Project MercuryHello, we are Team Mercury! Please contact our socials or email us at team.mercury@trans-media.org if you have any questions or concerns!
(This is an unfinished post, more to come soon!)
Zooble, from the new indie animation The Amazing Digital Circus, is a Zolo-toy that does not know their own gender and remains unlabeled for this reason, as confirmed by the creator of the series, Gooseworx.
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The Trans Legislation Tracker is a reliable resource website that regularly updates its documentations on anti-transgender bills in the United States, for anyone that would like to follow along. The bills selected are a result of independent research and consultation with lists maintained by the ACLU, Human Rights Campaign, Freedom for all Americans, GLAAD, and other organizations.
The site includes information on the legislative calendar, the types of bills being tracked, how many there were in the past 6 years, and the impacts of the bills on the transgender community. There are also recaps for the past 2 years, with the previous year being more in-depth. For the visual appreciators, there are many charts and graphs. For those that want a quick look, each page detailing a bill also includes a selected quote for quicker reading while also communicating the severity of the bill.
Unfinished – More to come soon!
Poison Mushroom Cookie is a playable nonbinary character from Cookie Run: Kingdom. A minor antagonist in the main story and exploration missions, Poison Mushroom Cookie seems blissfully unaware of the “evil” or malicious intents of their peers. They are generally very cheerful, innocent, and a bit child-like.
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Kazi is a nonbinary character from The Dragon Prince. They are a sunfire elf and a student of language, as well as a translator for sign language. After the release of season three, the official Dragon Prince Twitter account announced that Kazi was nonbinary and goes by they/them pronouns.
Demi Lovato is a popular pop singer that started using exclusively they/them pronouns in 2021, stating “I didn’t feel like a woman, I didn’t feel like a man. I just felt like a human. That’s what they/them is about for me — feeling human at your core.” A year later, they added she/her as a pronoun again because “Recently, I’ve been feeling more feminine, so I’ve adopted she/her again.” People were also confused on how to refer to her. Some of their most popular and well known songs are “Sorry Not Sorry”, “Solo”, and “Échame La Culpa”.
More coming soon…
I literally just want to see how this appears. If you’re anyone but me seeing this, have a good day/night! Keep goin’ 😁
More to come soon!
While the creators of “Into the Spider-Verse” haven’t confirmed Gwen as trans, many fans are able to point out the obvious hints. In her room hangs a trans flag with the words “protect trans kids” on it, and her dad (a police officer) also has a trans flag on his jacket, which no other officer has. And of course, there’s her spider suit, featuring white, pink, and blue, the prominent colors of the trans flag.
(Unfinished post!)
Do I Pass? is a short visual novel, playable on web browsers and GameBoys. It centers around a trans woman taking the bus home, and wanting to know if she passes. Using a magic website, she casts a spell to find out. She leaves her body as a ghost and reads the minds of the people around her to see what they think of her. There are three different ways it can go, just as there would be in reality. She either passes, is misgendered, or is unreadable.
Bridget is a character from the Guilty Gear series who has a whole transition journey through her continuing storyline! She’s a bounty hunter that fights using a yo-yo and her teddy bear, Roger, who is mechanized and possessed by a ghost.
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Story:
Bridget grew up as the child of a high-class family, as the second part of a pair with her twin brother. Her town, unfortunately, was convinced that having two male twins was a sign of bad luck for the town, and would insist that the younger of two male twins be either killed or sent to an orphanage. To avoid either of these outcomes, her parents decided to hide her sex from the other townsfolk, raising her as a girl, though they felt extremely guilty about this, feeling that they were forcing her to live with such a massive secret.
Bridget was, as expected for a daughter of her social class, given extensive training and a quality education. Soon after, Bridget strove to go off on adventures outside her town, on a mission to bring wealth and happiness to her village while living as a man, to finally dispel their superstitions, for herself and for her parents. Soon after, she found exactly the call to action she was looking for, on a poster for a wanted Gear (person with supernatural powers turning them into living weapons), with a hefty prize of 500,000 World Dollars for killing her. She left to find her target as soon as possible, and found her target, named Dizzy, already defeated in the Forest of Demons. Though they had failed this first bounty, Bridget got right back on her feet to look for new targets.
This is where we find Bridget in Guilty Gear XX, which actually has multiple possible storylines and endings for each character that the player can reach, though these endings don’t affect where Bridget is at the start of the next game. On her search for new bounties, she meets I-NO, a time-traveling musician that thrives on chaos, and quickly convinces her of her skill as a fighter. I-NO gives Bridget a list of targets, which, in a sneaky little twist, are all not real bounties. While working through this list, Bridget battles multiple other playable characters, including Baiken, Anji Mito, Chipp Zanuff. In one storyline, Ky Kiske cuts through I-NO’s façade, telling Bridget that her list of targets is fake. In another storyline, she happens upon Dizzy once again while with the Jellyfish Pirates, and the two become friends. In the third storyline, Bridget meets Johnny, who tries to fight her, and the h***y b*****d tries to seduce her while the fight. Eventually during the fight, Bridget reveals that she in fact actually identifies as a boy, to Johnny’s embarrassment. Discouraged by her lack of success as a bounty hunter, she decides to pursue a new career as an entertainer. In the first ending, Bridget becomes a waiter and yo-yo performer at Jam Kuradoberi’s restaurant. In the other ending, she returns to her hometown, where her uncle tells her that her twin has left the village to look for Bridget.
We find Bridget as a famous bounty hunter when her story continues in Guilty Gear Strive, which takes place six years after XX. She’s finally become popular and successful enough to break her town’s superstitions towards her, and is now free to live as she wants to. Still working as a bounty hunter, but now aimless, Bridget begins to ponder her identity, as living as a man doesn’t quite suit her. She is soon hunted down by Goldlewis Dickinson, who strives to capture Roger, Bridget’s spirit-possessed teddy bear, for his cryptid collection. After losing the fight, he casually calls her “lil lady”. Though Bridget responds by correcting him that she’s a man, she does so with a noticeable lack of enthusiasm, which Goldlewis points out. Now in the midst of a full gender crisis, she once again finds Ky Kiske, who tells her to be herself, no matter what. There is another split in endings here, where in one ending she simply decides to ponder her identity further, and in the other she admits to herself that, though she’s scared of the truth, she is a trans girl, and finally chooses to live her life as who she truly is, regardless of what others think of her.
Wendy Carlos is a transfem composer that did soundtracks for multiple big movies, such as Tron, The Shining, and Clockwork Orange, and pioneered the use of synthesizers as musical instruments. Wendy’s album “Switched-On Bach” has won three Grammys, and was the album that proved that synthesizers could be a powerful instrument beyond being used simply for futuristic-sounding special effects.
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Life Story:
Wendy was born in Pawtucket, Rhode Island on November 14th, 1939, and had felt gender dysphoria since a very young age. At around age five or six, she told her parents that she strongly felt like a girl, and always loved having long hair and wearing feminine clothes, and was confused when her parents didn’t understand. While studying at Brown University, she went on a date with a girl, and felt extreme jealousy towards her date.
Wendy didn’t begin to understand these confusing feelings until she first encountered the concept of being transgender during her later studies at Columbia University, when she studied transgender issues. She underwent therapy with Harry Benjamin, a prominent sexologist who specialized in transgender people, in 1967, and began hormone treatments in early 1968. This was the same year her career really took off when her album, Switched-On Bach, reached platinum sales, cemented the synthesizer as a legitimate instrument in the musical world, and would eventually win three Grammy awards. While this sudden success was nothing short of amazing, it created a new source of stress for Wendy as well, as she was terrified of revealing herself to the world as a trans woman (the hormone treatments had slowly been changing her appearance to one more feminine). When she was invited to perform some of her synth Bach covers live with the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra, she disguised herself as a man while on stage, slapping on fake sideburns, a wig, and drawn-on facial hair in a panic right before her performance. She would later hide the same way when meeting Stanley Kubrick and when she appeared as a guest star on The Dick Cavett Show.
After Switched-On Bach, she released The Well-Tempered Synthesizer, building on her previous methods, and made music for Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange, which included synthesized singing, an unheard-of technique at the time. In 1972, Wendy had saved up enough from the success of Switched-On Bach that she was able to afford bottom surgery.
Even after the surgery, Wendy wouldn’t reveal herself as trans until late 1978, during a series of interviews. She later said, in a magazine publication of these interviews, that she had always wanted to come out as trans, but had been extremely anxious to do so. As she said a couple years later, there wasn’t nearly as much an extreme public reaction as she was worried of. After these interviews were released to the public, she began releasing albums under her preferred name.
Wendy continued on to compose other movie soundtracks after her work in A Clockwork Orange, such as those of The Shining and Tron. She made several new albums (listed above), and at one point worked with Weird Al Yankovic.
She was officially recognized for her groundbreaking musical work in 2005, when she was given the SEAMUS 2005 Life Achievement Award.
Sidenote:
*Most of Wendy’s work can’t be found anywhere online, due to her dislike of music streaming services.