Gina Carano’s Protesters Both Meet and Subvert Expectations

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As promised, the outraged trans community (and/or their “allies”) came out to protest Gina Carano’s appearance at the Vancouver Fan Expo today, and the results were… pretty much what you’d expect. Drunk 3PO was on hand to film their attempts to stick it to the man – or woman, not that I’m a biologist – and perhaps the funniest part is that it took him a while to find them. You can see his video below, which is uploaded to his YouTube channel:

So, Drunk 3PO finally found the protest, and it consisted of four or five people; it’s hard to tell if that one person all the way to the left was part of the protest or waiting to cross the street. But they had rainbow flags, they had wigs, and I guess they were cosplaying, though damned if I could tell who they were supposed to be. But according to 3PO, they were mostly just cheering on other cosplayers, like the Winter Soldier guy who walked by. As we all pretty much figured, this was a tempest in a teapot that got amplified by an agenda-pushing media and laughed at by everyone else. It’s another example of how, though the phrase has been uttered endlessly by now, social media is not the real world because, in the real world, most people are normal and just want to have fun.

And that’s what’s so fascinating about this protest. Seeing it in Drunk 3PO’s video puts a lot of the feigned outrage over Gina Carano’s appearance into perspective. It looks to me like the protesters mostly just wanted to have their own brand of fun, hanging with their buddies and scoping out cosplayers like everyone else who attends these cons. I don’t understand why people consider protesting fun, but I don’t really get rock climbing or Pokémon, either. The point is, I think this is their version of a party, and that’s why they made a show of it. They seemed kind of happy in that video, not really shouting in anger but hooting like they’re at a concert. I wonder if they understand things better than the media and their online mouthpieces make it seem; maybe they get that they’re the counterculture, and this is their way of embracing that. It’s a shame part of it involves ire at Gina Carano (though, as 3PO said, they didn’t even mention her when he was around), but this is far from what I expected, in attitude if not in numbers.

At any rate, it looks like everybody had a good time, and that’s what these cons are all about.