in the previous wiki for what is now gender transitioning, and to not leave that page empty. Don't take it for a statement on this topic.

-

Danbooru is a visual tagging gallery, and it's impossible to tell from a picture what a character's thoughts are, so the current policy is to tag the character's biological sex for 1boy/1girl/character count tags.

I was referring to this part? Is that not about this conversation?

Again, I said temporary fix. I know it isn't an official thing.

Are the chances of this thread being locked again slim?

The topic was reopened so that people can continue to discuss the issue after having cooled down from the previous bickering. As long as it remains civil and both sides don't start throwing around insults again I see no reason to lock it.

Note that the wiki page says "current policy". This topic exists precisely to decide whether to change that policy.

sadodere said:

Are the chances of this thread being locked again slim?

Do you want it to be locked? Why would we lock it? Why are you so insistent on not allowing people to continue this discussion?

I already told you nothing's been decided, there is no "quick fix" we're just doing what we were already doing until a decision is made to the contrary

nonamethanks said:

The topic was reopened so that people can continue to discuss the issue after having cooled down from the previous bickering. As long as it remains civil and both sides don't start throwing around insults again I see no reason to lock it.

Note that the wiki page says "current policy". This topic exists precisely to decide whether to change that policy.

I understand, I was confused as to why it was locked for some time. Thought it was going to be closed permanently. Sorry for the misunderstanding, orz

blindVigil said:

Do you want it to be locked? Why would we lock it? Why are you so insistent on not allowing people to continue this discussion?

I already told you nothing's been decided, there is no "quick fix" we're just doing what we were already doing until a decision is made to the contrary

It was locked a few days ago, that's why I was asking. It'd be hard to really comment any arguments people have if it were locked again, was just asking to see if this thread will stay up.

Diet_Soda said:

Agreed with the sentiment that JP fanbase attitudes should be a decisive factor. It's hard to dance around Danbooru's predominant supply of Bridget content being made by people who enjoy him as an otoko no ko, for people who enjoy him as an otoko no ko, and so far there's no indication at all of this changing: as mentioned a few posts back, if you look into sources of posts from Pixiv over half is tagged with 男の娘, and not a single one includes tags or descriptions you'd use for a girl. Twitter entries can't be gauged as accurately, but skimming artist interactions in replies yields similar results. Sure it's unfortunate for the odd western artwork of proudly trans Bridget to end up with "boy" slapped onto it, but this is a minuscule subset of posts and a necessary sacrifice to keep the tag from spiraling into an inconsistent mess.

Were Bridget a newly created, unambiguously trans character, I'd have no issue with tagging her as female on SFW pictures Lily Hoshikawa-style. But apparently they're neither and holding tight onto their status as a beloved otoko no ko icon, which I feel should be respected over Western nomenclature, given the nature of this site. (And however easy it may be to lump every "cope" and dissenting voice together as bigotry, keep in mind how for a significant part of the fanbase, it's not so much anger at the introduction of a trans character as heartache over the perceived loss of a femboy one, which is understandable IMO. I say let them keep this one, they've earned it.)

Hello !

I will try to address the issues with some of the logic here :

-Should we really base our opinion on Japan though ? Even more concerning such territory that is highly social and discriminatory ? Let's not forget that Japan has one of the highest suicide rate, that life for female (and it is just one example) is a living hell and worse it's hard to even talk about those things, even if it is getting better.
-While usually I agree that we should always try to see the world from other's perspective, it is purely from a compassion and understanding point. Kinda like in science you always try to prove you are wrong, it is a method to understand the world. But here, I've got a problem because we see the world, once again, throught not the trans people (or even the LGBT), we see it throught the eyes of people that always have the same answer "Yeah but let's just keep things how they are" or "trans is just a phase don't worry". Which, in my book, is not really cool and missing the perspective of the trans people out there while trying to use the view of everyone except them. And, well, aren't they the first concerned about this ?
-We can apply exactly this to every website. Be it Pixiv or anything really. I have yet to discover a website that for once try to look from the eyes of the discriminated, living, breathing person's that have feelings.
-I am 100% on your line with "Why would they make Bridget a girl now ?". She was indeed a cool character that suplexed the usual way men are described. But then, if I am sad on this point, I find the character development to be fantastic. Showing that mistakes happen. That being forced sucks (concerning her parents) and at the end of the day, the choice is up to you and you should be the only one to decide about yourself. Little thought experiment : Have you already been forced to do something you like ? Did it feel good even if you like it ? Studies have shown that a lot of person don't like being forced even if they like the thing they are forced into.

All of this to say : I know that a lot of people will be surprised with Bridget being tagged as 1girl. But the fact is that on most images she looks like one most of the time for the Tag What You See rule. Even then, is gender only what you have in your pants ? Or chromosomes ? Because this brings even more question and a lot of suffering (Gender dysphoria for example). Even science is not as strict as "These is 2 sex, male and female".
She also feels like a girl, so denying that is... well kinda rude for those that are trans (suffering, gender dysphoria for example).

And even THEN, the way the trans tag works is just not it at all. I liked this site for several year, and it is such suffering to see such conservative forces to act when we could offer beautiful things and keep people from killing themselves because of misrepresentation or saying "Yeah it's just a phase you will grow out of this". Because this is what we are talking about. Deaths. Daily deaths. And murder also...

On this sad note, I'm going to cry a bit lol.

Have a nice day you all. I really hope that this site will offer something beautiful.

Edit : I mistakenly wrote "the choice is up to you" talking about trans identity, which is not really how it works. It has more to do with feelings (mainly even if not always I guess) which are not controllable.

Nobody is going to take your argument seriously if you start a paragraph with

Let's not forget that Japan has one of the highest suicide rate

You are on a platform which is heavily based on japanese culture.

Tag definition "transgender" said:
Danbooru is a visual tagging gallery, and it's impossible to tell from a picture what a character's thoughts are, so the current policy is to tag the character's biological sex for 1boy/1girl/character count tags.

While that is not official policy it is more or less what I would agree on to be so. Here it's not even the character's thoughts but so much personal interpretation of such but for sake of argument and others, let's presume it's canon. That is still poor justification for repurposing the *girl and *boy tags and pretty much any other related like futa_on_male, blindVigil already made a good list of where their usefulness is damaged. If the content is at strong disagreement to what searches are returning then tagging isn't doing its job, and for most searching it isn't about identity and should not be construed as such anyway.

Also it's been suggested to only do so for SFW images but that makes about as much sense as it would to tag trap characters based on appearance. It would be impossible to do consistently, but it would also break searching for those who are explicitly searching for hetero or otoko_no_ko. Maybe there are those who want to also search for trans but that has to keep in mind it's not the main use case or worth breaking existing searches.

Diet Soda said:
it's not so much anger at the introduction of a trans character as heartache over the perceived loss of a femboy one

This deserves repeating because yes, 1girl otoko_no_ko solo would be nonsensical, but this is also a hairball for future artwork tagging since you cannot usually assume it's supposed to be based on whatever the current information is.

poor_disp said:

Nobody is going to take your argument seriously if you start a paragraph with

You are on a platform which is heavily based on japanese culture.

To you, does it mean we should base our culture on suicide rate too ? Like it is nothing then and life doesn't matter ?

Yoto_tata said:

To you, does it mean we should base our culture on suicide rate too ? Like it is nothing then and life doesn't matter ?

I fail to understand exactly what Japan's suicide rate has to do with how an imageboard is going to tag a femboy character.

Yoto_tata said:

To you, does it mean we should base our culture on suicide rate too ? Like it is nothing then and life doesn't matter ?

I am going to be blunt and probably rude from your point of view: you've consumed too much internet garbage and need to have a reality check. Consider taking a sabbatical from the internet and going into the real world. Anime is supposed to be escapism, not reality. None of these characters is real, nor will they ever be. You are clearly in a poor mental state, so I am going to permaban you for your own good if you reply to this topic again. Please seek help.

g6672D said:

While that is not official policy it is more or less what I would agree on to be so. Here it's not even the character's thoughts but so much personal interpretation of such but for sake of argument and others, let's presume it's canon. That is still poor justification for repurposing the *girl and *boy tags and pretty much any other related like futa_on_male, blindVigil already made a good list of where their usefulness is damaged. If the content is at strong disagreement to what searches are returning then tagging isn't doing its job, and for most searching it isn't about identity and should not be construed as such anyway.

Also it's been suggested to only do so for SFW images but that makes about as much sense as it would to tag trap characters based on appearance. It would be impossible to do consistently, but it would also break searching for those who are explicitly searching for hetero or otoko_no_ko. Maybe there are those who want to also search for trans but that has to keep in mind it's not the main use case or worth breaking existing searches.

This deserves repeating because yes, 1girl otoko_no_ko solo would be nonsensical, but this is also a hairball for future artwork tagging since you cannot usually assume it's supposed to be based on whatever the current information is.

g6672D said :
While that is not official policy it is more or less what I would agree on to be so

And why not discuss about it ? Because to me this is also the goal of this thread. Isn't it ? A more broad discussion about how poor transgender characters are represented on Danbooru ?

If the content is at strong disagreement to what searches are returning then tagging isn't doing its job, and for most searching it isn't about identity and should not be construed as such anyway.

EXACTLY, I couldn't have said it better ! If the content is at strong disagreement. And well, it looks like a lot of person are in fact talking in favor of a different use for trans tag, right there at this moment, isn't it ? Otherwise this thread would've been closed.

"It isn't about identity"... weell, this isn't false per say. Also is it 100% true ? There are clearly some identity involved in some tags, aren't they ? So I guess that isn't exactly true. We can even talk about how otoko_no_ko or futa are also used as an identity. We search indeed at some characteristics that are a part of identity and visual identity. And we can talk about how dark-skin is a tag which is strongly associated with identity, isn't it ?

it's not so much anger at the introduction of a trans character as heartache over the perceived loss of a femboy one

Heartache is already kinda strange, putting an emphasis that hurt people because they are trans (aka "I just lost my son" or worse "I just lost my child" as if they were so different changing gender). It doesn't mean it exist, it surely does. Now I have a question for you : Why the gender identity such a violent topic ? Because, at it's core there is just people changing gender and... like that's all ? They are alive, the same, probably even in a better condition since they are more in line with who they are... so, why so much rejection, even there ?

g6672D said :
Also it's been suggested to only do so for SFW images but that makes about as much sense as it would to tag trap characters based on appearance. It would be impossible to do consistently, but it would also break searching for those who are explicitly searching for hetero or otoko_no_ko. Maybe there are those who want to also search for trans but that has to keep in mind it's not the main use case or worth breaking existing searches.

There is one counter argument :
-You have I think 100,000 white, hetero, cis, and everything that is considered "in norm" in terms of character and... we cannot have ONE ? I mean... you are not going to be overflooded either... there will be a trans character once in a blue moon, is this that big of a deal to you ? And again, some people (including myself) ARE ACTIVELY searching with identity in mind. (for the argument that came before) And I am not the only one for sure.

nonamethanks said:

I am going to be blunt and probably rude from your point of view: you've consumed too much internet garbage and need to have a reality check. Consider taking a sabbatical from the internet and going into the real world. Anime is supposed to be escapism, not reality. None of these characters is real, nor will they ever be. You are clearly in a poor mental state, so I am going to permaban you for your own good if you reply to this topic again. Please seek help.

I know you will ban me either way so, to end this :

I literally work at an hospital, I have my reality check every day. Mental health is as important, if not more, than physical health.

People die because of misrepresentation. You don't want to ear it I understand, it probably hurts you.
But then ask yourself this : Why is this so hard to accept more representation for everybody ? It's not like there will not be any white male character anymore. It's just egality and equity.

Wish you the very best and hope someday you will find someone who you love and will listen to.

If you want to point at the suicide rates, point at them in discussions on the Japanese work ethic, or somewhere else where that'd be on-topic. This is a discussion on whether or not a feminine-looking character that may-or-may-not-be-either-a-transgirl-or-just-a-femboy should be tagged as a man or not. We should listen to the Japanese voices, as this is the original region of the game's release, and the country of the authors' origin, as far as I am aware. If we *really* want to go this route, silencing the voices of non-white authors can be considered problematic as well, even if the country in question has its problems (and, to be fair, *all* countries have their own more-or-less unique problems).
Yes, there are transgender people in real life, and I do not consider equating them to their sex/set of genitals to be worthwhile, or even in good taste. However, Bridget is: a) fictional - not a real person, thus not affected by real-life harassment or potential misgendering, b) not even particularly playing into stereotypes that can be considered harmful, and, most importantly, c) not necessarily actually canonically transgender (as outlined above with evidence of both character lines and attitudes within the domestic fanbase).

If you want to argue for importance of transgender and related characters... you can! But please pick a different place, such as an actual social media platform (Twitter, Tumblr, Reddit).

--------

While so far most signs still point at Bridget being a cisgender crossdresser, and I do agree with tagging them as male in most cases, I think it'd be worthwhile considering in which instances they might end up tagged as female, instead. I can think of three scenarios that might call for it, ordered from most easily agreeable to least:
1) Bridget with added breasts and/or a vagina, similar to Astolfo's post #4422562.
That'd be simply a "genderbent" Bridget. There are tons of instances like this, so no point dwelling on that.
2) The image's author referring to Bridget as female, be it in commentary or directly in the image.
Unless there is a clear joke on the "femboy says he's a girl/is mistaken for a girl" trope, it's safe to assume that the artist's intent would be to portray Bridget as a girl, even if they end up looking exactly the same.
3) Bridget presented with a transgender flag.
This one might be the most iffy, but in general - a lot of western artists, especially from more progressive circles, already latched onto the headcanon. It might not be accurate, but then again, drawing them with breasts wouldn't be either. A transgender flag would in most instances indicate that the artist sees them as a transgirl, and since they already look feminine, if there are no signs that would speak against it (such as a bulge), I'd go for it.

1) Bridget with added breasts and/or a vagina, similar to Astolfo's post #4422562.
That'd be simply a "genderbent" Bridget. There are tons of instances like this, so no point dwelling on that.

Vagina + Breasts = rule63 Bridget
Breasts alone make it a "shemale" Bridget at best.

2) The image's author referring to Bridget as female, be it in commentary or directly in the image.
Unless there is a clear joke on the "femboy says he's a girl/is mistaken for a girl" trope, it's safe to assume that the artist's intent would be to portray Bridget as a girl, even if they end up looking exactly the same.

So if an author draws Bridget with his cock and balls hanging out, but in a tweet he says "It's a girl guys!" then you want to tag it as a girl? Hard no.

3) Bridget presented with a transgender flag.

And this changes his sex.... how?
Unless it's explicitly supposed to be rule63 of the character, it's just a dude posing with a flag.

Yoto_tata said:

And why not discuss about it ? Because to me this is also the goal of this thread. Isn't it ? A more broad discussion about how poor transgender characters are represented on Danbooru ?

EXACTLY, I couldn't have said it better ! If the content is at strong disagreement. And well, it looks like a lot of person are in fact talking in favor of a different use for trans tag, right there at this moment, isn't it ? Otherwise this thread would've been closed.

"It isn't about identity"... weell, this isn't false per say. Also is it 100% true ? There are clearly some identity involved in some tags, aren't they ? So I guess that isn't exactly true. We can even talk about how otoko_no_ko or futa are also used as an identity. We search indeed at some characteristics that are a part of identity and visual identity. And we can talk about how dark-skin is a tag which is strongly associated with identity, isn't it ?

Heartache is already kinda strange, putting an emphasis that hurt people because they are trans (aka "I just lost my son" or worse "I just lost my child" as if they were so different changing gender). It doesn't mean it exist, it surely does. Now I have a question for you : Why the gender identity such a violent topic ? Because, at it's core there is just people changing gender and... like that's all ? They are alive, the same, probably even in a better condition since they are more in line with who they are... so, why so much rejection, even there ?

There is one counter argument :
-You have I think 100,000 white, hetero, cis, and everything that is considered "in norm" in terms of character and... we cannot have ONE ? I mean... you are not going to be overflooded either... there will be a trans character once in a blue moon, is this that big of a deal to you ? And again, some people (including myself) ARE ACTIVELY searching with identity in mind. (for the argument that came before) And I am not the only one for sure.

I think that the problem here isn't the existence of a trans character, bit the fact that the character in question is Bridget. For years, 20 years, this character was known as an Otoko-no-ko, and that still is the image people have of them. The people voting for Bridget in Japan, where he got the first place in pools, voted thinking that they were calling a boy to the game, the people playing the old games played with a boy, the people who made pictures, fanfics, discourse, thought that they were a boy. During a long time there was no doubt that this was a male character, and it was the male parts that mande them Charmin. We also have to take into account internet and Otaku culture here, even people who have never played Guilty Gear know about Bridget, because during a long time they were a sensation, they were the one to teach a generation that boys can be cute, it's because of them that the term "Trap" is used on the western sphere.
So it's not that people don't want to give the trans community a character or that people want to deny others of their desire of representation, it's just that this character is seem as a boy, and changing their tag would cause problems for the people coming here, which in their majority want to see Bridget on the 1boy, Otoko-no-ko, tag.