"transphobic" is too harsh a term; too accusatory. "unsupportive" may be better here?
"you shouldn't rush your decision" is good, BUT the conclusion should be "take hormone blockers/hrt to buy yourself time" rather than "do nothing." the mom is equally as ill-informed, if not worse, than rinko. more out of ignorance than malice.
i think the sus part is her bringing up genitalia, but again, it's really hard to blame her because 95% of cis people equate trans = cutting off penis in their heads without really thinking about how actually one would transition. and again, it's more out of ignorance of trans stuff/uncaring of her own child than malice. and it sucks that rinko suffers bc of factors completely out of her control, and that the options that SHOULD be available to her are not, also completely out of her control
tangentially it seems like rinko and dad dont rly know about hormone blockers either due to how they dont bring it up/refer to the entire process as hrt. so the mom is technically right but not in the way that the mom thinks shes right in which is INFURIATING
idk if this is what you've said already/trying to say tho, i didnt backread the argument, im just trying to diffuse here ig xd
BUT the conclusion should be "take hormone blockers/hrt to buy yourself time" rather than "do nothing."
This is a very good point to mention. It will do more harm in the long run not taking hormone blockers and/or HRT, precisely because some parts of masculine puberty are irreversible (as of this moment). The author does seem to be aware of this from earlier chapters. And feminine HRT is almost entirely reversible, so she can stop taking hormones at any time.
The misinformation around vaginoplasty involving cutting of any penises, which is plain wrong, is unfortunate. It sadly also serves as a scare tactic to not take that surgery, but that's another point. But besides that, it should be noted that in Japan it is only a recent development that trans people don't need SRS to change their gender marker—only in October last year a
trans women was exempted from the law, declaring the law unconstitutional, and
in February this year a trans man was able to do the same. I wonder if the author, or indeed the mother in the story, is not aware of this development. Considering the form was mentioned to be for SRS first in Ch.8, but in the conversation with the mother it was for HRT, it is weird that these are conflated.
The mother is very unsupportive and misinformed at best, taking imperfect results as the reason to do nothing at all, and scaring Rinko with loaded language surrounding SRS while she is yet to start HRT, all the while the mother knows barely anything of Rinko's situation. Her mother assuming she is doing it for someone else is
odd, considering she hasn't seen her in a while. And as ScarletKomii pointed out in the comments, in past chapters her inner dialogue shows this to be not necessarily true.
She is possibly transphobic, considering a lot of her remarks echo transphobic talking points, but I am withholding judgement on that until future chapters.