I had a consciousness-raising experience about transgender people shortly after age thirty. I don’t think I was a complete shit before that, but did have a few embarrassing missteps along the path. I’ve always watched people around me more than I should, and during that time I started noticing whenever a person was androgynous or trans, and wondering, what’s that person got in their pants*? Classic wildly offensive goof, which mostly had the self-awareness to stay unspoken.
But this instinct was reawakened in me by an image set on tumblr, from an anime called Oniisama E…, or Dear Brother…. For some reason, there are girls in that show drawn with the proportions of androgenized bods. Broad shoulders, narrow hips, tall faces that make a forehead look short, strong chin, no visible breasts most of the time… These are the idolized glamorous older girls too, not shunned weirdos. And in the haze of this creepy terfesque genital obsession, I asked these paper dolls if they’d had, you know, the surgery..?
The answer is no, near as I can tell without watching the whole series and translating Japanese fan wikis. One of them gets breast cancer in high school (u got spoiled! as if you care lol). They’re cis-girls, in that universe. If somebody felt like watching the whole thing with the assumption they are trans in mind and doing the queer critical lens thing, that might be a diverting experiment.
I asked chat j’ai pété about it, and it said the original manga writer was inspired by the Takarazuka Revue, which seemed the opposite of what I’d expect to be the reason. Also, the drawings from the original comic did not seem as fully masculine as the ones in the animated adaptation. So, a hallucination, it seems.
Do any of you know if there’s a cultural reason why these anime cis girls look so non-passingly trans? I don’t get the impression my comment section is bubbling with otaku energies, but I might as well crowd-source my curiosity. This article isn’t the best showcase for it, but the cartoon looks very beautiful, which may be why it gripped me. One of the less manly girls looks like Sean Young in Bladerunner, but they’re all very cute. Never dubbed or subbed in English, so it slips away.
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*I think the vast majority of trans people will never, very seldom, or only situationally pass as cis, so the idea of passing as the singular goal of transition – the only fix for dysphoria – is harmful, even if it’s understandable that many of us are obsessed with it.
But still, even pretty hip people can be fooled hard by human androgyny. I had a high school teacher with no breasts, an adam’s apple, and a deep cleft chin – who got pregnant and carried that baby to term. Intersex but still functional, or just nature flexing on us? I dunno. Likewise, during my creepy shifty-eyed time, I had taken a skinny lady with an angular face as probably trans, and a few years later saw the same lady pregnant.
Most of the time you aren’t going to get a big tell like that, so you gotta learn to quell that curiosity when it arises. I did it; you can too.
