When we published our article on Gail Simone’s story in Batgirl #19 in which a character in the book is revealed to be transgender (see “DC Reveals First Transgender Character”), it brought out some responses from our readers who questioned the characterization in the headline that this was the first transgender character in a Big Two universe.

Reader Glenn Russell pointed out that Shvaughn Erin, in Legion of Super-Heroes #31, reveals that she was born a male but had been female due to a biological transformation caused by a medication.  “Where Gail Simone goes today, Giffen, Doran & Swan broke the ground twenty years ago,” he wrote.

And on Facebook, we heard from Pete Hooper, who pointed out transgender character Alvin/Wanda in the “A Game of You” storyline in Sandman #32-#37 in 1991-1992, which was peripherally tied to the DC universe.

The DC reveal was done in a high profile interview in Wired timed to appear on the release date of the book.  Batgirl writer Gail Simone told Wired that she “…wanted to have trans characters who aren’t fantasy-based,” referring to characters that were gender-fluid due to magic, shape-shifting, brain-swapping, and cloning.

We’ll leave it to others to determine if that characterization applies to the two examples here.  But given the high profile publicity connected with the Batgirl reveal, it’s safe to say that this is definitely the highest-profile transgender character in a DC universe book, if not the first.