You mentioned most members of the Marill line technically being transgender. If Pokémon could be transgender, how would this work with your ideas on Pokémon gender?
Disclaimer first of all that my ideas on Pokémon gender are totally bat$#!t and probably bear little resemblance to anything Game Freak’s designers have ever thought in the privacy of their own brains…
…and secondary disclaimer that since the last time I babbled about Azurill, someone has pointed out to me that Game Freak actually did remove/fix(?) the gender thing in generation VI…
…and tertiary disclaimer that I’m cis and have no close friends who are trans (or… I don’t think I do…), so I kinda don’t really know what I’m talking about here…
…but my understanding is that transgender is basically when your biological sex doesn’t match up with your psychology or the social role you’re comfortable with, and in a world where gender works the way I outlined in that article, this… well, wouldn’t happen. What little sex differentiation Pokémon exhibit is directly tied to their psychology, so by definition they’re all cisgender. Which means that if you believe my rambling nonsense, what Azurill is doing is something quite different, where her gender identity actually changes (the point of trans being that your gender identity was the same all along and everything else about you is catching up, so to speak – which is how you’d interpret Azurill if we do think Pokémon have biological sex differentiation), for which I think the term is genderfluid but I’m not really sure?
I’m just confusing myself now so I’ll shut up before I offend anyone I haven’t already.
Pokémaniacal 