So I do still consider myself a newcomer to the fandom side of RWBY – only having started dipping my toes in when news of RT’s shutdown filtered down to my circles – but at this point I’ve seen enough fanart and read enough fics that I’ve seen all of the main girls and a couple of side-characters depicted as trans for one reason or another (and no, I’m not counting the copious amounts of [redacted] here). I’ve not published anything myself yet, but I have found myself leaning into some trans headcanons myself quite frequently, so I’ve been wondering lately how others see it.

Ruby, I think, gets this treatment the most. She’s already kind of autistic-coded so I think she ends up ticking a lot of boxes for people. I myself like to have Ruby as trans a lot in my personal scraps, in part because I think it would answer a big question that I never see brought up: why she has her mom’s name while Yang has their dad’s. Now, I’m never sure how much plotting out deadnames even for fictional characters might be insensitive, so I’ve never really planned out who she would have been, but I always settle for “Ruby took her mother’s last name in tribute and she’d been born a Xiao Long”.

Weiss I don’t think gets trans-ified (is that a term at all? fuck it, I’m making it one now) that often as people seem to prefer just making her a faunus instead – although, funnily enough, I’ve read two different stories by different authors that had Weiss be cybernetically enhanced, so that’s like a different flavor of trans – but several of my most serious rewrite plots always make her out to be trans because IMO it would solve so many confusing elements about her story. It’s always bothered me why Weiss was the heiress of the SDC when she was the female middle child AND going into the same line of work as her older sister, but if she had been the firstborn son then it would make sense why Winter was passed over, why she (Weiss) is desperate to train at Vale instead of Atlas and pretty much wanted to cut all ties with her family.

Personally, I don’t ever think on making Blake or Yang trans, but I do want to note that canon Yang has always come across to me as the closest to “dudebro” so while that kind of figure would surprise me for a young trans girl, I could totally understand where the personality came from if she’d been raised a boy.