Name a superhero who wouldn’t be better off gay. Iron Man, The Flash, Captain America, Thor, Green Lantern: every one of them could be even more fabulous if we just let them. Even Wonder Woman is ripe for this treatment, as her mythology is obviously the product of the cisnormative times in which she was created. Sure, we can pretend she was based on the Amazon women, but we all know she’s more Sappho than Amazon. Let’s free her to be herself.

Stan Lee fought back against this line of argument in an interview with Newsarama. “It has nothing to do with being anti-gay, or anti-black, or anti-Latino or anything like that…I just see no reason to change that which has already been established when it’s so easy to add new characters. I say create new characters the way you want to. Hell, I’ll do it myself.”

New characters? Are you kidding me? As Cheney-Rice wrote at Mic, “Sigh.” Changing defining characteristics of existing characters is a nontroversy. No one cares if Thor is a not the son of Odin but the daughter of Mystique. What’s important is the time it takes to establish new characters. This is complicated in the case of female characters, because they only reach market maturity at 77 percent the speed of male characters.