So this honest to god essay of a response was originally sparked in conversation with someone else about my thoughts on the ways that the Sailor Moon manga (and it's author, Naoko Takeuichi) engaged with the subject of gender norms, gender expression, and specifically how that's expressed in the casual and comfortable ways that various women in Sailor Moon engage with themselves and others.
The conversation I had with that person ended up more heavily focused on other things, but I really like the writing I did here, and really, what is Tumblr for, but sharing the unnecessary essays you wrote for no other reason than because you had so many thoughts and not enough time to express them all?
The conversation that sparked this essay started with the other party sharing that they felt the manga's decision to have Usagi and Minako use their disguise tools to transform into men was playing into 90s era gags about gender, that Haruka was a Takarazuka Revue reference and nothing more, and that the manga's portrayal of the Starlights was rooted in Naoko's hatred for the idea of boys being Senshi. I disgareed with all of those sentiments… and thus was the essay born.
So here it is!
One thing I feel is pretty important is that Sailor Moon as a series has been rooted in conversation about and regarding gender norms and societal pressures placed on women in Japan from the beginning - it's a conversation that many Mahou Shoujo series engage in, and I see a failure to understand that conversation in this summary of events, which may explain why what the manga represents as at times casual but always whole-hearts explorations of gender and sexuality, could come across as dismissive gags or shallow references to someone unfamiliar with the source material. Assuming that there's no greater thought to any of this, however, is more dismissive than the series deserves.
I could - and almost did - write an entire treatise, running through the various ways that Sailor Moon as a series exists to combat and rework gender stereotypes, starting with the fact that in 80s to 90s Japanese culture, Usagi Tsukino was not the most feminine lead, with interests that marked her as boyish (enjoying video games and comics, a boisterous love of eating and a large appetite, rather than having a dainty diet) that were embraced as part of the characteristics that make Usagi who she is, rather than being used to put her down. That's not to say Usagi's some huge tomboy - she's not! But she was not the ultimately girly girl protagonist either, and as far as the time period went, she was fairly evenly mixed on having "boyish" and "girlish" interests.
It's not the most obvious place to start with Sailor Moon's conversation about gender and girlhood, but it ''is'' part of the conversation, just like the decision to have Sailor V/Minako Aino and then Sailor Moon/Usagi Tsukino be ''warriors'' was a decision made with thoughts towards gender as well, because the Senshi are warriors who are girls, and they are celebrated for it. Made at a point when the majority of Mahou Shoujo series were still more comedic and based more in helping around the community rather than fighting evil, Sailor Moon is generally regarded as the series which that combined Magical Girls with the sentai-style formula that had already been popularized by series like Kamen Rider and Super Sentai - both series predominantly featuring ''men'' who save the world (though Super Sentai teams usually have at least one woman on the team).
The conversation extends further than just being girls who fight crime with magical transformations, though. Even the fact that in Sailor Moon, the Senshi's transformation phrases involve the words "Make Up" is about gender, and femininity, and expressions of womanhood as a form of strength. Because make up and the wearing of it for personal enjoyment and beauty was seen as either a frivolity or a silly girly thing, having it be a part of the Sailor Senshi's power was reclaiming that and centering the having of power as feminine. Everything about the Senshi's designs was both based in what Naoko personally thought of as cute and in conversation with Japanese views on gender and society.
So with all that said, to address the idea of Usagi having been disguised as a boy once only for the sake of a one-time gag:
Usagi uses the disguise pen to become a groom (a groom who is a man, specifically, rather than a woman who claims for herself the title of groom) in the Sailor Moon manga in chapter 5, when Makoto is introduced. It is not as a gag, because a gag by definition requires something to be comedic.
There is nothing comedic about Usagi's transformation into a groom - in fact, it is played in full seriousness and as a rescue of Makoto's heart as much as her physical self. In the context of the manga, a youma has been disguising itself as a bride to capture, control, and drain men, as well as using those men to lure in women for capture. Makoto and Motoki are the victims of the day, with Motoki being brainwashed by the bride youma and Makoto falling under his influence - Usagi becomes a groom, not as a gag, not as a trick, not as a trap, but to come to Makoto's rescue in the same form that she's been manipulated in, restoring the romantic fantasy while also rebuking the bride youma.
It's a very short appearance - two pages - which is how most of the manga's uses of the disguise pen function; they are short-lived disguises for a specific purpose. In Usagi's case, it is to specifically take on the male form to rebuke the bride youma for manipulating others with beauty (the beautiful bride monster vs the handsome groom that is Usagi) and the sweet murmurs of love. Motoki, under the influence of the youma, told Makoto that he loved her, that he was waiting for her, answering all her girlish dreams. Usagi, as the groom, is stepping up to counteract the destruction of those dreams. Again, it's a short-lived moment, but it's not a gag. There are very few gags in the manga over all, because it's not a comedic series, it's a dramatic one, an action focused one, a romance one, but not a comedy, and this isn't one of those few gags.
I mentioned Minako transforming as well and I assume the same view that saw Usagi's transformation as a gag would would interpret these moments as a gag as well, so let me be clear - neither of those moments are a gag either, and it's not treated as a funny haha thing that Minako has done. She does it twice, both times comfortable transforming her gender to complete missions - the first time is in Codename Sailor V Chapter 4, in which a different youma is attacking and kidnapping male idols. Minako uses her disguise compact to become a male idol and infiltrate the area the youma is expected to appear again, both to avoid detection from the police, and to lure the youma in to revealing her position so she can be defeated.
Minako's transformation into a boy is treated as a utilitarian disguise, yes, but it's also clearly shown that she is indeed a "pretty boy idol" who is also Minako Aino. As a pretty boy idol, Minako maintains all usual personality, and expression but is very distinctly and visibly a cis male, in the same way that she is usually a cis girl, exemplified by a flattened chest and pectoral muscles. Once the youma has been lured in, Minako transforms into Sailor V - just as Usagi transformed into Sailor Moon - and rebukes the youma for turning innocent men into her slaves and being a disgrace to women.
In her second transformation into a boy, in Sailor Moon chapter 29, Minako transforms into a male student of Mugen Academy so she can sneak into Mimete's concert. It's also not portrayed as a gag - Minako could transform into a female student if she wanted to, something we explicitly know because Usagi has transformed into a female Mugen Academy student.
She ''chooses'' to become a male student, by which I mean Naoko chooses to write her as becoming a male student, and Minako is treated the exact same way as a male student by the narrative as she's normally treated when she's female, hanging out with other students, enjoying the concert, acting utterly normally. It is clearly not a big deal for Minako to be a boy or a girl.
All three of these transformations are treated casually, which I suppose could come across as trivializing to some, rather than as some deep personal struggle, but this is something that people have related to for thirty years. Thirty years, of people recognizing themselves in Usagi and Minako's easy but brief and comfortable existences as boys, because that is how many people - including myself! - experience being genderqueer - an equal comfort in existing as a woman or a man or as both or as neither, and in all cases an equal recognition of the self. These are brief appearances; everything in Sailor Moon's manga is brief, strung together moments that come together for a whole.
But Usagi becomes a boy effortlessly to protect Makoto's heart and Minako becomes a boy effortlessly to defeat a youma, to infiltrate Mugen Academy, and they are both casual and honest reflections of them being another gender, while being themselves. In a time where gender transformation was often a joke,
Looking outside of our heroes, we'll see other times in Sailor Moon where characters are comfortably presented as engaging in transformative gender expression: in the Nephrite's Shadow is represented as a woman, with no apparently discomfort or comedy for him; there is again, no specific reason that Nephrite's own Shadow is a women, except for Noako's consistent genderplay and interest in exploring gender as something beyond a binary of those are men and those are women.
Likewise, Zoisite disguises himself as a woman in his primary appearance as well, again, not something he has to do. The persistent appearance of characters choosing to express themselves as another gender, in non-comedic fashion, shows that this isn't something that Naoko did as a one-off thought, but builds into her overall presentation of gender and sexuality as the series goes on.
Now, address your second point: Haruka is modeled after the takarazuka revue. I can't say that there's no influence there - Haruka was in fact originally envisioned as being part of Takarazuka theater, playing a male role - but that's not *all* Haruka is. The Sailor Moon anime made the decision to establish a sharp gender binary with Haruka and Michiru, with Haruka as the masculine butch and Michiru as the femme, but in the Sailor Moon manga Haruka is presented in both highly masculine attire and highly feminine attire, preferring to wear the male school uniform but wearing very feminine outfits, and Usagi outright asks her if she is a man or a woman, because she wears both roles extremely well.
The manga doesn't use the language of nonbinary because Japanese doesn't ''have'' that language - a lot of terms for beings transgender and having different gender roles are loanwords borrowed from English. But Naoko has stated that Haruka has the heart of a man, that she likes to wear mini skirts and daisy dukes. Usagi's narration regarding Haruka states in chapter 29, "this person looks like a man and a woman". This is in fact the same chapter where Minako again becomes a boy, and I don't think its unintentional that in the same chapter that Usagi is questioning and understanding that a person can be both a man and a woman, Minako is choosing to again present herself as a boy while on a mission.
In chapter 30, Usagi asks Haruka outright, "Haruka, are you a man? Or are you a woman?" To which Haruka responds with "Man, woman. Why would something like that matter?" And then pulls her in as if to kiss her - this was the 90s, almost a decade before Tokyo Godfathers, another critical piece of Japanese media that talks explicitly about trans people by having one of the main characters be a trans woman - would come out. Neptune, speaking of Uranus, says in Chapter 32: "Uranus is like a man and a woman in one. She has the strengths of both genders, it is her special advantage as a soldier.
Sailor Moon was not the only series to explore gender and sexuality but it was one of the pioneering series' to explore it in teen/young adult media in Japan. Haruka is not someone who can be minimized as a tarazuka reference, she is as explicitly nonbinary as it was possible to be, with the language and information available at the time. The manga is in conversation with gender and stereotyping and societal pressures the entire time.
It's also not a coincidence that this is in the part of the manga that Usagi and Mamoru are having relationship troubles, struggling with the thought of attraction to other people, attraction to each other. This is the portion of the manga where they mature as a couple and have sexual activity for the first time, though of course its not specific and vague about the actual physical intimacies. Naoko was very intentionally having a conversation with the manga, one which explored what it means to be a woman, to grow up, to be in a relationship and mature and grow and ''be'' in the world.
Now, we get to the last part of the initial question, "As for the starlights, apparently Naoko hated the idea of boys being senshi, so instead she walked it back to standard gender bending of the time."
I've kept this assertion from the original conversation intact because this idea is one that exists outside of this conversation I had, and it's completely factually incorrect.
Naoko *created* the Starlights. She *created* their characters, and did not walk anything back.
In fact, the original anime is the one who made the Starlights into the example standard gender bending of the time - the classic 90s anime is what created the idea of the Starlights transforming from men as civilians and women as Soldiers. This was a choice they made that did not match Naoko's vision of the characters. When she spoke about the Starlights in interviews, it was to say that Senshi are always girls - which was a statement made in 1998, at a time when women's rights were still being fought for in both Japan and the United States (where she made the comment! She was in California at the time). Having the heroes of her story, the soldiers, the fighters, be ''women'' was a statement about protecting her brand and series as primarily for girls, about girls, with girls.
And in her series, girls can become boys. Girls can have the heart of a man. Girls can be both men and women. It's a limitation of language and the era that we have to remember, looking from 2024, at a manga started in the early 90s and finishing its run in the late 90s.
In the manga, the Starlights are always women, but they wear masculine attire as civilians, while their senshi forms are not especially feminine, but rather make it clear that they have the physical traits associated with women, are fairly femme as soldiers. In other words, they're butch in their civilian lives, but they aren't men. They are girls who can be masculine. They are women who can present as men. They are a continued exploration of Sailor Moon's on-going discussion of gender. It was about girls getting to be the warriors who save the world, women getting to be the centerpoint on which the universe turns.
It was the original anime that would rather portray Seiya as a man when he's trying to flirt with and woo Usagi, rather than keep Seiya's original presentation as a woman who presents masculine at times.
There are so many more points or characters I could have talked about, but in general, the entire manga factors into the question of gender exploration, particular in regards to what it means to be a girl, what it means to express gender, what it means for Sailor Senshi to be girls, and what being a girl means.
Sailor Moon's manga has many themes but one that consistently comes back is the gender play, and the way that Naoko expresses gender in characters.
