FTM Cartman Headcanons Part 1: Circumstances of birth, Liane, Tenorman, Nebraska, & family dynamics
Intro
I've been working on a lot of different fics over the past year or so, and all of them feature FTM Cartman. It started with simple curiosity--I've seen so many FTM Kyle/Stan/Kenny headcanons, yet there is a noticeable lack of FTM Cartman content. I began asking myself what that would look like, and ended up developing a huge amount of character details that were surprisingly gender-affirming for me as an FTM trans man. FTM Cartman is now my favorite iteration of his character, as well as my favorite FTM take on any of the Main Four.
Disclaimer
I've developed a generous backstory to help carve out a space for his trans past in canon. Other details were made while actively planning and writing several fics. Most of them are longfic, multi-chapter projects that will take awhile to finish, but in the meantime I've put up a smaller fic, Turning Gold, on AO3 as a proof-of-concept for several ideas, including FTM Cartman, which I'm updating in real-time as I edit pre-written chapters.
Note on vocabulary: As a trans man myself, I prefer "outdated" terminology like transsexual, etc, to describe my experiences, which I will also use to illustrate Cartman's character from time to time.
Parts
Circumstances of birth, Liane, Tenorman, Nebraska, & family dynamics
Cartman grew up with his mom in the dusty, flat plains of Nebraska. He was the product of an affair between Liane and Scott Tenorman. Liane had been a sex worker at the time, working up and down the length of the Front Range in Colorado; sometimes work took her into the Western Slope, where she met Tenorman, who became a regular client.
Eventually she got pregnant. Tenorman abruptly cut her off; by this point Liane had fallen in love with him and was heartbroken. She moved back home to Nebraska and took on odd jobs like waitressing until she gave birth to Cartman (originally named "Erica"), whereupon she resumed sex work.
Multiple strains of mental illness run in her family; bipolar disorder specifically in Liane's case, which worsened over the course of her pregnancy and after. As a result, she and her son were stuck in poverty for the entirety of Cartman's childhood, constantly cycling through the living rooms of grandparents, aunts and uncles, cousins, etc.
Cartman's gender dysphoria did not manifest early in childhood. Every year the family would give Liane garbage bags full of hand-me-downs from girl and boy cousins alike; his mother gave him full reign over the contents, and he naturally gravitated toward masculine/gender neutral clothing, sometimes going for girl clothes if they were especially sequined, glittery, or otherwise accessorized.
Liane, very much a child of the 80's glam and glitz, was obsessed with pop idols like Madonna, Cher, Cyndi Lauper, etc, as were the women of her family. A born drama queen and attention whore, Cartman was dazzled by these women, whose stage presence and personality seemed gargantuan compared to their stature; he studied how they articulated themselves and their bodies, and how fashion and beauty were tools of their trade. Though he did not participate in femininity day-to-day, he found value in its capacity to garner attention and project confidence. In short, he was made camp through childhood exposure to women in pop culture—hence his cross-dressing stints, ability to create complicated narratives on the fly, general theatrical behaviors, etc.
Whenever his mother wasn't using him as a misplaced vessel for her unspent love for Tenorman (i.e., smothering and love-bombing him), Cartman was pretty much left to his own devices. The other adults in his family didn't have time for Liane's accident and his cousins ragged on him constantly. His mother was his only source of true affection and approval, which he learned to exploit from a young age, creating a two-way codependent relationship that served both of their unmet emotional needs (i.e., Cartman's abandonment issues and Liane's anxiety around not being enough for her loved ones).
Whenever Liane wasn't around Cartman had to fend for himself. Smaller and younger than most of his kid relatives, what he lacked in physical strength he made up for in wit; even if he couldn't get the last hit, he always got the last word. He also had a penchant for nasty pranks and learned to psychologically manipulate people. Eventually he developed a reputation as a bratty piece of shit.
Liane, overcompensating for the circumstances of Cartman's childhood as well as Tenorman's abandonment of her, blinded herself with love and refused to acknowledge Cartman's troubling behavior. As he grew up and entered puberty his gender dysphoria became rapidly apparent. But any indications of his pain through acting out were summarily dismissed by his mother, whom he grew to demonize for lack of a more deserving target.
From ages 10-13 Cartman started outwardly expressing the fact that he was a boy, complaining about the size of his "dick" among other things. Around this time he started going by his surname only, interrupting teachers who used his birth name, cutting them off before they could finish speaking: "Eric--uhhhh..., Cartman." Subsequently, he started telling people that his name was Eric, no "uh".
When he was thirteen years old he finally learned the truth about his father and birth, which lead to a mental breakdown of some sort. The severity of the episode varies depending on the fic I'm writing. In any case, it was severe enough that Liane snapped out of her stupor and started paying better attention to her child.
She soon realized that staying in Nebraska would only prolong Cartman's suffering. In a desperate attempt to escape, she drove down to South Park, where she petitioned Tenorman for aid or else reveal their affair, and Cartman's existence, to his current wife and children, citing the fact that he never paid child support among other things, in an awesome display of righteous entitlement and psychotic emotional fervor that would have made Cartman proud had he been there to witness it.
Tenorman reluctantly agreed to help, which through some vague means resulted in Liane and Cartman acquiring their house. Thus sets the stage for Cartman's entrance into South Park: age thirteen, coming into town in the middle of sixth grade, fully living (and, for now, passing) as a boy, with an emotionally wounded mother and blackmailed biological father.