#my whole life i just sort of rolled with people i'd meet through circumstances and befriend them

[fly-sky-high-09]

Yet another 4am staring at the phone

[becausegoodbye]

the greatest ever fantasy for passive and diffident trans girls

The greatest ever fantasy for passive and diffident trans girls is a 2006 anime called Kashimashi: Girl Meets Girl. This, astonishingly, is the plot:

Hazumu is a very gentle young boy who loves gardening and has a crush on his classmate, Yasuna. Then all of a sudden an alien spaceship crashes into him, completely obliterating his body. The aliens didn't intend to do this – the aliens are nice – so they set about reconstructing the poor human they just squished. They're able to restore Hazumu to perfect health, with just one small alteration: something about the process inadvertently changed Hazumu's sex, and she's now a girl. Head to toe, unmistakably, a girl.

This isn't a secret. The aliens announce to the world whole that they've done this, and request that everyone simply treat Hazumu as a girl now. The rest of the show is mainly about Hazumu adjusting to life as a girl, and indecisively navigating a lesbian love triangle between her crush Yasuna and her tomboyish friend Tomari. But truth be told: there's not actually a lot of 'adjusting' that needs to be done. Hazumu is so plainly happier as a girl. There's no bargaining, no despair, no "oh no, how could this happen to me??" Hazumu just instantly rolls with it. Some others have a little difficulty with the transition, but Hazumu literally never does. She just wants to learn all the girl stuff she didn't know about, spend time with her friends, and live her best life. Which she does.

At Hazumu's age, I had no conscious sense of my own transness. There were all sorts of little signs identifiable in retrospect, but if you'd asked me whether I'd like to have a spaceship crash into my and change my sex, I think I would have been like, "Uhh no thank you?" But I'll tell you this. If a spaceship had crashed into me and changed my sex, I would have really impressed people with how well I took it. The adults in my life would have been stunned at how bravely and cheerfully I dealt with such a shocking blow, how quickly I adjusted to the idea, how naturally I just got on with things. "What an impressively emotionally mature boy," they would have thought – "I mean girl."

This is a curious and funny depth at which transness can be buried: unable to articulate a desire to be the other sex, but being able to deal with suddenly becoming the other sex with remarkable equanimity. One of the things that feels special to me about Kashimashi: Girls Meets Girl as a trans narrative is that it feels pretty clear that if the spaceship crash had never happened, Hazumu just ... would have been a boy. A quiet, gentle, uncomplaining boy, whose relationships with girls were a bit different to others, but other than that: a boy. But as soon as external circumstances intervened and made the decision for her – it's a repeated emphasis that Hazumu is very indecisive – the clarity is instantaneous. Hazumu was always a trans girl; she just only realised it through the gift of a medical transition so instantaneous and perfect that the fantasy of it can make a heart gallop.

This is rare kind of trans story. There are lots of trans people who always knew on some level, but there are also a lot of us who didn’t. It can be overwhelming to think about the contingencies involved with the development of even the thought of transition: the hideous army of unchosen circumstances penning our thoughts in at rifle-point and dictating our social and material possibilities. Kashimashi gives us a trans protagonist who, left to her own devices, probably would have just stayed a boy. She wouldn’t have wanted to put anyone to any trouble. But the story asks: "What if a giant fucking spaceship crushed your body into atoms and accidentally medically transitioned you, huh? Would you accept being a girl then?"

Which, for some of us, is weirdly the right question.

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The show actually has another trick up its sleeve, and it's a beautiful one. Yasuna, the crush, has always liked Hazumu back, but she's been dealing with a strange and difficult affliction that's made things hard for her. For some reason, she "can't see men". That is: she can see women and girls perfectly well, but when men enter her field of vision, they're just these scary grey blobs. She can register their presence, and sometimes identify them by voice, but she gets them confused all the time, and it's been a lot safer to just try to minimise her contact with boys and men. It makes the world very intimidating to navigate, and is the source of her shyness and reticence.

Obviously, "men are basically just grey blobs to me" is not a totally uncommon lesbian experience. But in Yasuna's case it's literalised, and deeply confusing, and you really feel how isolating it would be to attempt to live with it. There is never any attempt to explain Yasuna's condition, even to a goofy anime "aliens did it" degree. It's simply the situation for Yasuna, and she's been dealing with it alone for a long time.

The story feels like it's set up to say: oh, Yasuna didn't used to be able to see Hazumu, but now Hazumu's a girl, so now she can! And they can have a little gay love story! Cute! But that's not what the story does. Instead, the story is emphatically clear on this point:

Yasuna could see Hazumu the entire time.

During a time when every single man and boy on earth appeared to Yasuna as a featureless grey blob, Hazumu was the only 'boy' who was actually alive to her, who had a face, who she could bear to be around. Whatever was responsible for Yasuna's 'condition', magic or illness or curse or contrivance: Hazumu was always exempt. During a time when everyone else saw Hazumu as a boy, Yasuna was the only one who actually saw her.

This is unbearably romantic, but also shockingly affirming. Hazumu was always a girl! There is no non-trans explanation for any of this! The show has no explicit consciousness of this: the word 'trans' is never used, and nobody ever speaks as though anyone's ever gone through anything like this before. The language used (at least in the translated subtitles I had access to) is just "used to be a boy" and "is a girl now". And yet the whole story is the most remarkable trans fantasy, conjuring the most deeply blessed form of transness imaginable. A transness where the whole world knows you used to be a boy, but accepts you wholly as a girl. A transness of instant perfect painless transition, which you didn't even need to choose, but can simply enjoy. A transness actualised by aliens and confirmed by magic.

It's really something.

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Distasteful post-script:

Would it even be an anime if there wasn't an incredibly gross and off-putting running 'gag' that makes it impossible to recommend without shamefaced caveats? Kashimashi is no exception. After Hazumu's transition, her dad becomes creepily attracted to her, and around once every episode, there's a brief interlude – usually less than 30 seconds, and played entirely for laughs – where he attempts to molest her. He's constantly attempting to bathe with her, take revealing photographs of her, and touch her sexually. These attempts invariably conclude with Hazumu's mother catching him in the act, making a snarly face, and bonking him on the head. Then everyone acts like it didn't happen, and he does it again the next episode.

This is the fucking worst. Everyone hates it. It's an intensely upsetting smear on an otherwise beautiful show. In order to enjoy the things about Kashimashi that are genuinely rare and good, you kinda have to just decide to ignore the dad stuff, and I wouldn't quibble with anyone who thought it not a price worth paying. (I'd really love to go through and – similar to what I did with My Hero Academia – edit together a version that just simply got rid of all of the lecherous dad shit. It wouldn't be hard; you'd only be cutting 20-30 seconds from most episodes, and these moments are never referenced outside of that. Unfortunately, I'm pretty time-poor at the moment, so this'll have to be filed under "something I'd like to do when I have more time". Hopefully at some point I'll be able to. I'd love for more people to see this show, but I also really don't want to expose more people to the world's worst fucking running gag, so being able to give people files with that shit neatly snipped out would be a mercy.)

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Look, Kashimashi: Girl Meets Girl a silly anime in lots of ways. A lot of the episodes are kinda throwaway, the dad stuff is completely unforgivable, and I personally didn't love the ending (love triangles are annoying). But that core nugget of trans fantasy – what if aliens did it – is so resonant and joyous that I watched every episode enraptured. It's a cis cliche to call trans people "brave" without actually doing anything to make our lives easier, but the wonderful thing about Hazumu's story is that she didn't need to be brave. Honestly, she's kind of a scaredy-cat the whole series! And ruinously indecisive! Relatable queen!!! All of this, coupled with the after-the-fact clarity of her transition – delighting in being a girl only after being able to try it – makes her a trans protagonist I can see myself in to a pretty embarrassing degree.

Sometimes it takes a spaceship crashing into you, y'know?