NixOS 21.05
Article, Comments

As much as it's perfectly fine and great for many that Loki is gender fluid in the MCU, please for the love of everything, stop "justifying"(I didn't know of a better word here) it by saying that Loki was gender fluid in the original Elder Eddas. This misinformation is harmful to both the academic understanding of the Norse, and the LGTBQ+ community. There was no concept of "gender" to the Norse besides man and woman, there was the ability for a man to act feminine, but this wasn't necessarily being transgender. We do know of only one instance of referring to a man as a woman, where Þórr has to dress up as a woman and Loki uses a grammatical term to infer that there's a woman he's referring to. Despite this, Þórr is rather uncomfortable in this story, and it reminds us of exactly what the Eddas are, a fictional compilation of tales of ancient gods. Shapeshifting into a female horse and giving birth isn't out of the ordinary for fictional stories. I'd like to again reiterate that I have absolutely no problems with the MCU Loki being gender fluid, a modern depiction of Loki being gender fluid totally makes sense. But we can't pretend that he was in a society that had absolutely zero concept of gender fluidity or modern sexuality/gender philosophy. This misinformation is pretty on par with the idea that Loki is the god of mischief, Þórr and Loki are brothers, Óðinn is Loki's adoptive father, etc. We have to remind ourselves that these are adaptations and heavy modifications fit for a comic book universe, not the poetic sources from thousands of years ago

To add, when being shapeshifted as any other creature or gender, he's still referred to as male. The act of shapeshifting is semiuniversal and not special to Loki. All jötnar shapeshift, even Óðinn, an æsir, shapeshifts into an eagle. But, it'd be a grammatical incompatibility for Loki to ever be called female. Loki is a weak masculine noun. If using a feminine pronoun, it would default to the last feminine noun, not any masculine. In many languages(including Old Norse) this distinction is necessary with the language, as gendered language is used for far more than just people. We alternatively should point to Loki in the Marvel Comics, where being gender fluid has been pretty common. However it's very harmful to history to grasp at ideas and straws that just simply never were there.

STARFIELD TRAILER LEAK
https://www.washingtonpost.com/video/sports/launcher/trailer-starfield/2021/06/13/6dc44dc4-fbc4-4073-b99e-88593e4127aa_video.html