SC Andrews

Edit: This is a long one, sorry not sorry

I’m still struggling to figure WordPress out. I know it’s still a pretty standard blogging platform, and lots of websites are built on it but I can’t help but shake my cane and yearn for the olden days of Blogger. I knew where I was with Blogger.

Anyway. In thinking of topics on which I want to throw my sweet beanie hat with the helicopter on top into the ring, I would be remiss if one of the first subjects I delved into wasn’t Warhammer 40k. Or specifically, ruminations on why it seems popular among transgender women. I’d warn you that this is entirely anecdotal, taken largely from observations of out women while I was still buried beneath boring man clothes in the closet. So if you were looking for a well researched and intelligible opinion into a topic you didn’t even know enough about to not care, then you’ve come to the wrong place, hombre.

One might observe that it’s a relatively popular hobby/franchise that has a large degree of artistic freedom and expression involved with it. And, while this is certainly not true of all queer folk: artsy stuff is the shit. I went to an arts magnet school way back when, and the number of cisgender and/or straight people in my graduating class seems to be dwindling. I must say I’m new to the way to talk about it, and just really everything, but for me being a transwoman means that at one point I was at least outwardly presenting as a man. He got to drive the bus for 35 years, and some of the stuff he liked is still pretty cool. Warhammer being chief among them. I love painting, crafting, just doing something with my hands. And the autistic child in me loves all the goddamn rules. So, a perfect fit. Incidentally, in case you were wondering, some of the things he liked are not as cool any more. I no longer find the urge to wander into a Best Buy when I see one, just as an example.

So, I’ve served up an appetizing observation, a horse divorce if you will.

Sorry, I have to stop. I need you to know that I know hors d’oeuvres is not pronounced that way. I’m not my father, I don’t think it’s funny if people think I can’t pronounce things.

So, I’ve served up an appetizing observation, an amused bush if you will. It makes sense right? I don’t think it’s even close to the whole picture. Put the miniatures to the side, crack open a rulebook or one of the hundreds of novels (of which I’ve read many) and I think you start to get a little closer to the truth. First off, there aren’t many canon queer stories overall. There are a few, with more emerging all the time, which is excellent, but by and large sex doesn’t play a very large role in the stories of Warhammer 40k. Is it part of the Victorian lionification of gore and violence and abstention from sex and nudity? Probably. Pull any random book off the shelf and turn to a random page and odds are you’ve got a pretty good chance of finding a pretty gruesome depiction of someone dying or being wounded in there. But there are a lot of overarching themes that, while maybe not explicitly transgender, certainly appeal.

I’m going to get a little more into the weeds here so if you’ve already lost interest this isn’t going to get any better for you. Maybe skip to the last paragraph, I expect I will have figured out a point to this by then. I’ll also preface this by saying that I’m not very well versed in much xenos lore, being much more interested in Chaos and its shinier counterpart, the Imperium of Mankind. Although, I have to say, the niche meme about Trazyn’s Implants has got me itching to read up on the Necrons.

In no particular or exhaustive order I’d like to start with the Space Marines, the Adeptus Astartes, the roided up teenage abductees that may or may not have genitals. I really wanted to find a suitable hyperlink for that last statement, but instead I’ve got to go bleach my burned out eyeholes. These guys are built. Literally. They take organs, chemicals, machinery, and good ol’ fashioned mental conditioning to fashion them into walking weapons. The lore calls them transhuman. I know, that’s low hanging fruit, but here me out. There’s something appealing, at least to me, about using dark science to make yourself better than you were. You know, like HRT. Disregarding the noxious and fetid discussion around gender where it concerns space marines, I would say that I love how much I can identify with a Blood Angels aspirant that claws their way through hell just to get their body augmented.

Next up are the Adeptus Mechanicus, the robot fetishists from Mars. Obsessed with the perfection of the machine, guided by their Omnissiah (who may or may not be the emperor of mankind), they spend lifetimes augmenting their own flesh, carving out the weak and replacing it with the strong. For obvious (to me anyway) reasons most characters when regarding gender are considered to be ‘post’ gender, but I know different. Also, slight tangent, in looking up some discussions on this topic I kept seeing how different factions are beyond ‘petty concerns’ like ‘gender’ and ‘sexuality’. That description makes me absolutely feral, and not in a sexy way. I’m not one to immediately make moral judgements on people based on their reddit comments (lie), but comments like that are from people who have never struggled with either. The admech are the poster children for transgendered individuals as far as I’m concerned. You take your body into your own hands and you make it yours. That and an alarming number of transwomen are absolutely frothing for relations with machinery. I gotta say I kind of get it now.

I’ll give a slight nod to the Adeptus Custodes, whose recent canon controversy breached containment and had the whole of the 40k fandom showing their ass when a short story about a woman existing made some people mad. I’m not linking to it, I’m done with it. But they’re a lot like the space marines, augmented, but where the astartes are a dumpster fire of chemicals and aftermarket organs the custodes are finely sculpted works of art. Not for me right now, as I’m firmly in my grungy trashgirl phase of dress and makeup, but who knows, maybe when I’ve been on HRT a little longer and feel like I have less to prove.

This is already running long but I have to talk about Chaos and their Gods. The insultingly obvious (to me at least) God of Queers is Slaanesh, the embodiment of hedonism. Look, I get it, and so does everyone else. He/She is even agender, or all genders, or whatever. Look, I’m just saying most of the lore surrounding Slaanesh is kind of gross, and isn’t really celebratory of enjoying life, sex, and everything else. That said, there’s always room in everyone’s life for a little more. When I was a young man, I foolishly became obsessed with smoking pipe tobacco. This isn’t really about that, but I was once at a cigar shop where a young woman told me that she lives a life of excess in a deep raspy tone that has absolutely infected my brain ever since.

More to my liking for this exploration is Tzeentch, Changer of Ways. He revels in mutation, change, and just all around messing with people. And birds, for some reason. I don’t like to imagine that I’m entirely dictated by base instinct but back when I first was drawn into Warhammer almost ten years ago, I wanted the faction that was painted in vibrant magenta, pinks, and blues. So. There’s that. More than color though I think a god of change is the mascot for a queer person, of whom change is in their DNA, whether it be a change of outward presentation or of who they want to be, or of who they want to love in their lives.

I’ll lump Nurgle and Khorne in together for time’s sake, and because they fit in with my narrative a little less. Grandfather Nurgle, God of plague and pestilence is actually my personal favorite. He loves every living thing, including every virus and pathogen. He’d love your transgender ass too. And then he’d give you some sweet boils. Khorne, known for his worshipers screaming ‘blood for the blood god’, has little to no appeal to me outside of the unexplored elements of menstruation as opposed to blood from violence. Does that also appease the blood god? Come on Games Workshop, get on it.

When I skipped to chaos without mentioning the Adepta Sororitas it was on purpose. We get to my personal favorite faction, my obsession, and the what-ifs that keep me up at night. The Sisters of Battle, nuns with guns, Sapphic Warriors(tm), my favorite best girls, are a militant order of women based entirely on the Eowyn loophole that got the witch king killed. I have read and loved almost every book published about them, I collect fan art, and of course I collect the miniatures. I’ve still painted almost none of them for fear of messing them up, of not getting them right. If this isn’t abundantly clear already I’ll make it so: They are my own personal allegory for transwomanhood. I admired them from afar for years, kept them in boxes, or unpainted on shelves, quietly liking their posts on tumblr or instagram rather than diving in and swimming in their violent, seductive waters. I would begin to paint, place a brush upon a thigh or stomach and feel like a voyeur, a pervert, and set them aside, not knowing that this response wasn’t normal or healthy. Just as my response to seeing beautiful trans women was to panic, freeze, close the phone rather than be caught for just one second looking at something I didn’t think I could have. Yes, they are women, and I am women, but it’s personally so much more than that for me.

Lastly, I promise, I would be remiss if I didn’t discuss the fluid nature of Warhammer’s cannon. Over the years one creator or another has described the lore as something of a catch-all, ‘everything is cannon and nothing is cannon’, everyone is an unreliable narrator, the nature of the warp means there are infinite timelines etc. Sometimes it comes as a bit of a cop out when an author writes something that doesn’t go over well with the fans, but I still think it’s a fun policy. It’s like fanfiction you can play with in your hands. Those five sororitas you’re building: loving polycule. Those space marines? They do have genitals and they explore them together. The nature of this hobby means that those figures you shelled out a mortgage for can be painted however you want, and their backstory can be whatever you want. Cool hobbyists are famous for saying they’re your dudes. I’ll just assume they mean dudes in their most inclusive sense.

Maybe, after all this, it looks like I’m trying to justify spending time and effort in a hobby by saying that it appeals to trans-women. I hope not. It’s a running gag that, depending on the person saying it, is either playful or bigoted: ‘the only women who play warhammer are transwomen’. It’s a man’s hobby and transwomen aren’t real women. Or, transwomen are women and they’re the only ones who play warhammer. I prefer the second, but I think both interpretations miss the mark. Was it my latent transness that drew me in? Was it a way to explore a topic that was so hateful to my upbringing that I drowned it as soon as I could? I’ll never be sure, especially given my propensity for blackouts around that time in my life, but I think it’s more than likely. Transwomen are women and Transhammer is Warhammer.

-Sam

P.S. This, as with everything else, was all about me.