Girly Debut - Vol. 1 Ch. 2 - Polaris
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I'm loving this.
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MC x childhood friend 🥹
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I just realized all the classmates wear neck accessories to hide their Adam's apples.
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This was sooo fucking wholesome, I'll need more
He actively chose to put himself in a situation that would make him feel uncomfortable to try and understand his friend better. He didn't let his ego get in the way, apologizing relatively quickly, earnestly, and publicly. Girly is a better ally than 95% of people who call themselves an ally, and his exposure to trans and gnc people goes back like, three whole days.
Kitano is so sweet, I love her.
Kitano is so sweet, I love her.
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Don't explode: explode them
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I was just praising Girly's kindness and thoughtfulness last chapter and he went and broke a pure maidens heart first thing this chapter 😭
But im glad cuz it just shows hes got room to grow and learn, this chapter was real nice ^__^~!!
also Im rootin for Kitano : p
But im glad cuz it just shows hes got room to grow and learn, this chapter was real nice ^__^~!!
also Im rootin for Kitano : p
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He's a Otokonoko, a male. This story doesn't work if he isn't a boy. And later chapters, available for free in the japanese site of Weekly Shonen Champion, show that he has a male gender identity.
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First, are you going to provide some sort of source for that claim? Chapter number, page number, etc...?
Second, yeah, actually, the story can work perfectly fine if Kitano is trans! Really easily, in fact; we've literally already seen the mechanism for it to do so: Girly acknowledging that he didn't understand what Kitano was going through and changing how he looked at her literally just happened on-screen. The author could very easily make "there's only one [cis] girl" a massive red herring by simply having Girly acknowledge the others in the class as viable targets of his affection, just like Kitano. That basic idea isn't even new, it's literally how Stop!! Hibari-kun! from the 1980s worked with Kosaku having to let himself see Hibari as a woman and therefore making his attraction to her acceptable.
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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.
Second: No, the story wouldn't work because this would make Kitano a girl, and break the idea of a classroom of crossdresser where a single girl exists. Kitano being a girl would reshape the work in a way that would take away the original charm of the narrative.
The love Kitano has for Girly is already viable, he doesn't need to be a girl for his love to take form or reach Girly.
We see the foundation for this on chapter 2, Girly couldn't understand why Kitano would want to be girly, but he could sympathize with it, in the same way he can come to understand Kitano's homosexual feelings.
Honestly it's even weird to bring up viability and acceptability as justifications to why Kitano should become a girl. Shonen magazines have changed a lot in the last years, you know can find explicit boys love and homoerotic romance in it, this is something that has been happening since the time of Hibari-kun.
This is an Otokonoko manga, it was sold as a boy-meets-boy story in Japan. It would be weird and unfitting if all of sudden this story made one of their main crossdresser become a female character. You lose the homoeroticism, the crossdressing, the idea of a boy expressing themselves in an unconventional way, you handwaved the struggle and conflict that the work tries to build with Kitano's homosexuality and non conventional expression and how this affects Girly, his view of self, gender, relationships and Kitano.
I'm not opposed to the idea of Kitano being trans in headcanons, but in canon, in my view, him being a boy is what makes the character and manga shine.
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You seem to be under the impression that Kitano being a trans girl would be conventional and any potential romantic developments between Kitano and Girly would also be seen as conventional. Do we live in the same world? Kitano being a trans girl would be just as transgressive, if not moreso, than if they were a boy. Trans women often get called crossdressers anyways and then are further punished for asking to be treated as women. A man being together with a trans woman is often treated just a deviant as if she were a man.
Related, but you also seem to strictly think that otoko no ko=boy, and that is just not always clearcut. If you look on the Japanese wikipedia for 男の娘 you actually get differing definitions of the word otoko no ko, some of which include both femboys and trans people. It is not a unanimous definition of [assigned male]+[indentifies as a man]+[has a feminine appearance]. It's probably more accurate to think of otoko no ko as a subculture that can cover a few different kinds of people with similar experiences (some of which who identify differently).
Here's a diagram from that same wiki page:
And, yeah, trans women and crossdressers often frequent the same spaces and share similar interests (did you know there's trans women translating a lot of your otoko no ko manga). They can share a lot of the same experiences, which is why it's no surprise to me that trans women see a character like Kitano, whose life experiences heavily reflect their own, and go "that there's a trans girl if I've ever seen one". It's not very premise breaking for there to be one or more trans girls in the mix considering you'd just be thinking "there's only one cis girl" instead of "there's only one girl". Also, just, characters and people can develop over time. It would not be unthinkable for a crossdressing boy to go "actually, I think I'm a girl" after some experience crossdressing and people could be seeing Kitano going through something like that.
I don't personally think the story is portraying him as a girl, partially because of the marketing around this ("A boy-meets-boy coming-of-age drama"), partially because they haven't gone out and said it yet, partially vibes, and partially my own personal interests/experiences. I would need further story developments to convince me, but I don't think it'd be offputting or story ruining for it to happen. Canonical trans characters can be rare so it'd be kinda neat to see one even if I don't think it's happening here
Related, but you also seem to strictly think that otoko no ko=boy, and that is just not always clearcut. If you look on the Japanese wikipedia for 男の娘 you actually get differing definitions of the word otoko no ko, some of which include both femboys and trans people. It is not a unanimous definition of [assigned male]+[indentifies as a man]+[has a feminine appearance]. It's probably more accurate to think of otoko no ko as a subculture that can cover a few different kinds of people with similar experiences (some of which who identify differently).
Here's a diagram from that same wiki page:
And, yeah, trans women and crossdressers often frequent the same spaces and share similar interests (did you know there's trans women translating a lot of your otoko no ko manga). They can share a lot of the same experiences, which is why it's no surprise to me that trans women see a character like Kitano, whose life experiences heavily reflect their own, and go "that there's a trans girl if I've ever seen one". It's not very premise breaking for there to be one or more trans girls in the mix considering you'd just be thinking "there's only one cis girl" instead of "there's only one girl". Also, just, characters and people can develop over time. It would not be unthinkable for a crossdressing boy to go "actually, I think I'm a girl" after some experience crossdressing and people could be seeing Kitano going through something like that.
I don't personally think the story is portraying him as a girl, partially because of the marketing around this ("A boy-meets-boy coming-of-age drama"), partially because they haven't gone out and said it yet, partially vibes, and partially my own personal interests/experiences. I would need further story developments to convince me, but I don't think it'd be offputting or story ruining for it to happen. Canonical trans characters can be rare so it'd be kinda neat to see one even if I don't think it's happening here
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First, with regards to what is said in Chapter 3, I think you're being really disingenuous with what actually happens. Kitano describing herself as a boy isn't happening in a vacuum, it's happening specifically in the broader context of Kitano trying to determine Girly's feelings with regard to her viability as a romantic option. She explicitly talks about how Girly is focused on finding "The [Cis] Girl" hiding in the class and how she feels like implicitly that prevents her from being a real consideration. She then tests the waters by asking if a "guy" is out of the question, pointing out how a "guy" can still do a lot of the things Girly would reasonably expect to want to do with a girl. That reads far less to me as an attestation to her gender identity and more as her frankly trying to see if Girly could ever be interested in someone assigned male at birth.
Second, if you actually think Hibari isn't trans then I don't think there's any point in talking further with you. The word "transgender" may not have been used on the page, but Hibari insists she's a girl the entire series. She expresses the desire to have a more feminine body (Chapter 6, for example). She is literally enrolled at school as a girl, and preventing anyone from finding out her assigned gender at birth is an important part of multiple gags throughout the series. Other characters, most notably Kosaku, insist at times that she's a guy, but whenever someone does, they are consistently the butt of the joke. As I said before, him getting over his shit and allowing himself to see her as a girl and therefore resolve the conflict he's feeling over being attracted to her is the primary driver of the narrative. I already know you're going to take umbrage when I say this, but I genuinely don't care what Eguchi has to say. Whether it was his intention or not, whether he calls it that or not, he wrote a trans character. For a character from the early 80s, Hibari is as textually trans as you could reasonably expect any character to be.
Third, I think you misunderstood the point I was making when I referenced SHK as a comparison to Girly Debut. When you say "The love Kitano has for Girly is already viable", that's not actually what I was talking about at all. I agree with you in the sense that Kitano isn't the one who needs to do anything to make any sort of romantic attraction clear; rather, I pretty specifically talked about how Girly - just like Kosaku from SHK - is the one who needs to change the way he's looking at Kitano. He even partially does so in ch2, allowing himself to acknowledge that his 'heart did beat' ie he was able to feel some sort of attraction implicitly due to Kitano's perceived femininity regardless of her assigned gender at birth.
Fourth, again, I completely disagree with you that it would be weird if one (or all) of the characters in Girly's class were revealed to be trans. I'm genuinely asking, what do you think the whole point of the hook "there's only one [cis] girl in this class" actually is? Where do you think it's going to go? Are we just going to keep meeting more characters in the class, learning about them (i.e. their assigned gender at birth) and then Girly will magically automatically end up together with The Girl just by process of elimination? It would be trivial to have that just be a red herring, to have The Girl show up and ultimately not be someone Girly can see himself being interested in and force him to realize he ignored other romantic options because of his fixation. That would resonate just as strongly with the idea of having to get to know the girls first and would be just as much of an opportunity for Girly to grow, wouldn't you agree?
Also what are you even talking about when you imply that Kitano being trans would somehow take away from the story? Are you trying to suggest that there's no struggle or conflict for Kitano to have to deal with if she's trans versus if she's just a GNC boy? Do you think her romantic attraction to Girly - nominally cishet - is any less transgressive if she's a trans girl versus if she's a boy?
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