A curiosity of the X-Men is that, in this era when identity politics are on an upswing, the X-Men are singularly unequipped to deal with it directly; they only seem able to approach it through the metaphor of mutant status. You can give your cast a wonderfully diverse range of back stories and beliefs, but in practice it all gets overshadowed by them being mutants – all the more so in the years since House of M, where the mutants have largely been holed up in big campuses trying to build their own separatist communities. This leaves depressingly little room for characters to actually express any individual back story they might have, or any other aspect of their identities – even though, for most of us, identity is surely something that stems from a combination of factors. For the most part, these characters have simply ceased to exist in, or at least interact with, anything approaching the real world.