Japanese 'anime': Innocent cartoon fun or a gateway to 'transition'?
In the first part of this article, The Gold Report highlighted a type of "educational material" being served up to young children by the millions, with AI cartoons costing virtually nothing to produce while producers generate massive advertising revenue. In this second part of the article, we will highlight another danger of cartoons for developing minds: anime, and its links with the transgender movement.
Condemn, censor, confirm
Dr. Ray Blanchard PhD is a prominent psychologist who has focused on transgender issues for the past few decades. He served on the American Psychiatric Association’s DSM-IV subcommittee on Gender Identity Disorders and was also appointed to serve on the DSM-5 committee. (The DSM is the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the main reference book for psychiatry defining mental illness.)
Blanchard was also once a member of WPATH (or, as it was known back then, HBIGDA), the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, which recently gained notoriety for its extreme and non-scientific positions on transgender issues. He left the organization in 2003 following internal disputes, and has since become an object of hatred and derision by many in the trans camp due to several of his publicly stated beliefs.
One of those beliefs is that anime, animated cartoons originating in Japan, can contribute to persuading people that they are in fact “transgender.” A few years ago, Blanchard tweeted a link to an article published on Medium (since removed), commenting that it was an “essay on the possible relations among anime, gender dysphoria, and autogynephilia [a male's propensity to be sexually aroused by the thought of himself as a female],” and the backlash was not long in coming.
The essay survives in brief quotations in articles condemning its author (SocialJusticeWizard) along with Blanchard. Allegedly, the author believes that “transwomen” are really just “lonely” and “repressed” men who watch anime and reimagine themselves as “soft and gentle like [an anime girl], carefree and cheerful like her, enjoying life in the fullest without the heavy chains of masculinity.”
Naturally, such ideas do not find favor with trans warriors who prefer to see confused young (and older) people as “forced to live in a world that assumes sex assigned at birth and gender are one and the same.” The responses on X are full of scorn and derision that anyone could possibly see a link between anime and trans:
“Anime turned my kid trans!” This is real. This isn’t a parody, it’s freaking Whispers blaming anime for making people trans. I can’t even, he’s beyond parody."
"If you’re a PhD then I’m a Royal Shakespearean actor."
In fact, Crowd seems to have hit on a key aspect of what makes anime attractive to people “questioning” their identity — playacting. Anime has long been something of an interactive experience, with viewers identifying as characters and “cosplaying” or “crossplaying” them (pretending to be them as the actual sex/gender they are, or as the opposite sex/gender), sometimes at huge anime festivals where mostly young people experiment with living as the opposite sex/gender.
Setting aside the articles and tweets blasting Blanchard, one can find many references among those who identify as trans to anime being a useful tool for “gender exploration” and the like. Parents of confused teens have also frequently noted the oversized influence anime played in their children’s lives.
Entering an imaginary world
In part five of a series of articles titled, “When Sons Become Daughters,” Quillette author Angus Fox documented his interviews with several parents of confused teenage sons and examined how anime, which “offers vividly colored worlds, in which giant-eyed kids and anthropomorphized animals conduct heroic journeys,” influences young people to make sometimes drastic life changes.
Fox described how,
Parents of trans-identified boys mention anime repeatedly. The animation style seems to loom large in the lives of many — at least half — of the young men whose stories I’m telling.
This is certainly true of Charlie, 17 years old and identifying as a girl. His parents described how anime, as well as a digital card game known as "Magic: The Gathering" (or MTG) were a huge influence on him. MTG is similar to anime in several key aspects, most particularly in the way its fans often dress up as their favorite opposite-sex characters and how this attracts positive attention within fan groups.
Animal characters in MTG can also turn into humans, and this blurring of boundaries is also seen in anime, with characters such as “catgirls,” which are girls with feline ears and tails. This all comes together to strengthen participants’ belief that they can “be whoever they want” regardless of physical reality.
This phenomenon is also described by Gloria Pritchard in his (yes, Gloria is male) BA thesis, titled, “Anime made me gay and trans.” Pritchard interviewed a number of people for his thesis and concluded that anime was a significant influence in their “transitions.” Of himself, he writes:
When I was in middle and high school, I lacked the support from friends and family that I needed to explore my sexuality and gender comfortably. Much like a few of the interviewees, I was forced to look for other ways to explore my identity. And that’s when I found anime.
I must confess that at first, I watched it for the crossdressing boys, because it showed me that it is okay for boys to wear dresses. After that, though, I fell in love with the emotion of it. In anime, emotions are exaggerated, to a comical degree sometimes. That’s what kept me watching.
Unconsciously confirming Blanchard’s theories, Pritchard stresses that,
I know that my story is not unique. I’ve heard versions of it from so many different anime fans over the years. These kinds of stories are so prevalent that it’s a common joke for people to say, “anime made me gay!”
Pritchard denies that anime can “make” anyone gay or trans, but does not define what “make” actually means — whether it translates as “first putting the idea into a person’s head,” or “persuading a person to put thoughts into action.” From his words, it appears that anime does play a very significant role in pushing a confused person toward taking the first steps of many into a new “identity”:
Anime did not make me or anyone else gay or trans, despite what some transphobes will argue, but my point stands that based on my experience, I hypothesized that the anime community is helping queer adolescents and young adults in the U.S. figure out and become comfortable with their sexuality and gender. And for the most part, my findings support that hypothesis.
Safe playspaces and dangerous playmates
Pritchard describes how the initial anonymity of online spaces allows people “who are in the process of forming their gender or sexual identity to explore their identities in online and fictional spaces where there is little consequence for that exploration in their everyday lives.” This could apply to any online space, but particularly applies to anime fan groups because of their focus on cosplay. At first, the confused person merely toys with the idea of “being someone else,” as Pritchard writes:
It is through these safe spaces, with online cosplay, that a GSM [Gender and Sexual Minorities] fan would have enough layers of removal from their own identity to explore themselves in depths that are otherwise much harder and have potentially much more drastic consequences...
GSM [anime] fans who are exploring their gender identity might write queer fan fiction, or draw queer fanart, about a character that they relate to as a form of exploration of their own identity. They might confide in older GSM anime fans, or they might come out as queer to their anime fan friends online.
Many of the youth attracted to this subculture actually adopt the name of an anime character as their trans alter-ego. Things move a step further when online coming-out transforms into “real-life” coming-out at anime conventions, described as a “major aspect of fandom culture” by Pritchard.
Fandom conventions ... typically are three to four-day long events ... They take place at a convention center or hotel, and their main goal is to bring fans of a certain genre or medium together to share and bond with each other under the common ground of a shared fandom.
Some of these conventions draw tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of people.
According to Pritchard, what conventions offer the confused is mainly “support” for their new identities:
Conventions are an important aspect of anime fandom culture because they are a physical space where fans can meet up and discuss their favorite anime face to face in contrast to the non-physical internet space ... These physical spaces have the capacity to function as a form of organizational and interpersonal community support to GSMs. Conventions could afford GSM anime fans the opportunity to spend time with supportive friends and other GSM anime fans in a positive and supportive context, thus receiving both interpersonal support from friends and organizational support from the convention.
Attendees of anime conventions will often cosplay, or costume play, a character from an anime or manga [anime comic] that they like. This involves constructing a costume that resembles the character, often including prop creation and effect makeup. Sometimes, the cosplayer will practice acting as the character they are cosplaying, including altering their mannerisms and voice.
Pritchard himself used the occasion of a convention to first try out his new female persona:
[W]hen I went to my first anime convention I saw crossdressers. I saw that at conventions, gender didn’t apply to how people chose to dress, or who they chose to cosplay. A convention was the first place that I wore a dress in public. It’s the place where I had my first lesbian kiss. It’s the place where I first felt comfortable enough to be myself.
Darknet comes to life
For his Quillette article, Fox interviewed Leigh, a woman who has detransitioned (i.e., she once identified as a man but no longer does). Leigh mentions men like Gloria Pritchard, “guys who call themselves lesbians. It’s actually fascinating,” she adds, “but kinda heart-breaking. A lot of these guys are just lonely.”
Anime gives them encouragement to experiment with “being” female, while the conventions offer them a “safe” environment to put on a dress and “live as women.” But anime also encourages the sexualization of the entire experience because anime’s culture is intrinsically sexual, according to Leigh. Even if a person starts off in a seemingly innocent online anime game, they could end up viewing pornographic anime content “in just two clicks,” she confirms.
Ida, who was interviewed by Pritchard, describes herself as a lesbian (although it is impossible to determine from the thesis whether or not she is actually a male). Pritchard relates that “animated media played a major role in her realizing that she was a lesbian and becoming comfortable with being a lesbian. Her first exposure to the possibility of lesbian love was in Adventure Time, with Princess Bubblegum and Marceline.”
But anime has an even darker side that Pritchard does not attempt to hide — pedophilia and incest. According to Star, another interviewee,
There’s a lot of weird incest stuff, there’s gross pedophilia and things like that, and it kind of — just on like ani-memes and stuff like that it’s just point and laugh, but continue to engage with it even though we’re saying it’s gross. And at a certain point saying you’re doing it ironically isn’t a very good shield.
It is unclear from the text of the thesis exactly what she means but whatever it is, it is clearly unhealthy and dangerous. Pritchard comments that, “Star is referring to how pedophilia and incest are two relatively common tropes in anime,” and that,
... typically girl characters in anime are often sexualized by being animated in suggestive poses, or being pursued by older, often male, characters. Additionally, sibling characters often engage in romantic, and sometimes sexual dynamics with each other.
Pritchard adds that such features are not the exception, but the rule:
Nearly every participant [in his survey] mentioned that anime, and the anime community is problematic in some way. This indicates how pervasive these issues are within anime as an industry, and within the anime community in the U.S.
“Anime is part of me”
It can be difficult to conceive of how anime plays such an oversized role in a person’s life — to the extent that people literally rename themselves after characters. But the questions in Pritchard’s survey illustrate just how pervasive the influence of these animated characters can become. In order to gauge respondents’ “devotion to anime on a variety of levels such as time, money, and energy commitments,” people were asked to define their attachment to anime by choosing a response such as “I spend a considerable amount of money on anime,” or “I would devote all my time to anime if I could.” Other questions could be answered with, “I strongly identify with anime,” or “Anime is part of me.”
Once inside an anime world, it can replace real life and make reality recede into the background. The “insider” language and expressions can be unintelligible to outsiders, making it hard for parents to appreciate just how deeply embedded in virtual reality their children are, as Fox notes:
Even for parents who make a point of monitoring their children’s online activity, sites such as egg_irl present a challenge, because the discussions often are embedded within complex, cascading threads that are suffused with obscure and self-referential memes.
To an outsider, a lot of it will seem like gibberish. But for a child who spends much of his life internalizing the ideas and idioms contained in these fora, the worldview that emerges can seem coherent and persuasive. Teenagers are encouraged to view transition as the central focus of their lives — and to regard anyone who stands in the way of it as an enemy.
The tragedy of transformation
Is anime a solution to confusion and distress, as Pritchard seems to be claiming, or does it merely enmesh young, vulnerable people in a virtual reality that promises them a new life and provides nothing more than glitter covering up a dark interior? Fox points out that many of those who fall victim to anime’s lure are kids who already “spend a lot of time inside their own minds [and] may already be aware that they don’t quite fit in.”
Such kids (and adults) are more likely to,
[play] the abstract mental game of “What if?” As puberty takes hold, their social deficit transforms into a romantic and then sexual deficit, and the hypothetical trans version of themselves becomes worthy of examination. “Maybe I would be happier as a woman. Maybe I’d be more at ease with myself. Maybe I’m one of those special people I’ve been told so much about…”
But these vulnerable youth aren’t seeking to feel "special," for the most part. Rather, they are attempting to be “ideal” versions of normal and thus feel comfortable in their own skin, as Star tells Pritchard:
Star relates to the housewife instinct of Tohru from Kobayashi’s Dragon Maid, who is a lesbian dragon girl. “Plus, she has like this whole ability to change herself into whatever her ideal body image is, and like if that’s not what every trans person wants to do then I don’t know what is.”
Responding to Star’s comment, Pritchard adds, “We laugh.” But if anime is teaching confused and distressed young people that "perfect" is the ideal and an ideal that "should" be attained through transformation of one kind or another, it’s really not funny at all.
