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Fondueforkharpoon

On a little rock somewhere, looking at the stars

Fondueforkharpoon

On a little rock somewhere, looking at the stars
DNA Says Love You taiwanese drama review
Completed
DNA Says Love You
1 people found this review helpful
by Fondueforkharpoon
Sep 11, 2023
12 of 12 episodes seen
Completed 2
Overall 4.5
Story 3.0
Acting/Cast 10.0
Music 8.0
Rewatch Value 2.0
This review may contain spoilers

A true genderqueer show? - Some thoughts from a trans person

Let me start off by saying I have extremely conflicting feelings about this one.
The production value is great, as is to be expected from most Taiwanese shows these days.
The casting is good as well, and the acting is honestly my favourite part of the entire thing and the biggest reason why I managed to watch until the end.

But none of that, to me, made up for the way this show approaches genderqueer people's lives and intersex people's experiences in particular. Now, I am not intersex myself so I recommend you take what I say with a grain of salt, but as a trans person myself I do think I am somewhat more qualified than the average viewer to judge the story's take on intersexuality and trans-ness as a concept.
I do highly commend the writers and producers for attempting to not only do something different from the average gay romance, but to address the struggles of a highly marginalised group of people that are almost never talked about in media.
But as good as I believe their intentions were, they completely missed the mark.

If we approach this show from the perspective that Amber is a trans man who, while he did get diagnosed as intersex, didn't claim that identity but rather chose to use the opportunity this diagnosis provided to start his transition, there are certain plot points that make a lot of sense.
Amber's family moving away, the endless doctor's appointments, the deliberate cutting off of all contact to his former friends, etc.
And there are, admittedly, one or two moments in the show that I really connected with. Amber tearing up over the orange cake he loved as a kid is a great portrayal of the complex, heartbreaking joy of a trans person reclaiming bits of their childhood that they thought they lost due to their transition.
But that's where the good ends. Nothing about the way Amber interacts with his friends and family, with his surroundings in general, and certainly nothing about the way his friends interact with him seems true to what life is actually like as a trans individual. Of course there is no singular, one-size-fits-all trans experience, but there is a difference between depicting an authentic trans character and depicting a character who is trans for plot reasons only.
The way Amber is constantly misgendered by the people around him after it's revealed that he is in fact Wen-Wen - that alone made me so deeply viscerally uncomfortable that I just can't feasibly imagine Amber as a trans man.
I know (since I was kindly informed by a commenter replying to this review) that this misgendering is due to choices the translators made, since in Mandarin there are no gendered pronouns, which does make it easier to stomach, but unfortunately still leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Most international viewers (like myself) likely won't know about Mandarin pronouns and therefore have only the translations to go by and those, as previously stated, set an uncomfortable precedent.
This is not the show's fault by any means but should still be taking into consideration in my opinion.

So, the trans man theory is out. What else is there?
If we approach this show from the perspective that Amber is an intersex person who got diagnosed late in childhood rather than at birth, then there is an immediate, massive red flag that gets raised: the way Amber's transition is handled.
Yes, some intersex people choose to transition to a binary gender identity, but that doesn't erase the long, dark history intersex people have with the medical industry. To this day intersex children are often forced to transition to either male or female, mostly through surgical intervention - so-called "normalising procedures".
These experiences are extremely traumatising to the intersex people who go through them and the continued prevalence of such procedures is a clear human rights violation (and is even classified as such by the UN)
So the fact that Amber, who was forced to transition and repeatedly states how traumatic and agonising the entire process was for him, even if he is admittedly content with or at least indifferent towards his current gender identity as a man, has nothing but good things to say about the family who put him through such an ordeal and the show never so much as attempts to condemn forcible transitions, is at best a massive oversight on the show makers' part and at worst endorses the continued violence against intersex people.

I don't mean to sound inflammatory, but these issues are deeply serious. So even assuming that the show runners had nothing but good intentions, what their efforts resulted in is a show about sensitive queer issues written by people with little experience in such matters for an audience who are largely unfamiliar with these topics.
And while I do think that it is important for there to be shows about queer people's issues that are written to appeal to and be understood by non-queer audiences in order to educate them, this isn't one of those shows.

All in all I cannot in good conscience recommend this show. Yes, it has some good, even great, elements, but I believe that they are massively outweighed by its serious flaws. I'd suggest skipping this drama and, instead, looking for some genuinely thoughtful and well-researched stories about trans and intersex people. There aren't all that many, but they do exist and they are worth your time more than, I am sad to say, this show is.
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