Hey Kyuuji, thanks for making this thread and condensing all the information we have in a single place.
I've been reading this thread from time to time, especially when it's been stickied. There's one question I haven't seen discussed though, and I can't really find any explanation for it anywhere.
I feel like I've read through most of this thread, but it's always possible I've missed something, so I apologize if someone brought this up before. I have also not followed almost any Cyberpunk news outside of this thread, so my knowledge of the game is restricted to what I learned from this thread from you and the other posters. Finally, I am a cis man, and my understanding of trans issues likely is not as deep as many of the people posting in this thread, and especially the trans folks posting here. I am very aware of all of that, so I've worked hard on posing this question in a respectful way, but if I have been insensitive (especially with terminology) please let me know and I'll edit it immediately and promise to do better next time. I think I can speak for the majority of the community when I say we want trans people to feel welcome and respected in the forum.
With that out of the way, I think one of the most contentious things to have come out of the game is the now infamous "Mix it up" poster, as you described in the OP:
My question is: D
o we have any reason to believe this is a trans woman?
The way I interpret this ad is that there is one specific flavor of chromanticore that can give you a penis if you drink it. Not a regular penis either; a gigantic, clearly disproportional penis. The fact that it is so large and made so prominent in the ad is indicative of how this looks like an ad
for the penis. If you don't have a penis, but want to have one, buy this drink which can give you one.
In other words, this looks to me like an ad depicting a
cis woman who wants to "mix it up" and have a penis for one night, instead of her usual genitals. It could also be depicting a trans woman who underwent sex reassignment surgery and has no penis anymore, which should be indistinguishable from a cis woman, but we have absolutely no signal that this is someone who transitioned in the past. It seems to me like this is most certainly not a trans woman with a penis, which I believe is your interpretation of the poster. This drink probably isn't targeted at someone who already has a penis; it's clearly targeting someone who wants to have a penis but doesn't have one.
At best, I can see the case for the person in the poster being a woman who wants to transition to being a man, so a
trans man, but I find even that to be very unlikely, as from the advertising (Mix it up) it seems like this is a temporary effect, not a permanent one, and that consumers would be encouraged to try many different flavors. Furthermore, the woman depicted in the ad doesn't display any traditionally male characteristics other than the penis: no extra body or facial hair, still wearing clothes that fall more towards the feminine end of the spectrum, etc. I don't think we can call a cis woman a trans man just because she (presumably temporarily) has a penis, without any other indication that her gender identity changed.
Basically, from the ad this seems like a drink designed to give cis women, post-SRS trans women, and anyone else who doesn't have a penis a "biological strap-on", which they can use to have sex for a night. This is a drink that gives someone a penis - which means that
the woman depicted didn't have had a penis before drinking it, and thus there's no reason at all to believe it's a trans woman. If anything, it makes it more likely that the woman in question is cis, and not trans, because we can also exclude the possibility of it being a trans woman who didn't undergo sex reassignment surgery.
Finally, in the interviews I was able to find with the artist who drew the image, at no point does she say this is a trans woman, or even a trans person at all. The artist doesn't explicitly mention the character's gender, using the neutral pronoun "they" or 'this person" instead:
Eurogamer,
Polygon. Reading the interviews, you'll notice it's only ever the interviewers that state this is a trans character, while the artist doesn't say that at any point.
This is a woman with a dick. I understand that this is imagery that has been used to mock and humiliate trans women throughout the years, reducing their personhood to their genitalia. However, in this specific context, all evidence points towards this actually being just a (probably cis) woman with a dick, and not a depiction of a trans woman. In no context do we ever interpret someone who didn't have a penis before, but now does, to be a trans woman. Certainly when I saw the poster, my first reaction was "oh, this woman added a penis to herself" rather than "this is a trans woman".