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:

mild dysphoria

Having smile lines, growing unwanted facial hair, trying to manage your aging so people don’t just identify you as male, wishing you had transitioned sooner so you would’ve had better skincare, being jealous of people who started hormones early, having no memories of being young in the gender you want, being easier to present masculine when you’re older, having a weird mismatched body, using clothing to present femme but feeling dysphoria when you take them off and see your masculine body, changing your clothing style just so people identify you correctly, having a non-binary heart while still presenting in a binary manner, confusing looking femme with looking young, getting too old for sex, and many, many more!

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.

personal dysphoria

To be honest, despite the fact that it’s really light, I found myself quite bothered by a lot of it. For me, a lot of my dysphoria comes more from my age than my gender. I’m closer to 40 than 30 these days (much older than Arai when he transitioned), and sometimes I can’t help but think I’m a man playing dress up or that I missed my window to transition or that I’m going through some midlife crisis to make me look younger. I also acknowledge that there’s more to being trans and queer than being pretty, and a lot of transfemmes are really obsessed with youth and beauty, and then I just feel guilty for boiling down gender to being pretty. Anyway, I know all of these things aren’t true, and it’s just societal ideas that I’ve internalized that are causing me dysphoria. I can’t help thinking it would be easier to just age male, though. I wish I had the awareness that kids nowadays get, but back in my day (at least where I lived), trans literally wasn’t a thing. We had no language or conception of it. In fact, I’m remembering now that when I came out to my wife while bawling, I kept repeating, “I just didn’t know we could do this [transition]” >.>

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