Ronack said:
It's really, really sad how transgendered/crossdressing main characters are always in a more comedic show ... Well, there IS The Education of Max Bickford, a drama show which played it all more straight forward. But here, she was on the main cast but not the main character. I guess there's also TransAmerica.
I think that's because people find cross dressing to be humorous. And this isn't just because a bunch of nominally 'straight' people like laughing at the odd person swapping gendered clothing articles, even shows which are geared toward and aimed at transvestites often play up the humor, Rupaul's Drag Race being a good example of this. That's not to say that you can't have a transvestite character who isn't just doing it for the lols, but humor linked to men dressing as women is a core part of what many transvestite shows actually aim for.
That said, cross dressing done as an act or for humor is a different thing that someone who's transgendered wearing gendered clothing of the opposite sex. This cartoon in particular is not focussing on that though, it's focussed on the played-for-humor aspects of the former example. I think it's a fallacy to try and combine cross-dressing and transgendered roles into being of the same category, as one is often done specifically for comedic effect and the other is not. I would like to see more transgendered characters though, that's for sure.
OT - As for Bob's video, the only issue I take is his assertion that girl+guy = good, where as independent girl = bad. You have examples of females attached to male characters who are bad (Harley Quinn much?) and examples of independent heroines being good. Wonder Woman, as he pointed out already, but also the later version of Huntress and a bunch of the cast of characters from Birds of Prey (even if many of them started life as evil or connected to male characters, things have changed.)
We can also argue over what being 'connected' to a male character even means. Who's really independent, male or female, in either DC or Marvel? Nearly everyone's been connected to a team at one point or another, male and female alike. And just as there are often independent female villains, so goes the male villains. Note how many male villains were very often shown with no romantic interest and no connection to any female characters good or evil (except the occasional team up). This is because those villains are portrayed not as people, but as plot devices, objectified and without humanity. It isn't that independent female = bad, but rather that good characters are people who have socializations and are dependent on their inter-personal relationships, where as evil characters are either portrayed as psychopaths with no ability to form real relationships, or because they are so objectified that the idea of relationships never even comes up. Both of these phenomenon happen regardless of gender.