Back in 2015 — before Captain Marvel or Wonder Woman had even hit cinemas — Vulture tapped video artist Alex Coulombe to create this fake trailer for a potential woman-led superhero movie starring the one and only Spider-Gwen. It's a fun video, splicing up footage of Emma Stone in her role as Gwen Stacy in Marc Webb's Amazing Spider-Man films from the '10s.
At the time this video was made, Spider-Gwen as a character had only been around for about a year, after making her first appearance in an Edge of Spider-verse short story in 2014. Since then, she's gone on to headline several iterations of her own comic book series — first as Spider-Gwen, and later as Ghost Spider, once she became popular enough that it was too hard to keep pretending like "Spider-Gwen" made sense as a diegetic code-name.
Even more recently, Spider-Gwen has found a new purpose as a trans icon. Gwen has a prominent role in the new animated Spider-Man film Across the Spider-verse, and a number of fans pointed out that her animation style leans heavily into light blues, light pinks, and white. These are, of course, the same colors as the trans flag — the same trans flag that curiously hangs in Gwen's bedroom, and that her father subtly wears on his police uniform.
Naturally — Musk Twitter being Musk Twitter and all — there were some very vocal detractors to this fan theory. But who the hell cares? People of all kinds project their own experiences onto fictional characters all the time. A trans person seeing themself in Gwen Stacy is no different than a Jewish kid seeing themself in guilt-ridden Peter Parker, who grew up in a largely Jewish neighborhood, and was created by Jews. The question of whether Peter Parker is canonically Jewish is completely irrelevant. The same goes for Trans Gwen.
