There are so many lies out there about what it means to be trans, and so many scare tactics used against people who are transphobic, that it’s important to highlight any authentic self-voice narrative that is published. my journey with her go through Hirasawa Yuna This is such a book. Hirasawa’s one-volume autobiographical comic discusses her decision to undergo gender-affirming butt surgery in Thailand, candidly discussing the steps she went through, the surgery itself, and the hurdles she had to jump to gain legal recognition of her gender upon returning home. Japan.
If that sounds like a lot, it is. There’s no getting away from the fact that Hirasawa has been through some traumatic experiences, but one of the book’s major strengths is that it’s not about addiction. Hirasawa acknowledges that things haven’t always been easy, but ultimately her story is one that reaffirms who she is. Unlike many similar narratives, this is not about pain, coming out, or transphobia. That’s not to say these things don’t exist, but they’re not point of view.
That said, this book will definitely make you squirm. One of my favorite things is how open Hirasawa is about her surgery. For her, when the book was published in 2016, buttock surgery was necessary to legally transition in Japan. Things may start to change on that front as of July 2024, with a Hiroshima court ruling that requiring hip surgery may be unconstitutional. But in 2016, she needed to at least have the aesthetic appearance of a vagina, although Hirasawa opted for vaginoplasty to create a functional vaginal canal.
As you might have guessed, the process of turning a penis into a vagina is quite intense. Hirasawa elaborates using sausage, tofu, and a tofu bag filled with quail eggs for illustration (and possibly ratings relevance). It’s fascinating, and definitely a sign of the advancement of modern medicine, that Hirasawa was able to decide which form of vaginoplasty she wanted and how long she wanted her vagina to be. (As a reminder, the vagina is the inside; the outside is the labia, and the entire area is the vulva.) Hirasawa chose the procedure that uses a section of the intestine to create a self-lubricating vagina, and was honest about why that was important to her , which is part of what makes this book such a good one. Hirasawa doesn’t shy away from using real words to describe body parts rather than euphemisms to express things, and if she uses food to illustrate, it’s only the thinnest veil of censorship blocking so she can fully explain things to the reader.
While it’s not the point, Hirasawa’s discussion of her first few weeks as a vagina owner may resonate with cisgender women. Postoperative care includes dilation and insertion of a rod to keep the neovagina, which the body considers a wound, intact. The pain Hirasawa describes sounds eerily familiar, like the dreaded Pap smear or any gynecological surgery if you have a tight hymen or other hymenal disorders, some of which require treatment through dilation. Hirasawa also described some urinary issues she experienced, which may be at least somewhat familiar to cisgender women with postpartum urinary retention. Although the causes are different, the discomfort is the same, and whether you’re cis or trans, talking about these issues is important, not only medically, but because it helps realize that we’re all just human and our bodies can be weird And it’s painful.
For some readers, the sheer intrusion Hirasawa needed to go through to gain legal recognition as a woman will be disturbing. She was required to undergo multiple genital exams, not as part of the actual surgery but to confirm that she indeed had female genitals. She required two separate diagnoses of gender dysphoria, which in Japan is (as of this writing) commonly known as gender identity disorder, which pathologizes gender identity. While everyone she met in Thailand was supportive, she briefly noted that the Japanese were not, even though her siblings and sister-in-law went out of their way to let her know they loved her and supported her decision. Although Hirasawa glosses over these issues, choosing to focus on clinical details and her satisfaction with her choices, they are still present in the text. This leads her to ask, at the end of the book, what gender actually is, and to wonder why society places so much emphasis on gender, especially in a binary sense.
I think this is what Hirasawa wants us to learn from the book. While she could afford the trip to Thailand and the expensive surgery, not everyone can. She’s happy with her decisions, but she can make them. A nurse in Thailand once learned Japanese by watching videos one piece and seven deadly sinsappalled by the bias against trans people in this land shonen jumpShe sees their story as one of love and friendship above all else. Hirasawa didn’t quite know what to say (other than confusion), but maybe that was the point. These decisions should be personal and no one’s business, but that’s not the world we live in. The question she posed to us was whether everyone would be so lucky.
