such a face of death

Wow, that's fucking horrible.

Maybe he's was transforming into a demon for the next life

The shit people get themselves into.

How embarrassing

The argument is that while it's possible to argue for some entity in Tolkien's cosmos to be known to be "transgender" due to a corruption of their nature, whether or not their "transgenderness" is inherently a quality of their nature or a corruption of their nature is inscrutable to all but the entity themselves and possibly Ilúvatar, but that even if some other entity perceives it to be due to corruption, that per Ilúvatar (or this narrator's representations of the words of Ilúvatar, being the narration given by Pengolodh), that such is mere perception, and that ultimately all that which Men do translates to the completion and perfection of the work.

That Men (those of the race of Men) have a necessary inherent quality which redeems them and their actions, a part of their nature which they express (and which, in our parlance, no one can judge). Even the Creator refuses to condemn it - only celebrates it.

And IMNSHO Pengolodh (the narrator) is Tolkien's self-insert for the purpose of narration.

So "trans people don't exist / aren't valid" isn't an argument from axioms in the universe of Middle Earth. That's related to, but separate from, "here's a trans person in Middle Earth", which to my knowledge isn't in evidence. I want to be argued away from that / be proven wrong.

I wrote the analysis because using Tolkien's Middle Earth to say "Tolkien says trans rights" is using his cosmos as an allegory, which he alternately declaims and claims (the "it's not an allegory to WWII" claim and the "It's the story of Christianity in an alternate universe" claim - both detailed elsewhere). So it's a viable avenue of argumentation - if he's going to deconstruct and then orthogonalise the precepts of Christianity into an alternate history, then we can deconstruct and orthogonalise the precepts of that cosmogony back to ours.

Snapshots:

• ghostarchive.org

• archive.org

• archive.ph (click to archive)