transgenderer:
hmm. gandalf big naturals kind of rubs me the wrong way. i mean its not that it like “is” “transmisogynistic” but i think the comical use of it draws from the cultural undercurrent that both-androgyny, androgyny that contains both male and female secondary sexual characteristics, is funny and ridiculous (as opposed to neither-androgyny, generally neotenous androgyny that contains neither secondary sexual characteristics. note also that gandalf in particular is old).
oh this is good discourse, let’s absolutely run with this one!
Putting a pin for a minute in the matter of Gandalf big naturals, the general phenomenon you’re describing absolutely exists, but it’s important I think to emphasize that what you call “both-androgyny” is seen as funny ans ridiculous because it’s seen as shocking and transgressive, and humour is downstream of that for the usual reasons (left as an exercise for the reader, as it’s a post in itself).
The reason for this is important to understand! It’s an arbitrary norm in the sense of being socially constructed, but not arbitrary in the sense that it could just as easily be the other way round. The reasoning is because people think of gender as binary, but they also think of it as having a strength, which flows directly from experience: the salience and visibility of someone’s gender is its strength, and this varies a lot in real life, to the extent that we see people whose gender (and even the underlying sex it relates to) is unclear regularly in day-to-day life. That doesn’t make it safe, within a gender paradigm, of course. Outside of normatively desexed categories – the very young and very old, sometimes also the very fat or sick or physically disabled – it’s risky to fall within the “none-androgyny” group, and others will take their inability to gender you as threatening. But it’s an everyday thing.
“Both-androgyny” is much rarer because it involves strong signals in both directions at once, which explodes the entire classifcatory regime. Suddenly you need, at minimum, something like the BSRI, which if adopted in that capacity would force a complete reworking of all social relations around gender. “None-androgyny” can be understood as a corner of the Bem scale, but it can also be understood as simply a person whose Gender Strength is weak on a spectrum built around a binary “hinge”. It’s thus more expansively flattering of people’s prior gender models than “Both-androgyny”, which can’t be understood in the latter way. Moreover, while all these patterns occur in nature with regard to sexual characteristics, they don’t occur with equal frequency: the “conspicuously heterogenous” arrangement really is rarer, and that rarity in combination with how it undermines the model makes it more likely to be interpreted as “chimeric” where the weak-characteristics form only seems “empty.” So all this relates to natural salience biases, as well as binarist and heterosexist and essentialist ones. And like all memorable and dangerous things, it’s a well of humour.
But, okay, let’s return to Gandalf big naturals specifically. I think that while all the above seems true and I found it energizing to hear you bring it up, it’s only a small part of the humour in tis specific meme, most of which ties in with the idea that it’s Gandalf. The joke is about the incongruity of the presentation with regard to Gandalf specifically, as a highly familiar character, but all the above is just one aspect of it. It’s also about the fact that Gandalf is not just seen as iconically masculine, but as representing a kind of low-key, avuncular masculinity, humble and elderly and firm, and “big naturals” has a nearly opposite set of connotations. If you had, like, Gandalf wearing a thong with his whole ass out, or catboy Gandalf, that would get you 60% of the way to the same place without any of the gender-binarist elements.
I think the Gandalf angle probably bears some deeper inquiry at a future date because of how tightly coupled he is with the understood cultural archetype of the “fantasy wizard”, particularly the “wise fantasy wizard” as distinguished from the mad-scientist variety, and how all of this including Gandalf himself is downstream of Odin, whose ability to use magic is instrumental to the wizard archetype but was also, contextually, extremely female-coded to the extent that doing it would preclude being seen as masculine for anyone but Odin. I think that sort of got lost in translation but that there are still weird echoes of it in the whole “wizard archetype” that maybe bear some untangling. However, this is not really visible much in Gandalf at all, as any latent gender tension is completely overpowered by his extremely strong Dad Energy.
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