Is Chihiro trans or cross dressing?

[PanKo]

I got banned from a Discord server for saying that I had originally thought Chihiro was crossdressing, not trans, as in the game it is explicitly said that they dressed as a girl to hide from bullies and they went to Mondo asking him to start training to become stronger so they wouldn't have to hide as a girl anymore. The owner didn't actually correct me, just banned me almost immediately after I said that after calling me a transphobe. I've found arguments online, but I actually do just want to know if Chihiro was actually trans? edit: please let this thread die im begging

[Rain]

Maybe cis people should just avoid telling us how being trans work. Wouldn't that be nice.

[emi ★]

Originally posted by あきこちゃん:

I got banned from a Discord server for saying that I had originally thought Chihiro was crossdressing, not trans, as in the game it is explicitly said that they dressed as a girl to hide from bullies and they went to Mondo asking him to start training to become stronger so they wouldn't have to hide as a girl anymore. The owner didn't actually correct me, just banned me almost immediately after I said that. I've found arguments online, but I actually do just want to know if Chihiro was actually trans? Please don't call me a transphobe or anything, I genuinely did not know and may have been completely wrong, I had just originally thought Chihiro was a crossdresser.

he isn't trans, he only did it so for they not call him weak, he always identified himself or was more comfortable with the male sex

[joy mousie]

he experiences gender dysphoria as a result of not lining up with traditional masculine gender roles. through being gender nonconforming and being read as a girl, he's able to escape the societal pressure, but when monokuma brings up the Secret Shenanigans, he realizes that he won't be able to keep the facade up much longer. he confides this information to two people that he trusts a lot, mondo and makoto.

it might be helpful to think of him as a detransitioner more than anything. while he was read as a woman for quite some time, it's not what he envisioned himself as. at the end of the day, he wanted to be a boy.

[joy mousie]

Originally posted by Rain:

Maybe cis people should just avoid telling us how being trans work. Wouldn't that be nice.

i'm curious to hear your thoughts on this

[gooooood mewing vietnam!]

the kind of people that jump straight to full on trannyism because a petite boy has body image problems are truly sickening

[joy mousie]

Originally posted by Rawhide:

the kind of people that jump straight to full on [PLEASE DON'T SAY THIS] because a petite boy has body image problems are truly sickening

i know this is a board for a preteens anime visual novel game but please don't use slurs.
this is a question worth debating in the community and is one especially worth asking because queer characters in video games are few and far between.

[gooooood mewing vietnam!]

Originally posted by sham:

Originally posted by Rawhide:

the kind of people that jump straight to full on [PLEASE DON'T SAY THIS] because a petite boy has body image problems are truly sickening

this is a question worth debating

no, it's not, the answer is very clearly given in the game.

[joy mousie]

Originally posted by Rawhide:

Originally posted by sham:

this is a question worth debating

no, it's not, the answer is very clearly given in the game.

it's not always that obvious. while i agree with you that chihiro is not trans, the argument is not as clear cut as you think to others looking at it from other perspectives.

it's important to discuss why we think what we think rather than to just tell others to shut up. otherwise, nobody will want to talk to you, because its not worth their time to do so.

[Hurkyl]

A discussion of how a variety of people can relate to Chihiro's experiences can be worthwhile. You have a very hard case to make if you want to claim there's much value in debating Chihiro's gender, however.

Is this a symptom of the trend to divide people into identity groups? That people find it so difficult to conceive that different "types" of people can have similar experiences that they can't even conceive of the idea that a trans person can relate to a non-trans person's experiences? And so they have to insist that Chihiro is trans in order to talk about such things?

[Hurkyl]

To clarify, I'm not saying that provoking a debate over a character's canon gender can't be worthwhile; my point is that Chihiro's case seems clear enough that one needs a strong case to warrant doing so.

And I want to emphasize "debate" and "provoke" in that description: I'm not criticizing people interested in debate for for the sake of debate, nor people who are ignorant about something and seeking explanation.

(this thread seemingly started with someone bewildered at being the victim of bigotry seeking reassurance and had a contemporaneous intolerant troll, so my mindset is still sort of stuck in that framing of this discussion and I probably haven't acclimated to how the thread ahs evolved)

[The_hand_of_fate]

If you were talking about Naoto from P4, I could see the case (pre shadow)

[Mysti_Fogg]

Originally posted by sham:

Originally posted by Rawhide:

no, it's not, the answer is very clearly given in the game.

it's not always that obvious. while i agree with you that chihiro is not trans, the argument is not as clear cut as you think to others looking at it from other perspectives.

it's important to discuss why we think what we think rather than to just tell others to shut up. otherwise, nobody will want to talk to you, because its not worth their time to do so.

I can understand mistaking Chihiro's situation due to lack of information. At the point his sex is discovered, I understand it tends to shock trans people particularly, as does the pronoun issue at that point. You have to go through the whole case to find out Chihiro's motivations, and you might decide that his killer/Monokuma is an unreliable narrator, since the attack seems very like the kind of thing that can happen to trans people where they're killed by people when it's discovered they are trans. Hyper masculine men in a rage over being deceived seem to be a particular problem. During my first time seeing the case, I did wonder if the cross dressing was the motive. I just accepted the true account of the case when it was explained.

Also, this being the game rather than the anime, which is more limited, free time events make Chihiro's true desires and gender clear. And I would think if you were that invested in the character, you would go back and play through all of them. They support the killer's account.

I wonder if some of the people who get so upset about Chihiro's gender watched the anime first?

[Kug]

Hello, actually trans person here. Chihiro doesn't show any signs he wants to be a girl, he just presented himself as such to avoid getting bullied for being small and weak. Considering nothing in his story suggests he's attached to a feminine identity beyond presenting himself as such as a survival mechanism, yes, canonically I would say he's just a crossdresser.

...Though the existence of Alter Ego makes it harder to say for sure, since AE looks exactly the same as Chihiro presenting as a girl, but would likely only have been discovered by everyone else if Chihiro had died, at which point he'd be dead and it wouldn't matter as much how anyone saw him. Either his insecurity towards being bullied extended to the AI recreation of him or he had a greater disregard for which gender he presented as than anyone in this rather tiring debate might have considered, in which case some other gender non-conforming identity like genderqueer, nonbinary, agender, etc. might be a possibility. I don't know much about how Japan views crossdressing or trans stuff so it's possible a guy in that society would handwring a lot less about all the implications of presenting as feminine than we evidently do in the west.

Either way, there's no evidence I've found to suggest Chihiro crossdressed to feel better about himself or his gender identity. It was to avoid getting bullied, so suggesting he's trans is a stretch.

[joy mousie]

Originally posted by Kani:

Hello, actually trans person here. Chihiro doesn't show any signs he wants to be a girl, he just presented himself as such to avoid getting bullied for being small and weak. Considering nothing in his story suggests he's attached to a feminine identity beyond presenting himself as such as a survival mechanism, yes, canonically I would say he's just a crossdresser.

...Though the existence of Alter Ego makes it harder to say for sure, since AE looks exactly the same as Chihiro presenting as a girl, but would likely only have been discovered by everyone else if Chihiro had died, at which point he'd be dead and it wouldn't matter as much how anyone saw him. Either his insecurity towards being bullied extended to the AI recreation of him or he had a greater disregard for which gender he presented as than anyone in this rather tiring debate might have considered, in which case some other gender non-conforming identity like genderqueer, nonbinary, agender, etc. might be a possibility. I don't know much about how Japan views crossdressing or trans stuff so it's possible a guy in that society would handwring a lot less about all the implications of presenting as feminine than we evidently do in the west.

Either way, there's no evidence I've found to suggest Chihiro crossdressed to feel better about himself or his gender identity. It was to avoid getting bullied, so suggesting he's trans is a stretch.

i'd agree with what you say, with one minor nitpick - you don't have to adopt any gender identity to be gender nonconforming. that's the whole point of being gnc, innit?

[The_hand_of_fate]

Originally posted by Kani:

Hello, actually trans person here. Chihiro doesn't show any signs he wants to be a girl, he just presented himself as such to avoid getting bullied for being small and weak. Considering nothing in his story suggests he's attached to a feminine identity beyond presenting himself as such as a survival mechanism, yes, canonically I would say he's just a crossdresser.

...Though the existence of Alter Ego makes it harder to say for sure, since AE looks exactly the same as Chihiro presenting as a girl, but would likely only have been discovered by everyone else if Chihiro had died, at which point he'd be dead and it wouldn't matter as much how anyone saw him. Either his insecurity towards being bullied extended to the AI recreation of him or he had a greater disregard for which gender he presented as than anyone in this rather tiring debate might have considered, in which case some other gender non-conforming identity like genderqueer, nonbinary, agender, etc. might be a possibility. I don't know much about how Japan views crossdressing or trans stuff so it's possible a guy in that society would handwring a lot less about all the implications of presenting as feminine than we evidently do in the west.

Either way, there's no evidence I've found to suggest Chihiro crossdressed to feel better about himself or his gender identity. It was to avoid getting bullied, so suggesting he's trans is a stretch.

Like they said, "Some programmers create virtual avatars that look like themselves." Which, because everyone knew him to look like that, it's probably closer to, "I want you to look like how they know me" when designing Alter Ego