Apr 6, 2017
It's hard to rate/critique someone's personal story, but here goes.「Boku ga Watashi ni」details part of mangaka Hirasawa Yuuna's male-to-female (MtF) transition process. It's a highly educational read - about three-quarters of the manga is devoted to her sex reassignment surgery (SRS) in Thailand, and there's a lot of in-depth information on the medical and legal procedures involved, including corresponding terminology, the whole nine yards.
Occasional comic relief comes from her tongue-in-cheek explanations using food ingredients as substitutes for anatomical parts (sausage for chinpo, etc) and interactions with quirky Thai staff. Parts of the narrative made me wince in vicarious pain (phantom limb...er...appendage + dilation, anyone???). And
...
while she reveals some level of anxiety and unease as expected, being a stranger in a strange land undergoing a life-changing operation, I get the sense that on the whole Hirasawa is deliberately downplaying the emotional/psychological aspects of her journey. And as a cis-gendered reader, that is perhaps what interests me most in trans-gender stories - the stuff that you don't find in pamphlets and medical literature - the heart and soul of the storyteller.
Then again, it's easy to be an armchair critic and say: "I wish the story had more this and that," without giving thought to the broader implications of what that might entail. Hirasawa states in her epilogue that her intent is first and foremost to educate - not to enforce equality or demand societal acceptance, but to simply share her experiences and let the reader draw their own conclusions. And with a sensitive topic as such, I can see some necessity in her taking this approach, and I applaud her ability to take a step back and keep a buffer distance from certain expectations and/or biases.
Towards the end Hirasawa raises some important questions which she invites the reader to reflect upon: What is gender? What is "normal"? What constitutes "normality" or "otherness" in our world today? While the story may not have directly addressed these topics, its overarching theme presents much food for thought in this regard: one individual's struggles, both physical and psychological, in order to achieve a state of "normality" that most of us take for granted.
And, for what it's worth, I will never look at a sausage the same way again.
Reviewer’s Rating: 8
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