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.
Absolutely no clue about the anime. I don’t think I qualify for otaku status but I’ve seen quite a few anime over the years and I never noticed androgynous women as a common anime trope. Just the opposite really, extremely exaggerated female figures and/or very childish depictions are more what I remember and could do without.
Feminine/androgynous guys show up quite a bit, I’d say.
Not familiar with that particular anime.
With regards to anime in general, one thing to consider is that it is pretty much as heavily gendered as to the expected audience as Western stuff (though the details as to what counts as ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ can differ significantly), but same-sex relationships are also more accepted. Androgynous characters in both directions aren’t uncommon, though the relative frequency depends on the expected audience.
Both Ukyou from Ranma 1/2 and Haruka from Sailor Moon were mistaken as male by many of the other characters when introduced, though they were both rather on the ‘bishonen’ side even when presenting as male. (Granted, both series also had actual magical sex changes as plot points, but not for those characters.)
>> *I think the vast majority of trans people will never, very seldom, or only situationally pass as cis, <<
This is not true. Ask FtM dudes.
mordred – i’m more familiar with how you describe, generally. i do remember one ep of cowboy bebop with a manly woman, tho totally different presentation.
jenora – anime is wild. sometimes it seems cool, sometimes vile. worst homophobia i’ve seen in anime was on one-punch man. gross.
cripdyke – i don’t personally know enough trans dudes to have a good sample size, but for most of the ones i know, stealth ain’t an option. you’d know better from where you sit tho, i’d imagine.
I suspect that some of the people you assume are cis aren’t, but have seen no reason to enlighten you.
I do know a number of trans men & women, and while some might have trouble passing, most wouldn’t unless told that a particular person is trans. I suspect that is particularly so for people who started transition as teens.
I always assumed I didn’t pass, but I’ve had a number of incidents where the other person had no idea. My favorite was when I went in for my first mammogram, and the nurse asked me the date of my first period.
I don’t think the way that one anime portrays girls is part of some deep trend or anything. But anime is just an art style. Like many other art styles you can find popular stuff that lots of people like but you can also find niche stuff for specific audiences. And there are a LOT of different audiences.
That one in particular sounds like it’s a romantic version of a school where the main character gets involved with and probably fought over by a trio of popular people. School politics with students who are basically “Dear Leaders” and anime about people (mostly boys) fighting over the girl who’s the main character both look like subgenres to me. The latter seems to have thankfully died off, so I’m not aware of any current anime trying to sell young girls on the romantic idea of being someone else’s trophy.
You probably already tripped over a mention that the manga author also wrote The Rose of Versailles. The heroine in that sounds roughly based on a historical French figure of questionable gender known as Chevalier d’Eon. I dont’ think I’ve watched or read either of his works but I know of at least one other anime based on this historical person.
allison – at my first mammogram i can safely say that question was pretty fucking far from the nurse’s mind. the question of whether i want *cis* gender affirming surgery was.
congrats once again on the stealth, but you have to realize that isn’t at all encouraging to people who will never pass, nor is being told you’re a misbegotten outlier.
lanir – that late lovely manga writer / artist was a lady. pretty cool books, if not wholly my thang.
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A whole taxonomic family of related art styles, even.
So this is going to be one heck of an otaku nerd rambling. I usually never comment and only read your blog sporadically, but this hit the jackpot of my particular type neurodivergent otaku nerdiness so I couldn’t stop myself.
They represent an idealized masculinity for girls to admire and feel attraction to, and the roots are very much planted in takarazuka culture as stated, a theatre very known for its mostly female fan base where the otokoyaku (male impersonators) always are the most popular top stars. It has been said the attraction to the otokoyaku is because they are a supposedly ”safe” attractive masculinity without the threat of actual cis men, though I would not assume to simplify the motivations of the main audience to only that. The same thing can be seen, (at least in anime/manga, I don’t know how much it matches the lived reality) in that tall and more andogyne/masculine girls and women gets assigned an inofficial role as a ”prince” that other girls admire and fawn over like they were an otokoyaku (often in an all girls school setting like in Oniisama e here). Both Kaoru and Rei from Oniisama e falls within that archetype, which is obvious when you read the manga/watch the anime. (I will not get into the gender essentialist implications in considering otokoyaku as more safe and the whole historical cultural deal of wlw romantic feelings being seen as more okayish when the girls are young and unmarried)
Riyoko Ikedas (the mangaka concerned here) whole bibliography is based around these otokoyaku type masculine women (and in one case a trans man). She is part of the year 24 group that revolutionized shoujo (girls) manga in the 70s. Androgynity, same-sex love and gender nonconformity, but also other things considered transgressive in general were very much the thing of the mangaka grouped under that label. While most of them are famous for featuring androgynous boys and young men and male same-sex attraction, some like Ikeda Riyoko and Yamagishi Ryoko also have a theme of androgynous girls and women and female same-sex attraction. Everything is very idealized and dramatic.
Reading the otokoyaku-type Riyoko Ikeda characters as non-passing trans women due to the way they are drawn has actually not entered my mind at all before. Because they are such clear masculine otokoyaku archetypes in context, very much framed to be a kind of idealized parallel to an ”AFAB butch” (to try to culturally translate it) that ”passes” as attractive cis men, so that even supposedly straight women can be attracted to them, and that is why they also look so masculine in features. Their personalities and mannerisms are very much framed as masculine compared to the women and girls around them, always wearing pants and not skirts, being sporty or intellectual and not concerned with clothes or ”girly” things. Don’t be fooled by long hair and eyelashes and sparkles, the particular masculine ideal that is presented here includes these things as well. The character of Kaoru is directly compared to prince Genji through her nickname, the ulimate pretty boy and womanizer archetype in japanese culture. Feminine sensibility in some features but masculine in mannerism and action is a male ideal that has been present for a long time and has kinda seen a revival in shoujo manga, but in this case embodied by supposedly cis female characters. They kinda are natural born otokoyaku that does not need the training and costuming to present as an ideal version of masculinity for women and girls enjoyment. They look and act like attractive men, yet dating them as a girl places no external expectations to fullfill the obligatory female role as demanded by society in male/female romantic relationships. The characters shown in the picture here ends up dating as an example. What I have told you is kinda the academic
hypothesis behind these characters existence, I think the reality is probably more messy and varied than that.
Though I have been using quite cis binary gendered distinctions in this text for the sake simplicity, reducing these types of characters within a cis binary are a bit limiting, as ultimately the masculine characters in themselves also kind of represent a freeing from the constraints of gender in a heavily gendered culture. They can act outside the constraints of femininity (or masculinity in their counterparts) put upon people by society. Their ability to do that is reinforced by visually presenting them as having distinctive androgynous features setting them apart from the feminine cis women surrounding them. A non-binary, gender fluid and/or trans kind of reading is applicable if one wants to.
One of these otokoyaku-types in Riyoko Ikedas manga Claudine, Claude, even has a male gender identity and is stated to be transsexual (it was written in the 70s so the language reflects that) by a psychiatrist in the text, though he is an exceptional case here. For another example, Moto Hagio from the year 24 group often have non-binary bodied and sex shifting characters as a prominent feature in her sci fi work as well. They grappled with gender and sexuality a lot in 70s shoujo manga, and androgyny as a kind of ideal plays a role there as well.
If the otokoyaku characters in Oniisama E look even more exagregated in their masculine features in the anime, that is probably because the anime director Osamu Dezaki likely wanted to visually reinforce the exceptional gender-nonconforming masculinity already implicitly understood to be reserved for them in the manga. Though the character designer for most of the series he has directed kinda also often draws his women very tall and with that narrow body shape and angular faces even in general, so it might simply be a thing he likes aestethically too. It just gets extra obvious because the characters here are also masculine-coded.
That said, doing a subersive reading of these characters as butch masculine and non-passing trans women absolutely is a fun idea, though you have to imagine an alternate past were non-passing teenage trans girls could attend all-girls schools in 70s Japan.
For a very simplified shorter and less rambling but reductive version: they are drawn that way so that women and girls attracted to men can consider them an attractive masculine romantic partner that is at the same time not a man, and thus a way to break out of the heavily gendered cultural baggage surrounding male/female relationships and the assumed social roles following that. They are also drawn that way to free them from gender constraints in their actions and mannerism, androgynous humans that is reinforced as being that way by using visual clues, perhaps making their gender transgression more acceptable as special cases outside the norm.
Sorry if it is a bit incoherent, I’m not a native english speaker.
no, that’s exactly the kind of comment my post was asking for. thanks for the info.