Instead of doing something productive with my life this morning I instead decided to reply to a comment on Youtube saying that there's never been any trans rep in anime, it's all just crossdressing, with a whole list of sources.
I am a fucking idiot. The history of trans manga and anime IS extremely interesting though, and if I can educate ANYONE, I'll do my best lol
I'd love anime with actual trans rep in it. :3
in addition to the ones from @Lizstar's tags, there's
- Love Me For Who I Am: manga about a "femboy maid cafe", and the various staff members' actual complicated gender and sexuality feels. It's centered on a romance between a cis boy who works back-of-house and his nonbinary classmate who joins the cafe as a new maid; one of the side characters is a trans girl struggling with internalized transphobia, who gets the sweetest depictions of gender euphoria I have ever seen put to paper:
- Stars Align: coming-of-age anime about a middle-school soft tennis team. There's an episode where the team manager and one of the players need to dress as girls in order to do recon on a rival team, and the two of them have a whole conversation about gender afterwards, with the manager talking about questioning their gender and tentatively identifying as nonbinary, and the player talking about a trans man who's a close family friend. It's very explicit and realistic and respectful, discussed in those exact terms. Major content warning though, pretty much every member of the ensemble cast is dealing with some sort of physically or emotionally abusive family situation, and because the studio execs unexpectedly canceled the second cour (Hmmm I Wonder Why), the show currently ends 12 episodes into what was supposed to be a 24-episode run, with things in a super dark place and nothing resolved. It's a really good show, though, so if you can deal with that I'd definitely recommend it.
- Zombie Land Saga: comedy anime about a group of seven girls who have been brought back from the dead as zombies to form a zombie pop idol group. One of the girls turns out to be trans, not said in that exact language but pretty damn explicitly. Her teammates are initially startled/bemused but quickly accepting; the manager's response is "yeah I knew, so fucking what"; her mood is "being a zombie means no more puberty, fuck yeah this rules, I wish I could reconcile with my dad though" and she does and it's super sweet
- Heaven's Design Team: anime about a group of contractors designing all the animals for the biblical creation of the Earth. Basically "cool evolutionary biology facts, the show". One of the designers is drawn/depicted as a trans woman; she's just another member of the team with her own particular interests and design sensibilities, nobody ever needs to have a talk about her gender because why would they, when the team goes to a ryokan she's in the women's bath and it's totally unremarkable, just super chill seamless acceptance <3
- Kino's Journey (2003): anime about a traveler going around on their talking motorcycle, visiting various countries that all have their own weird stuff going on. It's got big Invisible Cities vibes, very atmospheric and philosophical for the most part. Never really talks about gender much directly, but it's incredibly trans. Kino dresses in a long trenchcoat, is varyingly read as a girl or a boy by different people they meet, and isn't really here for either ("I'm just Kino.") Their backstory episode, where we see them as a young girl in the country where they were born, is a slow-building intense story of queer self-discovery, with a climax that's equal parts traumatic and triumphant. I've only watched the 2003 anime, there's a 2017 reboot but it didn't seem quite as good.
- Skip and Loafer: really sweet romcom anime about a high-achiever girl who moves to Tokyo from the countryside to attend high school so she can study hard and go to a top university and become a politician and revitalize rural Japan etc etc, she's got it all worked out and everything will definitely go exactly the way she's planned it. She's staying with her aunt Nao, who's a trans woman and the best Cool Auntie ever <3 There's a brief moment where we see some strangers saying transphobic shit about her, mostly she's just around being a cool auntie and becoming sort of a mentor figure to one of the girls in the protag's class. She rules, and it's a great show in general, check it out!
- ONIMAI: I'm Now Your Sister: anime about a 20-year-old shut-in NEET who gets dosed with a sex-changing drug by their mad scientist younger sister, turning them into a middle-school-aged girl. She starts going outside again, making friends, discovering fashion, and generally having a way more fulfilling life, but not because she wanted to be a girl or anything, definitely not :p It's got loads of really great relatable trans feels and is one of my favorite shows of this past year. It's also an ecchi comedy about middle schoolers, which may not be your vibe. If you check it out, I hope it hits for you!
- Fantasy Bishoujo Juniku Ojisan to: gender TF isekai fantasy adventure anime. Y'know when you're hanging out with your guy best friend, getting super drunk, shouting about how you wish you were a girl, and then a goddess TFs you into the most beautiful girl ever and teleports both of you into another dimension? And also your best friend is kinda hot now, no he's not what are you talking about of course not. So then of course you gotta go defeat the demon king or whatever, so you can get the goddess to change you back, because you definitely absolutely want to be a guy again? And you're not having any particular feelings about gender or moments of self-discovery over the course of your journey? Yeah, happens to all of us. Just normal straight cis guy things.
- Steins;Gate: sci-fi anime about a guy with delusions of being a mad scientist, who accidentally invents a real time machine and needs to figure out what to do with it. One of the side characters is a trans girl, pretty much nobody is at all respectful to her and it fucking sucks, but she's there and she's absolutely trans. She literally uses the time machine to change her own birth sex so she can be a cis girl (this is definitely how biology and chromosomes work and definitely a thing you can do with time travel, don't worry about itttt), but they have to undo all of the time shenanigans due to Bullshit, it fucking sucks. We can't have nice things, but Rukako absolutely deserves nice things
