Were The X-Men Always Woke?

please don't hurt me I'm just an ordinary mutant I don't have any special powers I just look [Music] different the X-Men are one of Marvel's Premier super teams they have been for decades across different titles and different mediums team members change missions change back stories change but what remains consistent is the fact that the X-Men are mutant born different with abilities that sometimes appear gifts sometimes curses and sometimes both at the same time the other constant is that the mo

st enduring threats these mutants face aren't from space or from other dimensions but from Earth these threats come from ordinary humans many of whom hate and fear the mutant minority in many of the possible future timelines the X-Men often fight to avert that hate that fear has doomed not merely the Earth's mutant population but it's human one too this month sees the First new X-Men project to come to us screens in a few years the first mainstream animated one in over a decade X-Men 97 from Mar

vel Studios serves as a continuation of the widely beloved '90s animated series but much of the conversation ahead of this Show's release hasn't been on how this familiar world will look 30 years on or how Neo it'll be to hear the returning voice cast step back into their roles no much of the conversation has been driven by grieved influencers news sites and social media users claiming that this Disney reboot will be woke will make the X-Men woke that this wasn't the case until now these claiman

ts have pointed to the seemingly altered design of Rogue and to the pre-released promotional materials that confirmed this revival is going with an explicitly non-binary depiction of the character morph just as many voices have responded in disbelief claiming themselves that this bout of outrage is patently nonsensical because the X-Men were always woke so is this true what's even being disputed here and what are the stakes well those questions are what this video intends to settle or rather wha

t it intends to finish settling this is the final installment in a lose strip tick of videos so if you're interested in the Rogue matter specifically you're best to watch this video first and if you're interested in who the voices pushing this debate are and why they might be doing so I'd recommend my last video both of these should be linked in the corner now neither of those are required viewing for this though here we'll take the morph discussion as our primary focus and allow it to lead us t

o those larger questions let's get going part one the morph Factor so morph is non-binary now and that clarification led to a lot of push back most of these discussions are framing this as an absolute break X-Men the Animated show wasn't woke and now is suggesting this morph Stuff shows a clear change from what was to what is but how accurate is this framing sure historically there isn't a bunch of non-binary representation in Marvel's old cartoons but how about the comic books well that that is

a different matter you could look at a character like zaven from runaways or cloud from Defenders both of whom switch genders like a CS player with a fancy knife switches weapons sorry that's kind of a niche metaphor I mean a lot or we could just look at morph in his role in Exiles also where that wh head look comes from morph routinely presents in female forms and sometimes it's for a gag sure but sometimes it's not we also see in a flashback that morph wasn't gendered at Birth the doctor's wo

rds were literally congratulations it's a lob this stuff is from decades ago and yes it is stuff that post dates animated series Mo but you know what else came after the '90s show the Hellfire Gala the mutant nation of kcoa and it seems like X-Men 97's going to be using those ideas at least a little X-Men 97's philosophy isn't let's make the whole production team pretend it is literally 1997 hence the animation the slight design revamps right the philosophy there was reportedly fresh but familia

r and that phrase looks to describe the show's ethos as a whole quite nicely but even if this too is a bridge too far if you don't like the fresh but familiar approach if you're determined to hold against this show the fact that it's not trying to be a slavish period piece continuing only those ideas found specifically in or before the '90s cartoon less Revival more reanimation well we can just look to the show itself a recent Variety article features original showrunner Eric lewald yes one of t

he guys behind the 9s show highlighting the continuity between between 97 morph and '90s morph saying he attacks Wolverine his closest friend in the most dramatic way by turning into Gene gray and putting his hand on Wolverine's neck and leaning in for a kiss that's as non-binary as you can get it's more of turning into a woman and coming onto Wolverine to freak him out he says it was all there in morph's character now it Bears mentioning that being non-binary and being a shape shifter willing a

nd able to take on a differently gendered form aren't necessarily the same thing indeed I gather a lot of trans folks take issu of the way the gender fluid Shape Shifter Trope assumes a perhaps wrong-headed linkage of gender and sex and there's another reason that this character type isn't unpraised is shuing that binary have extra reasons for doing so would it not be better if we had some nonb characters who were just guys non Shape Shifter non alien guys on the other hand though where would th

at character be in a Revival of the '90s X-Men show well nowhere really and there's also the fact that some trans folks do like this character type enjoy watching the fantasy of switching between different bodies this seamlessly but whether or not morph will serve as good rep isn't what's being debated is it how a non-binary viewer experiences gender may not line up with the interpretation given here and whether or not that interpretation will push Beyond a potentially suspect Trope remains to b

e seen but what the Variety article does tell us is that the way X-Men 97 is approaching morph's non-binary identity has direct precedent in the text of the original show as I'm putting this video together only the first two episodes have been released but so far what we've seen of the character absolutely backs this up so what exactly are people up in arms about the culture Warriors aren't burning old issues of Exiles they're not decrying the old show they're mourning it even as its creators te

ll us that new morph is simply a continuation of old morph whose Behavior those culture Warriors didn't and don't find alarming well it's the term isn't it when you suggest that a shape shifter especially one with a habit of casually shifting from a male presenting form to other ones is probably going to have a different relationship with their body and the way it's perceived by Society than your average Joe no one bats an eye but when you describe that relationship as gender and that difference

as falling outside of the gender binary when you say non-binary everyone loses their minds non-binary is one of those scary terms like critical race Theory or Dei terms that are jargony or specific enough that somebody outside of the note isn't going to be able to instantly grasp their meaning terms that as a result can be redefined punched up and weaponized by conservative media without the general audience knowing take this article from Glen Beck's media Network the blade which uses the topic

of morph to assert that being non-binary didn't exist as a concept back during the original run of the animated series and of course to imply through this that morph being made non-binary now either reflects or is part of this new degenerate subversive leftist gay lifestyle push that the media and the celebrities are all in on that's a threat to the west and to the kids blah blah blah the problem is of course that the article is wrong it's almost right that is it's almost technically right non-

binary as a term didn't really enter the Lexicon until around the turn of the Millennium but the article doesn't say term does it it says concept and the concept of existing outside the gender binary is one that existed and was discussed in the '90s albeit with a different vocabulary with terms such as gender quer and is one that's observable far further back across the centuries and indeed across the world there's a whole page listing relevant historical examples which I'll link in the descript

ion it does few heavier toward recent years but that's largely because we just have more information on say the' 70s than we do on the Middle Ages because you know that's how time works one interesting example is the public Universal friend a genderless evangelist that traveled to the US around the end of the 18th century their existence and their assu of the gender binary is well documented and of course analoges exist in other societies nonadherence to a gender binary is visible for instance i

n various forms across indigenous American cultures with with this habit sometimes grouped together under the umbrella term to Spirit so regardless of whether a non-binary gender identity is new for morph or for Marvel it's not just some new thing either but again this stuff isn't yet common knowledge to The Wider public the term non-binary is still unfamiliar enough to be hijacked loaded up with moral Panic so when a certain subset of people see the word non-binary used to describe a character

in a revived show especially when that news is communicated to them through the blaze or one of the other distorting partisan media Outlets we discussed in my last video all those groomer Panic alarm Bells start ringing despite the fact that those Outlets are repeating lies that's morph he's back and he's nonbinary because that was a thing in 1997 remember all the non-existent nonbinary people back in 1997 and openly professing they didn't care before it became the hot button issue changeling AK

A Kevin Sydney which I believe is one of his original names or aliases go Google it if you want I don't care enough to remember cuz I was an a more fan how do you like that despite the fact that not much has changed despite the fact that what little has changed has textual precedent and despite the fact that a lot of the people making those changes are the people who made the thing being changed in the first place oh and of course the fact that there's nothing dangerous or degenerate or groomery

or new even about being non-binary that last bit ought to go without saying but it's probably worth saying anyway despite all that somehow people are convinced and enraged anyway they're making the X-Men woke and if your knowledge of the X-Men goes beyond say a few stray memories of a decades old cartoon or having half watched a film or two while you're scrolled Tik Tok or I don't know worked on that wood cutting skill Cape that complaint does come across as a fairly ridiculous one and it's eas

y to respond to that with sweeping claims to the contrary what do you mean the X-Men were always woke those sweeping statements are broadly true of course and the commonly cited examples from across X media are certainly valid ones the fact that Chris Clem had wanted Mystique to be Nightcrawler's dad even way back in the day the have you tried not being a mutant scene from X2 the way that first film's villain justifies his bigotry via his religion the way that same film positions mutants as Jews

and immigrants and yes let's not forget the very KK coded Friends of Humanity group from the Animated Series itself why do you hate us what did we ever do to you you were born it's easy to cite example after example of the franchise or its creatives having made or in some cases being held back from making explicitly Progressive points and gestures because it's happened a lot but sometimes this impulse leaves just a little to be desired don't get me wrong responses like this are you know right b

ut they're not always the most useful as arguments and that's fine most people responding to X-Men when woke claims aren't doing so in an attempt to reach out meet their opponent where they're at and walk them through why they're wrong and nor should they be it's not your responsibility to rehabilitate the people yelling at you hell that's what I'm doing most of the time in replies too if I've just been editing a video for 12 hours straight I open YouTube studio and I see someone's thrown an amo

unt of batshit nonsense my way that it take more than a few minutes to unravel I'm not going to be able to do that and I'm not going to want to I'll probably just politely inform them that their brain is made of soup and move on but since I'm intending this video to be somewhat definitive I think it's worth trying to take a fuller view of the issue so let's get on to part two were the Xmen always woke let us imagine a figure I'll call the skeptical fan he is an X-Men fan but he's the type of X-M

en fan that's more interested in the details than the subtext he can tell you which issue Kitty Pride showed up in at the drop of a hat on Kenny X-Men 129 for the record but he's not so interested in what her explicit texture ual jewishness means for the series and for the medium he can tell you that in 2019s Marauders series after having been rejected by the mutant nation of kcoa kitty started going by the name Kate the same name her weary battered future self had used in Days of Future Past in

the timeline where the Sentinels had won but the trivia Factor there is more interesting to him than asking what it means is it about rejection failure or is it about growth anyway let's say this bloke opens up Twitter one February morning and sees all that disc course kicking off around Rogue and around morph now he's seen enough of the animated show to realize Rogue was only this Caked Up in the one shot people are circulating so non issue there and he sees this morph and thinks yeah that's e

xile's morph sure but they're non-binary well morph always was a shape shifter sure morph could always change forms could appear female but morph did use male pronouns and now they're changing that maybe the skeptical fan has interacted with with non-binary folks before understands what that means but maybe he hasn't maybe this remains a little opaque to him and then he sees what appear to be accurate statements morph was a man this is new this is Disney's reboot adding or inserting queerness in

to what was a kids cartoon being responded to derisively people are saying making these points was always the purpose of the X-Men the X-Men were always woke if you don't see this you're the Friends of Humanity and that confuses the skeptical fan a little because he knows that whole Magneto was intended to be Malcolm X Professor X as MLK thing is an urban myth created in retrospect he knows like we discussed a little last video that the team wasn't created as an allegory for the persecution of m

inority groups the characters in setting Stanley and Jack Kirby created with the X-Men ended up providing a brilliant canvas for exploring ideas like that and soon enough creators would explore that intentionally even in the original' 60s run but to say this was always the idea behind the X-Men properly express its core ideas it's kind of hard to unpack societal ills when you can't even use words like kill or Die the results were sometimes Limited in another sense too Douglas wal in his book all

of the Marvels writes the clunkiest X-Men storylines are often the ones that try to draw direct connections to real world issues like a 1990 sequence involving a mutant killing AIDS standing called The Legacy virus it's also true of course that at its heart the mutant metaphor isn't a perfect fit for the racial queer or disability issues it's most often linked with comparing fear of mutants or registration or cure attempts to real world minorities too closely ignores the fact that mutants can l

egitimately pose a danger to life even when they don't intend to so are people overstating things is it revisionism to say this that the X-Men were always woke historically sure there are those examples we gave a moment ago but those only Pro that X-Men projects have made points in the past not that to be an X-Men project is to make those points intrinsically and no doubt many would disagree stuff like the Friends of Humanity is woke even if the friends are trying to evoke groups like the Nazis

or the KKK is criticizing them woke isn't it just a sensible uncontroversial stance were the X-Men always woke well okay part of the confusion here comes from the words we're using I think it's fair to assume exasperated people replying with some variation of the X-Men were always woke this is a nothing Burger pick up a comic book are aware of much of the above that there is some amount of cross talk and hyperbole going on facilitated by social media character limits and by the dunk incentive wh

en someone says the intention behind the X-Men was always to explore bigotry they don't necessarily mean this was true literally from minute one but that might not be immediately apparent to someone like our skeptical fan and there's a bit more cross talk going on too not with the idea that the X-Men were always woke but with the idea that the X-Men were always woke so let's talk about that word first I'll just clarify that if you think it means you've just woken up from a delightful sleep if yo

u're just a little guy who's always napping and that's where your mind went you are a bit off there but hey that being said you could probably do with hearing about this video's sponsor Manta sleep Manta make a whole range of sleep masks that range from Chic to high-tech and all of them are designed to help you get to sleep quickly and comfortably I'm a side sleeper so Manta sent me one of their Pro Models and I love it it's perfect for me with instant blackout and adjustable ey cups so I can ho

nk me me me all night long or all afternoon long Mana sleep a proudly Pro nap there's only one real woke threat out there and that's insomnia do you get it check them out and use my code pillar for 10% off at checkout but yeah back to X-Men discourse this woke doesn't mean that you've just risen from a delightful nap so what does it mean I've talked about this in more depth in these videos which are linked below so we'll try to keep this brief but woke isn't really one word in that the way the w

ord's been used has changed significantly over the years and we can divide this shift roughly into three phases the term originated in African-American vernacular English or a a and being woke meant being aware meant you'd awoken to the wide systemic inequalities that near invisibly influenced your lived experience as a minority the things the majority of society weren't yet aware of or interested by initially that is from the 60s until maybe 7 or 8 years ago most people using the word had this

sense firmly in mind a few years back after the term had entered the mainstream it began to be used ironically too by figures on the right and left alike criticizing xow corporate acts of performative inclusion and then partially because some of the right- wiers using the term had trouble differentiating performative inclusion from authentic sentiment partially because some of them were operating with a mindset which didn't consider that to be a distinction worth making and partially because som

e of them stood to gain personally or politically from muddying that water treating all inclusion as pandering I.E casting criticism of historical racists and bigots as merely smug grandstanding Wok's third and currently dominant usage emerged woke as a catch all term for modern progressivism modern Progressive ideas or for arguably Progressive aggessive modern artifacts Laden with vague great replacement connotations you will find many people who claim to have more specific definitions of this

third wave wokeness there will doubtless be some of them down there in the comments already but they're all more than happy to discuss and more often to criticize wokeness with other people whose specific definitions differ or do not exist and so the only workable definition for wokeness in this sense is a broad and malleable one to be disabled non-white or qu or an anti-fascist or a Critic of dominant power structures and so on is to be woke and to include any of these qualities in a work in a

way that doesn't explicitly apologize for their presence is to make something woke any one of an ever expanding cloud of attributes and sentiments is enough to designate a person or thing woke and that mere process of designation marks the person or thing as a threat part of a larger nebulously defined process of cultural replacement or subversion and as a target for the braying masses of sympathetic pundits creators and audience members to decry harass and Destroy both dangerously strong and hi

deously weak again we've covered this before so bringing it back to the X-Men two people can argue over whether or not the X-Men have always been woke and mean different things one can be intending to say the X-Men has always authentically reflected the minority experience and explored the inequalities and hardships faced by those outside society's norms and the other can intend to say the X-Men hasn't always explicitly included figures who embody currently controversial Progressive attributes a

nd they might not even realize they're arguing different points so looking at the rebuttal that the X-Men were always woke our skeptical fan might see absolute continuity being argued for when the fact is that something has changed morph wasn't explicitly non-binary and now they are they might see claims being made about authorial intention that aren't technically right and they might see the people making those claims asserting that the people disagreeing are just like the Friends of Humanity a

re a hate mob well that isn't right they're not a bigot they're just not getting on board with technically incorrect claims and if that makes the progressives online lump them in with the fictional hate group well maybe they've lumped some other people in wrongly too maybe it's worth seeing what those others are saying and maybe some of the lines about ists rewriting history or ignoring reality start to sound a bit more plausible what do you know our once halfway reasonable fan has well and trul

y entered the pipeline in 6 months time he's going to be one of those guys that posts cringe while convinced of his own rationality and in a couple of years he's going to be a full-blown de I SG wackadoodle and maybe this could have been avoided with a little more specificity specificity in moments of discourse flare up like this is valuable again though it takes a while and it takes effort to be specific and to be thorough and that means it's kind of a luxury one we can't always afford but that

's what a video like this is for I've put weeks into this so you can watch it in minutes and share it in seconds so let's nail down what we mean when we say the X-Men were always woke for good part three the X-Men were always woke the X-Men were always woke in that original sense responsive to the Dynamics of marginalization again perhaps not intentionally from minute one but unintentionally from minute one or rather issue one mutants as minority is textual from the beginning and intentionally f

rom not long after and just as important the franchise is doubling down on this minority Dynamic with the new giant sized characters and Clement's subsequent decade Plus on the book came hand in hand with the X-Men's Journey from cancelled sea listers to one of the bestselling American comic book series of the 20th century that meteoric rise was due in part to the quality of clar's writing and the talent of the artists he was working with but what clar wrote what those artists Inked and colored

were stories about identity exclusion and the social material systems that limit or Define our experiences to again quote Douglas wal Clement and burn figured out how to use the protein metaphor for oppression and marginalization that was embedded in X-Men's premise and turned it into rocket fuel for their stories for Ramsey FAS writing in his book the New Mutants superheroes and the radical imagination of American Comics right back to the new giantz characters introductory sequences the new X-M

en of the70s visually linked the popular fantasy of mutation to concrete differences grounded in histories of race hatred Cold War political oppression and Western imperialism across different decades across different continuities and different mediums the identities of our mutants change the real World struggles they evoke most clearly shift the specific problems they're up against fluctuate but the heart is consistently this woke this aware dynamic in wals words mutants as the despised and opp

ressed other and that isn't to say that every issue or episode of X media has something tangible to offer here just that you'd be hardpressed indeed to find a piece of X media that can't be read through the lens of marginalization and that many of the most beloved memorable or influential stories are centered around otherness this is seen maybe most clearly in the legacies of dark Phoenix and Days of Future Past the stories wal calls the two X-Men Master plots as while both were big events in th

eir own right they also provided two adaptable blueprints to be traced and traced again over the years wal argues so many key X stories like here comes tomorrow Age of Apocalypse House of M and many more are at Heart retellings of these Master plots those two stories formed this skeleton because of their enduring potential the way they ask the questions this world presents as wal explains dark Phoenix says this world is terrible to my people what might happen if it pushed one of us too far Days

of Future Past says this world is terrible to my people what might we have to do or sacrifice to make it right those are questions that haven't gone away in the past 40 years and it's not a flaw in Xmen that it continues to find new ways to ask them that's what sets it apart and it's different is its gift and this aware core persists across X media I quoted an Escapist article earlier which suggested that projects like the animated show toned this side of things down didn't have the vocabulary t

o express these ideas and I don't disagree entirely but I do think viewpoints like that don't give the show enough credit you don't need to say kill to make a clear Point why has it gotten worse when we saved president Kelly's life last year he learned that not all mutants were e Vil now his followers feel betrayed so often in our history unhappy misguided people have created scapegoats blaming those that are different for the problems in their own lives so in this first sense yes the X-Men are

and have consistently been woke but that's not the end of it what about the other dominant conception of wokeness woke as controversially Progressive therefore morally suspect artifact well you might think it's impossible to assert continuity here to rec flame X-Men as always woke in this sense since this sense is so shakily defined and so tied to our current cultural moment but I'm not sure sticking with wal for a moment an earlier passage from all of the Marvels is telling here discussing the

variable applicability of the mutant metaphor W writes mutants are sort of every marginalized group but they're also none of them or at least not one that exists in the real world continuing that in the 1970s and ' 80s and '90s when the heroes of popular culture were even more monotonously straight white able-bodied American CIS male types than they are now X-Men declared there were other possibilities and that observation points to a simple truth those Progressive sentiments we now take for gra

nted in the history of the X-Men the intersectionality of classic teams clamant empowered female Heroes and the way so many stories reject the dehumanization of those outside dominant social norms those only seem uncontroversial now because they happened so so long ago those pages have survived have been archived in our culture and our memories isolated from the cultural mure of their production and reception it's true that X projects of the past didn't always include the specific identities and

positions reactionaries and conservatives reject today but they did very often operate in ways reactionaries and conservatives of the past rejected then and while there were no Forum posts or Twitter threads back in the ' 80s I could pull up to demonstrate the way now classic characters and store stories were received back in the day you know what did exist TV so let's watch a report from 1984 by CBN News the most popular comic book series right now is the X-Men it's published by Marvel Comics

located in the building behind me here in downtown Manhattan the X-Men are subhuman beings with Supernatural Powers bent on destroying evil and this particular issue God love man kills the X-Men of course are the heroes the villain a Christian evangelist an evangelist felt he was called by by God to destroy mutants like the X-Men including the leader of the superheroes whom he crucified while quoting scripture of course in the end the Evangelist was shot and the X-Men and their leader lived thro

ugh the ordeal Marvel Comics which wouldn't Grant CBN News an on camera interview called comics and important print media kids are very receptive to however they said when it comes to religion they consider themselves neutral in this point and if he looks up is not this evil incarnate and then he says in awe and wonder he looks up to Behold a man now you recall the statement in the gospel Echo homo behold the man which had to do with Jesus and here there's a shaft of light and he looks up to Beh

old a man they've taken scripture and twisted it totally with a crucifixion image and so forth and here is the crucifixion going on of one of these subhumans and out of this guy's chest is coming another person who we're not quite sure as he's hanging on a cross and here he is bathed in light you tell me that's not Blasphemous and not only but this is being sold to your children meanwhile DC Comics greenberger who says he feels most Comics are spiritually uplifting also told us a large number of

the comic writers are quote very liberal and use the chance to poke fun at evangelicals who they feel are bending religious teachings the wrong way the industry says it is selling the public what it wants if this is what they want now what could they possibly want in the future the comic books have changed dramatically and I think what happens is we still have the concept of innocence in comic books that we had we were growing up for example Spider-Man and Batman you know Batman I grew up with

and Spider-Man is a relatively new hero this lady has got little or nothing on I mean she is I mean there she is so some 10-year-old is going to look at that picture and look at it and look at it and that has an arousal tendency and start fantasizing on these women now sure this is the Christian Broadcasting Network this is the discourse of the religious right so you might arue it's misleading to draw a comparison between this and the people complaining about the morality of leftist values in X-

Men today but as we touched on with entities like bounding into comics in that last video Christian fundamentalism and wasby white nationalism still absolutely undergirds a lot of the anti-woke platforms and messaging we see online of course nobody's saying God loves man kills is woke today but that's only because it isn't new only because it was already canonical before the gamergate Ghostbusters Last Jedi metastasis it's the Ripley of X-Men stories held as authentic an example of it being done

right despite its villain being based on Reagan's secretary of state because of that canonicity or rather it's one of the ripleys of X-Men stories because again commentary and progressivism abounds in this franchise and practically always has so if to be woke in this third wave sense this co-opted sense is understood not as displaying elements of progressivism controversial in the 2020s specifically but as displaying elements of progressivism controversial for the time if we reframe the discuss

ion from this angle asserting continuity here reclaiming the X-Men as always woke in this sense too becomes possible becomes inevitable if this is the framework of wokeness by which morph is woke the non-binary identity as today's morally suspect equivalent to the humanism and the emancipated costuming of God loves man kills then yes this wokeness too is visible all throughout X history and we can even see this further back one popular image of comic books in the' 60s is as a Fantastical but lig

htweight medium a time before the message overtook escapism but the preserved reader correspondence and staff responses in silver and bronze age comic back matter reveals this Vision to be a rose tinted one one famous Stanley column from the editor so-called soapbox makes explicit the company's Progressive stance and there is push back even then to the ostensibly straightforward commentary on Bigg Tre in books like X-Men's original run or say the Silver Surfer in 1970 one of Le's columns makes d

irect reference to read a correspondence accusing Marvel of putting moralizing above escapism and Lee's response is clear none of us live in a vacuum events shape Marvel stories as they shape the lives of their staff and of their readers it's clear that even this the messaging of these books the uncomplicated inclusive liberalism of Marvel 60s was controversial because we we are looking at the controversy the X-Men weren't always woke in this sense then because issues or episodes of X media from

previous decades included and affirmed precisely the same real world identities X-Men 97 displays today but because of the way it trended outspoken the way its ethos was oriented towards difference and tolerance and toward being ahead of the curve in ways which yes have become less visible but only because X-Men was right in predicting where the curve would be if we're all still around in another 30 years or so I wager nobody not even that Future's reactionaries will view non-binary morph as an

y less normal and non-controversial than things like storm or God loves man kills or Marvel 60 seem today because once again Society will have caught up with the X-Men so to recap with morph not much has changed what little has changed has precedent both within the wider X franchise and within the animated series 97 universe so if X-Men 97 is woke that wokeness is nothing new and someone might hold a position to the contrary either if they're not clued in the way X media has been aware of sensit

ive to reflective of inequalities systemic problems dynamics of otherness for nearly the past 60 years or if they're defining woke in a descriptionst presentist way as determined by the presence of specifically today's 2024's hot button social issues and attributes rather than as determined by issues and attributes Progressive for the time in which case sure it is now explicitly woke and was only implicitly woke before but the same could be said for practically any new piece of media being relea

sed and so being woke is even more meaningless a sentiment than it was before Oh or option three they don't actually believe it and are holding that position solely for clicks and that all covers a lot of the responses we've seen to 97 and its promotional material but not quite all of them because it's not all cross talk lack of knowledge and terminological confusion some of the shows the tractors some of the X-Men went woke crowd and not missing what the X-Men are and have been about are misrea

ding it or are perhaps unable to perceive it thanks to fundamental ethical ideological disagreements about what equality means and who deserves it for an example of this let's look back to the Blazers article see it isn't just wrong about the history of the non-binary concept it also applies its conclusions to the X-Men in an extremely wrongheaded manner The Blaze quotes their contributor Lauren Chen who of course has also worked for Turning Point USA it's all connected her web connects them all

in saying yes the X-Men as a concept was built on the message of inclusion but the idea of a non-binary character doesn't really fit into that if you ask me because the point of the X-Men is treat everyone the same regardless of their differences but when it comes to non-b people it's more like they are the same as everybody else but they want to be treated differently the entire premise of a non-binary gender identity is actually trying to make something that is really essentially the same as

everyone else into a different category which is the opposite of the X-Men's messaging Chen isn't reading here she's projecting what she's projecting doesn't make sense and the place she's projecting that makes even less the flaw in the idea that the correct thing to do is treat everyone identically regardless of their differences can be shown through a quick thought experiment imagine you're a teacher you're taking your class on a trip and you've got to provide them dinner you book a venue and

pre-order a healthy and filling meal for the whole class it's balanced it's got all your food groups yada yada yada on paper this is a good meal and it makes sense to choose this option at this restaurant but then you remember little Timmy's got celiac disease the tiniest amount of gluten in his food will seriously wreck his health and it doesn't matter if you've picked the dish without bread or pasta because if the chefs even use the same equipment to prepare Timmy's chips as they did some prev

ious guys beer battered fish Timmy's still done for you need to go to a place with proper Celiac accreditation but okay sure we can go there everyone can have the same dish there and it's fine right but the only place in town that has that accreditation is the Tie place and oh no little margara has a peanut allergy if there's so much as a stray peanut shaving in her dish her throat's going to swell up like Mrs [Music] Puff oh SpongeBob why you ring the place up and they say apologies but people

come from miles around to try their pad tie that's their most popular dish so while it would probably be fine you could get a different dish and there shouldn't be any peanut traces in there they can't guarantee that so one size doesn't always fit all to treat everyone the same a is to apply one approach to all and to do this you have to choose one approach and establish it as the norm and the moment you do that you're disadvantaging everyone for whom that approach isn't specifically tailored no

w you can treat the whole class equally here even Timmy even Margaret but you do that not by treating them identically but by affording both the opportunity to eat something they can process the same Liberty you're affording to their gastr typical men but she knows that they are the good guys so that must be it but it isn't Charles Xavier entrusted me with his dream and it does not ask you to love or embrace my kind as your own but merely to accept that this is a shared world with a common futur

e and that my kind like yours have the right to live in it as X-Men 97 or older stories like God loves man kills or any of the various cure plots either in the cartoon or the comics or even the films make clear the point isn't that there isn't and ought not to be any difference between the mutant experience and the non-mutant one the minority and the norm the answer isn't that the X-Men should try not being mutants it's that being mutants being different but just as worthy just as deserving of r

espect and empathy and Equity is an option because who said that normative modes of being are the true ones should be the universal Templar anyway faras 2 reads the X-Men's affirming inclusive ethos as oriented more around heterogenity than homogeneity finding in the team 70 Space Adventures in particular affiliations based on shared social interests rather than an assumed moral commitment to the category of the human he later writes that X-Men under clarant proposed an alternative to the seemin

gly allinclusive sign of universal Humanity in the form of a cross species kinship Network more properly described as a queer m UT anity the network far was suggests took shape through a distinctly feminist approach to forging alliances across difference through visually dramatizing the intersectional nature of identity and through the book's Collective production of an evolving cognitive map of individual histories as they came into contact with broader collectives that included mutants humans

and aliens of many stripes so in a truly shocking turn of events The Blaze contributor is wrong the X mindset isn't that we're all the same really that every identity is simply A variation on some god-given Norm that we all need to orient ourselves around to the detriment of everything else no it's that people are different but they all deserve dignity respect and the opportunity to coexist and to coexist with those differences intact without them being filed down to fit into society's Norms we

are different but we shouldn't be trying to fit into society Society should aspire to be more like us mutant am proud the X-Men's message isn't give all those kids the same dinner it's let's not let these kids go hungry it's let's build a new restaurant where everyone can eat and let's build another and another and eventually a whole society where different people's dietary identities are on equal footing proper allergen protocols for everyone you know I have plans for this place I mean to turn

it into a real campus you diversity not just for mutants either for humans too living and working growing together and let's celebrate which new elements of Cuisine present themselves all I've really done is create a world in which children can find peace and pride in being different let's dispense of the overlong food metaphor any way you slice it astronaut meme prevails it is inevitable yes the men were always woke obviously right did we teach you people Nothing were you not watching '90s show

writer Julia lewal said to variety did we not figure out how to be nice to each other and how to get along it's very odd to feel like we are still dealing with the same issues that we were dealing with 30 years ago it's painful on that yeah she and I agree the past few weeks have been a bizarre time to be an X-Men fan online the only thing more ging than seeing the post gameer cryptofash industrial complex turn out sloppy attempt after sloppy attempt at reframing this enduring cultural Beacon o

f progressivism as the latest thing to be destroyed by wokeness has been seeing that messaging embraced uncritically by so many but it has also been an encouraging time to be an X-Men fan because guess what the Revival is good and the Revival gets it we see in moments like that clip I just played that unlike some this show is crystal clear on what the ethos of this team is we see their goal and we see their problems institutions like hospitals refusing service the way shared problems aren't shar

ed equally when marginalization intersects with privilege and you guys I think I've had the Executioner in my comments section before know what I hate you're kind you act like you got it so bad normal people have it hard too we just have the dignity not to whine about it sure okay maybe some of that is a little on the nose but there are layers here too Cyclops goal of deescalation with the protesters or the complexities of storm and Jean's mutant Sisterhood and guess what four decades ago claran

t opened a story with two little African-American mutants getting lynched by a hate mob tell me why that's different how it doesn't count that it was subtle please go on make a fool of yourself but most of those guys aren't going to right they're already moving on notice the way almost all of the anti-woke rabble rousers quietly stopped talking about the show since it actually started airing since it became clear that people liked it and its approach the benefit of pre-release woke spotting like

this is that you can clam up or pivot when the thing releases if it becomes clear you read the room wrong that it'll just be another one of those increasingly numerous counter examples to the get woke go broke Mantra you can even skew positive after the fact change some old video titles and pre hesto you were just being cautiously optimistic this whole time again we've covered this they're abandoning ship you don't have to defend your position if you just move on to the next battle since I star

ted work on this video this what switched to trying to make gamergate 2 happen based on willful ignorance to what the phrase narrative consultancy means and now I hear they're onto the acolyte too because people don't understand the concept of unreliable narrators so they can claim a trailer is Cannon breaking shows Disney killing Star Wars for what like the sixth time at this point and the uncomfortable truth behind all this the thing I've been blocking my ears to over the again weeks I've spen

t on this video is that counterargument educational debunk whatever you want to call them videos like this can't be the thing that defeats these channels these websites and their reign of misinformative propaganda because the time it takes to properly refute something is orders of magnitude greater than the time it takes to make narrative pedaling nonsense up like Mark Twain said falsehood flies and truth comes limping after it except that wasn't Mark Twain that was Jonathan Swift but do you see

the way you just believed me the way that even the 3% of you that felt a little doubt over that quote's attribution would have had to pause the video rewind type the quote into Google and check the source for something so simple as a direct quote now scale that up to the sort of vague nonsense that drives this culture war and you'll see the problem I've just taken a month or so to try and set the x record straight and in that time the people moaning about its misalignment have made made their p

lay farmed their outrage and moved on to greener pastures even if any of them end up seeing this video they won't give it a second thought and let's be honest with ourselves this probably hasn't convinced a great number of those viewers either mental goalposts will have simply moved so this video isn't the answer it's not a silver bullet for the culture War it can't be but it's not nothing either and I think it is still worthwhile because in amidst all this murkiness these moving goalposts the t

reachery of terminology meaning does still exist the X-Men were always woke I have shown that you have seen that and that has to be worth something right thanks for making it through this was a long one oh and please don't comment below telling me I forgot to mention one particular historical instance of the X-Men being woke I know I've left some out but that was always a given since there are so many examples or you know do I don't mind engagements engagement if you're interested in pursuing th

is topic further make sure you've seen my other two related videos there's a brief elaboration on part two maybe coming soon I also pop up in a video actual fandoms making on this topic which will probably be out before this one is but above all I recommend checking out the books I've quoted from in this video Douglas WS all of the Marvels and Ramsey faers the New Mutants the former is a lighter read the latter is a weightier one it is really good though also just read more old X-Men Comics it's

all there on a more selfish note if you did like this video please do consider helping to support the channel either on patreon or with a YouTube membership I've tried to go deep this month and really settle this X-Men issue but YouTube likes quantity over quality and that is reflected in the AdSense payouts ultimately beefing up those financial support systems is the only way I'll be able to keep making stuff like this long term so yeah a giant sized thank you to everyone you're seeing on scre

en now the people supporting me already my Mutant power is is being extremely grateful for all this faith and Shout out especially to Hanan Daniel goldon Karen kouman magath Ryan Emily something something capitalism bad Thomas R and weirdy beardy thanks for watching and don't go [Music] anywhere [Music] he