Heartstopper season 3: feminists wanting single-sex spaces are transphobic

[HelenaRavenclaw]

And there we go again...perhaps it comes as no surprise since this show featured a male student with long hair and artistic skills being allowed to go to an all-girls school in the first place.

In the new Season 3, "she" does a radio interview where the interviewer asks her about her views on the trans debate and her thoughts on a feminist who spoke up for single-sex spaces and said gender-neutral toilets increased the risk of sexual harassment. The stock answers followed: there is no "debate", trans people are human, the feminist was "transphobic". Later, this trans-identified male is shown feeling depressed as "she" scrolls through news about NHS policies on single-sex services, etc.

These scenes were not even in the original Heartstopper comics. They were clearly added just for the show for "TERF-trashing" purposes. It should be noted that the trans-identifying male had the right to be upset that "she" was being asked about topics unrelated to her artwork (she was wrongly given the prior impression that this would be an art-related interview). But to use an upset teenager as a mouthpiece to denigrate feminists who stand up for girls' rights to single sex spaces, on a Netflix show with a huge following, is disgusting. I hope sensible parents who watch the show with their children will point out how misogynistic and dangerous such blanket "no debate" statements are.

It's especially sad as the main Nick/Charlie storyline is sweet and lovely to watch, but all this trans nonsense (plus a new side story of a lesbian girl declaring herself nonbinary with "they/them" pronouns) makes the show so ridiculous. It's scary to think of all the kids who will watch this and be indoctrinated by gender ideology, if they haven't already.

This is very interesting.

Tbh I don't really think it's appropriate for tweens. Even the comics.

I’ve never watched Heartstopper but have DD14 who is a big fan. Just had a look at the scene that is referenced in the OP off the back of this thread and I thought it was okay actually - for me it acknowledged that there actually is a debate, that young gender questioning young people are getting caught in the middle of it, and the character didn’t really have any answer for what was said other than to say it was transphobic which didn’t actually make sense in the context of concerns about gender neutral toilets. Would be an interesting conversation starter for sure but I didn’t think that scene in particular was TRA-y.

I tend to agree.

I understand young girls wanting to have idealised, non-threatening young men to daydream about (in my youth we had actors and pop stars who were marketed that way) and I also understand that girls might reject stereotypical portrayals of women from typical romance stories so they gravitate towards these Shonen Ai/Yaoi or slash fanfic stories because the characters are more relatable to them. Relatable because they're men written by women to be that way and not because they're realistic portrayals of typical men.

But there is also that darker side to it all via Tumblr, AO3, TikTok, YouTube etc where girls are being introduced to sexualised elements in stories that they're not mature enough to deal with or they are introduced to ideological elements that are purposely written into the stories. And girls who have personality traits in common with the male characters in the stories are nowadays encouraged by lots of elements of our culture to over identify with the boys and to see themselves as potentially boys too.

And because media content is such big, profitable business these days, and companies have realised that there's money to be made in lots of niche types of media too, almost every type of content from web comics to YA fiction is telling kids stories with elements that might concern their parents if they were aware of it all.

@UtopiaPlanitia When the original LOTR came out, I remember Livejournal being FLOODED with fan content featuring the hobbits and Legolas together in various states of relationships.

It was weirdly wholesome and sweet and entirely cultivated (and consumed) by teenage girls.

Heartstopper is only sweet when you haven't got a child who is blindly lapping it all up. My ASD DD desperately wants to transition and won't have it when I tell her that she cannot change sex. I have to really bite my tongue and tread around the subject very carefully to make sure I keep the door to conversation open.

DD devoured the latest series within 24 hours of it being released. I haven't seen it. I wish I'd read this thread before as I would have made sure we'd watched it together to open discussions. I could scream at this nonsense that's being shoved down vulnerable teenager's necks. I've got 2 years before she's 18 to talk her out of the surgeries she's adamant she needs to be happy. I could weep. And actually often do.

@JustGotToKeepOnKeepingOn this is the reality of what the messages pushed by this kind of stuff is doing to autistic young girls (boys too, but there are important differences) 😥 Keeping the door open is the hardest and most important bit - from what you said, it sounds like you're doing a great job 💪💐

@WyrdyGrob 💐 Hopefully you've found other threads with useful ideas too? I'm going to add an update in my own situation below but it might be too specific to my family dynamic to be of direct use.

@UtopiaPlanitia @TempestTost this is the key driver behind all of it: the manipulation and monetisation of teenage angst. In this case, targeting vulnerable girls (misfits, autistic girls) whose sexual feelings are only just waking up but also, I think they've cleverly targeted vulnerable boys. The gay storyline really is lovely - it's innocent and heartwarming. But there are girls getting the "buzz" from the anime type influence as per Utopia's info and there are boys watching someone be their "true self" whilst also seeing the storyline about the transgirl. It's all been carefully crafted.

Update following conversation with my younger (not autistic) daughter:

I told her I'd seen that the new series of Heartstopper was on Netflix and I wanted to talk to her about some things that worried me about its content. She said "Oh, I'm not going to watch that. That's what the furries [at school] are in to" 😱 (Obviously we had a side conversation about "the furries at school"). I reminded her that she'd enjoyed the first series and how lovely the Nick/Charlie story was. She said she just finds any romance stuff awkward to watch - she's 13, so maybe not yet in the anime "target zone" as per the above.

I shared my concerns about her sister watching it and she agreed. She said she didn't think her sister would be interested in it. So for now, I'm just going to wait and see if she (sister) watches it - if she does, I'll watch it too and will then choose some topics to talk about.

Given we'd already had the conversation about sports and changing rooms earlier, I mentioned the NHS Heartstopper storyline in our conversation. I said that to me, it sounded like manipulation because it felt like a reaction to the situation with the Darlington nurses. Obviously my daughter hadn't been aware of their situation, so I told her. I was fully expecting her to tell me I was a Karen for making that connection (they have both called me this previously when I spoke about any of this... hence I follow their lead and bite my tongue a lot) but she didn't. She agreed.

If anyone has watched the series, it would be good to hear about some of the other storylines. The description in the OP about the NHS angle suggests that there may be other emotionally loaded messages too, very much like their were in Sex Education. For anyone with a vulnerable child in this awful mess, it really is like playing a constant game of whack-a-mole on all the things that are directly or indirectly influencing them to believe that they're in the wrong body 😔

Oh yes, fanfiction on LiveJournal tended to be rather sweet back in the day. And if there were certain Journals dedicated to weird or adult stuff they were locked and well signposted as NSFW and endeavoured to keep out minors.

In recent years, fanfic has developed a problem - there’s always been PWP (for those who don’t know, PWP = largely erotica) stories, and there’s no objection from me if someone wants to write that type of story as long as they keep it away from the eyes of kids. And there have been stories that deal with darker themes if they were already present in the source material but in the last 10 years I’m seeing lots more stories with tags and descriptions that have really extreme things like body modification, mental health/severe depression, torture, sadism, cutting, and also kink stuff in them that honestly seems like it’s lifted straight off porn sites or something.

I don’t know if all this was starting to happen anyway (and some of the darker stuff seems to be writers torturing their characters because they as writers enjoy it) or if the mainstream success of 50 Shades of Grey heavily influenced fandom writers. It feels like Tumblr encouraged a lot of really unpleasant stuff in communities of teenage girls and it spread to other fandom sites.

But at any rate I wish AO3 and other sites that host this stuff would make it impossible for minors to read it/write it. And I worry that comics like Heartstoppers might lead youngsters towards communities online that don’t make an attempt to shield minors from adult sexuality.

She said "Oh, I'm not going to watch that. That's what the furries [at school] are in to" 😱

This made me laugh. I like that there is a hierarchy and furries are rightfully at the bottom.

PWP has always existed in some form, but if you go on AO3, it seems like every fic now is blatant porn. Fewer decent, thoughtful, character-driven literary fanfics, just Character A and Character B having shallow, porn-inspired sex. Generation no-attention-span.

@UtopiaPlanitia Teenage girls will absolutely find this stuff, especially waiting between series. AO3 doesn't care, they don't even hide "underage" tags, instead putting it in bold right at the top of the list! I believe insane tagging started from Tumblr's twisted etiquette (as so many things have done) to provide proper content warnings for people who didn't want to read about certain things. Now they are nothing more than adverts indicating which pornographic acts will be in the "story".

I'm not being facetious when I say the pornification of fandom has contributed not just to the the rise of boy-identifying girls but asexual ones too. Everywhere teenage girls are, but especially online, they are being bombarded with sexual messaging at one of the most confusing times in life. Parents are too busy to adequately supervise or understand their children's online interests. Fandom is a groomer's paradise yet so many children turn to it in good faith for acceptance and friendship. It's all so deeply intertwined with identity ideology.

If you have teenage girls, I'd genuinely advise getting them offline ASAP and not letting their brains rot from the carefully crafted saccharine lies of Netflix nonsense.

Could not agree more @lavlavbluedillydilly 👍 I really wish AO3 took this issue seriously and tried even minimally to prevent adult material being so easily accessible.

These days, I keep starting stories and abandoning them because they take a weird porny turn for no reason. Or the writer establishes a really interesting premise for the characters but then just writes grim sex scenes for 75% of the story. TBH, these days I’ve gone back to reading my favourite longfics from years past because I’m finding that older style of writing very hard to find as newer, younger writers have begun writing fic.

For me, fanfic was a huge improvement on tie-in novels because, unlike those write-to-order authors, fans knew the characters and the fictional world really well and could write dense character explorations that included lots of world-building and, unlike novel authors, they didn’t have to worry if their plot upended the plot of the show or book or film in any way.

I would also advise not letting teenagers read fanfic nowadays because there are so many people online who don’t care what reading about their particular flavour of kink does to immature minds and I find that disgusting.

Couldn't agree more. The whole "no kinkshaming" thing just covers up a cesspit.
If you're getting off to stories of adults pretending to be babies shitting in their nappies, you bloody well should be ashamed.
And virtually every HP story now has to feature a trans person to signal to the crowd, I'm on the right side, don't hate me.

If you have teenage girls, I'd genuinely advise getting them offline ASAP and not letting their brains rot from the carefully crafted saccharine lies of Netflix nonsense.

Sadly it's not that simple, unless you choose to go full Erin Friday (see link below) - which is obviously a completely legitimate way of doing things, depending on the risk level you're facing at that time and you're own parenting style.
My daughter needs the internet to enjoy herself. We've just come back from a nice afternoon out (whole family trip to a garden centre, including eating massive cakes 🍰 and enjoying the nostalgia of looking at the animals and fish) and she's now gone online to play with her friends. She also uses the internet for some of her hobbies e.g. tornado and volcano stuff.
So for us, the approach is about being aware of the risks, mitigating it where possible and helping to build her critical thinking skills (while also continuing to build her mental health back up again after her major crisis a couple of years ago). We won't be taking our daughter off the internet unless things take a major turn in a bad direction.

It's threads like this that really help articulate what the risk is and how it links up to other similar risks. When I was still in the early days of understanding gender identity to support my daughter, I heard the detransitioner Helena talking with Benjamin Boyce and Carole Hooven about fan fiction and how it draws girls in (particularly re the positioning of gay men, through the lens of how women imagine it to be) but I hadn't connected the dots with the storyline and writing of Heartstopper. It really does make sense. Here's that interview - it covers lots of other related things as well (it's long but well worth a listen):

Here's Erin Friday talking about her approach. She did an amazing job supporting her daughter, that's the important bit:

Is this on Netflix? I've been meaning to cancel it for a while and this might just be the nail in the coffin.

I’ve written fanfiction on and off since 2002, and I strongly disagree with the characterization of slash as being all about teenage girls writing girly boys. In my fandoms, at least, the most important thing was writing the characters in/character as portrayed in the source material, and while there were certainly plenty of teenage girls, some of the most well-regarded writers were mothers in their thirties and forties who wrote fics in order to have a creative outlet when they weren’t dealing with work or kids.

I liked the first couple seasons of Heartstopper, mostly because of Nick and Charlie. I didn’t believe for one single second that Elle was “really a girl,” but s/he seemed like a nice kid and I was curious to see where the relationship with Tao would go. Now I don’t know if I even want to bother watching third season. It’s one thing when characters don’t share your views and another thing when the script villainizes your views.

It's good to read a different perspective on fanfiction, thank you @YankSplaining I'm still going to treat it as high risk (AFAIK my 15 year old autistic daughter hasn't actually come across it yet) but it makes sense that there are still some writers who don't have a TRA or progressive sexual agenda towards teenagers.

I didn’t believe for one single second that Elle was “really a girl,” but s/he seemed like a nice kid and I was curious to see where the relationship with Tao would go.

This is how I felt when I watched series 1 with my daughters. I can't remember if there was any relationship potential in that series (the only relationship storyline I remember is Nick/Charlie) but I was definitely open-minded and curious about how Elle would get on at the girls' school. I had been very much hooked in on the emotional journey and was rooting for Elle to be accepted there as a girl. I clearly hadn't thought that part through and probably just assumed that the girls in Elle's new school would not think Elle was "really a girl" either - if I try and tap in to how I felt back then guess I probably thought that there would be an unwritten rule to accommodate everyone's opinions/needs that meant it all worked out just fine for everyone #BeKind.

It’s one thing when characters don’t share your views and another thing when the script villainizes your views.

This ⬆️⬆️⬆️

You make a good point, not all slash fic is written by teenage girls; as I mentioned in my earlier post, I’ve gone back to reading older + longer stories because the quality of the writing is superior. And, as you point out, those stories were written by older women who had genuine writing talent and a desire to write about the characters/fictional world.

However, that being said, I feel like that old-style type of writer is hard to find these days because the amount of poorly-written porny fic is taking over in a lot of fandoms. I don’t know if it’s because the older writers have drifted away from writing (a lot of older, established writers have said that the old fanfic culture of leaving comments for fic as ‘payment’ for the story is dying off; nowadays people just want to leave ‘likes’ and writers miss the feedback and connection with readers) or if it’s because the new type of writer is increasing for some reason, but I do wish that porn/kink-influenced writing wasn’t so prevalent or so easy to access.

Another phenomenon in fanfic is writers transing characters and only discussing those types of themes in their fic to the exclusion of including elements from the source material or even very much in the way of plot. These stories feel very different in tone to old-style gender swap stories that used to be a way for a male character to learn how the other half lives and how hard they have it. I often get the feeling with these new style fic that the writers are using the characters to work through their own feelings or to push an ideological view rather than to tell an engaging story. I don’t enjoy being preached at.

(plus a new side story of a lesbian girl declaring herself nonbinary with "they/them" pronouns)

Missed this part the first time I read the original post - that’s it, I’m done with this show. The first season was fantastic. It made me just smile all day thinking about it, because Nick and Charlie had such a sweetly developing romance and because my inner teenager wished that sort of show had existed when I was in school. Second season was pretty good. Now Elle is all “boo evil TERFs” and Darcy is declaring herself nonbinary? (I looked up which character it was.) Complete with a chest binder, it seems, because I guess Darcy having visible breasts is a problem now.

Darcy is the sort of outgoing, slightly goofy feminine-androgynous girl that I would have had a big crush on in high school. So now there’s no couple on Heartstopper consisting of two girls who like being girls?! Everyone goes on about how great this show is for LGBT representation, but wait, no, can’t have a female couple. (I mean, they do, obviously, but now we’re supposed to pretend Darcy isn’t a girl.) God, I am so disappointed. Especially because I think this show did such a great job with the nuances of Nick discovering his bisexuality and I loved it for that.

Thanks, @BonfireLady and @UtopiaPlanitia . 🙂

I was talking to my daughter who used to be obsessed with Heartstopper back in 2021 and she watched Season 3 anyway just to see and said the reason the lesbian character was non-binary now is because of the actual actress who is non-binary and they wanted to make her feel comfortable.

I still think the show did a really good job of showing general mental health of both Charlie and Nick to be honest and a lot of the relationships are really sweet, if a little cringe. But what happened to Darcy makes me very sad. She was a great character. And Elle has always annoyed me.

She said "Oh, I'm not going to watch that. That's what the furries [at school] are in to" 😱

Lol my daughters said something very similar. Still, one of them watched it as she used to like it and the comics and said it was very cringe still but that they did a good job in some areas and she had to give it credit for that.

And how many impressionable young girls are going to take up the mantle of non-binary themselves because the series insisted on affirmation instead of saying no? Girls who might not have even heard of the term "non-binary" until then, who'd just wanted to watch the cute gay love story popular among their friends. How many of those girls will fall deeply into TRA rabbit holes, become discontent with their changing female bodies, and believe hormones and surgery is the solution? How many of those girls' parents will stand by and let it happen, out of fashion or fear?

It's all grooming. It's all corrupt. Girls desperately need protected from this.

I agree about the increased pornification of fanfic. I would disagree about one point of the teenage girls writing fanfic - from my understanding, most writers of fanfic are adult women. Of course, some writers are teenagers. Sometimes this is very clear, given the writing and presentation of the work; othertimes not. It also really depends on the fandom in question.

I don't think there's anything innately worrying about fanfiction as a practice. If we look at say Pride and Prejudice fanfic, it's largely in line with P&P published continuations (sometimes better quality, sometimes it gets removed from the web to be published commercially). I would criticise it for distorting book canon and relying on adaptations as well as a tendency to villainise Caroline Bingley in ways inconsistent with her portrayal in Austen's book, but it's not pornified (generally speaking). Harry Potter is such a large fandom that it would be more appropriate to split it up according to ships; this really varies. As a digression, another fandom (for an adult work), which used to get a lot of post-canon and canon divergence works now gets a lot more works with tags dealing with violent sex, male pregnancy, or trans identities (not present in the canon).

The issue comes with certain things (tropes/kinks) that gain popularity within certain fandoms. Thinking about things like A/B/O (a sort of fantasy werewolf structure that originated from fiction about the actors in Supernatural, where you mostly have an alpha/omega couple, where, irrespective of sex, the omega is capable of pregnancy and usually subjected to treatment analogous to RL oppression of women) and kink (in particular, a normalisation of BDSM). Scrolling through some fandom tags on AO3 is an uncomfortable experience for this reason.

I caught this too. Irked me as well.

So dismissive of woman's voices.

It's a shame, I actually quite liked the person playing the role. But turns out they're either a dick or were too chicken to call out the writers on this bs.

Brainwashing bullshit.
And the other character Iiked suddenly became a they/them clearly just for checking the diversity box. Ugh.

Tbh all the side characters suck.
They're the sort of people I'd go out of my way to avoid.

Nicks so damn adorable though that I had to finish the series.

the reason the lesbian character was non-binary now is because of the actual actress who is non-binary and they wanted to make her feel comfortable - ugh. Looks like Kizzy Edgell declared a nonbinary identity about a year after the show premiered. That’s like having a character change religions or citizenship or something just because the actor did. What’s “uncomfortable” about playing a character who’s referred to by a pronoun that you’ve been referred to by for almost your entire life?!

IDK, maybe I’ll tough out third season for Nick and Charlie. I really adored both their characters, particularly Nick.

Review from the Observer:

https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2024/oct/06/the-week-in-tv-joan-industry-nobody-wants-this-heartstopper-review

Apparently it's got some "prejudice", "it’s about an idealised Britain" and the series "seems determined to grow up"

Well, I guess that's us told then. Sod single sex-spaces etc, life is better when you embrace a fanfic-porn-inspired world "where cynicism is crushed to death beneath an avalanche of Love Hearts sweets". Apparently. FFS 🤦‍♀️

To be fair, describing the crushing to b death of cynicism in this way does sound like a pretty accurate framing of the impact of #BeKind.

and said the reason the lesbian character was non-binary now is because of the actual actress who is non-binary and they wanted to make her feel comfortable

This is so bloody pathetic! 😡 An actress can cope with being called the ‘wrong’ name because - guess what? - she’s playing a character, but couldn’t possibly cope with the ‘wrong’ pronoun 🙄 I am sick to fuckery of this simpering, braindead pandering to immature, self-centred young people who are so boring that they leap on the latest bandwagon to try to appear more interesting.