Grateful Goblin

And that's not even getting into the fact that you can't try to slap USAmerican queer culture on a Japanese queer character. Japanese gender identity is its own thing. They've got their own culture going on there. There are certainly points of intersection, but a Japanese person isn't going to express their gender in the same way as a USAmerican, trans or otherwise.

Making Kinosaki act and dress up as a woman for the whole story can appeal to prejudiced people and gradually make them warm up to the dynamic between the main characters and provide an opportunity for them to see queer people in a better light. However, at the same time Kinosaki not having to conform to the stereotypical image of men for him to identify as a guy is also a breath of fresh air in its own, especially for a deuteragonist in a shonen. I think (or at least I hope) it is a stepping stone in paving the way for more open queer representation in shonen in the future.

This is one of the reasons why I think Gerosaki ending up together is important to the themes and story itself, and making Kinosaki a biological woman who just pretends to be a guy for the plot, as some theories suggest, takes away from the story and how it handles queerness cause in that case we would go two steps back instead of a step forward when it comes to queer representation.

It would be nice to have a shounen that breaks away from the usual expectations and MarriageToxin does not shy away from writing queer people openly, Gero's sister is openly a lesbian and in a relationship with a woman for example, and this is so important to me because I need people to stop associating the idea of queer people existing solely in works categorized exclusively as bls or gls. It is only when it comes to queer-coded ships or queer-coded characters that people have a negative stance towards and tell you to pick up ''gls '' or ''bls' instead, but they won't tell you to pick up a romance if there is a straight pair in a story despite the main genre not being romance.

But Squirrel Girl is weird. She's WEIRD weird. She's autistic and barely bothers to hide it. She is very loud and annoying and insanely progressive. Her best friends are all people of color who are extremely opinionated and one of them is trans.

She openly talks smack about Nazis. She's thick as fuck and not just in a comic way she's a big girl. She has a round face and buck teeth. She has no filter. She loves herself.

Squirrel Girl is so much more than just a furry stand in crush and honestly a large majority of the fan base would not like her. She is a GIRLS girl and her best friend writes loki cat fanfiction.

Kinosaki shouldn't be cis woman because the whole point of the series is the choice of happiness over strict 'traditional' family adherence that believes "blood is thicker than water" and that having children is the most important thing you can do to continue that bloodline.

Kinosaki could be seen as trans because a key theme of the series is that WHO YOU ARE AT BIRTH shouldn't determine your value as a person, and that being able to biologically have children shouldn't be the only definition for being a woman (i.e. all the marriage options are only considered good for their blood, biology or birth right).

Kinosaki could also be seen as trans because reading her as a trans woman makes sense; she only ever reveals that she's a 'man' to people she's not conning because she doesn't believe she can be seen as a woman unless she's 'fooling' someone. Despite this she still chooses to dress and act as a woman in non-swindling social situations, meaning she wants to be PERCEIVED as a woman, not to mention she has never once chosen to dress as a man even in a private setting (only example being something gero imagined in his own head). Additionally, she wishes she were Gero's actual bride (see the wedding photo chapter) but doesn't believe herself to be an option not just because she doesn't see herself as a 'real girl' but also because she cannot bear children.