Why Poison Ivy is MY Transgender Icon

Celebrating the 30th anniversary of the immortal “Pretty Poison” BTAS episode!

By: Toxicka Shock

ToxickaShock@gmail.com

On Twitter: @ToxickaShock

On Instagram: @ToxickaShock

On DeviantArt: @ToxickaShock

A while back, somebody asked me if I could pinpoint the first time I felt dysphoria about my gender.

It took me quite some time to pinpoint an exact moment, but in hindsight, it seems so fuckin’ obvious.

There were subtle hints and clues along the way, I suppose. But if anything hypothetically cracked my metaphorical egg, you can blame it on Batman.

More specifically, “Batman: The Animated Series.”

You don’t need me to tell you how legendary “BTAS” is. Even now it’s not just one of the best cartoons to ever hit the airwaves, but one of the best TV shows, period. Episodes from three decades ago still feel just as fresh and gripping as they did in 1992 — if any show could rightly be considered timeless, “BTAS” would surely be it.

And there’s one particular episode of the series that holds a special place in my heart. Not only did it introduce me to my all-time favorite supervillainess, it also gave me my first real femme icon — not just a character that I could pattern my aesthetics after, but someone whose persona I could adopt (in limited capacities, obviously) during my own sexual transition. 

“Please … call me Poison Ivy.”

Sept. 14, 1992. For whatever reason I convinced myself it was a Friday, but it was actually a Monday (a revelation that really did surprise me.) 

That afternoon, the episode “Pretty Poison” aired for the first time. And my life would never be the same, with ramifications on my psyche that wouldn’t make themselves fully apparent until decades later.

I’m assuming you’ve seen the episode by now, probably a couple of times. It’s your basic murder-mystery potboiler, even if nobody technically dies in the episode. The premise is pretty straightforward — the district attorney of Gotham City has been poisoned by somebody, and it’s up to Bats to not only find the culprit, but also find a cure before Harvey Dent is a goner.

Of course, the mastermind behind the poisoning is the same redheaded vixen that gave the D.A. an abnormally long and fairly risqué for its time kiss at the beginning of the episode. Go ahead, rewatch it — you can even seen them open their mouths during the snog, which is something that’s usually verboten in kids’ cartoons.

So, anyway, that redhead is this brilliant botanist/mad scientist named Pamela Isley. Apparently, she’s pissed that the district attorney helped build a prison on top of a field where an insanely exotic flower used to grow, and wouldn’t you know it, it’s also insanely poisonous to the human mucus membranes, too.

OK, in hindsight, it’s not a terribly realistic premise. We all know the EPD does a lot of scoping and studying for rare wildlife and flora before any major project breaks ground — but this is the future Two-Face we’re talking about, so maybe he bribed a couple of federal employees to look the other way? Fuck it, that’s going to stay head canon for me.

Well, it takes Batman a preposterously long time to put two and two together, but eventually he decides to break into Pam’s green house while she’s taking a shower (creepy!) and of course, he ends up nearly being eaten alive by a mutant fly trap that, coincidentally, looks like a humongous green vagina.

And like that, an entire generation of lipstick fetishists was born ...

Right before Batman is gobbled up, though, Pam emerges from the shadows. Only this time, she’s wearing this gaudy two-tone green bathing suit that kind of makes her look like a gender-inverted Peter Pan.

Now, if the show would’ve ended right then and there, the episode (and the character) wouldn’t have made that much of an impact on me. But the next five minutes forever altered the way I viewed myself and my gender orientation … even if it took me 20 years to realize it.

So, Batman is bound by this humongous fly trap abomination, which Ivy can apparently communicate with telepathically (oddly, the episode never really delves into this, which you kind of think would be a much bigger deal.) And while Batman is tangled up in all these vines, Ivy decides to saunter over to him and rub his shoulders and divulge her long-in-the-tooth scheme to get vengeance for those flowers made extinct because of that aforementioned prison.

You see, Ivy was able to save at least one of the roses. And like a goddamn queen, she decided to use the toxic petals of the plant to create a lethal lipstick … which, in what I am sure is just coincidence, she carries tucked in the hidden recesses of her cleavage.

“The blood of those flowers are on his hands!” she psychotically rants and raves before an eerie moment of calmness and clarity kicks in.

The camera zooms in for a ridiculously up-close shot of Ivy’s mouth as she slowly, sexily lines her lips with the poisonous cosmetic.

“So his fate was sealed … with a kiss.”

The vines tighten around Batman and he’s powerless as Ivy approaches. With his chin and head bound, Ivy embraces our hero and gives him a quick albeit lethal smooch, which immediately starts to disorient him even after his feeble attempts to spit out the poison.

The rest of the episode plays out as you’d imagine, with Batman ultimately stealing Ivy’s beloved rose and promising to trade it to her in exchange for an antidote (which, fittingly enough, she has on her person at that exact moment.) 

So the district attorney survives, Ivy goes to the same prison where the Wild Thorny Rose once grew (irony) and she vows her revenge … in a later episode.

All typical early 1990s cartoon stuff, really. But there was something about the episode, and especially Ivy’s concluding encounter with Batman, that made a very profound influence on my fledgling adolescent mind.

Of course, in my naivety, I initially thought that I had a crush on Poison Ivy. I mean, come on, she’s basically a sluttier version of Jessica Rabbit, and what straight guy wouldn’t be into that? I remember drawing her ALL the time, trying my damndest to recreate that epic kiss on countless reams of spiral bound notebooks. But I could never get the placement of the lips right — every time I tried to draw it, it always looked like Batman’s nose was poking Ivy’s eyeballs out.

It was much easier to recreate the episode with the action figures, obviously. Unable to find a suitable plastic mutant vagina plant monster toy, I simply doused my lone Batman action figure (I think it was from the first Keaton movie line, actually) in a mound of “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” ooze and had my Ivy figurine sex him up over and over again. I even made my teeny tiny Ivy a miniature poison lipstick that she could endlessly apply before killing Batman for the four-billionth time (it was basically just the tip of a red colored pencil.) It seems like every time I played “Pretty Poison,” that kiss of death got longer and longer. Like, I really wanted her to give Bats a strong a dose as possible. And of course, in my mind, Ivy “won” every single time they fought. Except they never really fought — it was more like Batman got placed in some sort of obtuse non-consensual bondage situation and Ivy did him in with even more non-consensual poison lipstick kissing.

I was absolutely ecstatic when I found out that Poison Ivy was going to be one of the live action villains in the ill-fated “Batman and Robin” movie. And while I think Uma Thurman definitely deserves more credit than she gets, I was still kinda’ disappointed by the overall production. Basically, I wanted the WHOLE movie to be that five-minute sequence from “Pretty Poison,” but alas, it certainly wasn’t.

It some point in the early 2000s, the Cartoon Network started showing old “BTAS” episodes late at night. By then, I was in my early teens and had at least a suspicion that I wasn’t as heteronormative as everybody else. In fact, I had already had my first on-the-down-low boyfriend —we used to steal our sisters’ cigarettes and meet up in the woods to makeout after school, but that’s a story for a different day, ya’ll.

So it’s a Saturday night and I’m scanning through the channels when I realize that the “Pretty Poison” episode I loved as a kid was playing. Remember, this was way before YouTube and streaming and even full penetration of the DVD market, so you were pretty much at the behest of the network programmers for all of your viewing needs.

So I a sat down and gleefully rewatched it, and my heart skipped a beat as the infamous “greenhouse rendezvous” sequence began.

As a first grader I couldn’t understand why it titillated me so, but as a high school championship masturbator, I certainly realized why at age 14.

The entire episode is just oozing with sex. And not just average, ordinary sex, we’re talking some VERY kinky stuff that I’m surprised ever made it past the censors.

In hindsight, “Pretty Poison” was my introduction to a ton of different fetishes that would ultimately fall under neat and tidy PornHub sub-headings in a few years’ time. The mutant plant tie-up play was BDSM for the elementary set; the lethal kiss was straight up executrix fetishism; and Ivy’s entire demeanor, and especially the way she toyed around with Bats, was virtually the text book definition of femdom humiliation.

At that point, I figured my fascination with the episode was borne out of some sort of furtive submissive desire on my part — i.e., that I wanted a hot chick like Ivy to tie me up and bully me and ultimately end my very life with a sadistic snog. Well, flash forward about five or six years — when I’m a college student that’s already experienced the joys of both sides of male-on-male anal sex — and the episode takes on an entirely different light.

I noticed that a male friend — who was allegedly straight — had a DVD box set of BTAS. I felt like too much of a weirdo to ask him to play the “Pretty Poison” episode explicitly, so I asked him if we could binge watch the first season.

I mean ... technically, it's sexual battery, right?

So we get to the “Pretty Poison” episode and the greenhouse scene and something new dawns upon me. Wait a minute, my obsession with this episode (and Ivy in the abstract) isn’t because *I* am submissive, it’s because *I* want to be as dominant as Ivy herself! All these years, I thought I wanted to be domineered by someone who looked like P.I. In reality, what I wanted was to actually BE Poison Ivy.

I wanted to be the hot femdom chick that overpowered men and lured them into their doom with irresistible sexual temptations. 

Perhaps its not a coincidence that the very first wig I purchased when I started doing a little bit of recreational cross-play was a bright orange one. Indeed, the very first full cross-play outfit I ever put together was — you guessed it — a gender-bent Poison Ivy, complete with neon green leggings and a spinach green leotard.

By the time I had fully embraced and come to terms with my gender identity — I’ll just say I’m “genderqueer” as a blanket statement — it was evident just how powerful that Ivy persona was. I don’t want to say that in femme mood I act like an eco-terrorist vixen (no matter how pretty your makeup looks, that’s a disposition that won’t get you laid), but I certainly have a bit of that domineering, Pamela Isley cattiness. In a way, she kinda’ encapsulates the power of the femme ideal — she overpowers others cerebrally, using her wiles to seduce and misdirect others into their fates. And no matter how you look at it, that is hot as fuckin’ fuck right there.

I did put together a full BTAS Ivy cross play last Halloween, but thanks to COVID, I never got to wear it out in public. The first time I had the full get-up on — complete with a floral crown and teal rain boots and a translucent, neon green fanny pack to make the bulge in my leggings a little less obvious — I almost cried tears of joy.

I never felt more feminine. And I never felt so sure, so confident, so powerful. All these years, there was a Poison Ivy trapped inside my body, and it took me 30 years to finally free her.

“Pretty Poison”, directly or indirectly, was the first proof-positive indicator that I wanted to be feminine myself. 

And putting the final touches on my Ivy makeup was something of a culmination of decades of self-repression coming to an end.

Naturally, the last portion of my cross play was the makeup job. And after painting my eyelids neon green and drawing little vine—like roots with my eyeliner pencil, I saved the most important piece of the ensemble for last.

Gazing into the mirror, and in my smokiest, sexiest femme voice, I slowly rolled the brightest, fieriest, blood-red lipstick in my arsenal across my mouth.

“So his fate was sealed,” I cooed in an intonation that would make PI voice actor Diane Pershing herself proud.

“With a kiss.”

XOXO, Toxicka