Chapter Text
Kimura Yūko 木村裕子—Fukaya, Japan, 2003
My ten-year-old son Aoki 青木 was almost always at home, as he didn’t have any friends. I wasn’t sure why he had such trouble making friends, but he did. My husband Shinichi had been upset that Aoki had been growing his hair out, but I didn’t see why the boy shouldn’t. Maybe that’s why he had trouble making friends with the other boys. Here in Japan, it’s very rare for boys to have long hair, and we look down on those who do. Aoki absolutely refused to cut his hair, even though he would have needed to do that in order to go to school—schools in this country don’t allow boys to wear their hair long. So, as a stay-at-home mom who had worked as a teacher before getting married, I homeschooled Aoki and let him wear his hair however he wanted.
One day I walked by Aoki’s room after he’d finished his schoolwork for the day. I heard the television on, as it often was when Aoki wasn’t doing schoolwork. I stopped walking when Aoki said to himself, “Cute dress. Oh, I want it!”
This went against everything I knew about my son, except maybe his long hair. I realized that there might be a very good reason for that. But it couldn’t be; how could someone who was born a boy ever be a girl? I went into Aoki’s room anyway and asked if we could talk, and he said we could.
“Why would you ever want a dress?” I asked. “You can’t wear dresses, Aoki! You’re a boy! I know it, I’m your mother!”
“What if I’m not?” Aoki shouted. “What if I’m a girl? I think I am a girl, Mom!”
I instantly calmed down. “Is that who you are?” I said as I pulled my child into my arms.
“Yes, Mom,” Aoki said quietly. “I’m a girl.”
This led to my next question. “Do you have a name you’d like me to call you?”
“Yes,” my daughter replied. “Call me Akiko.” (Akiko is okay with me telling you all her deadname; she knows I want to convey what it was like for me to think I had a son and then find out I had a daughter.)
“Are you sure you want a name that similar to your old name?” I asked.
“Yes,” Akiko said. “I’m still me.”
“I’m so happy to have you as a daughter, Akiko-chan,” I said, using the honorific for girls in Japanese. “You know, when I was pregnant with you, I was hoping for a girl.”
After a pause, I continued, “Is there a word for someone who was born a boy but identifies as a girl—even if they don’t look like one already, like you do?”
“Yes, there is,” Akiko said. “Transgender. I’ve been looking this all up on the Internet. Although I was never really a boy. You could say I’ve just been presenting as one—mostly to please Dad.”
“That stopped working when you grew your hair out,” I said. “We’ll have to tell him tonight.”
“Do we have to?” Akiko asked. “He won’t be happy. He wasn’t at all pleased when I grew my hair out. If anything, he’ll be even more angry.”
“But he needs to know,” I said. “You can’t keep presenting as a boy forever.”
Even though this story is translated into English, we are still Japanese. So I said to Akiko, “There are several different kanji for your new name. Which kanji would you like to use?”
I got out some calligraphy tools—a piece of washi paper, a brush, an inkstone, and an inkstick—and told Akiko, “You can write it here.”
Akiko, who had been learning calligraphy in school, prepared the ink by getting the inkstone wet and grinding the inkstick against the inkstone, as she had been taught to do. She then wrote the kanji 亜希子, which means "second, Asia" (亜) (a), "hope" (希) (ki) and "child" (子) (ko). That second one, “hope”, was what I really needed to keep alive when dealing with my gender-normative husband.
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That evening, after I’d washed the dishes from dinner—by myself; this shows just how gender-normative Shinichi is, since I’d also cooked dinner—we all sat down in the living room. Akiko is my only child, so it was just her, me, and Shinichi.
Akiko told her father, “Dad…I’m a girl.”
“How can you be?” Shinichi demanded. “I know you’re a boy, Aoki. There’s no way you couldn’t be.”
“I was born in the wrong body,” Akiko said. “I was assigned male at birth.”
“That means you were born a boy,” Shinichi said.
“No, it doesn’t,” Akiko countered. “I was never really a boy. Oh, and call me Akiko. Here are the kanji I’m using,” and she showed Shinichi the piece of paper on which she’d written the kanji for me earlier.
“While I’m pleased to see that you’re learning something from your calligraphy lessons at school,” Shinichi said, “I don’t believe that you can really be a girl.”
“She totally can be a girl!” I said. “She looks like one already, but even if she didn’t, there are things she could do to look more like one.”
“Like what?” Shinichi demanded. “He’s going to go through puberty eventually.”
“There’s a way to stop that,” I said. “I was looking this up online before we talked, and when Akiko starts male puberty—which she does not want—she can take puberty blockers to stop it.”
“No way,” Shinichi said. “You can’t keep your cute kid forever, Yūko. Every kid goes through puberty, and it’s cruel to stop that. Imagine the effect on Aoki’s health if he were to stay on puberty blockers forever! It’s not like his puberty is precocious.”
“She wouldn’t take them forever!” I countered. “Just until she can start on female hormones.”
“My God, that’s even worse!” Shinichi shouted. “I know you wanted a daughter when you were pregnant, Yūko. Now, after all this time, you’re trying to turn our son into the daughter you always wanted. How can you do this? I need to take Aoki and go! I never dreamed I’d have to run away from my own wife!”
“No, I’m leaving you,” I said. “Unless you accept our daughter, Akiko, for who she is. She’s a girl, and you can’t change that. Ever.”
“We don’t have a daughter!” Shinichi said. “Aoki is a boy and always will be. We’re his parents, we saw his private parts a lot when he was younger. Especially you when you changed his diaper as a baby.”
Shinichi had a friend, Kenji, who had been a toxic influence on him. When Akiko was a baby, Shinichi had changed her diapers sometimes. When Kenji was over one day, he saw Shinichi changing baby Akiko’s diaper. He said to Shinichi, “Are you a real man or not? Why isn’t Yūko doing these things? What kind of mom is she?”
Ever since then, Shinichi had expected me to do all the childcare. He said it really hurt when Kenji questioned his manhood. He didn’t want the same thing to happen to Akiko now, he said, and that’s why he tried to get her to be a normal “boy”. Indeed, that’s why he’d been opposed to Akiko growing her hair out; because the boys at school would question whether she was a real “boy” if she did. And they’d be absolutely right, because she’s a girl.
But would Akiko be able to make friends with the other girls at school if they knew her as a boy—even though she really wasn’t one? Would they see her as a girl? Probably not. So Akiko would have to go to a new school, preferably someplace far away where no one knew her as Aoki. I started looking for jobs—and apartments—in Tōkyō so I could leave Shinichi, who would probably never accept Akiko as her true self. I’d have to get a pretty high-paying job to pay for Akiko’s transition once she started it; I’d read on the Internet that it can be quite expensive if insurance doesn’t cover it. We have a national health insurance program here in Japan, but it doesn’t cover everything. Gender-affirming healthcare is usually not considered to be medically necessary, even though I was beginning to see now that it actually was.
The next day
I told Shinichi I was taking Akiko and leaving as soon as I found an apartment and a job in Tōkyō, unless he accepted Akiko as his daughter.
“No way,” he said. “And you’re dangerous to Aoki. There’s no way I’m letting you be alone with that boy. I will get custody, Yūko—whatever it takes. You can’t turn our kid into a girl. He’s a boy and always will be. Aoki-kun says he’s a girl, but he’s too young to know that for sure. You have to be pressuring him to act like a girl. You liked The Rose of Versailles when you were younger—maybe that was a toxic influence, when Oscar’s dad raised her as a boy. I thought the story highlighted how cruel he was to do that, but it seems like you got the wrong message.”
“How dare you accuse me of such a thing!” I said. “Right. I’m never going to get through to you. I can’t wait for the day when I finally leave you.”
A month later—Tōkyō, Japan
I found a job in Tōkyō, where there are also medical facilities I thought might be able to help Akiko become the girl she was always meant to be. Like I said, though, I would have to work a lot in order to pay for that. I also found a two-bedroom apartment in Tōkyō for myself and Akiko.
The first thing we did after we moved was to go clothes shopping. Akiko really needed some girl clothes, but I’d been afraid to get any while we were still living with Shinichi. But now she could wear whatever she wanted, and no one thought she was a boy—with her long hair, she looks that much like a girl. So the workers at the clothing stores didn’t object when Akiko went to try on girls’ clothes.
Akiko, who had wavy hair, also wanted a straight perm. I knew exactly why, because Shinichi had wavy hair and Akiko didn’t want to look anything like her transphobic father. Speaking of Shinichi, we were getting divorced, and we were trying to work out child support payments. Shinichi didn’t want to give me any money if I was going to spend it on something so “cruel” as helping Akiko become the girl she was always meant to be. He was legally required to pay some amount of money in child support, though—much to his displeasure. It was less than he could probably afford, but I still got some money—which of course I would use to pay for Akiko’s transition.
After the custody hearing (where, luckily, I was granted full custody of Akiko), Shinichi asked my daughter if she would ever go back to being a boy. “It’s your fault your parents are splitting up, Aoki-kun!” he shouted at her, misgendering and deadnaming her in a way that’s only possible in Japanese with the -kun honorific. “Can you please go back to being a boy to keep our family together?” he pleaded.
“No,” Akiko said angrily. “I’m way better off without you in my life.”
“Just tell me where you’re living now. Please.”
“Akiko, don’t,” I said. “Shinichi, go away. Now.”
“Okay. That’s it. I have no child!” Shinichi yelled. He went outside, got in his car, and drove away from the courthouse. Akiko and I were both glad to see him go; she was absolutely right that we were better off without that man in our lives. And that settled it for Akiko: not only was I changing my last name back to Ōhashi, my maiden name, Akiko would take the Ōhashi name as well.
Later, at home, Akiko told me that she was the reason why Shinichi and I had divorced.
“It wasn’t your fault,” I told her. “It wasn’t your transgender identity by itself that broke up our family—however many right-wingers complain about how ‘transgenderism’” (I made air quotes) “is breaking up families. The true reason for me and your dad’s divorce was because your dad refused to accept you as your true self. If he had accepted you as your true self, our family would still be together.”
Ōhashi Akiko 大橋亜希子—Two months later
I knew I would need to go on puberty blockers soon, but I would be unlikely to get them if I didn’t have a diagnosis of gender identity disorder. To get that diagnosis, I needed to see a therapist, although even that wouldn’t be very helpful if my therapist thought I truly had a disorder. Fortunately, my therapist, Dr. Tokiko Kanda 神田秋子 (whose first name can also be read as “Akiko”—my name with different kanji), is one of the very few therapists in this country who affirm their transgender clients’ gender identities rather than trying to get them to go to conversion therapy. Just like me, Dr. Tokiko sees it as transphobic that gender identity disorder is called that, and believes that the name should be changed.
When I started at a new school, we didn't tell the principal that I was transgender—and he never found out, because I’d gotten a diagnosis of gender identity disorder, and this had enabled me to change my legal gender to female. If my school principal knew I was transgender, he wouldn’t let me go to school as a girl. Although the school itself is co-ed, the uniforms are strictly gendered, and they're assigned based on students' sex assigned at birth. There wasn’t an all-girls elementary school in the area of Tōkyō where we now lived—only a high school, which I hoped to go to in the future. Yes, it would be even more important for me to go stealth there than it is at my current school, because otherwise I wouldn’t be allowed to go to that school at all. But if I was able to transition medically like I wanted to, I was confident that no one would ever know I was transgender. I looked like a cisgender girl, and I wanted to keep it that way. (The word cisgender is the opposite of transgender; I’d found that out online when I’d done my first research on the Internet about transgender people.)
I met other girls who were into fashion like me at my new school, and they had no idea that I’d been assigned male at birth. My dad had said I was “born a boy”, but he was wrong; I was never really a boy—I’ve always been a girl, I was just born in the wrong body. Just like any other girls, we talked about clothes, make-up, boys…some of my girl friends even came to my apartment sometimes, and I was proud to show off the fashionable clothes I’d bought. They never saw my clothes at school because we all had to wear uniforms, so I could only wear my own clothes outside of school. I asked my friends to call me Akko for short, even though my mom doesn’t—she calls me by my full name Akiko. I felt so happy the first time one of my friends called me Akko-chan! Again, -chan is the honorific for girls in Japanese.
Mom was working a lot (to afford our apartment in Tōkyō and save money for when I finally started transitioning medically), so she couldn’t go clothes shopping with me most of the time. Luckily, I was independent enough to go around Tōkyō by myself; Japanese kids like me are expected to be pretty independent.