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It's almost certainly more porn than anime, but you obviously can't bring up porn when coming out to your parents.
Unless you're Andrea Long Chu maybe.
Judging by the sheer quantity of anime avatars I see among the online trans, I rrally think it's the anime. I've personally witnessed the anime -> furry -> trans pipeline, but have never heard of porn being a major part of anyone's trans origin story.
Not that I necessarily think it's the anime itself that does it (though a genre where nearly all men look like ladyboy twinks and nearly all women look like 13 year old schoolgirls can't be particularly healthy for a developing sexuality). It's that anime as a subculture attracts a lot of mentally ill weirdos.
There has been a Dirtbag Left meme for more than a decade at this point that dissident right-wing - and, of course, 'transphobic' - online chuds and trolls usually select anime avatars, usually female ones. I think the reason given was that they see anime as counter-cultural or at least not mainstream in present-day liberal America. I don't think there's a deeper reason for any of this other than the intent to signal membership in a counterculture.
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I think you have the causation backwards. Trans are men who want to become women. It makes sense for them to have female avatars online. It makes extra sense that these avatars are not real 3d women. That leaves anime girl avatars. In a cartoon world, maybe they could be a cartoon girl. As for me, I use it for a different reason, which is that it is pleasing to look at, and also somewhat funny. Did watching anime cause me to feel that way, or is it innate and anime is downstream of my instincts?
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If you spend a lot of time home alone on the internet, odds are you get into anime.
A lot of transgender people are introverts and tend to stay inside. Naturally you get an overlap.
I would imagine that there could be a correlation between heavy use of certain social media and transness. The more time you spend online, the greater the odds that you notice a trans subreddit or trans discord or trans-positive streamer. If you become part of such a community, I can only imagine the chance of transitioning goes up.
So spending a lot of time online leads to more time on social media AND more time watching anime and playing vidya. But only one of these lead to transitioning.
They are also usually reluctant to socialize with normies, this feeling also being mutual, I think.
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You may be right. I have no way of knowing which way the causality moves (if any). I just notice that there seems to be a pretty linear relationship between the sexual weirdness of a given online community and the proportion of anime characters in people's avatars/bios. Most of the people I've met in real life who are either trans or some flavor of nonbinary are unusually into anime.
It's possible I'm letting my biases get the best of me and I'm just carelessly lumping trans people and otaku into an overly broad "sex weirdos" bucket. But as someone who is not a fan of anime, I can't help but notice how much overlap there seems to be between the two communities. Then again, you could make the same argument for dungeons and dragons, for example (thanks Dimension 20!), and maybe I just notice it less because I actually like DnD.
Are you perhaps actually noticing that the many trans people are autistic? That would explain those specific hobbies at least.
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I'm inclined to think that there's some further underlying factor that explains the trans + anime connection, rather than a specifically anime -> trans pipeline (and maybe that underlying factor is just "autism").
I unfortunately can't serve as a perfectly controlled experiment, because I was exposed to anime from an extremely young age. But I was having persistent thoughts about wanting to be a woman by the time I was around 10 years old, and prior to that time, I had only been exposed to what I would consider to be very "normal" mainstream children's anime with pretty normal male role models, like Pokemon and Yugioh and DBZ (Cardcaptor Sakura got shuffled in there too, but, I would be shocked if one show with a female protagonist had such a profound lifelong impact on my psychology).
Regarding furries I'm guessing the pipeline is not anime -> furry but maybe anime cosplayer -> furry specifically maybe?
I’m not a furry at all and have basically never interacted with that community, so you’d have to ask them.
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All three of these media franchises contain, as a central part of the protagonist’s path toward their desired social rewards, a magical identity transformation:
Yugi learns that his true identity is an extraordinary Pharaoh, and that this real identity was lurking within his body and waiting to appear after some puzzling around
Pokémon have their identities changed in a powerful and stunning way; Charmeleon, Butterfree, from egg to eggmazing
Goku shifts into a Saiyan which changes his fundamental identity into something cosmically-important
What is unconsciously grafted into the adolescent’s understanding of the world is that such magical identity transformations are normal and extremely desirable. They are sensed as “reinforcing” in that they occur at key junctions where a character obtains something highly desirable, and where he is otherwise in a stressed or confused state. We can imagine an idea being unconsciously smuggled into the mind: “what if I have my own shocking identity transformation which results in the social rewards I have been pining for? Doesn’t everyone have one of these?”
Where effeminate anime comes in, is that across many anime franchises the female characters are the most “privileged” and anxiolytic within the cast, and usually the most beautiful to boot. Imagine you’re a youth who, as @Botond173 and @4bpp suggest, has a lot of stress related to their gender and social identity. Your favorite activity to reduce stress is to vicariously live another life (essentially inhabiting the body of a new person), and the person you are vicariously experiencing often has a magical identity transformation that drastically improves his life. What’s more, the most comforting / anxiolytic / socially-desired objects in the animeverse are women. Often these women, or girls, are overly-feminine. You’ve essentially been primed to vicariously inhabit another life as relaxation, you’ve been conditioned to associate the highly-feminine with the most comfort, and you’ve been conditioned to expect an identity change to fundamentally flip your life for the better. Now, maybe still, for a lot of people this doesn’t do anything. But let’s say you are wired a little differently, autism or etc. And then on top of this, there are communities that are now ready to shower you in superabundant social praise and validation for your identity transformation, and even the media seems to be on your side, and there are psychological tricks that this community employs purposefully or inadvertently (look at how colorful you will be now; so much novelty; you’re part of a tribe and get a flag and grievances and purpose and . . . ).
Re: the porn element mentioned by @Tanista, one of the ferishes that seem to be far more common among MtFs is “puppygirl” et al. This is essentially the fantasy that you are so socially-desirable that someone wants to command you around all day as a pet, while at the same time providing a comforting identity through the outsourcing of control over your life. I think this is similar to the anime etiology in that there is an identity change which comes with a huge shift in social esteem.
There is some relevant data for this theory, eg the HomeStuck fandom is 50% transgender (100x prevalence?) and the media franchise is essentially (1) I had a fundamental life-altering identity transformation through logging into a digital social ecosystem [sburb]; (2) the coolest and most beautiful and less stressful characters are all women.
This is pareidolia. Any story where a character gets more powerful could be described this way, the only difference being that in animation it's also done visually.
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There is nothing trans here, in fact pokemon is gender-essentialist with its in-game breeding system and sexual dimorphism in many species. Evolution tends to track growing up, for example Charmander is a baby lizard and turns into a powerful masculine dragon lizard. Kind of like how the 8 year old boys the show is aimed at might turn into strong, powerful men. Charmander does not put on a dress and decide he wants to be Misty.
Goku was so ripped and cool that he made me want to lift weights when I was 12, the opposite of a sex change. I am not sure what this has to do with becoming trans.
again, they are not magical but rather innate and predictable based on baby traits. Goku fell out of a space ship and had a tail. He obviously was not a normal human from day 1. He only found out he comes from powerful racial heritage. If anything this will produce fascists or elitists and not transsexuals.
This is western stuff made for LGBTQ folks, not anime.
The only cool female character I can think of is Frieren, which is literally her name ... but she's not the coolest in the series. In male oriented romance series, which have tons of girls on screen, the girls are goofy and the guy is the coolest, usually. In female oriented romances, the guy is super cool because he's supposed to be really attractive to the main girl. In Frieren, Sein and Himmel are far cooler. Women generally are not cool. Maybe if I were naturally trans I would think otherwise, and it's all in the eye of the beholder, though.
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Sure. But
Themes of transformation and metamorphosis are incredibly common throughout fiction (not to mention throughout biological reality), in both sexual and non-sexual contexts. So it’s not particularly surprising that three randomly selected stories touch on those themes.
Undoubtedly, fantasies of transformation are very common among both boys and girls. And those fantasies might be inspired by fiction media. But isn’t the average little boy more likely to fantasize about transforming into something, y’know, male? A stronger man? Or maybe at least just self-inserting as the male hero in the show? What could explain the fact that a very small minority of boys go off in a completely random and unexpected direction and fantasize about transforming into women instead? Nothing in the show itself (given the examples we’re talking about). Which is why I hypothesize that some of them simply have a latent disposition to think this way, due to biological factors.
I’m honestly not sure what you’re getting at with this whole section. Pick any randomly selected battle shounen written for a young male audience (especially one made before 2010) and the female characters will clearly be less important and less capable than the male characters who actually drive the plot forward.
To the extent that you’re picking up on a real pattern, it’s just art imitating life. Yes, an attractive woman is socially desirable and she can convince others to actively work towards soothing her anxieties, by virtue of the fact that she is an attractive woman. That’s not anime propaganda, that’s just reality.
You mean… the exact same sorts of sexual fantasies that cis women have?
I don’t know how familiar you are with erotic fiction written by-cis-women-for-cis-women, but the exact same themes of subservience, of being “owned”, of courting favor and protection from those stronger than you, are extraordinarily common. This is just how feminine sexuality works. Usually not presented in such an overtly fetishistic way, of course. Although they sometimes are. I’ve certainly come across puppygirl stories for cis women too.
Some people naturally gravitate towards a supporting role. Many of those people are either women, or would prefer to be women. All of this is wholly unsurprising to me.
To be honest, I think your incredulity at the idea that some people could be born gay or trans (or at least be born with underlying factors that predispose them to that sort of developmental pathway) is just the rightist version of the leftist incredulity at the idea that some people are born stupid and violent. People love biology when it supports their ideology, and then they reach for “social construction” when it doesn’t. I simply consistently remain on the side of biology in all cases.
Exactly. And it's bizarre because I have never met an idea so powerful it could make someone want to self-castrate. It's unreasonable to think watching Madoka Magica can induce this in otherwise genetically healthy individuals.
Holy shit lmao. I’m stealing that one.
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I think this is brilliant.
What I would add is that your phrase "magical identity transformation" is fundamentally normal for teenagers. It is both the biological reality of puberty and the narrative logic of progressing from child to adult. "Young adult" media inherently concerns the realization of conflict in the world and the boy's need to become a man. (The Pokemon anime is fundamentally for children because the world is basically good and the conflict is all in good fun, with occasional exceptions. The games are closer to puberty media.)
A lot of trans experience starts with anxiety over puberty, so it makes a lot of sense to me to connect this to soothing soft media.
Is it really that high now?
I thought it had more to do with Homestuck's fascination with alternative sexualities. If I remember correctly by the end of the original story there were maybe two main characters left who were not at least ambiguously gay.
I think there’s a qualitative difference between media where an identity is fulfilled and media where an identity is radically changed in essence. If you’re a boy born in 1920, what media are you reading where identity is changed in essence rather than fulfilled in development? You’re reading about a cowardly adventurer becoming brave, a soldier rising through the ranks, something of that sort. Or if you’re a boy playing WoW or Oblivion, you start as a grunt whose identity is achieved through an expected transformation. In 2020, you’re more likely to read about someone transforming into an animal, some cosmic being, being possessed by a different spirit, something of that sort. But I don’t know, maybe comic books are a counter example. But I think this is just one of the co-factors involved. If we shamed transgenderism and deleted all of their online spaces, IMO there would be a lot fewer cases; the notion of identity transformation would still be in the mind but it would be expressed by (maybe) shifting careers a lot, changing your name, changing religion, becoming Chinese, whatever else. Yesterday’s Lawrence of Arabia is today’s Lilith of Transbabea, but the Bedouin is more aesthetic IMO.
Per a survey of 7279 individuals, 52.1% of Homestuck fandom participants are transgender. I didn’t consider the possibility that it was because of sexuality representation, thanks for that info. I haven’t read it. Though the rate still seems extremely extreme extra high esp as few of the characters are transgender.
Yeah, as a form of experiential avoidance / negative reinforcement. The vicarious escapism is extra reinforced given the default social stressors. The real trigger though IMO is the extreme validation and praise you find in LGBTc places, with so much color and art and tribalism and such; really just a night v day difference for an at-risk nerd.
Correlation, causation.
The people taking a Homestuck community survey in 2025 are clearly selected for a willingness to hold socially ostracized beliefs.
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Transgender characters? Not as far as I recall, at all. I did a search and it looks like a few were declared trans in the "epilogues" (which came out years later). Part of what happened with Homestuck is that evaporative cooling over time made the remaining fanbase much gayer and more trans than the original population. And it was always fairly gay.
At the risk of launching a Homestuck synopsis nobody asked for: Homestuck is inherently about the fracturing and rebuilding of the self. Especially as it related to teenagers in puberty. The plot of Homestuck incorporates time-travel, multiverses, video game mechanic "god forms," second lives, mind control, fused personalities, and alternate realities. The common denominator is that every major character ends up incarnated in multiple forms and interacts with different forms of their own selves. For a simple and example, take the character Dave Strider. Dave is a relatively normal laconic "cool" young boy who wears sunglasses, who gains the power to travel in time. As Homestuck progresses, it becomes apparent that due to the choices of some other characters, Dave lives in a doomed timeline, so he has to travel back in time and interrupt his past self. Once the timeline is restored, the original Dave allows his personality to be fused with a sort of primordial ethereal power and becomes known as Davesprite. Davesprite and Dave now exist at the same time. Davesprite is a kind of alter-self of Dave, doomed, saved, frustrated, wisened, still "cool". Davesprite and Dave are treated as different characters and at the same time as the same. Davesprite becomes a mirror held up to Dave.
Every character in Homestuck passes through multiple alterations like that just described, most of them more convoluted or involved.
Almost all the characters also pass through to a sort of final form called their "god self". This is a superpowered form brought about by the complicated rules of the video game world. It's basically implied that these god forms are their "true selves," although Homestuck continues to put a lot of caveats around that conception. But the idea, fundamentally, is that each character iterates through multiple versions of himself before passing into a final mature form.
Make of that what you will. I think it is not inherently a metaphor for being trans, but is easily interpreted as one, in the same way that The Matrix has been reimagined as being symbolically a trans story.
At the same time, Homestuck also features this alien species of gray humanoids "Trolls" that are a massive gateway to queer plots. Trolls actually had four different kinds of romance available to them -- one is standard love, one is a kind of hatesex rivalry anti-love, one is a kind of asexual friendship, and one is a basically polyamorous menage-a-trois. Trolls could have all of these different romantic relationships at the same time like wizards with four spell slots to fill. And there were no gender or sexual restrictions on any of these relationships. (It's not even clear in fact why they have two distinct genders, except to facilitate readers in picking their self-inserts.) This convoluted mechanic was the seed of a lot, a lot of queer fantasy and ideation. In fact I think a lot of the original tumblr discourse that created bespoke niche pride flags and polyamorous/asexual woke norms literally came from Homestuck fans. I don't mean this casually: for anyone who wasn't there at the time, Homestuck had a huge influence on the social justice circles that became modern queer leftlib politics.
All this to say, Homestuck had a lot of queer representation. Of the eight main human characters, two were in a (doomed) gay relationship (one was explicitly gay, one was explicitly bi), another two were explicitly made bi, one was implicitly gay, and just three were left as probably straight. The trolls add another gay element since they are basically all canonically bisexual. (There are 24 troll characters, most of them minor, maybe about eight of them major enough to matter.) Note that none of this was inherent in the premise of the story. If you read Homestuck naively you would probably not suspect anything gay was coming for the first ~500 pages. The author just kept adding more and more gay characters and elements. The fanbase got gayer and gayer. To the point that on the cusp of the final battle that ends Homestuck once and for all, Dave Strider, who had up to this point been assumed to be perfectly heterosexual, who was the subject of the most popular heterosexual fan ship, confesses homosexual thoughts in his diary and is probably actually bi. Chronologically this is like if Ron Weasley came out as bi one scene before Voldemort is killed.
I think the trans stuff comes later. Once Homestuck was "over" the author eventually extended the story with some dubious sequels half-written by himself half-written by elevated fans, deliberately blurring the lines between canon and fanfiction. I think by then most fans had trailed off. I certainly had.
Anyways I don't know that I have a particular point. I haven't thought about Homestuck in years. Anybody who was never familiar is probably underestimating how big a deal it was once upon a time. For a cohort of left-leaning downwardly-mobile and first-generation college-going white Comicon Americans Homestuck was really big. As big as anything. It's amazing to me how little of it is in the culture now.
Truly fascinating, I had no idea about any of this. Thanks for taking the time to write that up. I only learned about Homestuck when researching which online communities have the highest rate of transgender membership (it’s Homestuck by a considerable margin, then its fanfic and TTRPGs). This part was especially interesting:
Was it like the polar opposite incubation chamber as 4chan? 4chan incubated the far right in 2010-13, and Homestuck did something similar with the left? Was most of its community on tumblr / discord then?
Discord, man, Homestuck is older than Discord. I was in Homestuck communities on Skype. Wikipedia will tell you that Homestuck ran from 2009-2016 but the main part of Homestuck was essentially working toward its finale in 2012. What had been a webcomic with almost daily updates came to a crawl, occasional updates dribbled and drabbled out very infrequently, sometimes with months between them. The story was essentially finished in 2015, except for the grand finale, a half-hour long flash animation that was posted ~250 days after the last update. (One of the things that helped Homestuck get so big was its popular "Sound pages," which were flash multimedia exercises that were sometimes short animations, sometimes medium-length videos, sometimes entire point-and-click video games incorporated into the body of the webcomic itself.)
(I remember there was this little ingroup notification system where people would post "Update" or "Upd8" into a groupchat and everyone would stop what they were doing and go check the site. Somehow this got memed to the point that just texting "potato" was a valid way of letting people know that Homestuck had posted some new pages. This was a big deal, I remember when Homestuck posted the flash animation "[S] Cascade" (13 minutes long) the web traffic crashed Newgrounds.)
Anyways, there was no Discord. It didn't exist. Discord became the social media platform for organizing groups of fandoms and servers. You go on Discord now and there will be dedicated servers for Minecraft, or Genshin Impact, or your favorite anime, or your favorite streamer, any kind of fandom. But before that, there weren't really dedicated fandom walled gardens like there are now. The homestuck subreddit was a major community hub of course. But outside that anybody who wanted to participate on the fandom had to do it on the open internet, and that entailed a lot of tumblr, because that's what tumblr was for. Tumblr was well-suited for that pseud-anonymous half-real early social media vibe where you were still posting in public where anybody could read you but you weren't necessarily doing it under your real name. And tumblr gave you a lot more options and control over color and html and music and theme than twitter did, it was like Myspace. So everyone was operating their own microblog with their own aesthetic and everything felt much more personal and yet much more surreal. Tumblr was much more like a mask you put on than twitter ever was, where twitter might be serving everyone a different algorithm but fundamentally the same experience.
Anyone who was around in those days of tumblr will remember that Homestuck was huge. The Homestuck fandom was essentially as large as the fandom for major TV shows like Supernatural or Dr. Who or Sherlock. (Those people were often called Superwholock because of the propensity of those three fandoms to overlap.) If you went to comic conventions there was often a huge contingent of Homestuck fans, often approaching the largest group. The alien Troll race I described in my previous post was characterized by having gray skin and horns, so it was very common to see people wearing gray makeup and somewhat casual outfits. (The Troll race was also extensively themed around astrological signs, which was a big part of their appeal.) I remember hotels having to put out warnings to convention organizers because too many people were cleaning up in the hotel sinks and the gray makeup everyone used would clog the pipes. This was not a one-off thing, this was a big incipient subculture. Somehow it mostly escaped broader cultural notice. But anyone who hung out in what we would think of as anime circles today was extensively familiar with Homestuck back then. It was all the same thing.
And it was absolutely the same thing as the far-left tumblr fan culture where a lot of woke gender norms percolated. It was exactly like the left-wing 4chan. I'm not saying that Homestuck specifically created the trans pride flag. But Homestuck, Superwholock, pop music, pornography, anime, Breaking Bad, Pokemon, Atheism Plus, on tumblr they were all fundamentally flavors of the same thing. And that subculture produced a lot of what later became characterized as woke. At the time they were all "Social Justice Warriors" which now feels like an extremely dated term, but back then it was absolutely a term people used to describe themselves in earnest. There was a whole cringe language of faux-offensive swear terms and slurs, this is where you got people saying "twatwaffle" and "shitbird" with venom and half a laugh. And in the same way that "Social Justice Warriors" gladly appropriated that epithet coined by conservatives, there were a lot of conservatives who gladly took the name "shitlords". (That was really what the tumblrites called them.) And this culture produced an enormous amount of what today is basic woke 101. The prohibition against saying "retard" was from tumblr. New norms about polyamory and disabled rights activism came from tumblr. The pride flags literally came from tumblr, anything that isn't the original gay pride flag was literally made up by someone on tumblr, there were discussions where people would just fill out and codify flags for "asexual" and "mlm" and "polyamory" pride like kids collecting every last Pokemon. Pronouns came from tumblr. Pronouns! If you weren't there it's hard to understand, it's hard for me to even prove this anymore, but I was there and I remember.
There was this idea at the time that the internet was inculcating the far right, the internet was making people nazis, and this idea burst out after Trump's election in 2016 and lead to a huge wave of internet censorship and control. ("Fake News" is another topic entirely, but it's also related in this sense.) But I remember what I was seeing and arguing at the time that, no, obviously it's the opposite, the internet and the way people socialize on the internet was driving a huuuuuuge leftward radicalization. And yet it wasn't "radical," it just seemed to flow naturally from basic obvious rules about how to behave, or, if you prefer, "basic fucking human decency".
Trans stuff was a huge part of this too. Of the friends I used to discuss Homestuck with almost all of them eventually went trans. It was a kind of social contagion, I saw it in real time. There was one woman (very nice) (very fat) (pink-haired) who declared that she felt herself to be agender and wanted to be called "it". All of my friends dutifully changed over and would say things like, "Where's Crystal? I haven't seen it since this morning." It was weird watching this in real time. I remember eventually there were counter-reactionary communities like subreddit /r/TumblrInAction, but I felt all along that this was not going to stay contained on the internet. It was really surreal.
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A bit reductive, no? The pharaoh is an entirely different person, that Yugi needs to let go of in order to realize his own growth. And Goku changes to become more masculine. Stronger, faster, angrier yet simultaneously in control of himself. He doesn't become something else. He enchances what he already has. In Pokemon, the main characters do not evolve because that is clearly impossible. That kind of transformation is limited to a different species than us.
Sure but I think this is just a co-factor that didn’t exist in the past. The pharaoh is a whole other identity co-inhabiting Yugi’s body. Goku becomes more masculine, but the Saiyans are a totally different race that Goku realizes he truly is; it’s over 9000% different than just being a normal human. Ash doesn’t evolve, that’s true, but the Pokémon have kind of human-ish personalities; people love to cosplay them.
There are two different ideas here, dualism and power-level / level of divinity (to connect it to ancient religious ideas better, for example creator deity, Olympian, lower god, demi-god, angel, demon, mythical creature, etc.). Dualism is not the same thing as divinity or level-of-divinity. It's not really the dualism that is the issue, the beings are depicted as having stable qualities of soul that are revealed rather easily. Rather it's the power-level problem that invokes envy in people, beings that are much better than a human are depicted freely in anime. This happens a lot less in Western media, it's mainly superheroes and even then only Superman who is an alien. Many superheroes are just men who gain some kind of power from technology or a bestower, like Iron Man, Batman, and Spider man.
This could make someone value their own life less but I don't see how it could make them think they can be the opposite sex.
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