Originally Posted by
Sutekh
If I added some transgender rep to the Legion, I would have pissed everyone off and made Ayla transgender instead.
Every pair of Winathian twins we'd seen to that point had been identical (same-sex) twins.
Winathian twins tend to be inseparable. They get the same job. They marry another twin-pair. They *do not* randomly leave Winath without their twin, join an organization, marry a Titanian and basically go *years* without mentioning, 'oh, yeah, I have a sister, whom I never mentioned, because I apparently couldn't get away from her fast enough...'
When we first meet Ayla, she looks similar enough to Garth that she manages to fool his best friends into thinking she's Garth for some time.
All of these things have meta reasons. Ayla (and the Winathian twin-thing) didn't exist when 'Lightning Boy' joined the Legion. Artists never really considered that they'd generally shown only same-sex twins for other Winathians. Golden age hijinks that allow someone's 'secret identity' to be 'he's wearing glasses now!' or Jimmy Olsen to spend so much time disguised as a woman would also excuse the other Legionnaires falling for Ayla's impersonation of Garth.
But it's also fun to make the subtext, text. Ayla transitioning from a boy to a girl, and Garth not handling it well, could explain his rush to get off Winath and never speak of her to his friends, and her ability to so smoothly impersonate him (perhaps not being fully transitioned yet?), and why she and Garth are opposite-sex and yet still 'identical' twins.
And for funsies, Timber Wolf would have found out about it fairly early on, and not cared a bit, because he's not her twin and doesn't see her transitioning as distancing herself from him the way Garth did.
Thankfully, I never got to write the Legion, 'cause I'm sure that would have been way more of a tempest than Sean/Shvaugn!