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The Transgender Lottery
4 years ago
General
Starting in April 2022, Japan's Tokyo Metropolitan Government will effectively recognize same-sex marriages as legal: quite a departure for a country that prefers the idealized characters of BL and yuri manga to queer people in real life. There as here, the law moves at the speed of the law, inexorably but never fast enough.
Well, that's good news for same-sex couples, but we're all learning that gender and sexuality are very fluid categories. Case in point: a transgender woman and her boyfriend want to get married, but the law says no. That's the situation that writer/artist Chii finds herself in, in The Bride Was a Boy (Seven Seas, 2018), a charming, didactic, autobiographical manga about the author's transition from a confused, closeted young man to a happy, confident woman. The didactic aspect is necessary: most of us, certainly this cis-male reviewer, have no idea what it's like to feel trapped in the wrong gender.
I know there are people who feel trapped in the wrong body -- the body of a human as opposed to, say, the body of an intersex feline, but that isn't real, and nothing is ever going to make it real. Transitioning from male to female or vice versa, though -- that's within our grasp.
When Chii was a schoolboy, the idea of being uncomfortable with your birth-assigned gender was still seen as a mental disorder, and that in itself was just a reflection of an all-pervasive sexism that doesn't quite see women as "people" in the first place. (We still have issues with that, don't we?) The manga is both a love story and a painless introduction to gender studies. I doubt there's anything here that people who've lived their own TG experience don't already know; I'm not even sure that some readers wouldn't finish this book with a feeling of envy. Chii is an extraordinarily lucky individual -- supportive family, smooth medical and legal transition, marriage proposal... Not everyone gets to win the transgender lottery.
https://www.amazon.com/Bride-was-Boy-Chii-ebook/dp/B07BGG2BMC/ref=sr_1_1?crid=34LLMVAAFEF10&keywords=bride+was+a+boy&qid=1642605626&s=books&sprefix=bride+was+a+boy%2Cstripbooks%2C439&sr=1-1
Well, that's good news for same-sex couples, but we're all learning that gender and sexuality are very fluid categories. Case in point: a transgender woman and her boyfriend want to get married, but the law says no. That's the situation that writer/artist Chii finds herself in, in The Bride Was a Boy (Seven Seas, 2018), a charming, didactic, autobiographical manga about the author's transition from a confused, closeted young man to a happy, confident woman. The didactic aspect is necessary: most of us, certainly this cis-male reviewer, have no idea what it's like to feel trapped in the wrong gender.
I know there are people who feel trapped in the wrong body -- the body of a human as opposed to, say, the body of an intersex feline, but that isn't real, and nothing is ever going to make it real. Transitioning from male to female or vice versa, though -- that's within our grasp.
When Chii was a schoolboy, the idea of being uncomfortable with your birth-assigned gender was still seen as a mental disorder, and that in itself was just a reflection of an all-pervasive sexism that doesn't quite see women as "people" in the first place. (We still have issues with that, don't we?) The manga is both a love story and a painless introduction to gender studies. I doubt there's anything here that people who've lived their own TG experience don't already know; I'm not even sure that some readers wouldn't finish this book with a feeling of envy. Chii is an extraordinarily lucky individual -- supportive family, smooth medical and legal transition, marriage proposal... Not everyone gets to win the transgender lottery.
https://www.amazon.com/Bride-was-Boy-Chii-ebook/dp/B07BGG2BMC/ref=sr_1_1?crid=34LLMVAAFEF10&keywords=bride+was+a+boy&qid=1642605626&s=books&sprefix=bride+was+a+boy%2Cstripbooks%2C439&sr=1-1
Patpahootie
~patpahootie
Yeah - i transitioned despite the4 opposition and enmity of family. Never been happier.
roochak
~roochak
OP
You've written some pretty harrowing journal entries on that subject. You've earned your happiness.
Patpahootie
~patpahootie
