What are your thoughts on the theory that O!Ciel could be a transgender man? You mentioned in a previous post that O!Ciel was one of the more gender ambiguous characters of the series. Personally, I think it would be really cool and could add in depth on how he feels inadequate to impersonate his brother
Ah sorry I caused a misunderstanding. What I meant in the post you refer to was how characters are being treated, not that their identities themselves are gender ambiguous. As one of the very few, O!Ciel and Doll have explicitly stated their gender identities, after all. But the misconception is entirely my own fault, I did not phrase that properly.
I really doubt O!Ciel is a transman, because if he were we would have known after 15 years of serialisation and 172 chapters with him as the main character about whom we even know his childhood growing up.
Why Our Ciel is 99.9% certainly cis-male.
If O!Ciel were a transman he’d have to be assigned female at birth (afab). He was however, explicitly assigned male at birth (amab).
In male-obsessed 19th century people would make sure to assign children “properly” based on genitals to avoid having “fake boys” or “insult real boys by degrading them to female”. Especially in upper society they wouldn’t “mistake the superiour male sex”, especially especially if the Lord does not have an heir yet.
I can’t believe I have to talk about a child’s genitals......... To further prove this point, Sieglinde refused to believe O!Ciel’s male identity without checking his genitals, so she went and confirmed the presence of what made O!Ciel amab for us.
Even if O!Ciel is actually afab, then R!Ciel would be afab too, because identical twins always have the same sex. The only exception would be if O!Ciel has Turner Syndrome while R!Ciel remains unaffected. Turner Syndrome however, comes with physical problems that would show in O!Ciel’s appearance tellingly. So we can rule out Turner Syndrome.
If you need O!Ciel to be a transman, then without the Turner Syndrome both twins would be XX-chromosomed. As canonically they were both assigned male at birth, everyone involved must first have agreed to pull a “Rose of Versailles” to make that possible. They already had a female predecessor and a current Queen Regnant. So why the hell would they do that? Even if somebody involved were a male-centrist, “the wife is still young, just get more children,” Victorians would have said. And if Rachel could not take another pregnancy, then marrying a new wife in Henry VIII-style was also not unheard of. Making a woman birth again or remarrying was surely more acceptable at the time than risk the scandal of having ““fake sons””.
XXY-Chromosome or Klinefelter Syndrome exists too of course, which is often how people get the wrong gender assigned. But this syndrome affecting identical twins has only been reported THREE times in all of (preserved) human history. Fine, let’s humour this thought for one minute and say both Ciels have this syndrome. Most XXY children in19th century however, would have been assigned and raised as male anyway. “Better err on the right side”, so to say. So if O!Ciel’s gender identity is male then he is still cisgender.
What makes somebody transgender is in greatest part because they feel the gender imposed onto them and in which they have been socialised are wrong. For some transgender people their genitals don’t even matter. The core of transgender experience is wrongly imposed gender and socialisation, so lacking either/both experiences makes somebody not trans.
Our Ciel apparently has the genitals which got him assigned male at birth,
was clearly socialised as male,
has stated his own male identity.
In conclusion, O!Ciel is a cisman.
