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bruciesnumberonefan · 2 years

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Batman au where everything is the same, except Bruce is a woman instead of a man.

Her name is Beatrice.

Her personality is exactly the same.

She’s still 6′ something and built like a tank.

Her superhero name is still Batman.

She was originally just going to go by The Bat, but then the media started calling her Batman, and she just rolled with it. Adds an extra layer of protection for her secret identity.

Some extra points that I find important

After the media dubs her ‘The Batman’, Bea spends hours gargling gravel in random closets in the manor to perfect her ‘manly Batman growly voice’ as she calls it. Her crime fighting identity is now male, and while she doesn’t speak much in the early days, when the time comes that she will need to speak she might as well have a voice that matches the name. She’s not going to do this halfway.

Bea has been diagnosed with OCD and is either somewhere on the autism spectrum or has ADHD, she stopped going to the psychiatrist before they could figure out which one. (Not that different from cannon, but it was important to me to mention it.)

While most of the Justice League only finds out Batman is a woman when she reveals her identity to them on her own terms, Wounder Woman can recognize a fellow warrior women almost on sight. She pulls Batman aside privately later to explain that she knows, and states that while she doesn’t understand why she is keeping her gender hidden from the others she will respect her decision to do so. They have girls nights twice a month.

When 12-year-old Jason Todd finds out that Batman is a woman after getting caught trying to steal her tires, his immediate response is to inform Bea that his respect for Batman has just increased immensely. Jason is very proud to have a new mom who could probably bench Superman.

While Bea enjoys wearing dresses, she mainly wears suits, pants, and traditionally ‘male’ clothing. Her reasons behind this being that it can be very hard to find dresses that fit her with out having them custom made, and while that’s barely a hindrance with how much money she has, she also thinks that she just generally doesn’t look flattering in most dresses because of her build.

Branching off the last point, Bea had some major body image issues in her teenage years. While she wasn’t as huge back then, she still had a fair amount of muscle mass from being incredibly active in a few different sports and with helping Alfred take care of the manor wherever it was needed. She has also always preferred close cropped hair to longer styles that would just get in the way and annoy her. Because of these things she always looked more masculine and never fit the ‘ideal’ look for woman. The inadequate feelings caused by that were made worse because she felt like she didn’t know how to be a woman. While Leslie Tompkins was a great older female presence in Bea’s life, Leslie couldn’t be a constant presence. And while Alfred tried his best - and passed with flying colours and unflappable determination in most areas - he was still a man and just couldn’t understand somethings about womanhood no matter how hard he tried. Bea kept all of these negative thoughts and feelings about herself bottled up inside of her like the emotionally constipated person she is until one day everything bubbled over with explosive force and disastrous consequences. It was a bad few months for both her and Alfred after that incident. Alfred still feels guilty for not noticing the signs sooner. As an adult Bea has become one of the biggest advocates for healthy body positivity and mental health. She still deals with those thoughts and feelings, though not to the same extent and she recognizes that the majority of them stem from her OCD. She has copping mechanisms set up to help handle these thoughts and feelings and will almost always go talk to Alfred when any of her emotions become to much and she starts to drown in them. (One notable exception to the ‘always go talk to Alfred when everything gets to much’ rule was after Jason’s death.)

All of the few dresses and skirts that Bea owns are ankle or floor length and show very little skin. She just doesn’t feel comfortable having a lot of skin showing, to her it feels like an invasion of her privacy for anyone other then the people she trusts most in the world to see more skin then just what is generally visible while wearing a t-shirt and shorts that cover the knees. Tight fitting clothing gives her a similar feeling of discomfort, so if the outfit is more form fitting it has to be covering her ankles and wrists, but if it shows skin it has to be on the looser side. Everyone who is close to her understands this fact, and it has caused problems with injuries on the field of battle before. (Whenever one of her kids thinks that they have lost her trust they are very surprised when they are proven wrong the next time Bea gets hurt in battle with them and she lets them treat her injuries. Jason cries every time at this show of trust when it’s directed at him. Sometimes when Bea knows she’s messed up with one of her kids and doesn’t know how to fix it, she’ll go on patrol with them and get hurt on purpose just to let them know she still loves them and still trusts them even if she can’t say it. Alfred, Cass, and Tim are the only ones to have caught on to this behaviour yet, but Damian is suspicious and very close to figuring it out.)

Damian is still her biological kid, Talia is still his other parent, and Bea still had no idea of his existence for the first 9-ish years of his life. Haven’t figured out how that works exactly yet, if anyone has any suggestions I’m all ears.

Bea has less of a ‘sleeps around’ reputation then her cannon male counterpart mainly because most of Gotham high society is intimidated by pretty strong lady who could probably crush like a grape if she really wanted to and they have no idea how to handle it because there is no precedent for something like this. The last time Gotham high society had to deal with a woman even remotely as huge as Bea was in the mid to late 1800s with one of her ancestors. (Who was also named Beatrice and who is considered to be the first great Matriarch of the Wayne family as it is agreed upon by most historians that the Wayne name and business are as powerful and influential as they are today because of many of her actions and choices.) There have been plenty of tall and muscular women in Gotham high society, but Bea is just so huge that they just don’t know the proper and polite way to approach her. Would it be insensitive to bring up her size in casual conversation? This inability for the socialites to figure out how to talk to Bea about anything other than business is not helped by the airhead persona Bea puts of in public. She doesn’t mind though, people are hard to talk to, the less people that she has to mindlessly chat with the better. The majority of those Gotham socialites that aren’t intimidated by her size will mainly approach her for a relationship for either fame, money, or purely for sexual desires. Bea doesn’t want an intimate relationship with someone unless it’s going to be a serious one and with someone who cares for her and wants the relationship because of her and not what she could give them, and after the forth potential partner approached her purely to increase their standing in high society and for some fun in the sheets, she decided that it was not worth the damage her self worth would take for whatever extra secret identity protection being an airhead who also likes to sleep around might give her.

The whole ‘Batman is a dude but Beatrice Wayne is a girl’ thing did throw Tim for a bit when he figured out Robin’s identity. As far as 9-year-old Tim could tell, the only man who was a part of Dick Grayson’s life was Alfred, and Alfred looks nothing like Batman. It didn’t stall him for long though, because once he realized Batman and Bea had the exact same body type it wasn’t that far of a stretch to assume that Bea chose the name Batman as a way to hide her secret identity more, and he admits that it’s a smart idea. (Later when Tim takes up the superhero identity of Red Robin, he carefully crafts his costume to make him appear more feminine for the exact same reason. The flame wars on the internet over what Red Robin’s gender is are absolutely legendary, no one can say that they are one hundred percent certain as to what this vigilante’s gender might be)

Whenever someone finds out that Batman is indeed, in fact, a woman, they completely loose their minds. Some of them are in complete disbelief until it has been proven to them without a shadow of a doubt that Batman is in fact female. Some look deep inside of themselves and ask “how did I not figure it out?”. Others, mainly the non human/not raised in human society and culture ones (and John Constantine), go “ok, thank you for trusting me with this clearly very personal to you information” and move on with their lives.

A small handful of villains, both big bosses and small time henchmen, have figured out that Batman is a woman. Lex Luther pieced it together because he’s smart and is willing to accept the idea of women who are tanks unlike other smart villainous men who despite all the extensive evidence they have collected clearly pointing to at least the possibility that Beatrice Wayne is Batman refuse to entertain the idea simple because Bea is a woman and Batman has man in his name. (Lex’s right hand man is a very capable woman named Mercy, after all. He may treat most other people on this planet like they are beneath him, but he will never treat one gender as less then the others.) The majority of bad guys who know that Batman is a women don’t know her secret identity, and only realized Batman is a women because they were in a fight where someone got in a lucky shot at the Dark Knight, making him down for the count, and instead of whichever one of his army of children was with him in that fight got worried, but instead of calling out ‘dad’ before beating the stuffing out of all the collective bad guy force, they screamed ‘mom’ before beating the stuffing out of the collective bad guy force.

Selina Kyle found out that Batman is a woman one night a few years into both of their nightly careers. As Catwoman, she saw Batman sitting on the edge of a building looking even more broody then usual and offered to be a listening ear for Batman to rant to if he wanted. Batman, having had a crappy week, happily agreed, and given the strange nature of their relationship figured that it was only a matter of time before Catwoman found out her identity, completely dropped the ‘manly Batman growly voice’ and proceeded to rant about some gold digger who wasn’t taking no for an answer and who was starting to take it to far and about some board member she was to deal with who keeps disregarding her and brushing her off when she tries to give her input into the inner workings of her own company, and the only reason this week hasn’t fallen into her top 10 worst weeks of her life is because all of the pain resistance training that she endured before she let herself become Gotham’s protector that is making her period cramps manageable. Selina listens as she said she would and has a slowly building existential crisis because, holy crap, Batman is a woman, and not only that, but she’s giving out info that could probably easily link Batman to her secret identity, and is Batman actually trusting Catwoman, one of her more infamous rouges, with her secret identity?! After her hour long rant, Batman turns to look at Catwoman asking if she might have any advice, to find that Catwoman has done the mental equivalent of blue screening while trying to process all of this. They soon become kinda friends after this and Selina joins Bea and Diana on their bi-monthly girls nights. (Or Diana joins Bea and Selina on their bi-monthly girls nights, depends on if Selina and Bea become friends before or after the Justice League forms. Pick which one you like better.

Batman still has a bit of a reputation for ‘being involved’ with some villains.

When it comes time for Bea to give the puberty talk to any of the boys she’s raising, she freaks out. No mater how many books she reads, how many experts she consults, how many times she’s done this in the past, she still convinced that she’s gonna mess it up and misinform one of her boys on something very important when it comes to their biology and development that will have long lasting and horrible repercussions all because she doesn’t have personal experience in this area. Alfred helps out to keep Bea from having a panic attack, because in all honesty Bea would do just fine on her own for this parenthood milestone, the only thing that would negatively effect the situation, and therefore the outcome, is Bea having a panic attack. When it’s time to give Cass the puberty talk Bea breaths a huge sigh of relief because, finally!, she has personal experience with female puberty.

As a bit of a joke, Dick would give Bea presents for both mother’s day and father’s day, because while Bea may be a mother, Batman is, technically speaking in the eyes of most of the world, a father. This habit spread to Jason who would always try to one up the presents Dick would give Bea out of spite that Dick was kind of of jerk. When Tim joined the family and saw Dick giving Bea presents on both days, he just assumed that that’s what your supposed to do because his parents were never around for father’s day or mother’s day. After that the tradition just kind of stuck to the Wayne family, and they all give presents to multiple important parental figures on both holidays. ( It takes Tim years to realize that that is, in fact, not how everyone does things, but is in fact just a thing they do. He is very shocked.)

That’s all I have for now. If anyone else has any ideas they would like to add, please do!

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