Girly Debut - Vol. 1 Ch. 2 - Polaris

[Narehate]

In the literal next chapter, chapter 3, Kitano and the others acknowledge themselves as boys, this keeps happening throughout the whole story, it's one of the main sources of drama, conflict and reflection of the narrative.

First: By Eguchi own words in the manga and his personal social media profile, Hibari is a boy. His relationship with Kosaku is an homosexual one, and that's what makes it so charming and daring.

I think an important thing to note is that when trans people refer to and are spoken of by others in Japan it’s treated differently culturally. In the West, “trans women = women, don’t refer to them as former men” and vice versa with trans men dominates the conversation, but I’ve seen a lot of trans people in Japan freely refer to themselves as “former men” and use other such language.

Using a western frame of reference to confirm or deny a character’s transness doesn’t really work because the language they use for them isn’t the same. There’s quite literally a trans woman autobiographical manga on this website that is TITLED “The Bride Used to be a Man”.

Generally speaking when a character or person is trans, from what I’ve seen anyways, phrasing like “the heart of a man/woman” or something to that effect specifically will come up a lot. In the west it’s like “I am literally and physically a woman” for the purposes of self-affirmation and confidence, and in Japan it’s “spiritually I am a woman, though my body is male and I won’t deny that.”

As it stands, to me anyways, Kitano hasn’t said anything of the like and only confirmed that he likes and always wanted to wear female clothing. I get trans vibes but I don’t take this as confirmation — it’s fine to want to express yourself with feminine clothing and not identify that way! That doesn’t have to mean you are trans. Right now I’m just keeping my eyes open.