Tag Archives: transgender

A Trans Man on What Sailor Moon Means to Him

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A writer named Alexander left this comment on Erica Friedman’s post about Sailor Moon. I thought I’d reprint it here.

Sailor Moon, for me, really gave me the foundation to learn how to be strong as I got older. As a transgender male, it was extremely difficult to come to terms with who I was and stop trying to force myself into believing that my body made me a girl despite the sinking feeling that it was all wrong, and I doubt I ever would have come to accept myself as quickly as I did (though it did take years), had I not had the values of believing in oneself, staying strong, and speaking out for what was right embedded in my heart by this beloved series, a series who also offered a collection of strong, brave mentors and role models. All of the characters breaking through the typical gender binaries really encouraged me in a time I couldn’t find it in myself to accept who I was or what I was going through. Sailor Moon also helped me significantly in dealing with others’ perception of me due to the fact that my boyfriend of two years (and best friend of six) are both transgender males and ridiculed for it on both sides(those who think we’re in a lesbian relationship, those who realize we’re both guys in a relationship.) Characters like Uranus (who, as a transman, I looked up to enormously growing up and felt my heart glow for when Neptune said in a scene in the manga that Uranus shared both male and female traits) and Neptune who, though oppressed by censorship and paranoid parental figures, loved so fearlessly and beautifully that it was impossible not to see its depth, characters like FishEye, who, though he or she was often rejected or taunted, continued to dream and aspire and express them self, characters like the Starlights, who broke all rules in regards gender, particularly during the anime (though manga Seiya will always be dear to my heart)… They were all characters who reflected aspects of who I was that I would never be able to accept in myself, but who allowed me to accept and even respect through their brilliance and inspiration. There we also the others. Hotaru, who, though abused, mistreated, and abandoned by so many for her differences, continued to strive to be a good person and to love. Minako, the leader who struggled to live up to the pedestal she had been placed on by her duty to her princess and friends. Rei, whose fierce personality taught me that it was alright to actually speak up for yourself. Makoto, who was often misjudged and seen as a bad person due to childish rumors and misunderstandings, and yet never fell into the persona others had attached to her. Ami, whose quiet demeanor often left her to toil with her emotions and insecurities alone, and yet made her mature. Setsuna, who saw the possibility of doom ever-present on the horizon, and yet continued onward with hope for a better tomorrow. Chibiusa, whose innocence never faltered, and whose love was unconditional and everlasting, even when bittersweet. The Amazon Quartet, whose wish to hold on to their childhood and fear for what dangers becoming an adult held for them led them into darkness in the anime, and finally, Usagi, whose love was never severed by hate or rage, who fought for all, even if it meant her own suffering or even death, whose experiences made her even warmer rather than bitter, who held no bias in her heart even for those who had wronged her, and who taught me that being mature didn’t mean letting go of your inner child. Honestly, I can go on and on, but I know I’m talking too much. My point is that I truly do believe that Sailor Moon played a significant role in making me who I am today, and without it, I’d probably be pretty lost. I love Sailor Moon. I am a transguy, and I am not afraid nor ashamed to proclaim that.

 

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Gluey Tart: Better Living Through Celebrity News

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If you read celebrity blogs (and fully 23.7% of Kinukitty’s brain is occupied thus; dlisted is one of my favorite things in the world, right up there with Twix, Fresca, and peace, love and understanding), you might have recently become aware of Stephen Ira Beatty. I think the Daily Mail started it, and it spread to the National Enquirer, and so on, and so on. Stephen has popped up in this context before, but this video seems to have spread further than anything else.

This could be a coincidence, or it could also be totally wrong; I did some half-assed research but did not employ science or anything. Assuming it’s not wrong and there is a reason (because, really, why not?), I can’t help thinking it’s because Stephen Ira Beatty is tremendously appealing. Also thoughtful, intelligent, educated, and well spoken – and sure, all those things are fine, but really, the adorability helps. And, in my mind, it’s exciting that habitual readers of the Daily Mail, the National Enquirer, TMZ, etc. are watching a video of a trans man chatting about being trans.
 

 
He got all the publicity because he’s the son of Warren Beatty and Annette Benning, of course, not because people want to better understand transsexuals or because he has interesting things to say, and that does suck. What also sucks is the circus sideshow tone of some of these posts – child of famous attractive heterosexual people is transsexual! Can you believe it?!!? All noted. (Here’s Stephen’s take on that.) But still – that’s an awful lot of people who probably never think about this stuff taking a moment to acknowledge it and, possibly, having a wow, that guy is pretty cool moment.

Said video, which made the rounds in mid-July, is of Stephen chatting about being transgendered and stuff. He started transitioning at age 14, and he’s 20 now, which I find mind-bogglingly splendid, and also really very encouraging. His parents are rich, and apparently at least somewhat open minded, which obviously put him in a better position to address his gender dysphoria than most people are in. (For instance, if you follow Dispatches from Tanganyika (which is damned hard to spell), you’ll read about how Billy Martin – formerly Poppy Z Brite – has had to sell off possessions to pay for his testosterone, and he still had to stop taking it for a time.) That doesn’t make Stephen any less impressive; it’s just worth nothing. Looking back at my own 14-year-old experience, which was muddled and unpleasant and thoroughly lacking in resources for fixing anything, I can only say damn, Stephen, you kick ass.

And Stephen’s blog, Super-Mattachine, is charming and interesting and well written. His most recent post is a review of queer porn movie Speakeasy (available here, along with a lot of other great stuff, including the marvelously titled “The Genderfellator.”) There’s some interesting introspection and discussion of the movie (Speakeasy, I mean; there’s a trailer here if you’d like to take a dip), including an acknowledgment of the cerebral nature of the review, which he clarifies by saying “A++, would fap again.”

The name of the blog, by the way, refers to the Mattachine Society, a pre-Stonewall gay rights group (founded in 1950) and its newsletter, The Mattachine Review. According to group founder Henry Hay, via Jonathan Katz, Gay American History (Crowell Publishers, 1974), via Wikipedia, the name references a French medieval and renaissance masque group called the Société Mattachine. These societies (again according to Wikipedia) were “lifelong secret fraternities of unmarried townsmen who never performed in public unmasked, dedicated to going out into the countryside and conducting dances and rituals during the Feast of Fools, at the Vernal Equinox. Sometimes these dance rituals, or masques, were peasant protests against oppression – with the maskers, in the people’s name, receiving the brunt of a given lord’s vicious retaliation. So,” Hay said, “we took the name Mattachine because we felt that we 1950s Gays were also a masked people, unknown and anonymous, who might become engaged in morale building and helping ourselves and others, through struggle, to move toward total redress and change.” Which is interesting, dontcha think? Also interesting (and also from Wikipedia), the Mattachine Society’s goals were “to unify homosexuals isolated from their own kind; educate homosexuals and heterosexuals toward an ethical homosexual culture paralleling the cultures of the Negro, Mexican and Jewish peoples; lead the more socially conscious homosexual to provide leadership to the whole mass of social variants; and assist gays who are victimized daily as a result of oppression.”

I had heard of Stephen before I saw the afore-mentioned video on dlisted, etc., but I didn’t start Googling him frantically. And, not to get all earnest and shit, I appreciate having another opportunity to find out more about him. He dislikes the celebrity media, which has outed and hounded him, so I suspect he might not find my enthusiasm in this particular case worth the candle. He would have a point there, obviously. He seems like a tolerant guy, though, so maybe he’d see a silver lining here, too.

(Also, I don’t know about you, but I’m pretty upset about Kristen Stewart cheating on Rob Pattison – why, Kristen, why? Apparently she can’t act – I don’t know because I only saw her in the first Twilight movie, and I thought she banged “glum teenager with not ideal decision-making skills” dead on – as it were. I don’t care about that, though. I just like to look at pictures of her in Us and shiver at the pointy perfection of her nose.)

(And by the way, am I the only one who thinks the Orbit tower at the London Olympics site looks like it was built by Phineas and Ferb? That’s not an insult, by the way.)

The Not So Transgendered World of Osamu Tezuka’s Princess Knight

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[Images read from right to left. Wikipedia synopsis of Osamu Tezuka’s Princess Knight (1953) here. It’s a fairy tale romance for kids folks!]

 

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In the cloud strewn halls of heaven, the sexual fate of a  group of cherubic “souls” are decided through a lottery of colored hearts. The consumption of a blue heart produces a boy child while the consumption of a red heart produces a girl. When the nascent Princess Sapphire is accidentally fed hearts of two different colors, her sexual fate is thrown into doubt (the covers to the Vertical edition of Princess Knight cleverly highlight this dichotomy). In order to rectify this disastrous turn of events, the supreme deity dictates that her blue heart must be extracted if she is in fact born a girl.

To be sure, this game of hearts has little to do with any real determinacy when it comes to sexual orientation or desire. Rather it is a foreboding of the future course of Sapphire’s life, a premonition of years of chaste crossdressing. The heavenly mix-up is not a recipe for hermaphroditism but for an individual fully at ease in the world of masculine (sword fighting, horse riding, wall climbing) and feminine (pretty dresses, fixations on princes, cat fights) activities.

When Sapphire is born a girl, she remains comfortable with and desirous of her femininity. It is her political circumstances which dictate her need to adopt masculine ways and this she does with a degree of reluctance but with utmost decorum. Her sexual orientation is never in question. As with much children’s literature, this is a world where secondary sexual characteristics like breasts are clearly on display but genitalia never spoken of. Sapphire’s enemies are unable to discover her true sex because she doesn’t have a vagina (nor do Tezuka’s men have penises for that matter) — this constraint undoubtedly due to the age of Tezuka’s readership but also accidentally suggesting that sexual divisions are a cultural product and not predicated on sex organs (hormones not withstanding).

Sapphire is forced to be a prince in public due to the careless birth announcement of a lisping doctor. The swift rectification of this mistake is impossible due to an arcane law which, like most fairy tale legislation, doesn’t hold up to much scrutiny.

When we first see Sapphire as a young girl, we are swiftly apprised that she likes frilly things. Her transformation into a “prince” is a terrible inconvenience which she has come to accept over the years; an act of subterfuge which has caused such youthful bewilderment that she sometimes forgets to discard her heels in favor of more princely boots.

She is otherwise the consummate professional. Her mastery of disguise beggars that of Clark Kent and Diana Prince with their obfuscating spectacles and boring business suits. Her prince charming is blind to the wiles of his “flaxen” beauty the moment she discards her blonde wig and billowy ball gown. It’s either that or the magic of make-up, you never can tell.

Early on in the story, Sapphire reacts violently to a series of entrapments by a deceitful courtier who attempts to expose her femininity through a woman’s “natural” passions for sewing and cuddly animals.

Yet it is the feminine calling of a beautiful gown that she secretly yearns for.

In many ways, Tezuka is less interested in gender identity (as a crossdressing protagonist would seem to imply) than in a kind of old school female empowerment. Unlike other fairy tale princesses, Sapphire drops a knife and not glass slippers. She is always “correctly” and heterosexually attracted to her prince charming and the aforementioned lavish dresses, yet fully capable of defeating her opponents in single combat — an antediluvian Lara Croft without the pneumatic breasts. The 6th century Ballad of Mu Lan had similar concerns but less reservations about the strength of women.

It is only in the second volume of this new translation that Tezuka begins let his guard down. When Sapphire’s female heart is extracted by the nefarious Madame Hell, she struts around in male fashion and rejects the advances of her prince lover.  A more conservative approach is adopted when her angel guardian reverses this magical surgery and replaces her male heart with a female one — she becomes a wilting flower…

….a stance Tezuka swiftly dispenses with in light of his mildly feminist agenda. What’s an adventuring heroine to do if she can’t wield a sword? Even the emancipated ladies of the court use brooms to engage some invading soldiers.

 

Despite its long standing tradition of being the castrato of the comics world, North American comics have had an endless fascination with the transgendered lifestyle. Many of these are almost monkishly respectful while others posit rape as the first instinct of a male-female body swap (see Skin Tight Orbit; an erotic fantasy written by Elaine Lee). The latter device is a common trope in transgendered pornographic fiction.

The transgendered stories surrounding Superman are perhaps the most entertaining from a historical perspective, but the canonical text in the genre must be Al Feldstein and Wally Wood’s “Transformation Completed” (Weird Science #10, 1951).

Here the unwitting fiancé of the female protagonist (androgynously named Terry) is transformed into a woman by her jealous father. Two constraints are at work here. Firstly, the bugbear of the homosexual lifestyle which can never be in a children’s comic and, secondly, the EC line’s own penchant for the “shock” ending. Both of these factors ensure that mere lesbianism will never be an option as far as the couple’s fortunes are concerned. On the final page of the story, Terry injects herself with her father’s gender change drug and becomes the groom to her newly female bride.

This kind of slow, forced feminization and simple gender reversal is a mainstay of transgendered literature (pornographic or otherwise), and satisfies both male-to-female and female-to-male desires and fantasies. We can see something similar at work in the operative female perfection achieved in Almodovar’s forced feminization horror-fantasy film, The Skin I Live In. Here the possibility of a lesbian romance is held up as the final shred of hope after years of sexual abuse at the hands of Antonio Banderas’ surgeon-torturer.

Needless to say, Tezuka will have no truck with any of this. The manga is question is for kids afterall. The taboo of abandoning the straight and narrow of the female lifestyle is suggested by no less than a minion of Satan (Madame Hell) and is rejected outright. [Sidenote: the female reincarnation of Tristan in Barr and Bolland’s Camelot 3000 is offered a similar bargain by Morgan le Fay but finally opts for lesbian love with her Isolde]

Readers prone to detect the lesbian frisson in the performances of the Takarazuka revue (said to be an influence on Princess Knight) will be left bereft by the heterosexual mores and desires of the protagonists in the manga. Sapphire’s potential bride (as seen in the penultimate chapter of the series) is left weeping at the altar once she is apprised of her groom’s substantial bosom; a Shakespearian moment further emphasized by the translator’s choice of priestly complaint (“Oh, this is sacrilegious, so much ado for nothing.”)

Considering its worthy progenitors in the field of literary transvestism, one might say that the most surprising aspect of Princess Knight is not its crossdressing heroine but the author’s need to contrive a celestial accident for a woman to be skilled at athletic and martial activities. What little “feminism” we see on the page soon gives way to escapades not dissimilar to what you might find in the adventures of Zorro, The Prisoner of Zenda, or a movie starring Douglas Fairbanks. One assumes that this presents an advance over the usual position of women in comics during the 50s and is to be commended.

Nevertheless, this is a manga to be read more out of a sense of duty than anything else. Its historical importance as far as manga directed at girls is concerned is indisputable, but the romantic dilemmas on show are uninvolving. The tiresome and largely unimaginative plots will prove a chore for most. It is undoubtedly virtuous in intention but also averse to do away with childish things even if only for a moment — a product of its time with all the limitations that implies. Nowhere is this more clearly seen than in the death of Sapphire’s father which is not so much a terrible moment (see Bambi or Charlotte’s Web) but a simple plot development and an exercise in frantic cartooning.

There can be little doubt that Princess Knight remains a perfect example of that safe, asexual entertainment people have come to expect from comics.