Undisclosed gender in fiction: Difference between revisions

* In the Sailor Moon franchise, across the various comic and animated adaptations (not counting bowdlerized English dubs), there are some characters who aren't gender conforming.  

** One such character is Haruka Tenoh, whose heroic alter-ego is Sailor Uranus. She looks like a masculine woman, and is in a lesbian relationship with Sailor Neptune. Japanese has several different first-person pronouns (equivalent to "I, me") that speakers can use to express their gender. Sailor Uranus uses the informal masculine first-person pronoun "boku" for herself. She alternates between feminine attire (including a uniform with a skirt) and dressing in such a masculine way that other characters think she is a man, so she is gender nonconforming. Because all Senshi are women, she is necessarily a woman, at least in some way. However, some dialog in the canon talks about Haruka's gender, and fans disagree on how to interpret these remarks. In the manga, Sailor Neptune tells Sailor Moon, “Uranus is both a man and a woman. A soldier of both genders, with strengths and personalities of each.” This line also appears in the animated adaptation, in Sailor Moon Crystal. In the manga, when Sailor Moon (in her alter ego as Usagi) directly asks Haruka if she is a man or a woman, Haruka responds, “A man or a woman… is it that important?” (Or, depending on the translation: "Man, woman... why should something like that matter?")<ref>SailorSoapbox, "Setting The Record Straight: Haruka’s Gender & The Prince Uranus 'Scandal'." ''The Art of (Overanalyzing) Animation'' (blog). January 29, 2014. https://overanalyzinganimation.wordpress.com/2014/01/29/setting-the-record-straight-harukas-gender-identity-the-prince-uranus-scandal</ref> Fans have variously interpreted these remarks in the canon as meaning that Haruka is a butch lesbian woman who is in touch with her masculine side, and/or physically intersex, and/or that her gender identity is not strictly male or female. This is with the understanding that in the 1990s in Japan, we did not have the widely-known familiarity with or terms for nonbinary identities that we have today, but people with nonbinary identities did exist in that time and place. The characters in Sailor Moon are all based around astrological symbolism, so it's relevant that Uranus is a planet associated with gender nonconformity and same-gender attraction. These associations with the planet Uranus in astrology are so widely known that in the 1870s, one of the first movements for LGBT rights referred to themselves as [[history of nonbinary gender#1870s|Uranians]].

== TV ==