For best results, please select the category that most applies to the manga you’re reading:
🔘 The author seems so excited to have discovered that nontraditional gender roles exist
🔘 Forcefem, but as reactionary as possible
🔘 These feels are rough, author buddy, you ok?
🔘 Oh, no, the very cis author thinks it’s just a gag but this bit will become fundamental to your identity somehow
🔘 Tragic, Wandering Son-style horseshit again
🔘 Porn, fortunately and/or unfortunately
🔘 TSF as a time-honored tradition without someone getting weird about it
🔘 TSF as a time-honored tradition but the author wants to get real weird with it
🔘 This is exactly the lived, joyful experience of being, say, a trans woman, but the author seems to be under a terrible curse that prevents them from even thinking the words “trans woman”, so the main character has to utter “but I’m a boy” every 2-4 pages in case we and/or they forget it
🔘 Autobiographical manga but if they were in your circles you’d have to take the author aside and have a real deep talk about internalized essentialism and binarisms
🔘 Being trans and both explicit, not for cis consumption and Regular about it? Like, what are you reading, Love Me For Who I Am again? (If this category fits your manga, please stay on the line and an agent will be dispatched to catalogue this incredibly rare event.)
puts her serious hat on
It’s a little dispiriting that what we get for translation are basically almost only things that are interested only in coming from a place of cishetallo hegemonic dismissiveness rather than healthy, sustainable self-exploration and an embrace of expansiveness and understanding. I’m happy I put $50 into J-Novel, say, and it did ultimately pay off with how much I’ve read on the entire year, but the frequency of stuff that makes me roll my eyes is sometimes a tiny bit overwhelming.
While there is far less of it than I would like, I can readily find pop culture in English that normalizes or celebrates queerness and the expansiveness of self, identity, desire and growth, especially in comics, in independent productions, or in adaptation — I can point to Heartstopper, Sex Education, Friends at the Table, Steven Universe, Questionable Content, Happiest Season, The Owl House, Bravest Warriors, Kill Six Billion Demons, She-Ra, Val and Isaac, any of the enormous avalanche of books from LGBTQ Reads, I can go on —
— and yeah, I actively seek out and love Japanese pop culture in translation that’s on this vibe and gets translated: people who know me know I don’t shut up about I’m In Love With The Villainess, Our Dreams At Dusk, Love Me For Who I Am, Those Two Are Always Like That, Ohana Holoholo, any of Gengoroh Tagame’s stuff, both porn and for general audiences, She Likes To Cook And She Likes To Eat, There’s No Freaking Way I’d Be Your Lover, Unless, I Think My Son Is Gay — heck, even manga whose that let me off with vibes I don’t like, like Wandering Son or Bokura no Hentai.
And sure, there’s the autobio stuff — I do own X-Gender, Until I Love Myself, the Kabi Nagata oeuvre, and more. But I’m interested principally here in how queerness exists in escapism more than I am about work that describes reality (tho this is important too!). Autobio work is read by the interested; escapism is, through the homogenization of commercial endeavor and the sieve of popularity, a vane for what people assume other people will want to see, and for the stances they think are acceptable when in the lighter mood of entertaining.
That’s why I’m sad that the great majority of the stuff I see in translation is generally putting the viewpoint into a place of deprecation or scandal when faced with the expansiveness of self. Things like, to cite two titles I read this week, language like “actual woman” from J-Novel’s translation of Sword Saint Abel’s Second Chance, to immediately invalidate the gender-switched protagonist’s behavior as being anywhere near the possibility of feminine by going full essentialist on gender roles and what is acceptable to see from a woman; things like invalidating bisexual or lesbian attraction in the same brand’s I Could Never Be A Succubus, by drowning the possibility for expansiveness into a textual “if it’s between girls, it doesn’t count” (a triple whammy: used to justify dubcon/noncon between two women, used by the protagonist to justify satisfying her own sexual wants while keeping herself “okay” to pursue her comphet attraction with the protagonist without communicating with him, and absolutely cratering any discussion of queer attraction by latching it square in the category of kinky sex).
While I could blame J-Novel and the priorities of commerce, there’s a similar proportion of titles in noncommercial scanlation setups. It’s not that I don’t want to hear stories where ‘I’m a boy, though!’, it’s that I find almost exclusively stories about ‘I’m a boy, though!’, and it tinges my enjoyment of titles like I Turned My Childhood Friend Into A Girl or Crossplay Love absolutely sour.
(And again, it’s not the trope itself — heck, say, Zenbu Kimi no Sei does it brilliantly if only because, beside the magically gender swapping protagonist that “I’m a boy, though”, it a has magically swapping protagonist that doesn’t think in those terms, and a cast that includes also non-magical-genderswap trans and queer and nonconforming people! And I could critique bits of it, sure, but this thoughtfulness puts it miles ahead of the two above, IMO, as good and close to my gender feelings all of those are.)
So:
Perhaps it’s a matter of proportions, such that there is so much English material that I can find with ease despite the large majority of it being bad?
Or is it just the case that what we get here in translation does not reflect an original-language proportion that does exist?
Is it a sourcing bias, in which I am looking only at commercial titles, or perhaps at outlets that prioritize more conservative outlooks? Should I be looking more closely, say, at translation groups that are queer-focused?
Or am I judging by a meter I should adjust?
