See, the problem is that folks don’t seem to know the difference between appreciating representation, and obsessing over representation.

I appreciate representation. When there’s a legit good trans man character in something, I’m ecstatic, through the roof, dancing in the clouds. It means so much to me to see someone like me in the media.

But I don’t boil the character down to his transness, and erase the other parts of him. If all a person can talk about re: a character is how trans he is, that’s not going to turn me on to the character. It’s going to make me think he’s shallow and two-dimensional, ‘cause no one is talking about his vices or his virtues, or even the most basic facets of who he is and what he does.

It’s all about how trans he is.

If someone tried to reduce all that I am down to a single label–to a gender, at that–I would be livid. I’m much more than a transgender man. I’m much more than that. I have hopes, dreams, passions, goals. I have loved ones. I have a past and a future. I have worries. I have fears.

There is so much more to me than just being trans, and if someone can’t appreciate the more, then they aren’t truly appreciating me. They’re appreciating my gender identity, and treating me like that’s all I am.

The vast majority of the people you see getting up-in-arms about fetishization and representation are, shock and awe, minorities themselves. We get heated about y’all’s behavior, because y’all are obsessive, not appreciative. We feel fetishized, objectified, turned into some special thing for y’all to gush over. It’s not a pleasant experience, to realize that someone doesn’t care about who you are, they only care about what you are–everything else about you be damned.

That comic was on point. It described exactly how I feel when people reduce a character down to their transness, or, hell, when people reduce me down to mine. I can relate so much to Miles. I felt the anger and the disappointment and the indignation, because, like me, he’s more than his skin color, and while I’m sure he recognizes that it may matter to some people, that seeing a black-Latino man do such incredible things can inspire others like him, the way that girl handled it, the way she obsessed over it, was goddamn offensive.

This is a young man who’s saved lives and gone up against incredible odds, and this girl can talk about nothing but his skin color–without even knowing what he is, just describing him vaguely as “brown.”

That isn’t being appreciative. It’s being obsessive and gross–especially if you’re doing it to a real person.

You’ve got to tone it down, y’all. You’ve got to learn some respect, and you’ve got to learn the difference between being appreciative and being obsessive.

We aren’t against representation. We want representation. We need representation.

But we’re sick of minority characters being boiled down to their minority status. It ain’t right now, and it ain’t ever gonna be right.