The Male Hysteric

A few days ago I went thrift shopping with my boyfriend and ended up looking at the women's blazers because I may need something for interviews and going out and sometimes women's are more interesting and I can fit into the larger ones. We found this navy blue and black brocaded tuxedo jacket and it was $15 and fit me and so I had to get it. As we checked it over we found the tag on the inside that said had its designer that read "FOR MEN" on it... it was actually a men's jacket, but because it was interesting and a bit flashy, had automatically been flagged as a women's garment and put all the way on the other side of the store in the women's section, while the men's garments maintained a very strict conformity of things that men were 'supposed' to wear.

I get that the Savers staff are very busy and sorting through lots and lots of clothing, and it's something of a cliche to say that "this says a lot about society" but also, this says a lot about society, I think.

So I just saw the monthly "Is Haruka/Sailor Uranus genderfluid" post on Reddit and they're at it again, arguing about how gender works in Japan vs the west and lots of quibbling over terminology of what did or did not exist in 1994 when the character was invented.

I think it's very tiring to read this because regardless of the creator's intent, Haruka Ten'oh is probably the clearest, unambiguous, most simply read genderfluid character I've seen in a lot of media. Sometimes Haruka is a girl, and sometimes Haruka is a boy, and she's enough of a girl that she's in the 'girl only' group of sailor scouts, but also enough of a boy that she lives through her private school system as a boy in a boy's uniform without any of this presentation being questioned. This is different in the anime, apparently, which I have not seen all of, where she clearly denies being a boy at some point, but in the manga the read is startlingly unambiguous, and the waffling is from people who deny that gender fluidity is possible or real, and want to couch her existence in safer terms, like 'really' being a girl who likes to dress in boy's clothing.

And, like... I do think there's a huge cop out here when labeling characters as 'only' butch lesbians vs genderfluid, transgender, etc. Because the pervasive labeling of a character like Haruka as a butch lesbian is never a real analysis of her identity but always couched in making her safer and simpler to understand to a cis audience, when this is not the reality that actual butch lesbians who are actively read as men in real life situations experience. The 'only a woman in man's clothing' has been a label to soothe cis people and has not protected butch lesbians from gendered and sexual violence for their existence and does not necessarily reflect their views on their own genders. There's multiple writings by butches on how they don't feel like women, and they feel like men forced to live in some kind of liminal space or otherwise not women, and how they feel like they can't actually express this. This is not to discount possible butches who do see themselves as women in men's clothing, but to shove off a character into the category of 'butch' does not mean that they are devoid of gendered feelings, complexity, and interiority that would make a cis audience uncomfortable, and Haruka's actions do demonstrate that whether the audience likes it or not, regardless of any vocabulary used. Gendered subcultures like butch, genderfluid, nonbinary, etc are historically very fluid but this does not mean the formalized gender is correct, just that it is a forced choice forced by a society that cannot tolerate ambiguity.

I'd call Sailor Uranus genderfluid but she could be read as butch. But she's not 'just' butch. She's not 'just' anything.