Thinking about transgender Battler AU’s (Wheel Clocking, Wanderlust of the Golden Witch, the story carries on, etc). Courtesy full spoiler warning.
Battler is a girl. She knows that she is a girl, whether she has always known or came to discover it later in her life (her six year absence from la familia Ushiromiya-), even when everyone else around her thinks and tells her that she is a boy.
And I just keep chewing and chewing on the two concepts of Battler proudly strutting her stuff (as she should) a la Koibuchi Kuranosuke if he had been raised in the 80’s -
As well as the fact that people around her (Rudolf, Kyrie, the Ushiromiya’s of 1986 if VN events occur) would react, likely in either transphobia or trying to understand but not fully getting it.
Just consider: Battler publicly comes out as a girl.
It starts in small touches to her appearance, so small that it isn’t at odds with how she normally dressed before the egg cracked.
She begins to grow her hair out, just a little longer at a time. At home, she starts wearing clothes that are probably considered a little more feminine - blouses, sometimes, in place of T-shirts. Practices padding the shape of her chest in her room.
Later still, maybe Battler starts to wear skirts in place of her jeans when she’s in private. Then, in the evenings outside…and then more and more, changing between jeans and shorts and skirts as she pleases.
And she moves on to dresses. Spinning in her room, walking around her grandparents’ house.
At some point, she starts going to school wearing the girl’s uniform.
It’s little changes at a time for her, but eventually those little changes will become noticeable, and then it’s a big change (for most of the people around her, at least).
Battler (whom they consider a boy), now claiming to be a girl.
Assuming she comes out after the school year starts, her classmates and teachers would know her before she came out - When Battler ‘was’ a boy, dressed as a boy, and had a ‘boy’s name’.
(if she chose to change her name, because Battler is such a unique name that it isn’t really gendered? Person who fights. Unless you transliterate it to soldier? Then maybe it would be considered gendered, because predominantly men were soldiers throughout history).
They still view her as a boy.
There’s something to chew on in considering how the teacher’s could react. Namely, Battler is breaking the school dress code in wearing a girl’s uniform, they may considering ‘his’ cross-dressing as a form of delinquency, the potential of deadnaming, etc.
Then there’s how her fellow classmates would react, potential harassment or the ideology that Battler’s a creep or something, which doesn’t bode well for Battler because it’s the 1980’s -
Followed by Battler’s life with her grandparents (I sit firmly in the camp that her grandparents love their beautiful fucking granddaughter. I will die on this hill), all of which would be affected by japan’s general attitude towards the concept of transgender.
Battler would most certainly deal with either harassment or outright avoidance from other people, if not both - being publicly avoided while getting harassed behind the scenes, such as her desk or locker being messed up, because she is “a boy acting and dressing like a girl” to other people.
You see it in a lot of media, where cross-dressing characters, “trap” characters, are often utilized for ‘comedic’ effect such as being called perverted or degenerates (or, in lighter medias, other characters are just mind blown by the fact that this character is actually a boy, and life moves on).
There’s also just the fact that many more people just wouldn’t talk about it. In day to day life, it simply isn’t talked about. Because it isn’t normal.
Transfem Battler could, to some subtler extent spending on where exactly she is, could deal with that same stigma and thusly - ostracization, harassment, and disdain from others.
In a slightly (barely) happier concept, Battler could have come out some point prior to Asumu’s death, and post-Asumu’s death, after moving in with her grandparents, may have moved far enough away that she needed to switch school districts, and thusly - most people don’t know Battler ‘was a boy’.
(Battler’s 12 when Asumu dies, which is just around the time he would have entered middle school. I’m assuming here that several of his elementary school classmates would have attended the same middle school, thusly the above argument of his classmates knowing her as boy unless she attended a school away from the district she originally lived in).
This isn’t touching on how the Ushiromiya’s would respond. Because oh boy would they react. Unpleasantly.
Gender Roles, Misogyny, Toxic Masculinity everywhere. It is literally everywhere.
I have. Thoughts. About this.
I also actually was considering the thought of writing Battler, transgender or not, through the lens of if he (she/they) was intersex.
This was primarily because Batbeato’s reading of Sayo as intersex/intersex-analogous has permanently altered my brain chemistry, and I remembered seeing a posted image on Pinterest or google somewhere about a Phantom of the Opera Ask blog.
It consisted of someone asking something along the lines of if Christine’s perfect face was a mask and she had the same physical appearance as Erik, if he would judge her (and honestly, while Erik would judge himself for his own face pretty badly because he has Trauma, especially in Susan Kay’s edition, Christine? His Christine who he obsessed over? And attempted to murder/actually did murder several people for? Yeah, no, can’t see it happening in any universe).
A Battler who is born intersex, whether it’s merely hormonal or his body physically developed differently than the average person, is a sort of narrative parallel to Sayo, I guess.
Sayo, as she grows up, although she was raised as a girl - she doesn’t get the typical feminizing puberty many girls have. She doesn’t get her period, she doesn’t begin to grow breasts, and she doesn’t get much taller. This is largely caused by the injuries to her body as an infant, and the genital reconstructive surgery/mutilation done to both save her life and turn her from Lion, the man from 19 years ago, to Yasuda Sayo.
Part of that, her lack of a traditional feminine puberty, is what later drives her to dress as Kanon, explore a masculine gender identity, in comparison to the feminine ideal that is her identity as Shannon. And Sayo is both.
A Battler who also goes through the struggle of an ‘atypical puberty’, one that comes late or is only partially masculinizing (we know he was fairly short, the shortest in his class, until some point in his first or second year of high school), a Battler who also struggles with his/her/their gender identity, a Battler who - if his body was ‘atypical’, might have been mutilated by surgery - has his right to his body violated?
It’s an interesting, and painful similarity, especially as Umineko grapples so heavily with the expectation of social roles and how that forms certain characters viewpoints towards one another, their mindsets.
If you were to enfold that into a transbattler AU, i find that interesting how that would also effect how some characters (such as Rudolf, and perhaps Asumu) would perceive Battler’s identity as trans compared to others.
Example: People 12 years into the future might rationalize it as Rudolf’s illegitimate daughter with Kyrie he mutilated to make her into Asumu’s son. Rudolf himself, while at odds with Battler’s identity as a girl, might also rationalize this as just another fuck up on his end - his son, his daughter, his child was not born in a ‘normal’ manner by any means of the word.
Again, if there’s one family that takes traditional gender roles to an extreme serious point - it’s the Ushiromiya (adults).
Also, maybe a little bit of spite, because when I open AO3 and filter for the intersex tag, I don’t want to see smut. I want a deep dive into the mind and life of the character I’m looking at, how the way their body is considered different from others, how they’re body was treated and how it was supposed to grow vs how it doesn’t, how that effects them mentally and not just physically, the potential fluctuation of their gender identity if they are not what they have been assigned, and the inevitable grief of, even if they do consider themselves what gender they’ve been assigned - the revelation of what makes them different if, like so many, they were simply told to hush and take vitamins, and if they have scars, no they don’t or it was just a minor surgery.
Instead, I find futanari kink fics that sexualize intersex genitals as having ‘both’. Not all, but enough that it really grates on the nerves.
That’s also why I’m so terrified of discussing or writing such an AU, though. People who are intersex already have their struggles either hypersexualized or erased entirely because of how heavily stereotyped and sexualized it is.
