Neopia and Gender, Or Shinko Reads Too Deeply Into Things

[Shinko]

Putting this in D&D because potentially heavy topic with real world parallels.

Anybody who has done medieval collabs with me can tell you I overthink things. So hold on to your britches because here comes some classic Shinko Overthinking Things.

So last night I mentioned that I got myself an ixi transmogrification potion (okay, I didn't mention that but it was implied by my stating that I sunk money into it- I'm pretty sure you're still not allowed to buy neopets for neopoints). I used it on my cloud Zafara, Prci, who was male. Prci as a Zaf had never had a character, he just chilled on one of my side accounts and existed. After I mutated him into an ixi, however, I was trying to think of a story for the character and found myself persistently assigning female gender pronouns. I kept reminding myself Prci was male, and yet I kept thinking of the ixi as "she" and "her."

I eventually conceded defeat, accepted that the character clearly wanted to be female, and swapped her over to my lab ray account. See if you use the lab ray you can get the lab ray scientist as a battledome opponent, and said scientist is very obliging about throwing strange potions at you in battle. Said potions will change your pet's gender without having to take risks with the lab ray itself, or sink millions of neopoints into buying a strange potion. It's all very convenient.

Only a few hours later, after I already changed Prci officially into a female ixi, did it occur to me that perhaps more than being a female from birth, the ixi was trying to tell me that she was trans. (And yes- I know TNT would likely never let such a thing show up on the Neopian Times or anywhere onsite because they're stupid squeamish about everything and even romance isn't allowed, but humor me. We're not talking meta here, we're talking Neopia in-context.)

Anyway, this got me to thinking- in a universe where the lab ray and strange potions are arguably canon, I wonder what sort of politics and social whosiwhatsits would be attached to wanting to change one's gender or identify outside of their biologically assigned sex. If any.

Thoughts?

[Coaster]

From the NT comics I've read about the topic, the implication is that every pet is cis and their gender is forcibly changed by the lab ray with bad mental health outcomes as a result, or else their gender at creation is irrelevant and owners don't acknowledge that there was ever a change. But that's kind of symptomatic of a lack of awareness in culture to begin with.

As far as my own pets, I do headcanon at least one as trans (and there was an item on the site that in times past as a glitch could change your pet's gender to female, adding to the lab/potion methods); I really doubt official or NT-accepted material would accept work that addresses transgender/non-binary pets directly and makes a point about it, though.

But I do like to think that in a world where one can grow or trim eyelashes without much fanfare, play with any toy or grooming item without askance looks, and in the few cases where there is wider dimorphism (Elderly, Royal, Usuki/Quiguki), a gender change doesn't change the rest of the body and all the clothes are compatible regardless... I would assume that gender roles are conveniently adhered to by characters when they feel like it, but otherwise they kind of just let each pet do their own thing and gender isn't a super relevant construct compared to in the real world.

(EDIT: For the sake of simplicity, and since this is how it's treated all over the site, I refer to "gender" as a euphemism for sex characteristics since it's used fairly synonymously, not gender identity which it seems is ultimately in the hands of the owner to choose given site mechanics.)

[Breakingchains]

I think how it would affect Neopian culture probably depends heavily on what that potion is actually doing. All we have is a short pink or blue stab of text to tell us what's going on and use of the word "gender" circa 1999-ish. Which was pretty intuitive to me when I was eleven, but has since ceased to be so.

So, without putting too fine a point on it, are the changes from a "strange potion" biological or psychological or both? (If it's biological, that opens its own can of worms because a whole lot of holes got poked in the idea of a biological sex binary while some people weren't lookin', but I digress...) And when did the ability to make these changes come about--were strange potions available from the dawn of society? Since a few hundred years ago? Since yesterday? How widely available are they to the general public?

I could try to tackle this more seriously as a worldbuilding issue, but I suspect it'd come around to somewhere like "and why are they all dressed like that in a world without Kacheek Jesus" and nobody wants that. xD But I would think that clarifying the basic nature of what "changing your pet's gender" even is, and when it popped up, is probably where you would want to start.

But really, you could actually start a much broader conversation about identity itself in a world like Neopia. What happens to identity when everything about your physical being can change at will--or at random? Think of what a stereotypical craven, scheming villain looks like. You probably pictured something straight out of Physiognomy texts without realizing it, because it's been passed down from dead pseudo-scientists to Disney movies to you. The "evil albino" character type, the beautiful maiden with a heart of gold (who is always white and blonde and blue-eyed), witches that have big noses, dumb guys who are short and fat. Would anything like this be able to exist in a universe where every aspect of the physical form was subject to change? Change that is easy, often cheap, fast, painless, and permanent?