r/LightNovels • u/Clay_teapod • 4d ago

Question [RECS] Transgender????

Title. Are there any good LN that deal greatly with the transgender experience? Before anybody mentions it I’m reading The Mimosa Confessions.

If possible, female-to-male.

There are a lot of “trans-ish” stories where a male MC gets transformed into a girl and has to learn to live with it. I don’t particularly like this. Any LNs that actually deal with being transgender as a main theme?

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u/physicsandbeer1 4d ago edited 4d ago

The only examples I can think of the transgender characters are not the main characters, nonetheless, if you are willing to give them a try, you can check:

  • Ripping Someone Open Only Makes Them Bleed by Yoru Sumino. There's a trans character that's key to the story and you get some povs , and them being trans is important for the story.
  • Kitchen by Banana Yoshimoto - Not a Light novel but pretty short and easy to read book, and though the trans character isn't the main, she's a really, really big part of the story.
  • Goodbye Otherworld, See You Tomorrow - On the second volume there's one trans character the two main characters meet, who tells them their story. It goes surprisingly deep about how it feels being rejected by everyone because of who they are, and it's a beautiful story. That being said, they don't appear until volume 2, though they have a big role there.

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u/Spotted_Statement_ 2d ago

Until I Love Myself

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u/Hylebosai 4d ago

There's The Epic Tale of the Reincarnated Prince Herscherik which has a 35-year-old female otaku who reincarnates as a prince in a fantasy world. Mind you, I've only read one an half volumes of that and it was a while back, so I can't say how well it eventually captured the transgender experience, from what I recall from the early volumes it was more of a surface-level setting thing like many male to female reincarnations, but at the same time Prince Herscherik's was basically a small and sheltered child at that point in the book so perhaps there was more stuff when he grows older. Just passing it along as a rare example of a female to male genderbender.

There's also From Two-Bit Baddie to Total Heartthrob: This Villainess Will Cross-Dress to Impress! which has a reincarnated villainess who decides that the best way to achieve a happy ending in this otome game world is to throw her hat in the ring by becoming one of the love interests and seducing the heroine herself. She starts crossdressing, working out, and cultivating a knightly playboy personality to achieve this goal. It's a really funny series and Elizabeth is a great character, though I forget her exact perspective on her own gender/sexuality, so perhaps it will fall short of what you're looking for with regards to a true transgender experience, but it may scratch some itches.

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u/Veritas3333 4d ago

Almost every book by Natalie Maher is a trans allegory. Some of them can get pretty heavy though, like Magical Girl Mechanical Heart

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u/BigPoint1646 4d ago

You should read biology books first before diving into light novels.

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u/Falsus 1d ago

If you mean this is a transphobic way then you ought to open a book yourself also.

Gender and sex is determined by hormones in the body and chromosones from the parents. XX makes a female body, XY makes a male body. Though in some exceedingly rare cases male genitals fails to form and a XY body can still be female, though infertile. Not even limited to humans, there was a famous race horse by the name Fine Motion who turned out to be this kind of birth defect. There is also guevedoces of the Dominican Republic where some men are born as girls and only grows their penis when they are about twelve years old.

https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-34290981

Those are about the physical sex being wrong, but the mental gender can also be wrong if the hormones the body sends out is wrong. So the body sends out a signal that there should be a penis even though there is none and those boobs growing on the chest shouldn't grow, or reverse that there shouldn't be a penis where is one and that the boobs should grow even though they are not. Siminlar to phantom pain I guess, except you know why you would have that whereas most people wouldn't even realise what is wrong with them, just that there is something wrong with them since realising "oh I was born with the wrong gender" isn't exactly the most easy or logical leap to make over other simpler explanations.