Until I Become Me by Satou Hatsuki
Trans rep: 8/10
General enjoyment: 8/10
Okay so this will be the first of my longer reviews that I post, and so for readers that don’t want that I’ll first say some words about the comic (in summary or smth). Basically the comic is good but oddly executed and is built around a sort of stupid gender swap premise. Okay so uhm yeah heres my goliath of an essay (actually its just like 600 words, but yk this is tumblr not a newspaper… oh whatever):
I started writing about Trans comics almost three years ago because I noticed that there was not one single thorough guide or reading list for someone trying to find comics about Trans people. There are a few guides out there that allow you to search under the tag of “Transgender”, but every single one has the same five or ten entries that barely have any Transgender representation.
The genre of Transgender comics may seem small, but once you start digging you’ll quickly find that there are so many great comics to be found, if only you just look hard enough!
It took me three years of searching to find Until I Become Me by Satou Hatsuki in the footnotes of a poorly written article about another Trans comic I was researching, but boy was it worth the wait. Until I Become Me is a not-so-classic twist on the classic manga trope of “gender benders” or “gender swap,” in which a character (typically male) magically Transforms (typically overnight) into the opposite sex. This trope generally plays into outdated understandings of gender and sex and the intersection of the two to create what has historically been seen as a humorous plot point.
Gender swap tropes are rooted in a gender-essentialist perspective that there is something inherently “female” about some bodies and something inherently “male” about other bodies and that only a magical binary “switch” could turn a boy into a girl. In reality, gender and bodies are not so completely binary and not so completely set in stone, and furthermore if someone wants to change their body, modern medical transition options are very effective for changing someone’s “sex”.
Normally I can’t stand comics like this because they are full to the brim with Transphobic rhetoric, gender-essentialism, and usually a good amount of oversexualization. However, Until I Become Me is different, because the gender swap mechanic is not seen as a funny joke or a one-off bit but instead as a serious and confusing emotional experience for a character with a lot of internalized self-hatred and Trans desires.
The main character, Akira, hesitantly explores what it means to have a feminine body while simultaneously coping with her growing enjoyment of this experience: she didn’t magically become a girl overnight (mentally speaking) but the “girl” might have been there all along.
This strikingly fresh take on both the Transgender experience and the gender-swap trope is as fun as it is heart wrenching. Before her body changed, Akira regularly harassed and bullied girls in her class, and then after changing ends up facing much of the same treatment from boys in her class. Watching Akira reflect on her own past behaviors towards girls when she was a “boy” hits deep into the real-world challenge of many Trans people to balance internalized prejudices with learned experiences.
Although overall I found the comic really enjoyable and its storyline surprisingly poignant, there were definitely some moments that were hard to read.
The way in which her parents treat her, as a freak of nature that desperately needs “fixing,” and the way that boys in her class (particularly early on when they knew her before the change) treat her, as a subject of ridicule and regular sexual harassment, its all quite difficult to read. But this does not make the story any less valuable as a Trans narrative, in fact the balancing of the softer internal exploration with the harsh outside world is exactly what makes Until I Become Me one of the most harshly realistic comics I’ve ever read.
Admittedly, the gender swap mechanic is a bit cheesy at first, but I think Hatsuki did a good job separating the brain from the body and allowing the Transgender themes to come front and center. The comic is on chapter 63 currently and regularly updating, already having cemented itself as one of the greatest Transgender texts, comic or otherwise, that's ever been written.
