#someone more eloquent and knowledgeable than me pls elaborate

[fallowsthorn]

listen i wanna talk about the bit in the (3rd? 4th?) episode of ofmd when the bartender guy whose name i didn't catch takes off jim's disguise for spanish jackie's nose jar after selling them out to, uh, some stabby people (look, i had no subtitles and i can't understand speech for shit)

because it very easily could have been the sort of spiteful gender reveal we see all the time, from twelfth night to mulan to mrs doubtfire. character dresses up as another gender for plot reasons, shenanigans happen and the disguise is revealed, other characters' reactions are played for drama or comedy accordingly. the revelation is always about the character's "real" gender and usually about how shocking and/or hilarious it was that they weren't performing it correctly.

but bartender guy doesn't give a shit about that. he unmasks jim, yes, but it's to illustrate that jim is the person they've been looking for. it's stede who's stunned that "jim's a woman???" and only that because he obviously doesn't have the vocabulary for anything else (and was just stabbed, iirc). bartender guy taunts jim about seeing through the disguise, but it's "i know what you did last summer time you were here," not "lol u thought u could pass? what an idiot." jim's gender or lack thereof is a nonfactor until the next episode when the crew want to know what was up with the disguise, and even then it rates the same as questions like "if you're not jim anymore, can i be jim?"

(side note, i love the "women's bodies have crystals" bit both because it's hilarious and as a jab at gender essentialism/transmedicalism/that fucking thing where cis people are like "ooooohhhhhh nooooooo it's science!!1!!!1" blah blah shut the fuck up and google it, horatio, your philosophies are for twelve-year-olds aNYWAY)

and then NO ONE BRINGS IT UP AGAIN. that's what fucking flattens me when i think about this, that there's no Very Special Episode (or, well, Very Special Two and a Half Minutes, these episodes are packed) where all the cis people suddenly have to relearn basic grammar and there has to be a whole investigation and Trans 101 handholding session and it's just sooooo haaaaard to rememberrrrrrrrr!!!!

no. none of that. jim's pronouns are they/them and not a single person slips once.* even the nun who raised them and hasn't seen them in [an indeterminate amount of time implied to be on the scale of years] gets it right! (she does call them by their birth name, but jim seems to be using the name jim mostly out of convenience anyway, not as a "new identity" kind of thing.) even black pete, who's the character i was expecting to be a dick about it (obnoxious, openly derisive of stede (previously the most visibly gender-non-conforming character), snarky), just. uses the right pronouns for jim. every time. no questions. no eye rolling. no scoffing or sighing or checking if jim is in earshot or pretending he's forgotten how to conjugate verbs. i can't remember if izzy ever refers to jim in the third person but i definitely** would've remembered if he misgendered them so even this feral repressed trash fire of toxic masculinity and internalized homophobia can do it!

so i think what we can conclude from this is that i need to start stabbing more people? it seemed to work for jim. i don't see any flaws in this plan. it's perfect and i need to make dinner good night.

*(presumably someone updated stede about this offscreen, since at the time he was, uh [checks notes] berating himself via gut-wound-and/or-sepsis-induced hallucination)

**probably, see above re no subtitles