TRANS LARS: THE MASTERPOST

Because I saw a lot of confused posts by people who seem to think that the Trans Lars headcanon has sprung out of nowhere after “The New Lars”, when in fact this episode only further completed a picture that has been in the making for a long time. Don’t believe me? Here’s everything I could find to indicate that Lars is a trans boy, from the very beginning.

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First of all: From his looks to his mannerisms, Lars is someone who adheres to a quite strict code of hypermasculinity that is, apparently, self-imposed. If you look at his environment and at the people he associates with, it does not seem likely that he picked up that kind of behavior from direct outside influences. Sadie is totally chill and also doesn’t give much of a hoot about stereotypical gendered presentation. The cool kids are also chill, and actually surprisingly in touch with their not so stereotypically male sides. Ronaldo? – Nope. Now we met his parents, and they also don’t seem the type for toxic masculinity. But Lars draws the need to be perceived like that from somewhere, and if it’s not from the pressure and the standards of masculinity coming from the people around him, then where?



I mean, this is almost a caricature of “manspreading”.

Sometimes – ok, pretty often – he takes it too far and comes off as simply a jerk (though I feel like I need to mention that Lars has some very real emotional issues and this is by no means all related to him being trans!), but as it always is with over-the-top behavior in a certain direction: it’s mostly just there to distance yourself from something else that you really don’t want to be associated with. In Lars’ case, the way I see it, the most distance from being seen as a girl is achieved by playing up his masculinity, and as he’s still young and insecure about himself, he tends to overdo it.





In Lars and the Cool Kids, Lars takes center stage for the first time – and takes off his shirt. Some people have used this to discredit the trans theory, because his chest is flat and he doesn’t have any surgery scars that we can see, but actually, I beg to differ. It is unlikely that Lars at his age would have had top surgery done anyway, but surgery is not the only possibility here. He could be on puberty blockers. He could be on T. Additionally, he could just have naturally small breasts – you know, those exist. And if you look at Lars’ build (barely discernible upper chest fat, no hip fat, skinny as a stick), it seems that he has just always had a very boyish figure anyway, no matter what gender he was assigned at birth. (EDIT: For those who don’t want to discount surgery completely: there is such a things as Keyhole or Periareolar Surgery, which is perfectly suited for naturally small-breasted people and leaves little to no noticeable scarring. Thank you @papercrane​ for pointing that out!)

And looking at him in this episode, he is definitely not completely flat-chested.



A boy that skinny has no business having that much muscle/fat in his upper chest area, and yet he is consistently drawn with that slight outward curve of his chest and the line in the middle of it. You can often even see it while he has his shirt on. This is not character design happening on accident; this is very much intendend.

And I believe Lars is aware that he passes very well, but maybe not entirely upon close inspection. It doesn’t seem like going around shirtless is something he is accustomed to, and his reaction when he sees the Cool Kids all undress for going swimming is the opposite of enthusiasm: shock, maybe a little bit of fear.



He then turns away to take his shirt off and visibly steels himself, taking a deep breath and a sort of “I can do this”-moment before turning around again, ready to face them.



EDIT: Thanks to @missthornbirds who let me put in her tags about this part:

#regarding the taking off his shirt scene LOOK AT HIS STANCE! #before he turns around to face the cool kids he makes sure to puff out his chest and get rid of the obvious curves there #to smooth them out by stretching them

which I thought was a very neat additional observation!



Then, of course, they almost get eaten alive by Rose’s moss and Lars saves the day with Steven, all the while shirtless, and by the end his initial anxiety about it seems to have all but dissipated. He even initiates Steven’s “chest-high-five” that he had been fending off before; showing, I believe, both that he has bonded with Steven and that he has become a little more confident about casual touches in that area being okay.



More under the cut because this post is LONG:





We get another very nice shot of Lars’ upper chest area in Coach Steven.



And really, that looks pretty obvious to me. Especially as he’s, you know, facing downwards, so gravity is doing its part to amplify the effect.

Then in Island Adventures, Lars, Sadie and Steven spend… well, it’s hard to say how long exactly, but… a lot of time stranded on an uninhabited island. Long enough for Sadie to grow a substantial amount of leg hair (and I can’t even tell you how much I ADORE the Crewniverse for that!! No magically-hairless-under-any-circumstances girls in SU, oh no!), while Lars… doesn’t show even a hint of beard stubble on his face.

And especially in contrast with Sadie, who shows that the crew did put thought into the places you’d suddenly grow hair if you were stranded on an island, this is quite noticeable.



Furthermore, if Lars were really taking p-blockers or hormones, then being cut off from them could have played a part in his desperation to get off the island as soon as possible, and his intense anger at Sadie for her deception (aside from that being quite a natural reaction regardless).





On to Horror Club, wherein we meet the pre-pubescent versions of Lars and Ronaldo. And everything in that flashback points to that what we’re seeing here is Lars before he came out to… well, pretty much anyone, I suspect. Anyone except Ronaldo.

First of all, he looks pretty feminine. If you’d told me this was a tomboyish girl, I’d have believed it no problem (mostly it’s the haircut, but that goes a long way).



And while for Ronaldo it’s ghosts all the way, the only thing we see kid!Lars really concerned with is the confirmation that this is and will remain a secret clubhouse.

Young Ronaldo: This is the perfect clubhouse for the Beach City Explorer Club! *laughs*



Young Lars: Secret clubhouse, right, Ronnie? *makes mouth zipping motions* Zip!

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Young Ronaldo: *runs over to Lars* Lars! Lars! (He shoves the picture of Lars getting slammed in the face by the wooden board into his hands.) When you turn on the TV tomorrow, this is what’s gonna be on every station!

Young Lars: *sweating nervously* B-b-but—But you said this was secret!



And then comes the kicker: Why is it so important to Lars that the club remain secret and nobody sees this photo, to the point where he takes it from Ronaldo and rips it up – sorry, rips “himself out”, as he says it? Why is he not just annoyed about the stupid photo but downright anxious about it, and everything to do with their adventure?



Young Lars: Oh, come on. Ronnie, you know I can’t let people see me like that.

What is “like that”? He doesn’t just mean it’s an embarrassing photo of him. Lars’ tone and the words “you know” tell us he’s appealing to something Ronnie knows about and should understand, something that they’ve talked about before, and the “I can’t let them” instead of, say, “I don’t want them to see me like that” speaks of something more than personal embarrassment.

And it’s not about being in a forbidden location or doing something they shouldn’t, either, because again Lars’ words and behavior don’t quite fit. He could have said “You know I’m not supposed to be here”, maybe, or something else to do with his parents, who should be the only relevant authority persons he needs to worry about here.

But no, it’s an unspecified general “people” that can’t see him, “like that”. To me, the phrasing makes it clear that this is specifically about Lars looking like he’s not supposed to look, and HEAVILY implies that that is not the way he normally dresses. That this is something he does in secret, when no “people” are around and he’s with Ronaldo in their secret clubhouse (into which he immediately wanted to carve his name, by the way – I wonder how long it’s been since he decided to go by Lars). He’s not ready yet for everyone to know about him, and he seems afraid of their judgement.

“Why do you care so much about what other people think?!” Ronnie yells at him, not understanding, and Lars retaliates, and thus their friendship breaks. It’s just sad all around.

Lars-in-the-present is pretty rattled by the whole thing.

While the others look on astonished and curious, he literally hides behind Sadie and then immediately goes to put as much space as he can between himself and the others once the flashback ends.



Sadie (about the lighthouse): So, all that lashing out was just from feeling hurt and trapped for so long…

Lars (lashing out): I didn’t mean to rip it up, okay?! You can stop talking about me now.



Sadie unwittingly hits the nail on the head, and even though she was talking about the house, and not about Lars, the parallel here is made pretty clear, isn’t it? Especially since Lars very much registers that as a comment about himself and reacts accordingly by drawing in on himself and going on the defensive, confirming to us that he has indeed been feeling hurt and trapped for a significant part of his life.

They were all caught unawares by that flashback, and Lars is probably feeling horribly exposed in the aftermath, even though I believe it’s relatively safe to say that he hasn’t just been outed. Ronaldo obviously knows, and I hold to the theory that Sadie does, too – it’s been heavily implied that they have been physically intimate before. And Steven…? Honestly, who knows about Steven. Maybe this is all flying right over his head, maybe it doesn’t and he just genuinely doesn’t think it’s a big deal at all – but I’ll talk about that more when I get to the next episode.

Lars, at least, doesn’t want to discuss this at all and is highly uncomfortable with any attempts. When Ronaldo tries to apologize and talk what happened through with him, Lars flees the scene as fast as he can, claiming he doesn’t care and it doesn’t matter. All in all, his emotional reaction to the childhood flashback is extreme, and I am honestly at a loss to explain all that as anything other than Lars being trans while having it still make sense, because there’s absolutely nothing else happening in there that I can see that could have upset him this much.





Finally (for now): The New Lars. There is a lot happening in this episode. We see some more naked Lars (this time all the way), and more importantly, Steven gets confronted with some naked Lars, raising again the question: has Steven known Lars is trans, or did he not know but it just doesn’t make a difference? Even if the kid doesn’t have an [insert anything you want here]-phobic bone in his body, at least a brief moment of “oh, okay that’s not what I was expecting” would have been understandable and natural. But in this scene, Steven doesn’t seem caught by surprise by anything other than the fact that he suddenly finds himself in Lars’ body. That’s it.



Ignore the naked Lars butt, please.

But he does say something that to me feels like he knows very well what’s up:



Steven: I guess while I’m in here I better do my best to respect Lars’ body.

Now this can obviously pertain to very many things while Steven is literally running around in Lars’ skin, but something about specifically the word body instead of, say, “Lars’ life” or whatever, makes me feel like it was chosen deliberately.

And what about Steven obviously not thinking that anything about Lars’ body is any sort of a big deal? You know, I got to thinking about that. And my answer to the question “Can the kid really be just that nonchalantly awesome about all this?” is… yes, mabye. And my answer to the question “how?” is, actually: Amethyst.

This may be surprising, but think about it. Amethyst is very experimental with gender and with bodies; much more so than any of the other gems. Because of her, Steven has grown up with someone around who goes about life presenting as very recognizably female (which does not mean she is! I’m talking in-universe, where the Gems never state anything about their own gender and use she/her pronouns exclusively, and from a strictly human perspective), but still sometimes comes home looking like this:



and has a frequently-used male alter ego that looks like this:



Amethyst revels in these body shapes that are almost exaggeratedly masculine – hairy and muscled and buff – just as much if not more than she does in any other form she occasionally takes (and I could talk about Purple Puma all day, tbh). And it has never been in question that whatever form she takes, at the core of it it’s still Amethyst. This is what Steven grew up with; this is Steven’s normal. I honestly don’t find it all that far-fetched to think whatever body parts Lars does or doesn’t have, it wouldn’t register as anything out of the ordinary to Steven. Early childhood influences are incredibly formative.

EDIT: @shatterstag reminded me that additionally, Steven has, of course, fused into Stevonnie before! So he even has personal experience with a different gender and body than the ones he’s used to, making it all the more likely that he wouldn’t carry any rigid thoughts and opinions that would make him react negatively in this scenario.



Back to Lars; after Steven has respected Lars’ body by putting on some clothes, we meet Lars’ mother at the breakfast table, who serves Lars some breakfast and us the thing I’ve long been waiting for to pop up: a deadname.



Martha: Here you go. Oh, it’s good to see you this morning, Laramie.



Steven in his innocence asks her who Laramie is, but we can see from Martha’s reaction upon realizing what name she called him that this was a slip-up, and one that Lars would not have been happy with.

Lars doesn’t want to be called Laramie, and his parents know it. Now, technically, Laramie is a unisex name. It’s more commonly given to girls than to boys, but still. But you cannot tell me that any creative team of a tv show would ever dedicate their valuable time, money and energy into drawing and animating and voicing and producing a scene in which a character is revealed to have a birth name that he doesn’t like, that’s (very likely) of the wrong gender and that only his parents still call him by IF THEY DID NOT INTEND FOR THAT CHARACTER TO BE TRANS; IT LITERALLY WOULD NOT MAKE A SHRED OF SENSE. I’m really just talking animation/filming 101 here: A scene needs to serve a purpose. If Lars is cis, what on earth would be the purpose of this one?



EDIT: This may be a coincidence or it may not, but The Laramie Project is a play “about the reaction to the 1998 murder of University of Wyoming gay student Matthew Shepard in Laramie, Wyoming. It is often used as a method to teach about prejudice and tolerance in personal, social, and health education and citizenship in schools, and it has also been used in the UK as a General Certificate of Secondary Education text for English literature. The play has also inspired grassroots efforts to combat homophobia.” (Wikipedia)

Think of this what you will, but of all the names they could have picked for Lars, it happened to be one with prominent lgbtq-associations. Thanks to @papercrane (and an anon) once more for the pointers!



And another EDIT: A couple of people asked me to add something in about the heart-shaped ear gauges that Steven-as-Lars wears in this episode. I initially dismissed them, because while they’re definitely part of the argument that Lars is very strict about rejecting “girly” things, I figured if he were a cis guy concerned with his masculinity he would probably be just as much against wearing them as he is now. Silly a concept as it is, accessories with hearts on/in them are just not seen as very manly in our society.

But just look at this adorable face.



Lars’ reaction aside, however: the fact remains that Lars had them around somewhere and so Steven put them in, and after he leaves, Lars’ mother tells his father: “And he’s wearing the plugs I got him!”, all happy and touched.

Seeing Lars with the plugs comes as a positive surprise to Martha, indicating that she bought them probably in the full knowledge that Lars wouldn’t want to wear them… but maybe hoping? Or maybe she just hasn’t shaken the habit of buying her child things like these, even though she knows he’s so against it. Whatever her motivation: heart-shaped ear plugs don’t feel like the stuff a mother would typically buy for her son who expresses no interest in stereotypically feminine things – except, perhaps, if she lived under the assumption that she had a daughter until not so very long ago.



Now I still don’t quite know where I stand about his parents. Actually, both of them seem very concerned for their son’s welfare, and also after the immediately corrected slip-up at breakfast they initially do not misgender him again, neither to his face nor when talking about him in private. They consistently use he/him pronouns and his name, whether he can hear them or not. That would definitely be a point in their favor, were it not for the end, when Lars (being himself again) slips back into behavior that they don’t approve of so much, whereupon Lars’ father, chastising, calls him “Laramie”. That way, it feels like using his preferred name and pronouns before was more like them sort of… indulging him because they were pleased with him, and not something they can be relied upon to do consistently. Idk.



But whatever the case may be with his parents, one thing I’m very happy about is the character design of Lars’ mom! Because remember when I said at the beginning of this meta that Lars might just have naturally small breasts? Well, his mother all but confirms this:



Looks-wise, Lars takes after his mom almost exclusively. I can’t see any resemblance to his father at all, actually, except for a hint of the darker skin. Lars’ mother passed her height on to him, her thin statue, her hair color – and if he takes after her in bust size too, then I’ll guarantee you he doesn’t have to worry about a D-cup, because her chest is almost as flat as her son’s. Aren’t genetics just amazing?





When Lars comes back “online”, his first reaction is confusion. Then Steven confesses that he spent the day with his mind in Lars’ body, and Lars FREAKS.

Then he looks in horror down at his body as if Steven might have done unspeakable things to it. Now I don’t know about you, but if I were in that situation, I think I would linger at “confusion” a lot longer, followed by some more of the same. Lars’ reaction is that of someone who has something to hide, for lack of a better word; who has something that he doesn’t want revealed, and his horror at the breach of privacy that Steven admits to immediately overrides any questions of “…huh?” or “how is that even possible“ or “wtf are you talking about”. It’s like if Steven had said “I’ve seen you naked” (which he basically did, but let’s say a random hypothetical situation), and Lars’ mind had jumped immediately to catastrophic scenarios of what that might mean for him, skipping the question that someone who doesn’t really care about the naked part might ask, such as “how’d you even get in my shower?”

The episode ends with some positive interaction between him and Sadie, so maybe the poor boy’ll get some reprieve after all that stress. And also hopefully do some more growing towards healthy relationships and emotional honesty, but that’s a topic for another day.

I really hope we’ll see some more of Lars soon, and when we do I plan on updating this post with any new info we get, so this is sort of an ongoing work in progress.

The conclusion until then: LARS IS TRANS and I personally consider this canon!



*some episode transcripts courtesy of the Steven Universe Wikia*





UPDATE:



There is a little scene in Tiger Philantropist where Lars is telling Steven that he doesn’t know what he wants for breakfast half the time because “I am a complex, individual teenage boy!”

Besides the fact that he seems to put a little bit of extra emphasis on the word “boy”, it’s interesting that he uses it at all. “I’m a complex, individual teenager” would have worked as well, and the way Lars chooses to say it evokes the impression that for him, it’s a concern to put “boy” right alongside “complex” and “individual” as noteworthy characteristics to describe himself by. This would seem to me to be an unusual thing to do for a cis boy, since in that case, his boyhood would be a given to him, and not in need of emphasizing.