All Folks Bright and Beautiful: The casual gender diversity of Heaven’s Design Team
Come for the neat animal facts, stay for the charming cast breezily ignoring gender norms.
gender variance Tag
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If the Belt Fits: The battle for trans characters in fighting games
Ask someone who plays fighting games to list trans characters and they’re probably going to struggle. It’s not exactly their fault, either: While indie games offer marginalized creators a chance to represent themselves and major Action/RPG franchises have worked to make their worlds more diverse, fighting games are one of the many genres lagging behind.
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My trans experience with My Lesbian Experience with Loneliness
It is so rare to find fiction that speaks to your Otherness and to truly connect with it. As a trans woman, I more often than not feel disappointed after opening my soul up to allow for validation and comfort. So perhaps you can imagine the tenderness with which I turned the pages as I read Nagata Kabi’s My Lesbian Experience with Loneliness.
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The Sparkling Masculinity of Sanrio Boys
While there’s certainly a male audience for handsome dudes and fluffy mascots (like the guy writing this article), Sanrio Boys also wants to reach out to those conditioned to dislike cute things, directly addressing its male viewers through its musings on—and challenges of—traditional ideas about masculinity.
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Art as Discovery, Art as Hope: Kamatani Yuhki, x-gender and asexual mangaka
Kamatani Yuhki often confronts identity and marginalization in their work, as informed by their life as an x-gender (nonbinary) and asexual person. In a world where the oppressed often can’t tell their own stories, Kamatani’s manga are a must-read.
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Nerdy Talk and New Frontiers: My wandering ramble on coming out in the anime fandom
Hi everybody! My name’s Samantha. I’m a gawky, geeky trans girl who loves video games and anime. I had a different name up until a few days ago, but it’s dead now. Please be kind and don’t bring that up, ‘kay? I’m just Samantha now. Thank you!
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Kino is the Nonbinary Protagonist We Deserve
Because of the choices made by the 2003 Kino’s Journey adaptation, Kino becomes something incredibly rare: a nonbinary, AFAB anime character who isn’t a robot, alien, or sentient rock, but a human being.
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Catherine, Trans Identities, and Representation in Japan
The inherent transphobia written into Erica’s character is reflective of Japanese society, as conformity is part of the social constructs within the country itself. Erica is the product of misinformation about lifestyles that were not visible, and still remain somewhat invisible, in a conservative society.
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My Fave is Problematic: Fushigi Yugi
Full of big adventure and bigger emotions, Fushigi Yugi scratched an itch I hadn’t even known I had: for fantastical, adventure-driven comics and TV shows that placed as much focus on character relationships and emotional turmoil as they did on action and intrigue, and treated those feelings not only with respect, but as powerful forces essential to the plot.
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Land of the Lustrous, singular “they,” and the politics of subtitles
Land of the Lustrous made minor waves by deciding to refer to almost the entire cast with neutral “they/them” pronouns. In an industry that has historically chosen binary pronouns for characters who aren’t gendered or are gendered ambiguously in the original text, this marks a small but important—and most crucially, conscious—shift.
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An Analysis of Magical Sex-Change (TSF) Manga
Transsexual fiction/fantasy is a genre of stories featuring the transformation of the main character from one sex to another, usually through coercion or by accident. While these stories can often resonate with trans viewers, they can also feature a variety of problems.
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“Trapped” by Fandom: The very real harm of calling “trap” a genre
Referring to a person who dresses and passes as a woman as a “trap” is extremely dangerous. The idea that trans women are traps implies that they cause harm to (cis) men and women, which perpetuates the fear-mongering that allows society at large to defend people who murder trans women.
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Gals of All Stripes: ClassicaLoid and the Girls’ Day Out
In episode 8, “Girls’ Day Out,” the ClassicaLoid ladies take some time off to unwind and open up. With humor, subtlety, and a dash of vinegar, their time together becomes an exuberant exploration and celebration of what it means to be a girl—and their answer turns out to be a happily inclusive one.
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Body-swaps beyond ecchi punchlines in Your Name.
I was expecting Your Name to be a fluffy, gender-bending rom-com, and I got that. What I wasn’t expecting, though, were the progressive and fantastical twists that breathed new life into the exhausted body-swapping subgenre.
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“So That I Could Be Myself”: Gender performance in Showa Genroku Rakugo Shinju and Yuri!!! on ICE
While they take place in very different settings, Rakugo Shinju and Yuri on Ice both challenge cultural expectations about how men should or shouldn’t act, and show why it’s important to cast aside restrictive gender roles and play to our own strengths.
