Lily from Zombie Land Saga is the character that immediately comes to mind. She literally dies and becomes a zombie because her gender dysphoria from facial hair shocks her. It's a gag that if handled inappropriately could really come off as tasteless but going off what little of the series I've seen--ADHD is a bitch--the Lily character seems to be handled with a lot of care from a purely writing-level. I mean, hell, I'd have probably written something similar since facial dysphoria really is just that scary.WittyUsername wrote: ↑Sun Jul 05, 2020 1:15 pm I can’t imagine that there would’ve been very many trans actors in places like New York or Texas back in the late 90s/2000s. Maddie Blaustein seems to have been the exception, and as far as I know, she was mostly cast as male characters.
Come to think of it, how common are trans anime characters anyway? I would assume that Japan probably wouldn’t be very sympathetic to the transgender community.
As I mentioned before, there's the very transphobic scene from Yuu Yuu Hakusho, too, where main character Yuusuke sexually assaults the transgender woman Miyuki.
Hunter x Hunter also has a trans character in Alluka, Killua's younger sister. She is constantly deadnamed and misgendered by anyone not Killua.
All three are played by cis women. I'm sure there are other anime out there I'm forgetting about, too.
There are also a lot of anime or series with trans-coded characters, like Pretty Cure. Dirty Pair (1985) also had a trans character, albeit she was a one-off character.
For Kamen Rider Wizard there was a trans-coded character named Kamimura Yuu played by KABA-chan. After the series KABA-chan came out as a trans women herself.
I'm sure that I'm missing a lot of trans characters, too. Keep in mind, though, that cis authors are so often poor at understanding queer issues--especially for us trans folks--that they wind up just appropriating our aesthetics for cis characters.
Queer people exist both inside and out of Japan. Queer Japanese people are still fighting the same battles we fight in the US for representation and rights. In Japan a trans woman cannot change her legal gender to properly reflect her real gender until she has had gender affirmation surgery. The thing is, not all trans women want gender affirmation surgery. Some times hormone is enough, some times a trans person doesn't want either, they want only to socialize and present as their gender. Trans people and non-binary people are valid, no matter how they present or what their medical history is and to codify the necessity of surgery just goes to show not only the ignorance of cisgender people but also the obsession cisgender people have with the trans body.