The happy, lovey dovey autobiographic story of how Chii, the mangaka, found out she was trans, transitioned and got married.
This started as a series of blog posts, short four panel comics in which Chii talked about her life as an “ex-boy” and how she got married. With the encouragement of her husband, she then turned it into a book that was published in 2016 in Japan, then translated and published by Seven Seas two years later. I first read it in scanlation some time before its official translation. The scanlation group had thoughtfully included a link to the book’s Amazon.jp page so I bought it there, then bought the English ebook version when it came out.
Chii’s story, as she presents it here, is probably about as straight forward as a transition story could possibly get. She never quite felt comfortable as a boy growing up, but it took some time before she learned about trans people and that she might be one. Even afterwards, she was still resistant to the possibility of transitioning because of the stereotypes about trans women Japan has. It was only after she became a working adult, having finished college that she took the step to start transition. Which at first did not include medical or legal transition as she didn’t think it necessary, but as she got more uncomfortable with her body and partially because she needed to be legally transitioned to be married in the first place, she pursued both.
Intertwined with that transition story and as important, is the story of her love life and how she met and became the girlfriend of her husband to be. In high school and college she passed as (mostly closeted) gay man and had had several boyfriends. This of course brought its own challenges as people of course expected her to have a girlfriend rather than a boyfriend, while she could never be quite honest with her boyfriends either. Once she transitioned, she met her husband at friends and he immediately fell in love with her, while she took some time to do the same. Once they got in a relationship, she came out as trans to her, which he was completely unfased by.
One of the sweeter parts of The Bride Was a Boy is how accepting her family, husband and friends are. When she came out to her mother the first thing she did was arranged the traditional girls’ coming of age photo shoot, something usually done at twenty. Her father and siblings too were accepting and if anything, a bit too muted in the responses. Chii mentions that her relationship with her father actually improved after her transition and that he even forgot she had been a boy…
Each of the nine chapters in the story also includes more general information on trans and queer issues, some of which is more particular to Japan, explaining the challenges faced by people wanting to transition. The biggest hurdle is that you have to legally transition to get married, which in part requires a medical testimony that you are trans. Because Japan still does not have marriage equality, you need that legal gender change to be able to marry as a trans woman if you want to marry a man and worse, if you’re already married to a woman, you need to divorce to get that legal gender change. Even the laws allowing that gender change are quite new, only dating back to 2007. Even if in Chii’s case all this went relatively smoothly, it still shows how many obstacles there still are for trans people to easily transition.
The Bride Was a Boy is a book you can give to your parents or friends if they’re mostly ignorant about trans people and want to know what being a trans woman is “really” like. Of course it’s not the end and be all of trans experiences, not even of Japanese trans experiences, but it’s a good introduction.
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