Forum adverts like this one are shown to any user who is not logged in. Join us by filling out a tiny 3 field form and you will get your own, free, dakka user account which gives a good range of benefits to you: No adverts like this in the forums anymore. Times and dates in your local timezone. Full tracking of what you have read so you can skip to your first unread post, easily see what has changed since you last logged in, and easily see what is new at a glance. Email notifications for threads you want to watch closely. Being a part of the oldest wargaming community on the net. If you are already a member then feel free to login now.

But people do comment on race. If someone is a Cadian, it'll be commented on and possibly be judged as a failure, a catachan, commented on. Ogryns and Ratlings are treated differently. Yes they're layering over a coat of abstraction by calling them sanctioned abhumans but they are treated differently because of things they cannot control. Hell even different space marine chapters won't see eye to eye based on their heritage or cultural differences.

I feel many people sugar coating the whole xenophobic portion of humanity. It's not just aliens but anyone who is different. I doubt any sort of mutation or disability would be treated kindly unless you're someone of status or wealth enough to have it overlooked. Which speaks of the corruption and unfair treatment in the imperium.

Then you have psykers, another pretty easy racial analog or a comparison to race. They don't have a choice in it but their life is hard purely because of how they're born.

You can claim Fallacy of the Undistributed Middle if you like, but neither of us have a hard yes or no to answer this question so i'm making comparisons to what we do know and the real world places the fiction was drawn from. Others are just saying nope they're developed beyond this when everything we know about this fantasy universe is a story decay, decline, horrible unfair mistreatment and sadness.

40k is a mashup of nazi oppression, soviet oppression, religious oppression being accepted because yes, there is an alien swarm the next solar system over. But every day to day thing is terrible. Those in power will have a very narrow definition of what is acceptable and everyone else will have issues.

Skitarii Mitranda in Brutal Kunnin referred to self as "They" because they had downloaded so many consciousnesses and the fact "flesh is weak", they don't count as either, and don't care.
Orks also don't have a gender, but are generally regarded as "He"- but Makari chose "They", mostly because of the respawn, but to me it heavily implies Ghaz is actually two beings.

Being in theater arts, I had a lot of "Alphabet Soup People" friends (one of which gave me that euphemism vs spelling out LGBQT+) and more than a few Trans friends. I will always accept what a person wants to be called... to a point. It hasn't happened yet, but if someone tells me they prefer "(Insert weird new pronoun here)" I will tell them "Well, I prefer "Voltronmasteroftheuniverse: not just Voltron, not Master of the Universe, Voltronmasteroftheuniverse all together." But this can be cleared up by using First/ Last names.

Anyhoo- the main problems in the Imperium (as relates topic, b/c.. yeah, where do I start in general with problems?) is that 1) there's not a lot of what we'd consider "Middle Class"- you're either a worker, more akin to a grueling slave or a Noble with gold toliet paper. And 2) we don't have very much on the day to day lives of Imperial Citizens beyond "Work work work for the Hegemony". Outside of fanfics, we don't see any dating (Except maybe the snogging of Inquisitor retainers and.. whatever Cain and Vail are up to), let alone non-binary/ trans relationships. But, lack of info doesn't mean lack of people sleeping around.
As dogmatic as the Ecclesiarchy is, we've never explicitly gotten a "Ten Commandments" type set of rules. Other than "Kill xenos/ mutant/ heretic" there doesn't seem to be "Thou Shalt/ Shall Not"s for daily life. And as much as R34 people like to link Slaanesh to sexual deviance of all sorts, ANY sort of excess of sex feeds "She who thirsts", so not just same sex pairings.

When it comes down to it- who knows what social mores will be like 38,000 years from now? Hell, 40 years ago Homosexuality was considered a "Mental Defect"- so there you have it.

 Gert wrote:

cody.d. wrote:
I doubt it'd go well in Tallern, an islam analog.

Not an analog for Islam, they're based on the Arabs that T.E. Laurence fought with and that is only for their aesthetic. The Tallarn themselves aren't any different from other Imperial citizens.

Also, to me his statement is pretty close to islamophobia.
We're talking about the Imperium, that is modelled after tropes of the catholic church from the 15th/16th century and you're telling me the guys that are modelled after people from the Near East surely must be the transphobic ones?

Also, the Imperial Cult is the Imperial Cult.

Given there’s nothing to suggest said religion preaches transphobia? There’s no reason to believe any particularly dedicated member would just decide “all of what it teaches, and some transphobia just in case”.

The Imperial Cult is malleable enough that it can incorporate primative sun worship on feral worlds...

Just like 'Are there a significant number of women in the Imperial Guard?' the answer is probably that it varies based on location and circumstance.

The Imperial Cult, and the Missionaria Galaxia, might be the most tolerant part of the Imperium (outside of the Inquisition).

"Hello, fellow humans. I am Cardinal Voss of the Missionaria Galaxia. What is this ritual going on here?"
"We are worshipping the mighty sun god!"
"I see. And what happens at the end of this ritual. Do any of this sun god's servants appear and cause mischief?"
"What? No! We just have a bountiful harvest"
"That's good to hear. Y'know, I think I know of your sun god."
"Really?"
"Yes, except my people call him The Emperor. How about we tell some stories about our Emperor - or sun god, if you will - and I'll see if they're the same person!"
"Sounds great!"

And 18 months later they're all worshipping the Sun God "Emperor". If they were as bigoted as people are making out, their first recourse would be to purge this "heretical" religion. Yes, it's subversion, but they tend to look at local religious customs as a way of bringing the Emperor to these people, not as something to violently suppress.

There’s a significant difference to “and we you say Sun, you really mean The Emperor” type adaptation, and using that good book to justify a persecution which, given such persecution isn’t apparent elsewhere, that good book is most likely completely silent on.

Again, the argument here is that the Imperium as a whole isn’t at all fussed about culture war stuff we have in the modern day.




Automatically Appended Next Post:

 H.B.M.C. wrote:
The Imperial Cult, and the Missionaria Galaxia, might be the most tolerant part of the Imperium (outside of the Inquisition).

"Hello, fellow humans. I am Cardinal Voss of the Missionaria Galaxia. What is this ritual going on here?"
"We are worshipping the mighty sun god!"
"I see. And what happens at the end of this ritual. Do any of this sun god's servants appear and cause mischeif?"
"What? No! We just have a bountiful harvest"
"That's good to hear. Y'know, I think I know of your sun god."
"Really?"
"Yes, except my people call him The Emperor. How about we tell some stories about our Emperor - or sun god, if you will - and I'll see if they're the same person!"
"Sounds great!"

And 18 months later they're all worshiping the
"Emperor" Sun God.

Bah, Ninja’d!

cody.d. wrote:
But people do comment on race. If someone is a Cadian, it'll be commented on and possibly be judged as a failure, a catachan, commented on. Ogryns and Ratlings are treated differently.

You're now conflating "race" with "nationality" and "species".

Also, being aware that someone is from a different village, town, city, country, culture, planet, segmentum etc is….just an observation about their point of origin.

For instance, I’m Scottish, and live in South East England. Despite that being the case for…erm…32 years, my accent remains. And said accent is commented upon.

That’s not a problem, until the commentator uses that to draw conclusions about my nature and personality - whether positive or negative.

H.B.M.C. wrote:

cody.d. wrote:
But people do comment on race. If someone is a Cadian, it'll be commented on and possibly be judged as a failure, a catachan, commented on. Ogryns and Ratlings are treated differently.

You're now conflating "race" with "nationality" and "species".

This. I already mentioned that imperials do judge each other based on their planet of origin or culture in general. See my previous example about Fenrisians. Whether or not abhumans are literally a different species or basically just an unusual "race" is maybe debatable; "race" being a kind of vague term that we use to refer to collections of phenotypes and/or cultural elements depending on the context. Regardless, the abhumans are a great example of why 40k doesn't really need conventional racism.

In Wraithbone Phoenix, the main characters are abhumans, and we get a first-hand look at some of the abuse they endure as a result. It reads like racism. The setting is able to explore racism through the abhumans without having to make white imperials racist towards black imperials or what have you.

cody.d. wrote:
I feel many people sugar coating the whole xenophobic portion of humanity. It's not just aliens but anyone who is different. I doubt any sort of mutation or disability would be treated kindly unless you're someone of status or wealth enough to have it overlooked. Which speaks of the corruption and unfair treatment in the imperium.

Heterochromia probably doesn't earn you a lot of abuse in the imperium. Being disabled probably does (or even gets you killed.) This is consistent with what I'm saying. Mismatched eyes don't interfere with the imperium's goals. Workers who may require additional assistance to perform their duties *do*. Although even there, the nature of the disability and the context probably matter. We know that bionics are easy enough to come by in some environments for, say, a disabled limb to not be an issue. Something like a chronic fatigue condition might be harder to address.

Then you have psykers, another pretty easy racial analog or a comparison to race. They don't have a choice in it but their life is hard purely because of how they're born.

I feel like psykers are maybe a better analogy for queerness than race. Potentially "invisible" otherness unless they're actively doing psychic stuff in front of you.

You can claim Fallacy of the Undistributed Middle if you like, but neither of us have a hard yes or no to answer this question so i'm making comparisons to what we do know and the real world places the fiction was drawn from. Others are just saying nope they're developed beyond this when everything we know about this fantasy universe is a story decay, decline, horrible unfair mistreatment and sadness.

To be clear, you were specifically asking for examples of specifically religious figures specifically and explicitly calling for inclusion regardless of sexuality/gender (topics which are not commonly brought up in 40k media). That's a pretty specific ask, but I was able to provide *some* evidence of at least default acceptance of one's fellow human as well as specific examples of people being gay or trans and not being hassled over it.

Basically, you're saying that you don't really have any evidence to suggest the imperium promotes transphobia/homophobia, but you really really want it to do so because you want it to do all the bad things regardless of canon or whether those bad things make sense.

40k is a mashup of nazi oppression, soviet oppression, religious oppression being accepted because yes, there is an alien swarm the next solar system over. But every day to day thing is terrible. Those in power will have a very narrow definition of what is acceptable and everyone else will have issues.

On the whole, life in the imperium is awful. Every inhabited world has at least a dozen things that make life suck. But that still doesn't mean that every world is terrible in every way imaginable.

The Twice Dead King series explores a few transgender related subjects. If my memory serves correctly members of the Ogbobehk empire arrive to give aid to protagonist Oltyx. Their leader mentions that their patriarch is now titled a matriarch.

That's the most obvious one, but the book also goes into some related topics as well. The trauma of losing their bodies leads to something called the 'disphorak'. An obvious play on the word dysphoria which is itself a system brought up often with trans topics. Oltyx went into the bio transference a pubescent teenager and came out with a rather adult and hyper masculine body. He's often physically described as large and powerful and Oltyx has a few quiet moments where he struggles with this dichotomy between his mind and body.

It's a fun read if one wants to explore Necron body horror.

cody.d. wrote:It is true that homosexuals and transgender people are rarely directly mentioned. The closest I can think of is a necromunda novel involving a Cawdor and a Delaque where the delaque was androgynous and possibly non-binary, refereed to as they not by he or she. Where they male or female? Never mentioned and didn't really matter for the story. But these were also the gangs of necromunda, who would be not be considered the "normal" imperial citizen.

That's just simply not true though. There's an image going round (I'll link if I can) of all the mentions of LGBTQ+ folks who appear in GW's novels, but suffice to say, there's a good fair few of them. We know that Inquisitorial agents are taught tactical pansexuality, we know that several journalists who followed the Legions were queer, we've literally seen example pointed out in this thread of LGBTQ+ folks. If anything, it's rarer that straight folks are directly called that.

The closest analogy given or commonly spoken about is tranhumanism. Is a marine still a human, are they the same creature anymore. Some call them monsters etc etc.

No, it's really not the closest anaolgy. The closest analogy is LITERALLY trans people in the setting.

This is also the imperium we're talking about, what would by current day standards be called monstrous and inhumane. In the emperors vision for the imperium yes i think trans people would be very much accepted. But it's been corrupted by the religious and desperation.

And yet, we don't see that happening.

You're arguing for something which we simply don't have a reason to believe is widespread. Why?

Are Trans people mutants IRL? No, a hard no. Would some religious donkey-cave give them the title to try and justify stirring hatred and bigatory? Well it happens IRL so I have no trouble imagining it happening in 40k. If something happens IRL I believe it will be even worse in 40k. To say otherwise seems like it's missing the whole point of 40k to Flanderise it.. Taking out the humanity in progress makes things worse for everyone, leads to facism, bigotory and all the darkest things in us as a species.

Some religious donkey-cave might also make up some fearmongering to say that "those who hail from the Galactic South are all heretics", but, well, that's clearly nonsense.

Perhaps it would vary from world to world, culture to culture. I doubt it'd go well in Tallern, an islam analog.

That feels pretty Islamophobic.

cody.d. wrote:

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
And yet you’re still to provide a single example of The Cult Imperialis preaching racism, sexism, homophobia and/or transphobia.

Do better.

I cannot. Can you provide an example of those exact same people preaching acceptance of anyone who is not the same to them?

That's not the same thing, and you know it. The Imperium doesn't preach "acceptance of anyone who is not the same", but it doesn't preach "hate homosexuals and trans folk". Why? BECAUSE WE LITERALLY LGBTQ+ FOLKS IN THE SETTING WHO DON'T SUFFER DISCRIMINATION FOR IT. In fact, I've NEVER seen it depicted, or even hinted at in 40k, in any faction.

I'm assuming that bigoted people are going to be bigoted.

Bigotry is learned, not innate.

Missed this the two times I listened to the Ghaz book, .. and when I saw the vid the first time, But Adeptus Ridiculous pointed out that the Inquisitor Tytonida wanted her comfy bed back and "a comely serving girl to share it with." So- if one of the highest-ranked women in the Imperium can be a lesbian (or at least Bi), then it's prolly not a big deal for trans people.
Also- Nate Crowley wrote both Ghaz and the Twice dead King books- good on him for being inclusive!

Speaking of which- if you want a franchise that's really inclusive, go play pathfinder. One of the gods is literally portrayed as a man and a woman, and some people don't see the cursed item "Belt of Gender Changing" as a negative.

Well, the Ad Mech are putting in extreme implants that hooks a brain up to a giant city- destroying robot, with half the tools being not much more than witch-doctory. I think the Biologis can perform a sex change as an out-patient prcedure.

Good catches on the Ogbobekh matriarch and the couple from Alpharius. I read/listened to both of those, and they totally slipped my mind.

This topic reminded me of this.

"To be a man in such times is to be one amongst untold billions. It is to live in the cruelest and most bloody regime imaginable. These are the tales of those times. Forget the power of technology and science, for so much has been forgotten, never to be re-learned. Forget the promise of progress and understanding, for in the grim darkness of the far future there is only war. There is no peace amongst the stars, only an eternity of carnage and slaughter, and the laughter of thirsting gods."