Adventures with Crossdressing Sword Girls

[forestofglory]

In recent months I have been consuming so much crossdressing girl in disguise media! It’s become my major comfort trope of the moment.

I grew up on a certain kind of girl power story about how women are just as good as men and can do all the same things. I later came to see how this kind of story undervalues feminine things and domestic labor and to value those things more, but this type of story still holds deep appeal to me. There’s something so satisfying about seeing young women succeed against the odds.

However, before I got into Chinese media several years ago I hadn’t read or watched many stories like this in a long time. I was mostly reading adult SFF where I wasn’t aware of many stories like that. Even as I started to get into Chinese stuff it took a while to get back to this beloved trope, as I started with stories that centered men. These shows aren't all crossdressing girls but they make a thematic cluster.

I slowly started watching dramas featuring extraordinary young women succeeding in traditionally masculine fields like in The Moon Brightens for You orA Girl Like Me and remembering how much I enjoyed this kind of thing

But watching The Long Ballad really reawakened my hunger for this kind of story. The main character in that drama, Li Changge, not only crossdresses and is good at fighting, but she’s exactly the kind of super smart chaos muppet that I love. Plus while Changge falls into the “not like other girls” trope, her best friend Li Leyan is more traditionally feminine and they are the most important people in each others lives. (It’s just a really good show! The character arches for everyone are also excellent!)

At the start of this year I was really craving something comforting to watch, so I watched my first ever Korean drama, Rookie Historian Goo Hae Ryung. This is not actually a crossdressing drama. Instead, our main character is one of the first women allowed to become an official historian, the officers of the court charged with writing down everything that happens as it happens for posterity. It's a show that gave me a lot of thoughts and feelings about history and an institution and practice.

While this show doesn’t have crossdressing, I do want to call attention to the way the male lead is extremely princess coded. He’s a prince who has been locked in a tower his whole life, he leaves out rice for the birds, at one point he wears a flower crown, and he’s always the one swooning or having his wrist grabbed. (He’s also a chaos muppet and I love him so much!)

Another thing that I love about Rookie Historian Goo Hae-ryung is that it deals with people in constrained circumstances taking what agency they can. That makes it sound kinda grim and it's not really. It's also one of the few stories that I know of that depicts monarchy but doesn't endorse it. Overall I really like how this show talks about political change and personal agency.

After that I watched Sungkyunkwan Scandal, another Korean drama about a woman scholar. This one does feature crossdressing. The main character disguises herself as a man to go to an all male school. It's a lot of fun. The political stuff isn't as good as in Rookie Historian Goo Hae-ryung but there's friendship and shenanigans. I gather it's a bit of a classic of this sub genre. I also especially enjoyed the fic for this one.

Another similar drama that I enjoyed is A Love Story of Oiled Paper Umbrella, about a plucky young woman who wants to be a demon hunter. This one features crossdressing but none of the women who crossdress are in disguise as men– they are just wearing men's clothes. It's actually really fun! The costumes are inspired by the Tang dynasty and we know women in the Tang dynasty crossdressed like this a lot but I don't see it in shows much. I actually really love the whole textile aesthetics of this show! So bright and colorful, with all kinds of mixing and matching!

The show also features an interesting friendship between the female lead and the second female lead. I wish it had gotten more screen time! There's lots of interesting characters and the plot really goes places and I liked it a lot!

I also just finished watching In A Class of Her Own, the Chinese remake of Sungkyunkwan Scandal. It made me think a lot about adaptation choices. I wouldn't have said Sungkyunkwan Scandal was grim or anything but In A Class of Her Own is an even softer version. I didn't love how Sungkyunkwan Scandal handled queerness but it was the only one of these shows that acknowledged that queer people exist. It's kinda strange watching the Chinese version get around some of that. “I'd rather have a life long friend than a wife” just doesn’t have the same impact as “Maybe I'm gay!”

Actually, given how queer the whole theme of crossdressing girls feels to me, all these shows are pretty heterosexual. I would love to see a trans version of this! Changge in The Long Ballad has a lot of gender vibes but mostly these shows don't even get that close. These days SFF has more room for queerness than in my youth but these types of stories are not very popular in the genre at the moment. Meanwhile these stories seem popular in Asian media but so far I haven’t encountered queer versions there either. I know in China queerness is censored, though there are a few f/f novels with crossdressing that I haven’t read yet. Meanwhile I’m just dipping my toes into dramas from outside of China. So I’m still looking for stories that lend more into queer potential of crossdressing girls.
Despite that, this trope still brings me a lot of joy! I love stories about women having agency and living lives outside of narrow gender roles. It's been a lot of fun diving into them. There's so many of these shows and I've barely scratched the surface. I'm looking forward to watching even more of them and maybe reading some novels along these lines as well. Please tell me about your favorites!

Comments

[goldgust]

I know what you mean, I read quite a few books featuring crossdressing girls as a kid but not so many nowadays. Perhaps it is a kidlit trope in particular.

She Who Became The Sun is a recent SFF novel I liked about Zhu who crossdresses and pretends to be her brother in order to survive, then grows into her own identity and power while continuing to pass as a man. She also falls in love with and marries a woman. Very gendery book!

For a VN flavour, the MC of Ladykiller in a Bind spends the game pretending to be her twin brother. Although that one does not have the 'girl excelling in a male field' vibe.

[forestofglory]

I've heard of She Who Became The Sun but somewhere along the way I forgot that it had crossdressing! Thanks for the recs!

[stholtzmann]

This is a favorite theme of mine, too. Season 6 of beloved Japanese classroom drama "San-nen B-gumi Kinpachi-sensei" included a character who's a little difficult for me to describe, since I didn't have as much understanding of gender then as I do now, and it's been about 20 years since I've seen it, and I don't actually remember if the show takes a position on the character's gender. Ueto Aya plays a student who is perceived by others as a girl who should wear the girls' uniform (school standards were notoriously inflexible about gendered uniforms then--I think it's eased up a little now?). I'm sure it would come under criticism if it aired now, but at the time I remember it was praised by a lot of queer groups in Japan.

I haven't seen any Chinese shows like that or (OG) Coffee Prince, but there's a memorable side character in The Sleuth of Ming Dynasty who presents as a man to most people. I was pleasantly surprised by the ending of the character's story arc. (I don't remember if you've seen this one. There are like half a dozen instances of crossdressing in Sleuth, if not more, but the other occasions are for utility only.)

Of course anime is rife with gendered clothing shenanigans, from Rose of Versailles onward.

we know women in the Tang dynasty crossdressed like this a lot
We do??? Well, there's something to add to my "things to look up" list!

[forestofglory]

I have seen Sleuth, and yes that character is great!

There's a lot of Tang Dynasty art of women wearing men's clothing, and some poems complaining about it. I don't think I have any references that focus on the crossdressing but it came up several times in my textile reading. (The Tang Dynasty had many gender deifying powerful and interesting women -- who are pretty understudied)

[stholtzmann]

(Wow I left out the part where the Ueto Aya character fights to be allowed to wear the "boys'" uniform, but I guess that was kind of implied.)

[alterkrmn]

Back when I had just started watching Asian dramas, I watched The King's Affection and Love in the Moonlight, both Korean dramas. Maybe they qualify as crossdressing girls media. I liked them, but I was left with a bit of dissatisfaction after watching them one after the other, because in the end they were, as you mention in your post, pretty heterosexual, and this made me seek other kinds of stories. I'd also love to see trans versions of this.

I really, really liked Rookie Historian Goo Hae Ryung, and now I'm curious about the other dramas you mention here. I'm always looking for good dramas to watch.

[forestofglory]

Other people have recced me both of those dramas so I will likely check them out at some point.

If you end up watching any these I'd love to hear your thoughts, they are all a bit different of course.

[lessonsinescapology]

If I understand correctly, you want to see/read about crossdressing women who like other women?

[forestofglory]

I'm interested in any recs for things featuring young women crossdressing to they can do things that otherwise wouldn't be allowed, but I do feel like the versions I've been watch have not done as much interesting gender stuff as they could and that it would be fun to have one with f/f romance or a protagonist who decides they aren't a woman actually

[owlmoose]

In that case I definitely have to echo the rec for She Who Became the Sun, it ticks a lot of those boxes!

[sophia_sol]

seconding goldgust's rec for She Who Became the Sun!

I too hunger for more queer variations on the crossdressing trope. The only other one I know of that runs with trans themes for a main crossdressing character is Unmasked by the Marquess, by Cat Sebastian, but tbh other than the gender stuff I found the book merely ok.

You might also find that The Order of the Pure Moon Reflected in Water by Zen Cho is relevant to this trope, though. One of the characters is an afab person presenting as a man, and it is unclear what gender he actually identifies as though he isn't a woman, so it might be some form of crossdressing or it might be him dressing in confluence with his gender. I do think that he was written in response to the ubiquity of clearly cis crossdressing girls! the ambiguity is deliberate, as a good representation of how gender can sometimes be complicated, imo.

Oh, and The Unbinding of Mary Reade, by Miriam McNamara, also is doing interesting things with gender and queerness and crossdressing, though coming at it from a different direction. One of the main characters is a cis woman, but for most of her childhood her mother has her pretending to be her dead brother, so in many ways she had the experience of growing up assumed male, and transitioned in adulthood to presenting female, which happens to be her assigned gender at birth. And she gets a wlw romance!

also Monstrous Regiment by Terry Pratchett is entirely about the crossdressing trope, and one of the secondary characters is definitely trans....depending on which edition of the book you have. Different editions use different pronouns for this character after his assigned gender at birth is revealed. But it is obvious from the narrative that he identifies as a man, imo.

[forestofglory]

Wow my memory is worse than I thought! I have read both The Order of the Pure Moon Reflected in Water and Monstrous Regiment!

The Unbinding of Mary Reade sounds really interesting though, thank you!

[aurumcalendula]

Have you seen the mini webdrama Soul Sisters? I think you might like it. The lead actresses have great chemistry and I enjoyed the queer subtext that was included.

[forestofglory]

It's on my to watch list, maybe I should get to it sooner rather than latter!

[ehyde]

It's not explicitly queer, but Tai Sui by Priest has a major supporting female character who sometimes crossdresses (and if my memory is correct, presents somewhat more masc even when not explicitly crossdressing) and who ends up living with another female character, they're very shippable, I might go so far as saying they're the closest thing to a canon couple in the whole novel (which is gen).

Torikae Baya (the manga I keep requesting from Seven Seas every month) is very gender, and features crossdressing in multiple directions -- the basic premise is that two siblings realized as children that they were better suited to be each other's assigned genders, so they were both raised trans, with their parents' full support. They both ended up with different court positions (this is Heian era Japan) and then due to court intrigue reasons (there's a pregnancy plot) have to switch places. So they end up both crossdressing as their AGAB. I haven't been able to read the manga, as there's not even a fan translation, but I read the novel it was based on (which was actually written in the Heian period) and I'm interested in seeing how the manga version plays out: although everything I wrote is true about the novel, I hear the manga is much queerer; the novel's ending--which might not even be by the original author, might be a later revision/addition--is very 'and they finally realized their true places in life and all was well' which I was not super happy about.

[Edit: I finally tracked down a digital copy of the original novel, and I think I may have been conflating some of my memories of it with my memory of a friend's commentary on the manga--the siblings' parents and the general attitude of the narration were not nearly as supportive as I had remembered. Anyway I hope the manga gets translated someday.]

How do you feel about the trope when "this character is a crossdressing woman" is a spoiler or is treated like a big reveal?

[forestofglory]

Thank you! I have an ebook of Tai Sui but I am intimated by how long it is


Torikae Baya sounds really interesting and I hope someone translates the manga!

The only things I can think of where "she's crossdressing" was treated like a big reveal are things where I could tell that's what was going on (or in several cases where I didn't realize that the character was crossdressing because I'm not always great at wuxia gender conventions) and it felt a little silly that the characters were making such a big deal of it.

Though several cdramas I've watched are at pains to make sure the ML finds out the FL is a woman before he has romantic feelings about her, which is kinda gross actually.

[asakiyume]

These sound great--I love the sound of Rookie Historian Goo Hae Ryung in particular (and laughed at what you said about the prince having his wrist grabbed. SUCH a power indicator, and I'd never seen anyone mention it. I also laughed when you said "I'd rather have a life long friend than a wife" being way less impactful than "Maybe I'm gay." LOL, so true.

[geraineon]

Thank you for sharing this! I enjoyed reading~

I took a look at my list and hm, I don't think there's anything that is explicitly crossdressing woman to do something in traditionally masculine fields.

Sauinkoku Monogatari, which has been mentioned in else-internet, does have a main female character who is trying to break into traditionally men's space (she does have support, but a lot of the work is still hers).

There's Kino's Journey, but that's not crossdressing woman, but I'd ID Kino as non-binary who was AFAB, and the circumstances for the start of Kino's journey is pretty awful. The story itself is kinda philosophical, kinda zen, where Kino and a talking motorbike travels from place to place, stay for three days, and observes.

On the classic tragedy side of things, there's Butterfly Lovers... Ahaha

On the comedic side, there's Hanazakari no Kimitachi e, a manga, jdrama about a girl who crossdressed to attend an all boys school because of a crush. It's a very lighthearted story, and it's not about breaking into a traditionally masculine occupation, but if you're looking for romcom, you can try that.

[halfcactus]

+1 to Kino's Journey!!!!!! The world is not beautiful, therefore it is. :')

[forestofglory]

I haven't done Buttery Lovers because my tolerance for tragedy is low, but do you have a favorite version?

Kino's Journey does sound like something I might enjoy, thanks!

[geraineon]

Kino's Journey is one of my favs of all time! Hope you enjoy it~

It does deal with darker themes. The tagline of the show, as halfcactus said, "the world is not beautiful, therefore it is."

/scans through all the replies/

Ah, there's also the classic Rose of Versailles which has a movie adaptation (is gonna be on Netflix later this month): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rose_of_Versailles_(film)

I haven't watched it, but I plan to!

Re: Butterfly Lovers

I took a look at the list of adaptations and somehow can't find the version I watched there (idk if I just remembered the actors wrong or something). I'll get back to you on that!

[tornadox]

I liked All the Painted Stars by Emma Denny; it has a crossdressing sword lesbian.

[forestofglory]

Thank looks good, thank you!

[halfcactus]

I'm not sure if it ages well but one of my formative YA reads was Tamora Pierce's Song of the Lioness series, in which the main character trades place with her twin brother to become a squire and later on opens the path for women to be allowed to become knights.

Persona 4 also has a girl who cross-dresses as a boy so people take her more seriously as an investigator and becomes the school heartthrob. I headcanon that character as trans, but this is not explicitly supported by canon. ^^;

And of course, as mentioned above, Hana Kimi (and Ouran High School Host Club) and Monstrous Regiment! And while it's quite not the same I think you might be interested in the anime Kino's Journey which is a gen piece of canon with self-contained episodes and has cross-dressing elements and a lot of Gender in it, if you don't mind something quieter but still very thoughtful. The main character is androgynous and doesn't identify with any gender but they're dressing up like a specific person.

[forestofglory]

The Song of the Lioness was formative for me too!

Thanks for the other recs, I'll look into them!

[amedia]

Here via c-ent! I have always enjoyed identity-mysteries of many different kinds, and girls/women crossdressing to have more opportunities make for delightful stories, at least historically.

The Rookie Historian show sounds wonderful!!! (makes a note) I thoroughly enjoyed the C-Drama The Imperial Coroner, in which a young woman raised in a coroner's family becomes one herself despite pushback from others; there's also a young woman martial artist who wanders the jianghu like so many male heroes do. No cross-dressing, but awesome women's agency.

I ♥ ♥ ♥ Sungkyunkwan Scandal sooooo much, despite the heterosexual emphasis in the main romance. OTOH, Goo Yong-Ha and Moon Jae-Shin won some kind of award for best couple, which makes me super happy! I did not realize there was a Chinese remake - that sounds interesting. (makes another note)

The whole thing where Lee Sun-Joon thinks he's gay because of his feelings for Kim Yoon-Hee reminded me of the novel Bloody Jack, which combined a girl dressing as a boy (to escape desperate poverty) and the Age of Sail (a time period I love to read about), so that she ends up as a ship's boy and falls in love with a midshipman who is baffled and concerned by the feelings he develops for her. I didn't find that book until I was an adult but I loved it, and so did my son! There's a whole series, but only the first book has the cross-dressing, I think.

Concerning exactly the opposite: I really, really wanted to love the BL K-Drama Nobleman Ryu's Wedding, which featured a guy taking his sister's place (including crossdressing) when she runs away before her wedding. It was the first BL K-drama I watched, so I was very disappointed, but after seeing a bunch of others, I realize in retrospect it was better than most. (Which isn't saying much.) The disparagement of the original bride pissed me off, but the queer chemistry between Nobleman Ryu and his bride-to-be's brother was very appealing.

Another opposite (sorta): Mr. Queen was a non-BL (strictly speaking) show in which the body of a male chef from the 21st century is transplanted into the body of a Joseon-era queen. Sort of a trans metaphor? I thought it was strongly hinted that he fell in love with the king! The Dowager Empress and the Emperor's wife have an ongoing "cold war" that demonstrates how they were able to exercise power in a variety of ways. It's not all fun - there are some weird tonal shifts between tragedy and comedy - but I did enjoy it.

[forestofglory]

Rookie Historian is really excellent, I do rec it if you like that kind of thing!

When I say I enjoyed the fic for Sungkyunkwan Scandal what I mean is that I spent almost a week reading all the long Goo Yong-Ha/Moon Jae-Shin fics on ao3. (Sadly their counterparts in the Chinese version aren't as fun, but the originals are hard to live up to!)

Thanks for all these recs!

[skygiants]

CAREENING IN FIVE MINUTES LATE WITH STARBUCKS. I love this trope, I have written [bad] [undergraduate] papers on this trope, here are some of the ones that have been formative and important to me!

a.) MOVIES: OG Twelfth Night is one of my favorite plays (also As You Like It but it is frankly a weirder and less coherent play and so gets done a lot less); She's The Man, the 90s rom-com starring Amanda Bynes, is not deep but IMO genuinely quite charming. There's also a Bollywood remake of She's The Man (and, by extent, Twelfth Night) called Dil Bole Hadippa! which I have been meaning to watch and could make a fun compare/contrast, but I do not alas expect it to be very queer. However, for another weirder queerer rec, the movie Dororo (based on a manga by Osamu Tezuka that I have not read) features a plucky cross-dressing thief as sidekick to a tragic Frankenstein baby (he gets better) and ends with the thief shouting "I still won't become a woman, I will be a man forever!"

b.) YA NOVELS: obviously Alanna is the one everyone remembers but I'm gonna second amedia's mention of the Bloody Jack series, which actually does continue the crossdressing intermittently throughout and also gets gayer as it goes on; it's a pretty interesting example IMO in that Our Plucky Cross-Dressing Heroine is a bit of a chameleon and is constantly putting gender on and off along with other identities as she gets into Various Situations over the course of the books. Unfortunately the series getting gayer coincides with it getting worse in various other ways, but I think it's worth noting. Also, Robin McKinley's Outlaws of Sherwood sticks a crossdressing girl OC into Robin's gang and she's great.

c.) MANGA: and for another entry into 'we put a cross-dressing girl into this famously all-male group,' Kaze Hikaru is 'what if there was secretly a girl in the Shinsengumi?' Another one that I like a lot is Basara, which is another along the lines of 'girl has to pretend to be her twin brother' except in this case her twin brother is the dead destined saviour of their people and so now she has to lead a rebellion, while pretending to be her twin. Neither of these are particularly gay as I remember them but they're both quite epic and fun; Kaze Hikaru does a good job dealing with the Mores and Culture of Samurai Life and Basara is just nonstop balls-to-the-wall chaos.

d.) TELEVISION: Coffee Prince is the classic modern cross-dressing kdrama (she gets accidentally hired as the love interest's fake boyfriend, for reasons) and does deal very explicitly with the fact that the hero has gone through a whole coming-out arc before he finds out that the girl he fell in love with is, in fact, a girl, and is not in act relieved to learn her gender but hugely upset about it because he already went through this character development and now she's taking it back?! On the sillier side, You're Beautiful is maybe the most nonsense drama I've ever seen, in which a NUN has to join a KPOP BOY BAND pretending to be her IDENTICAL TWIN BROTHER because he's healing from COSMETIC SURGERY GONE WRONG. Is it good? Well, no. But is it very funny? oh, yes.

I am sure I have more but I'll leave it here for now and come back as they occur to me!

[forestofglory]

Thank you for all these amazing recs!

[jajalala]

AHAHAH finally someone else who has seen "You're Beautiful"... Watched it with my siblings some time ago and was yelling at the screen all the time bc omg the melodrama... I recall hating the main male lead, he was legit SO mean to the female lead for no good reason XD.

I recall enjoying Coffee Prince back in the day. If you want another "Guy goes through a whole gay discovery journey before learning his crush is secretly a girl", that's a big plot point for the second male lead in Hana Kimi, which has a Japanese, Korean, AND Taiwanesse adaptation (and was originally a manga). I can't remember if the adaptations particularly differ in how they handle it, but I recall tearing up and feeling strongly for the secondary male lead throughout...

[bluapapilio]

I enjoyed reading this and I'll be checking out some of the things you and the comments mentioned! 💖

[jajalala]

I relate to this so much, ahaha. I remember as a teenager going onto scanlation sites, some of which had a specific filter/tag FOR crossdressing alone... Found a lot of gems that way. But like you said, there was a shocking undercurrent of heterosexuality among almost all of them. I remember being upset a lot of the time when a girl would fall in love with the cross-dressing girl but then have to give up on that love bc the cross-dressing girl inevitably had a male love interest... Come on!

However, there is something special about that somewhat ambiguous state of both heterosexuality AND queerness that those stories evoked... Though the main relationship(s) are typically M/F, there's an appeal in a M/F relationship that can start with the basis of male friendship--sharing a friend group, all-boy's school, club, work, whatever allows for a platonic ideal of courting that prioritizes foundational friendship rather than JUST "we're a boy and girl so we gotta get together". Although it's somewhat common for the male love interest to know she's secretly a woman, she nevertheless is allowed into the male spaces, and she gets to be close to her love interest in a way that she wouldn't be allowed to as a woman. And if the male love interest DOESN'T know her gender and interprets himself as gay, then there's also an appeal to the vibe of "He loves her so much that he is willing to go against all of societal conventions" (though there's a certain gender essentialist tint to that "he can only fall in love with a man who's "actually" a woman" that's uncomfortable when examined). Overall, a girl-dressed-as-boy gets an opportunity to be freed of her usual gender expectations, which has a huge appeal for both queer readers and women in general who wish they could be "freed" from sexism.

That ambiguity feels like the precursor to queerness, but tends to default to the "proper" cisheterosexual state by the end. A lot of endings involve the girl "growing out" of her cross-dressing tendencies (Ouran High School Host club manga felt like a particular betrayal when I read it... what do you mean this gal who's expressed so many agender thoughts has now decided to present entirely feminine with long hair and a skirt?), often still positing marriage as the ultimate end goal/state for the woman. Which perhaps is part of how certain creators "got away" with presenting a queer work to publishers: Yes, this woman cross-dresses and challenges gender, but her love interest is still a man, and in the end she will become a "proper" woman, so it's okay for her to do all this gender-challenging stuff during the course of the story!

As heterosexual as these stories can end up, I think there was a reason I gravitated towards them when I was a teenager who hadn't yet confronted her own bisexuality. They present a form of M/F love that doesn't have to fit in the exact M/F gendered box, plus a "safe" kind of F/F love/crushing (where girls can swoon over girls-dressed-as-boys), and so appeal to latent queerness while being "safely" heterosexual. There are stories which I might find disappointing nowadays (as my desire for explicit queerness has risen), but which resonated deeply with me as a child.

Nowdays I don't see so many of these stories, though it may be that I'm not looking for it. Your point about its absence from recent SFF makes me wonder, too... I've seen a lot of queer/feminist creators invent gender-equal/neutral (and sexuality-equal/neutral) societies for their stories. Though I have found that appealing in many ways, a sense of rebellion/challenge is lost. Many of the cross-dressing stories may feature cishetero women, but they are explicitly going AGAINST society in their journey, which is still relatable to a queer struggle. Meanwhile stories ostensibly about queer characters can sometimes lose that sense of marginalization/struggle when the society depicts the queerness as fully normalized. Not saying either approach is better/worse (I have loved stories where queerness is fully normalized and the characters are queer without that being the "focus" or struggle--other things can fill the plot/tension), but sometimes a "straight" story about a character hiding their true gender or true sexuality, with lots of plot points bringing gendered expectations and anxieties into focus, can capture a compelling queer struggle.

For some actual media I personally recommend: Revolutionary Girl Utena (the anime, not the manga) is a fascinating case, MANY things going on beyond the main girl "dressing in a boys uniform" (it's not the boys uniform really, it's something entirely its own but she's clearly a gender non-conforming character), but the story has a lot of themes about gender, narrative, and some explicitly queer characters. Plus, sword-fighting! Very 90's shoujo style but also a deconstuction OF 90's shoujo--check trigger warnings if you're sensitive to some common big TWs.

While I'm here, I just want to shout-out a silly crossdressing manga: Classi9, which involves a bunch of classical composers as pretty boys going to a music school together, with the central character being the Japanese composer Taki Rentarō--a man, historically, but in this manga he's a girl who has cross-dressed to attend this all-boys music school! Although I think it was canceled (it ends abruptly) it's a delightful little gem for people who like or are curious about classical composers.

[anne]

This explains a lot about why I loved Victor/Victoria when it, ahem, came out.

[forestofglory]

You make so many excellent points here! Thank you!

Definitely one the reasons I love this type of story is because it allows for transgression of gender roles. But your point about how that allows these characters to form closer bounds with men is really important too.

And yes I see what you mean about recent SFF having more accepting societies, but I love this trope and wish there was more of it.

About two days after I posted this I sat bolt upright in my chair and yelled "Utena! Why didn't I think about that?" There really is a lot going on there with gender and queerness!

[douqi]

A couple of drama recs, since they're more accessible than novels.

You've already been recommended three of the four great cross-dressing dramas of the mid to late 2000s, the fourth and IMO queerest one is Painter of the Wind. There's what comes extremely close to a f/f romance (may even be one) in the first half, and the protagonist's gender identity is readable in multiple directions throughout.

There's also the most (accidentally?) queer Taiwanese drama I've ever seen, Bromance (2015). The reveal comes very late: the male lead has his pansexual awakening AND a whole coming-out with his family before it hits. And IMO the protagonist is readable as non-binary/bigender throughout (the Doylist reason, I suspect, is that the actress looks super hot as a boy, but that doesn't detract).

[forestofglory]

Thank you! Those both sound good!

What are the other three great crossdressing dramas?

[douqi]

The other three are Coffee Prince, Sungkyunkwan Scandal and You're Beautiful.

[forestofglory]

Thanks!

[satsuma]

Seconding your wish for more queer/trans crossdressing girl shows (when I was watching Sungkyunkwan Scandal I shipped Kim Yoon-hee and Cho Sun more than I did the main pairing tbh)

My wife & I recently watched Accidentally In Love (2015) which interestingly uses a lot of crossdressing girl show-esque tropes, despite the fact that the female lead is in disguise as another girl rather than a boy (the male lead does quite a lot of actually crossdressing though!) I’d be interested to know how intentionally they evoked those tropes vs it just being a coincidence arising from similar premises

[forestofglory]

Kim Yoon-hee/Cho Sun is a good ship! I really wanted Cho Sun to find out that Kim Yoon-hee was a girl much earlier and for them to be friends!

That's really interesting about Accidentally In Love!