Ranma To Onimai: 30 Years Of Trans Themes In Anime

Comparing two of the biggest ‘Gender Bender’ anime

Ranma Cosplayers by Solomon203 (Creative Commons 4.0 License)

I got into Rumiko Takahashi in a way no one else probably ever did: by reading Maison Ikkoku omnibuses at my local library, so it’s not surprising that when I first watched Ranma 1/2, I was not prepared for what I got. Ranma is exactly the kind of zany romance anime whose use of kung fu cliches and magical realism could only have been made before the year 2000.

At the same time, despite being a 40-year-old story of arranged marriage, Ranma presents an almost unbelievably modern view of gender and gender identity as something performative and fluid. When the modern fandom claims that Ranma is a trans lesbian, that’s not a fanciful headcanon; that’s an almost unavoidable reading of the actual text.

Not only are both the audience and her love interests’ first impression of Ranma as a girl, but within the first major arc, she’s making statements about the benefits that being a girl gives in enjoying things that are considered gendered.

Despite Ranma’s insistence that she wants to return to being a man, she tends to solve as many problems with acting cute and sexy as she does with actual kung fu training, or, in the case of the second arc in the anime, by fighting in a gendered girls-only kung fu match to avenge her fiancé.

This is coming from a manga written back in the 1980s, when other Kung Fu stories were about being extra macho and talking about brotherhood. The contrast is incredible.

So perhaps back in the day, you could only get away with a more feminine take on the genre by having a tough male character get cursed to become a woman. Maybe that was easier to sell the world on than an actual female lead, and it certainly made the series more marketable than making Ranma a character who chooses to be transgender.

Indeed, one of the low points of the anime is the villain who does choose to be transgender. She’s depicted as an air-headed mean girl whose choice to live as a trans lesbian means she has a few screws loose compared to Ranma, who has, of course, been cursed to live in pretty much the same way. Of course, the hypocrisy of Ranma’s disgust is pointed out by other characters, but the arc is still somewhat tasteless.

I guess we can’t have everything.

So I checked out Onimai: I Am Now Your Sister. The manga was released almost exactly 30 years after Ranma, and the author cites Ranma as the story’s biggest inspiration. Which means I was expecting something more or less a modernization of the Ranma format.

Interestingly, it is pretty much what’s written on the label: Onimai also features a boy, in this case, unemployed lout Mahiro, who is forced to turn into a girl, in this case, by her mad scientist sister’s gender swap potion, who now has to deal with the situation.

What makes Onimai different is that Ranma’s curse is just bad luck while Mahiro’s sister has purposely turned her into a girl as an extreme form of therapy to get Mahiro out of the house and back into a healthy life. The act of being a girl is the catalyst for Mahiro becoming a healthier person mentally and emotionally, aka the modern idea of gender affirming care.

Onimai is only 12 episodes long, and by the end of episode one, Mahiro has already admitted in her narration that she’s happier as a girl than as a boy: maybe. Admittedly, the line is ambiguous and could be read either that she’s happier being a girl or that she’s happy that she no longer has to endure society’s expectations of being an older brother.

However, because the line is ambiguous, it’s just like with Ranma, an immediate indication that a trans girl reading of Mahiro is absurdly justified by the actual text.

Several other plots from Ranma are also reused: Mahiro is a lesbian whose love interest is a masculine tomboy, for example, and this shows the interesting understanding of gender behind both these stories. And indeed it allows me to wholeheartedly recommend them both.