Mr. Tines wrote:

Jäeger#904775 wrote:

Wish granted

SPOILER: Show

Muahahahaha, you got me

orcot wrote:I'm not sure you got what I meant but if I insulted you or some community I apologize. Cooking is mostly seen as a female interest where I'm from that said most of the chef cooks around the world are actually male.

Accepted.

The background is that I am the admin of a substantial forum which, though it's not the main topic, actually specialises in support for transgender people; so I am sensitive to the sort of things that can cause upset, even if inadvertently. We also frown upon the kind of stereotyping that sees cooking as a female interest.

pwhodges wrote:

orcot#904784 wrote:We also frown upon the kind of stereotyping that sees cooking as a female interest.

For anyone who does not know the idea of men doing certain things and women only doing certain things is called gender rigidity, it's a very dangerous and harmful stereotype, as it pigeon holes both genders in real life in different ways that can hinder and really hurt growth. It means girls who do male hobbies are told you will never be good enough and should leave or do not belong here get out and if boys do female hobbies they are ridiculed for being weak, gay or pathetic or told they're not real men.

It hinders the real life growth of the individual and forces them to in to hobbies they don't want to be in and have no interest in and deeply affects their mental health long term leading to therapy in later life. It's also why toy makers started creating gender-neutral toys, so both genders would not have the issue of assuming that blue is for boys and pink is girls and nether gender would feel left out.

it's a very dangerous and harmful stereotype

It's stupid that what it is. Like jockeys why are they all men? Only 1/10 of horse riders are male and women are lighter then men. Women would be better jockeys. Makes no sence.


abouth gender neutral They made korra from the legend of korra bisexual out of the blue for some reason at least She'ra has some build up. I am not entirely sure what they are getting at but I don't like it. They are trying to hard.

Getting pushed into hobbies I think youtube did a thousand times more then tv show ever could. ANd not knowing where you getting yourseld into can be fun aswel. I've done 2 years of diving betwen 11-12(swimmingpool) you had to be 12 to start but nobody cheked. Looking back it was ridiculous but I have some fond memories from that time.

...none of this is eva related

So, taking the silent assumption that gender rigidity is merely a social construct and not the way the innate biological traits are expressed...

silvermoonlight wrote:For anyone who does not know the idea...

...Hideki is having a hard laugh at you at the moment, because erasing the gender rigidity erases the reasons for sex reassignment. There's nothing to risk, nothing to aspire when all genders are equal and completely interchangeable. There's no pain with full acceptance of who you are granted for free. All what's left is merely a somatic inconvenience prosthesised with culture rewarding people for having fun by living a life of a freak.

Also, stuff can be called dangerous when it may lead to death, or injury, or trauma. Eg. sex reassignment is dangerous, especially for false positives. Still there are people who take a risk and do dangerous things - sometimes for benefit of others, sometimes out of their own needs; sometimes both reasons matter. A sound culture, which is willing to thrive among other cultures by keeping valuable people as its adherents, rewards the heroes and punishes the cowards. A culture unable to make the difference is walking dead.

To put it as simple as possible: if men do not cook, Shinji can sense a flavorous meaning in advancing this road; but if nobody cares, Shinji has one reason less to not to jump off the cliff.

Velorex wrote:

Smeljthe#896970 wrote:Is there any merit to Shinji actually being trans? If so I'd love to hear other examples that people have come across!

Both the Rebuilds and NGE/EOE never elude to the idea that Shinji is trans.

Shinji is not a failed man; he's simply an underage kid, he is still growing both as a person and as a male and you should not conflate the aforementioned fact with him rejecting masculinity. He is simply an immature individual; both NGE/Rebuilds worked hard to convey this notion.

And I also think they make a solid point of expressing that personality has been put together from losing his mother (the nurturing aspects now denied him) and being rejected by his dad (the male bonding denied) - something that psychologically, most would agree, would have an effect on the masculinity of a young boy.

As has been said, this forum is not a place that allows serious discussions, such as this subject can lead to.

In any case, this forum already had this discussion, when it was allowed for a time, and this thread contains it, together with better factual information than you will find almost anywhere on the Internet (find the posts by ZoeB) - stick to reading that if you want to know about transgender matters.

On that note, let's not equal being trans to "having failed as a male", that's not how this works and quite a disrespectful thing to say.

In any case, describing anyone as "having failed as a male" is reliant on outmoded stereotyping of maleness.

^ I agree, though I will point out that Shinji does a lot of non-stereotypical things for a male, and the series does point that out. Misato challenges him in Episode 1 by saying "You're a boy, aren't you?" In later episodes, she actually backs off on that sort of rhetoric and becomes more understanding of Shinji's personality traits. The series doesn't highlight the fact that she does this until Asuka comes in and complains about Misato's "coddling" of Shinji, but even then Asuka kinda backs off from that after Episode 16's "You are number one" story bit. Through this lens, Shinji declaring "I am me" in Episode 26 can also be read as him affirming how he decides to perform his gender.

Sure - but the series is from a quarter of a century ago, and views have continued to change; so we can expect things in the series which would, shall we say, be expressed a bit differently now..

Absolutely. But it's important to note that, while Misato and Asuka were certainly unbecoming by challenging Shinji's masculinity in that way, this is only a trans reading of Eva. I don't think the series had intended to say anything about that specifically, but it certainly touching on various subjects regarding gender. I just re-watched the series last week, but since I wasn't looking for anything in particular, I'm coming up a but short on the full breadth of the gender talking points the show has.

I'd go further, and say that Shinji not conforming with masculine stereotypes, whether in his own mind or simply in the eyes of some others, is just that - and is not in any way related to a possibility of his being trans. There is not the slightest indication that he has gender dysphoria.

There is a brief flash of Shinji's head on Rei's body, in End of Evangelion.

And in Both of You Dance Like You Want to Win!, Shinji and Asuka wear the same outfit and speak in unison. I feel like he was definitely getting in touch with his fem side in this episode.

The thing about Shinji is that he is just starting to figure out who he is, and accepting, and loving himself at the END of the show. Where does he go from there? What happens after The End of Evangelion? It's up to the viewer's interpretation. Personally, as a trans woman, I see a lot of myself in Shinji.

The Hospital scene with Asuka, I could kind of relate to. Thinking "I'm so fucked up" after jerking it, I mean that was how I felt for a long time, for being into transgender stuff. I felt ashamed for being gay/trans because people would tell me it was bad or wrong. But like, I'm sure lots of people have felt like that before not just transgender people.

Following that line of logic, though, we should be able to deduce and construct a pretty coherent healing process (the answer) if the crux of the narrative was about exploring the problem (or question); to put it like math, the equation and solution are the same thing in different expressions on either side of the =. I'm not going to say that NGE & EoE are without their ambiguities, but they seem extremely forthright about detailing Shinji's problems. Each ending has him explicating in very clear terms what his problems revolve(d) around, and they all resonate in very direct ways with the themes. The overwhelming crisis is one of not knowing how to gracefully navigate the interiority of himself when met with that of others, and we're shown very strong examples of each as reified in the visuals. If his crisis had to do with not belonging in his own body, I figure the symbolic plot elements would look radically different. And as the dialogue isn't shy about his other problems, I don't think the dialogue would have been shy in showing him stewing in feelings of gender displacement; but he doesn't ever, for instance, question his gender. The frame of his head on Rei can mean a multitude of things, and so I can't say it doesn't refer to some kind of gender identity element--but to my mind it would need to resonate with a number of other examples to be significant, and be more deeply and consistently woven into the core visual building blocks. As it stands, I could just say "it's a trippy visual to express the co-mingling of everyone in the primordial tang" and immediately have a just as strong argument.

And I don't think we should conflate cross-dressing with being transgender. A man wearing women's clothing doesn't always mean one thing. It' also kind of just a stock gag in anime & manga and that's a gag-rich episode. Other gag-rich side material, like the games and the gag panels staffers drew in the laserdisc pamphlets, have many other instances of Shinji cross-dressing. One of them, the Shinji Ikari Raising Project game (made by Gainax in-house), has a meta, 4th wall breaking moment about it. For context, he's wearing a girl's swimsuit as part of a PR project for Nerv similar to a bake sale or fundraiser (did I mention it was gag-rich?).

Shinji: Why do I have to wear this girl's swimsuit?

Ritsuko: You're androgynous, so you speak to a certain market. We have to do whatever we can to bring customers in.

I know it's as non-canon as you can get, but it speaks to the impetus behind a lot of why anime & manga includes elements liable to be read under a modern lens as personal (instead of commercial).

And I know it's a separate continuity, but I believe it speaks to Anno's conception of Shinji's character; we jump ahead to Shinji well along in his healing process in NTE, and the crowning visual image is him perhaps more masculine than ever before. OP's premise made a parallel between Eva and the Matrix; given that re-examination of the Matrix bore in mind the Wachowski's identities, shouldn't a parallel examination involve bearing in mind that Anno isn't trans?

Starkid08 wrote:The Hospital scene with Asuka, I could kind of relate to. Thinking "I'm so fucked up" after jerking it, I mean that was how I felt for a long time, for being into transgender stuff. I felt ashamed for being gay/trans because people would tell me it was bad or wrong. But like, I'm sure lots of people have felt like that before not just transgender people.

You've got some good points in the rest of the post, and I agree! But this seems like a little bit of a stretch too far. I don't think the act of masturbation is what makes Shinji shameful, rather the sexual assault that it took place through. Though, I could just be speaking more from a sex positive lens than a teenage boy in 1990s Japan.

Axx°N N. wrote:And I know it's a separate continuity, but I believe it speaks to Anno's conception of Shinji's character; we jump ahead to Shinji well along in his healing process in NTE, and the crowning visual image is him perhaps more masculine than ever before. OP's premise made a parallel between Eva and the Matrix; given that re-examination of the Matrix bore in mind the Wachowski's identities, shouldn't a parallel examination involve bearing in mind that Anno isn't trans?

I feel as though The Matrix is so trans-coded that it can very easily be seen without knowledge of the Wachowskis' trans-ness. But at the same time, I speak as a trans woman, and I worry sometimes that everything looks like a nail. Anyhow, regardless of a lack of direct intent to create Shinji as a closeted transgender woman, it's fun to have the concept in mind and talk about it. The series has been analyzed to death, so why not throw some fresh ideas in the pot?
Regardless though the lack of Anno's trans identity doesn't pry him away from discussing gender and society's views on it. See his other work such as Love & Pop. Evangelion itself is also full of commentary on the way women are seen in and used by society. For Shinji to not have a little bit of fem in his heart feels contrary to some of the other goals the series has in exploring those themes.

decafhotchocolate wrote:I feel as though The Matrix is so trans-coded that it can very easily be seen without knowledge of the Wachowskis' trans-ness. But at the same time, I speak as a trans woman, and I worry sometimes that everything looks like a nail. Anyhow, regardless of a lack of direct intent to create Shinji as a closeted transgender woman, it's fun to have the concept in mind and talk about it. The series has been analyzed to death, so why not throw some fresh ideas in the pot?

I never saw the trans allegory of it until I read how the Wachowskis felt about it, but it made total sense in retrospect. I think it's worth considering that the Matrix was more explicitly trans-coded at one point (one of the minor Nebuchadnezzar crew was a different sex in reality than when they enter the Matrix) and so those elements were ironed out into being less obvious in the final product.

I'm not against a trans Eva reading, I'm just liable to disagree with where exactly in the narrative those supporting details exist in a way that makes sense to me. For instance:

decafhotchocolate wrote:For Shinji to not have a little bit of fem in his heart feels contrary to some of the other goals the series has in exploring those themes.

I think this kind of gets into an interesting point of discussion where there's a breakdown on agreed-upon definitions. As someone who is queer, I often find myself disagreeing with gender conceptions of other lgbt folks, and I've seen these disagreements hashed out many many times just as an observer. For instance, I don't think recognizing the agency of women and having clarity and empathy of their identities and intersections with society requires or means you have a "fem" part of your identity, or that what can be read in Shinji as "fem" actually is "fem." To echo a previous topic in this thread, I don't think Shinji being sensitive in general, or cooking to get more specific, are inherently "fem" traits. But because this seems subjective to me, I think it would actually come down to how Shinji himself makes sense of these things and conceives the definitions of his identity. Because there doesn't seem to be a very solid, unified agreement of ways to conceive gender among all lgbt people, for me it all comes down to the end user.

So, even if Shinji is trans or some other flavor of lgbt, it's worth considering that that wouldn't mean his version of whatever identity would align with a viewer's conception. Overlapping a schema of terms and rules onto the symbols in this way seems kind of like a willful adaptation or projection instead of meeting in the middle as an understanding interpretation. Shinji is Japanese, he's in a particular time period, and he's an individual--any of these can amount to not fitting neatly into modern, western conceptions of gender, and even if he were a modern-day westerner that's no guarantee of overlap.

A dude cooking and cleaning doesn't imply he has gender dysphoria...

Also, for the longest time I was 99% sure Shinji was bisexual but Anno denied that he had any carnal desire for Kaworu. I was shocked but when the creator denies it, it's pretty much torpedoed.

Asunji_Yuko wrote:Also, for the longest time I was 99% sure Shinji was bisexual but Anno denied that he had any carnal desire for Kaworu.

He never said "any," he said a specific instance of blushing (in the bath) wasn't particularly out of carnal desire. It doesn't rule out romantic inclination elsewhere, nor does it put a definitive thumb on the other instances of Shinji blushing. The context around that quote is Anno specifying that homo-eroticism was intended, and wondering (but not saying he even knows, definitively) if there are outright gay characters within Eva and whether he has any homosexual tendencies. ("As far as I know, it’s possible that I put in a few guys like that. Otherwise, I wonder whether it might be that I have parts of me like that, myself, things that are at about that degree.") So, not at all your paraphrasing.

Interviewer: What did it mean that he blushed? Although, of course, it’s a joy that shows your good will.

Anno: That’s right. It’s not that Shinji-kun was particularly inclined toward carnal desires there, you see.