CONTENT WARNING: Discussion of transphobia, queerphobia, and gender essentialism.
SPOILERS: General discussion of Hana-Kimi and W Juliet.
When a manga bills itself as “genderbending,” the reader might expect the series to experiment with gender nonconformance—that is, gender expression or identity that’s not aligned with traditional assigned-at-birth gender (this includes everything from binary and nonbinary trans people to butch cis women to drag performers). Unfortunately, however, the genderbending genre is rife with series that simply use queer window-dressing to tell a fundamentally non-queer, heteronormative story.
The framework of “[cis girl or boy] must pretend to be [“opposite” gender] in order to [accomplish bizarre main plot driver] before getting together with [“opposite” gender co-lead], thus restoring their [femininity or masculinity]” invites biological determinism by making the plot’s stakes dependent on the successful concealment of the main character’s “true” (here, meaning “assigned-at-birth”) gender. The idea of a “true” biological gender is itself a transphobic trope that does harm to the gender-nonconforming communities that genderbending manga purports to represent.