It’s either something the author knows about and the characters just don’t yet (and will discover in a later chapter) or the author is just ignorant which would suck and I really hope isn’t true.
Well, it seems like all of the characters around Rinko so far (with the possible exception of Yuuki)
are ignorant, so either it's an intentional choice by the author to reflect the average person's knowledge on the subject, or it's a reflection of the author's own ignorance. Hopefully the former.
Either way, it's pretty clear that Rinko has been really let down by her support network so far. Poor girl. It's even affecting her education and physical health (night terrors). I can't help but feel a bit confused by the lack of professional counselling and medical attention she's received, considering this condition is supposed to be somewhat common in this world. Why didn't she have someone sit down with her and walk her through all of her options moving forward when it happened? She was just given a dinky little brochure and sent out the door.
the trans/puberty blocker discussion is very interesting but all I can think about is how
her mom fucking sucked!!!
Like what the shit, controlling as fck when Minori was small, and then up and disappeared for work one day, hard to contact/meet irl.
She's basically absentee from Minori's life, and the moment she got back she's gone right back to control Minori's life/decisions?? Such a shit parent.
anw, thanks for the chapter.
Absolutely. I think everyone who is saying, "What the mom said is correct" is missing the fact that she could have given her whole, "You need to do it because you want to" speech and still signed the consent form if she really felt that way. Just tell her before she leaves to make sure she gives serious thought about who she is and what she wants, and that she'll stand behind either choice. That would be a supportive parent giving good advice.
Instead, she said, "lol, get fucked, I know what's right for you better than you do" even though she wasn't able to even recognize her own daughter a few minutes ago, and flew back to the other side of the world, leaving Rinko with no way to get the required consent that she needs. She misgenders Rinko multiple times and finishes off with telling Rinko that she'll never be a woman (you can argue that's not what she actually meant, but she definitely wasn't tactful about it, especially considering how much distress Rinko is currently under. We see the effects of piling it on in this chapter). Not to mention that Rinko was specifically requesting for HRT and the mom jumps straight to GAS as a scare tactic. Pretty awful.
The first red flag for me in this manga was the fact that Rinko's attraction to girls was attributed to the sudden increase in testosterone. This is kind of a common trope in GB manga, but it's an archaic misconception, and we've known for decades that testosterone does not promote attraction to women in neither men nor women. It merely increases the sexual drive for whatever preference the person was born with (i.e. developed prenatally).
The manga did keep it vague enough that I've been holding out hope that it was a misunderstanding on the hopeful Rinko's part. That the brochure actually just meant that they would experience increased sex drive and Rinko took it to imply that it was towards the (post-transformation) opposite sex, and not just in general. The manga wasn't clear if the text boxes were coming from the brochure verbatim, or if they were Rinko's interpretation of them. That, combined with some other dialogue about Rinko potentially liking boobs beforehand, and not having a physical reaction to boys (i.e. Yuuki) made me hopeful that Rinko was actually just a closeted lesbian, and that she was eventually going to be forced to work through her sexuality along with her gender identity.
But with the way everything else has been developing in these past two chapters, it's starting to look more and more like the manga is just going to commit to this outdated version of biological determinism, and that the author just believes that sexuality is determined by your genitals, like a surprisingly large amount of other mangaka. That would be largely uninteresting to me, and pretty disappointing considering the panelling, art, and comedy have all been great so far.
But there's still plenty of room to turn this around and work through these as misunderstandings. There's a ton of really interesting places to take this story still. Personally, I want to see Rinko decide to continue living as a girl while accepting the new changes to her body. Maybe it's my yuri brainrot, but I got the feeling that they might be hinting at Mao being interested in Rinko as a girl. I think that would be really interesting to see them try and work through Rinko's challenges together as a pair, and contrast that with Subaru's interest in Rinko as a (potential) man, as well as Yuuki's choice to begin living as a man. But again, the manga's been pretty vague with its intentions. It could be that it was setting up a love triangle between Rinko and Mao towards Yuuki as well. That could be either interesting or not, depending on how it's gone about.
Either way, I haven't given up on this manga yet, but my optimism is starting to wear thin a bit.
