hi:)

it's been a few months but it's still crazy to me that twcfm straight up made jigoe canon like damn ok.

one thing i really like about oscar twcfm is that they managed to get across in her the very trans feeling of wanting something negatively associated with your gender to happen to you because it'll make you feel more "real". reading between the lines i got the sense that oscar felt like she needed to be objectified in the way fujiko is to feel like a "real woman" (which is a very good metaphor for girls of the week). and that's just the thing that got her and fujiko to see past each other

one thing i kinda regret not mentioning wrt her is that japan is generally still fairly bioessentialist when it come to trans people in the way tbh much of the world still is & anglophone countries used to be, the conception of “trans women are women” is there but not to the extent that it is in western countries. i’m not an expert or insider by any means but from what i’ve picked up there’s an acceptance for gender non conformity when it’s in its “time and place”, so there’s a larger cultural acceptance for crossdressing, but the bar for being a man/woman is an entirely different thing (and usually conceived of in medical terms due to the emphasis on patrilineality/having kids). presenting oscar predominantly “as a man” rather than having her more explicitly aspire to womanhood or dress/present as a woman feels like a much more direct test of biases to that end, especially considering the prevalence of “otokonoko” (which is basically 1:1 with "femboy" in english, in that in theory it refers to feminine boys but in reality due to bioessentialism it ends up getting conflated with trans women, larger context is more important i’d say, if the vice-versa they did with goemon getting fujikofied proves anything) characters in anime as is. also speaks to the “oscar” metaphor, oscar is “a woman in disguise as a man

one thing i really like about oscar twcfm is that they managed to get across in her the very trans feeling of wanting something negatively associated with your gender to happen to you because it'll make you feel more "real". reading between the lines i got the sense that oscar felt like she needed to be objectified in the way fujiko is to feel like a "real woman" (which is a very good metaphor for girls of the week). and that's just the thing that got her and fujiko to see past each other

one thing i kinda regret not mentioning wrt her is that japan is generally still fairly bioessentialist when it come to trans people in the way tbh much of the world still is & anglophone countries used to be, the conception of “trans women are women” is there but not to the extent that it is in western countries. i’m not an expert or insider by any means but from what i’ve picked up there’s an acceptance for gender non conformity when it’s in its “time and place”, so there’s a larger cultural acceptance for crossdressing, but the bar for being a man/woman is an entirely different thing (and usually conceived of in medical terms due to the emphasis on patrilineality/having kids). presenting oscar predominantly “as a man” rather than having her more explicitly aspire to womanhood or dress/present as a woman feels like a much more direct test of biases to that end, especially considering the prevalence of “otokonoko” (which is basically 1:1 with "femboy" in english, in that in theory it refers to feminine boys but in reality due to bioessentialism it ends up getting conflated with trans women, larger context is more important i’d say, if the vice-versa they did with goemon getting fujikofied proves anything) characters in anime as is. also speaks to the “oscar” metaphor, oscar is “a woman in disguise as a man