Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-1255374-20151024145123/@comment-995426-20151101202600

Tarrlok&#039;s the REAL Hero wrote: Yoshimickster wrote: gender constraints There is a differance between gender constrains and gender habits. Raph shows female gender habits, which would mean he would be gay or bi in a TV show for older people. Well, it's not as simple as him being gay or bi. I mean, yes, indeed, Raph (as he used to be written) is probably gay (after all that sexual tension with Slash and his previous indifference to women). But now we also understand that transgender people exist, and people can actually have a gender identity opposite of their biological gender, and if they love the same biological gender, they are actually hetero. Though, paradoxically, there certainly are transgender people who love the same identity gender, and are gay, even though a similarity-situated non-transgender person would be hetero.

But as for another matter, why does it have to just be for older people anymore? When I was 11 in the early 1990s growing up on, I had a perfectly decent openly gay role model. He was a good friend of my mom (may she rest in peace), and he was perfectly ordinary and I never saw him doing or saying anything inappropriate. He even gave me my first personal computer, his old Tandy 1000 (a primitive semi-compatible PC), as a hand-me-down. And I wasn't clueless&mdash;I knew what gay was. It's people who, when they fall in love, only have feelings for someone of the same gender instead of the opposite gender. It's sad that this was so ordinary in my home community almost a quarter of a century ago, and yet life on mainstream popular all-ages entertainment still can't manage to reflect that.

When it comes to TV shows, a good role model for children would be Degrassi, where characters are more varied and complex (with gay and lesbian youths and even transgender youths), but in so many ways they're also still largely ordinary, and more often than not they believe in good things. My mom loved Degrassi for these very reasons. And that series airs on TeenNick, so we know Nick is not ignorant to this. :P