This came up on reddit, and I've been brewing over about it.
I'm on the Ranma 1/2 subreddit, which is a weird place because it has a lot of what feels to me like really weird, unnecessary conversations for people who are brand new fans to a thing that's thirty years old and are trying very hard to make a thing of it. Like a Ranma 1/2 Abridged narrative.
And someone tonight started a conversation about whether or not the manga is homophobic, with a lot of... awkward positions, positions like referring to Tsubasa as a trans woman.
Here's what I put out:
Speaking here as an older queer who has spent a lot of time pickling his brain about Ranma 1/2: These are pieces from a different world. For context, Rumiko Takahashi was born in 1957. It wasn't until 2018 that sexuality was a category for anti-discrimination legislation for housing in Japan. Not gay marriage, gay renting.
What I'm saying is: Don't think you can map the worldviews and queer life you're used to onto how things are in Japan, especially the work of a woman who, while a trailblazer in her own space, doesn't necessarily relate to the framework you're used to. The existence of queer media from Japan doesn't mean 'Japan is better at queer stuff than we are,' that's a pernicious myth that a lot of people tell themselves for a host of reasons.
Just as an example: It's a pretty big lift to claim that Tsubasa's a trans woman. He's a crossdressing dude - he's pretty clear about that ! I mean, that may be how it reads to us now especially if you ignore what he tells people, and you can bring that reading if you want! But Takahashi wasn't replicating something we know from queer culture, she was writing a comedy gag martial arts manga, and she put things in it that she thought were funny and interesting. In the original Japanese, there's a lot of language between the characters that can be best described as slurs. Pantyhose Tarou, one of my favourite characters, calls Ranma some pretty heinous shit, and the characters don't find that language offensive, they find that language wrong to use because it doesn't apply to Ranma, and that's the joke.
The fact that Ranma 1/2 has such an important trans narrative in it is kinda accidental, and the reason it got to exist was because Takahashi wasn't actually engaging in queer dialogue. She thought the idea was so silly as to be fanciful. The works of Takahashi are texts that were not made in conversation with the world as you're familiar with it. Even if they weren't coming from a different country and framework, they are coming from the 1980s.
Don't think 'is this text homophobic?' like it's a document which has an opinion and like, wears pants. Think instead in terms of media frameworks and lenses: What in this reads as homophobic? What about it can be read in a non-homophobic way? Trust me, there are a lot of millenial queer folk who got our start thanks to Ranma 1/2, but when you've had that experience you can usually step back, look at the old text and go: Phew, that's a bit rough, innit?
Love the series! It's great! But also don't go into it expecting it to know how to talk to you, now. Remember it's from the past, which is a different country. They do things weird there.
And I think about this a lot. I think it's funny that trans acceptance to me, did in fact come from really, really dumb conversations about 'would you fuck Girl Ranma?' kind of spaces for me, about how Ranma 1/2 is how I met my first trans friends - friends who I have long since lost contact with!
But like... that's accidental.
I made a lot of jokes about 'Amerimanga' because to me, it was very much a media type I saw being made by people who were questioning, in that space of weird gender-swap webcomics that made maybe four or five pages or fanfictions that got absolutely lost on some genderswapped OC that wound up having nothing to do with the original core material.
The space was queer, the audience was queer, the characterisation was queer, but it wasn't because we were being given queer stuff or specifically trans stuff. Ranma exists the way it does because the idea of a boy who becomes a girl is fundamentally comedic. It's a punchline.
"Why don't these media types that play with so much trans stuff just say trans?"
Because mostly, they don't think of trans people.