It’s crazy to me how Steven Universe is about being not a woman but being expected to be one (Rebecca Sugar said so). Because I 100% understand how White Diamond would represent an oppressive, unobtainable ideal.
BUT as an AMAB trans woman, I find comfort in her design? Where Sugar must have seen signifiers of expected presentation, I see everything I was never allowed to be, expectations I was never ALLOWED to have.
Imagine being forced at gunpoint to wear a dress. If you don't want to, you would feel viscous, animalistic rebellion. But if you aren't "allowed" to wear a dress and want to, it almost gives you an excuse. It's like "well I want to wear the dress, but technically I'm only doing it because I'm being forced to."
From Sugar's own words:
"We had been avoiding certain markers of femininity for Gems, but we gave them all to her. We wanted her to have all these hallmarks of an old, stifling standard of beauty."
I don't typically like Auteur theory applied to shows because a billion people work on a show, but viewing Steven Universe through that "lens" it's so interesting