Before my egg cracked, I watched a lot of japanese youtubers who refer to themselves as 女装男子, which roughly translate to "male crossdresser".
- Many of them look like very pretty cis woman
- Some are even on HRT
- Some have really really nice femme voice
- Some try to spend their day dressed femme without getting clocked like here and here
However in all the videos above, they refer themselves as male (男) in some way or another. Some of them eventually stopped mentioning their maleness but none really declare themself as a woman. Of course, maybe some of them are really just cis guys with an interest in presenting fem, but the ratio of crossdressers to trans people in Japan seems unusual and the amount of effort some of them spend on makeup, keeping feminine hair, going for surgery, voice train, etc are typically seen as trans people transitioning.
When I started learning more about gender dysphoria from reddit and the english speaking world, it became apparent that gender identity is viewed quite differently between the two cultures. When I search for the term トランスジェンダー女性 (trans woman), all I see are newsreels about people adopting the anglosphere POV of gender identity.
Out of curiosity, I looked for discussions on crossdressing and transgender people on chiebukuro (it's like yahoo answers but in japanese and pretty active). On posts about crossdressing, people were pretty supportive and nice but on posts about being trans, most of the comments give off TERF/transphobic vibes and reading them was depressing.
I've learned enough Japanese to consume its media but have never lived there or have Japanese friends. People who know more about Japan, what's going on?
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