Meyer has been accused of transphobia for calling out the questionable elevation of a transgendered comic author, Magdalene Visaggio, who seemed to come out of nowhere with no history or accomplishments in the industry. Visaggio rose quickly for a beginner, leading some, like Meyer, to believe he was hired for diversity instead of skill. Visaggio won a new talent workshop at DC Comics that put him in a position to be mentored by the top comic writers in the industry even though he appeared not to like or understand DC characters like Batman.
He also appears a little unstable, threatening "cis" people with violence on social media.
But there isn't any real rush to buy Visaggio's transgendered comic book Kim & Kim, ranked #373 in the July sales ratings.
Meyer believes he is being targeted for, among other things, daring to criticize Visaggio. "You can't say anything about the diversity hires because they're magical," he explained. "One of the successes of my channel is that I say what other people are thinking. There's about 100,000 fans out there waiting to come back. America only has a few unique institutions and one of them, comic books, is literally being murdered. Normal comic pros have been chased away and it is now a weird club for people with personality disorders."
Both Kims are queer—Kim D is bisexual. Just wanted to get that out there! So yeah, I’m a trans woman, and Kim Q means the world to me. I had barely started transitioning when I began developing Kim & Kim; I had only been in therapy about a month at that point, and I was still terrified. It was really important for my own sanity to make transition stop feeling like this big giant monster, and instead to treat it like just another part of someone’s biography.
Kim Q is this realized human being who found herself in her transition and has not stopped trying to find herself. It’s not like she sat down, defined herself as a girl, and stopped developing right there. Kim Q provided me this vehicle to imagine myself, I dunno, a couple years down the line. Kim Q has a life. Kim Q hasn’t solved all her problems. Kim Q owns her past. It was kinda therapeutic, and it helped me get a little bit comfortable with the idea of transitioning, because one of my biggest worries was that it would overwhelm me.
My transition hangs over the book in another big way, too: it’s kind of unabashedly girly, in the way that Hellcat is girly or Rat Queens is girly. I’ve always had a really fucked up relationship with femininity, so this book is smothered in neon pink and rainbows even while it’s a beautifully foulmouthed, violent, bloody book. Developing this book was a really fun exercise in embracing this part of myself and seeing what it looked like, which ended up being a Lisa Frank assault rifle.
The other thing that really drove my portrayal of trans women in this book was the suicide of Leelah Alcorn. I don’t know if you read her suicide note, but she was so convinced she didn’t have a future. And why would she think anything else? If there’s one thing we’ve learned from the media, it’s that trans women are pathetic creatures who probably end up getting murdered. Leelah definitely imbibed that message. I did, too. I grew up with nothing by Jerry Springer, the Rocky Horror Picture Show, and To Wong Foo. That was more or less all I had to base my self-conception of myself as a trans woman on. And man — what a fucked up way to grow up. I wanted to make sure that, in my own work, I was putting trans women all over the place, as well-developed POV characters whose transness matters.
Dear Baby Queers Everywhere,
First, are you okay?
That's important to ask because you're important to me, and though it may seem hard to believe lately, you’re actually important to lots and lots of people. And we all want you, before anything else, to be emotionally and physically healthy.
That matters just the same way that you matter.
Ok. So what happened in November is that somewhere under half of the voting electorate—somewhere in the range of 63 million out of around 130 million votes case or some such, out of a U.S. adult population of 240 million people—decided to cast their ballot in favor of a guy who, honestly, doesn’t give a shit about us one way or another.
He doesn’t, really. But lots of his supporters hate us very very much. Mike Pence is notoriously anti-queer, and indications have been that he’s going to find a place in his administration for former North Carolina governor and living taint Pat McCrory, the man behind the Tarheel State’s anti-anti-discrimination law.
But we do still have to live in a world where millions of people decided AT BEST that they’re totally fine with putting a man in power who is a) obviously hella authoritarian and b) surrounding himself with anti-Black, anti-Muslim, anti-Queer, and anti-LGBT councilors.
We are, in short, non-people to them, barely worth considering.
So again. Are you okay?
I'm asking that again because one of the strongest acts of resistance we can offer is to love ourselves, and self-love is a prerequisite to any meaningful movement forward. If we do not care for ourselves, and do the things that make and keep us healthy, if we give into despair or nihilism, if we decide that we have no hope, no future, and that coming to terms with who and what we are is pointless—well, then they've won right out of the gate.
I'm going to level with you: I'm afraid. It's incredibly not hard to imagine Trumpism—antidemocratic, authoritarian, patriarchal Trumpism, which has no respect for the spirit of the law—overriding every single legal gain we've made in the last decades. It is a small step from arresting trans women in ladies’ rooms in Dearborn to raiding gay communities in Austin. It will not be hard for them to make our lives difficult and they already clearly have the motive. We're very much witnessing a political revolution that will reverberate in one form or another for decades, if not another century.