This post is a discussion of Shou Arai’s manga, “At 30, I Realized I Had No Gender.” However, feel free to just answer the question in the title if you’re not interested. I’m wondering if anyone here transitioned in their 30’s or 40 plus.

Shou Arai is an intersex person from Japan who is somewhat well-known in the local queer scene. Arai lived the first 30 years of his life as a woman before transitioning into a man. I’ll be using he/him pronouns to describe Arai, as those are the ones he uses in the manga. The LGBT movement in Japan is obviously different than it is in the West, so some terminology doesn’t fit exactly. Arai is physically intersex, having physical characteristics of both sexes. He is also described as trans, non-binary, or agender at times; however, in this case agender is translated from something that more closely resembles “between genders.” Having read the manga, I personally feel that the term agender doesn’t really fit in the Western sense, and I believe the title is more in reference to “I am without gender because society doesn’t have a name for people with genders like me” rather than a true absence of gender.

Like Poppy Pesuyama, Arai considers himself a manga essayist. This means that the manga is primarily expository rather than narratively driven. Unlike Pesuyama, who wove their exposition into an overarching narrative, Arai foregoes narrative all together. Instead, each chapter of the manga is based on a topic or anecdote. Some chapters are even just Q&A sessions with other queer people. Often times, Arai is just giving practical advice about being queer. Despite the title of the manga, Arai actually wrote it when he was nearing 50 years of age, so he 30 years of female experience and about 20 of male experience by that time. Quite a veteran queer!

Here's a list of the topics he covers:

As you can see, the majority of the manga is devoted to aging while queer, which is why I was drawn to it. Frankly, I think some of the advice that Arai gives might be a bit antiquated, but he is real af. I think that some of the chapters were hard to read for me not because the subject matter or presentation is heavy but because he clearly voices a lot of the small things we worry about when aging and queer. In particular, the chapters “If I had aged a woman” or “Is it impossible to be a young girl” are a little rough if, like me, you’re transitioning late in life. Other chapters just discuss aging in general like body measurements, choosing glasses, facial sagging, or having a big head lol. In general, he’ll discuss an issue and then provide a way to try to mitigate it or think about it differently, and he’s always real about what’s actually achievable.

The manga is a real grab bag of tough thoughts, which I’m gonna list here:

Overall, I think that the manga is rather formalistically boring. There’re really no characters, and the art is fairly basic, so there’s nothing really to latch onto. Unlike other queer manga I’ve read, this one didn’t really move me; however, I think it’s bursting with important and helpful content, so it’s worth a read if any of this interests you.

Anyway, I wanna hear from the younglings too, but this post is for the geezers like me. Have any kind words?

Really says something about society

Are you just tormenting me?

Just wanted to post this pic

Not sure how to curate my hexbear browsing experience

Edit: thank you!

This post is for all of the gender questioners who lurk around these parts and feel like their experiences don’t line up with other people’s. I write this as a trans person who has no clear indication of what s/he’s transitioning to.

In the last few years, I’ve gone through extensive questioning and experimentation with my gender all up until my recent hatching. During this time, I’ve met so many different kinds of beautiful people on this site. Over a year and a few accounts, I’ve talked with binary trans people, non-binary trans people, bigender people, people who have detransitioned, queer people, and many others who have been incredibly supportive when sharing their experiences and supporting my journey. I think the people who I have interacted with the most over this time, though, is the group that I belong to myself—gender anxious people—gender weird people. The people who aren’t even sure if they’re unhappy with their gender and their body.

I stayed quiet for a long time because I didn’t feel like my experience lined up with anyone else’s, but when I started posting, I started seeing one comment in particular. I wrote this comment to others, and people wrote it to me, and others wrote it to others.

“Are you me?”

After literal years of questioning, it took maybe two hours in the mega to have multiple people replying to me telling me that they felt the same way. If I don’t relate to the experience, I don’t reply, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen the call “does anyone else feel this way?” go unanswered. Other people feel the way you do about your body and gender.

Many of us feel like we’re in a gendered box, and we’re asking for permission to leave it. We want to know that our reasons are good for leaving the box. We feel like we need a clear destination of where we want to go after we’re out of the box. The truth is that we don’t need any of these things. We just have to want to leave the box—that’s it.

I was stunned when I read Trans Liberation because it had hardly anything to do with binary trans people at all. That book is about all of us, all the weird stuff sprinkled from binary to binary (including the binaries!).

Let me dispel a few myths for you:

1. There is not a prerequisite amount of pain that you need to feel to prove you want to change your gender or gender expression. You don’t need to be sick at the sight of your body. It doesn’t matter if you’re comfortable living they way you are. If you want to change your gender expression just because you think it might make you happier, that’s the only reason you need.

2. There is no number of signs that you need to collect that will validate your experience and choice. You don’t need an epiphany where you “knew for sure.” You don’t need to have grown as a boy who always loved playing with Barbie or a girl who hated wearing skirts. Many trans people knew for sure, and they knew it for a long time, and that comes with its own challenges; however, it is not a necessary experience for all trans people. Some of us get halfway through our lives and just feel like we’d like to be something else.

I think a lot of us who grew up in the West are stuck on essentialist thought. We want to feel that there is something inherent to our existences that will tell us what our gender is. What we “truly are” deep down. What we’ve always known we are. For some people, this may be comforting; however, I think that there are other ways to think about it. For instance, we can look at gender through the lens of practice, and we can ask ourselves how each of us practice our gender each day. Most cis people practice their genders daily, but it’s invisible to them. Once you start practicing your gender differently, that’s when things start to come into focus.

Once I started dressing in women’s clothing and painting my nails, you won’t believe how many straight cis guys came out of the woodwork to give positive feedback. They tell me things like “I always wished I could paint my nails, but I never had the guts” or “I’ve always been jealous of women’s clothing. I don’t feel like I have any options in menswear.” These are dudes who have probably never complimented another man’s outfit in their entire lives, but, when confronted with someone outside of the rigid gender box, they start admitting that they want to paint their nails and wear dresses.

So, what I’m saying is, regardless of where you fall on the gender/sexuality spectrum—even if you just want to break the rules a little—your gender expression is beyond valid. Your simple existence is revolutionary because it’s a challenge to a rigid binary gendered society.

Don’t believe your existence is revolutionary? Try to practice your gender in a non-sanctioned way. You’ll feel the counterrevolution real fast. If you’re a guy and you do something as simple as grow out your hair, you will be constantly socially policed. Push the gender binary just a little bit further than that, and you’re very realistically facing violent opposition in a fascist society. Don’t think being a crossdresser is valid? It’s valid enough to get you outlawed or thrown in a pit. These non-conforming gender identities, no matter how subtle, stand in complete opposition to the fascist project. You being publicly weird robs them of one more mechanism of social control.

So, if you take anything from this post, please let it be this:

1. If you think nobody else feels the way you do, start asking and finding the people who do.

2. Don’t get hung up on the validity of your feelings or reasons—they’re all real. Not every option is available to every person, but there are things within your power now to start practicing and exploring. Start practicing. It really doesn’t need to be big. start slow. You don't need to start HRT tomorrow, or ever, for that matter. Do what is fun and safe. It's your body to manage the way you please.

I hope to see more folks in the mega. It’s really been popping off lately.

Btw, even if, by some freak chance nobody feels the way you do, you’re STILL going to get good ass advice from our expert posters. There’s no gatekeeping happening.