Is it weird to fantasize being a boy because of yaoi? Does that mean I could be trans? I don’t think I am a trans man, but its weird. I also get jealous when I see yaoi couples because I wish I could be like them.

- Posted to Quora, March 20, 2021.

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Yaoi, also known as boys’ love (often shortened to BL) is a genre of fictional media —mostly comics and animated films — featuring romance and sex between young men. At its most basic level, yaoi is gay erotica for the female gaze. It is written primarily, but not exclusively, by and for women, and marketed primarily to them. In its native Japan, fans of the genre self-deprecatingly call themselves “fujoshi” — rotten women. In the West, they increasingly call themselves demiboys, non-binary, and transgender.

This is not conjecture. The connection is often made within trans communities online — frequently enough to merit Reddit posts like “I’m getting exhausted with the yaoi made me ftm crowd” (FTM is an acronym for female to male transgender). The yaoi to trans pipeline is real, but why is a matter of debate.

The phenomenon recently caught the attention of Genspect, a gender-critical organization that focuses on detransitioner advocacy. There, Eliza Mondegreen pointed out that the connection between yaoi and transgenderism is discussed straightforwardly in both the r/ftm and r/detrans subreddits. She highlights posts that portray the popularly perceived yaoi-trans pipeline as a source of handwringing on multiple fronts: some posters say it makes them question the legitimacy of their trans-identity, others feel guilt over “fetishizing gay men,” which is seen as “problematic” in typically social justice minded online yaoi/BL communities. For what it’s worth, gay men — by virtue of their definitional disinterest in women sexually — are generally pretty unconcerned about female sexual fantasies. I doubt anyone is losing sleep because a teenage girl has allegedly fetishized some caricature of them. The fact that people in yaoi/BL communities don’t seem know that speaks to the relative dearth of gay males in these communities. She also notes that some in the FTM and detransitioner communities apply the term “autoandrophilia” to their own experiences — a female version of “autogynephilia,” sexologist Ray Blanchard’s theory that non-homosexual men inclined toward transgenderism are motivated by erotic interest in the idea of themselves as female. Mondegreen concludes: 

Here’s what this looks like to me: for some adolescent and young adult heterosexual females, trans identification seems to be a response to deep discomfort with heterosexuality and what heterosexual relationships entail and imply…The concept of “gay trans guys” is difficult to make sense of unless you understand the online ecosystem in which young people form their transgender identities and grapple with sexual orientation and attraction. Based on other conversations in these communities, my sense is that some of what’s going on here is age-old discomfort with the unequal sexual and reproductive burden on women and girls, but early exposure to hardcore pornography — and thus porn-addled depictions of heterosexual relationships as inherently exploitative, degrading, and even violent — also seems to contribute. Exposure to porn in many cases precedes actual experiences of sexual intimacy. Idiosyncratic sexual identities may appear to offer an exemption from dynamics young people — female or male — want no part in, letting young people who adopt these identities say: That’s not who I am. That’s not what I want. Don’t treat me like that. Don’t see me that way. Don’t make me the woman (or man) in that kind of relationship.

Yaoi might not be straight porn, but the young androgyne characters sometimes suggest that it might be, and the genre is no stranger to rape as a plot device, and BDSM themes are common. It’s a part of “trash culture,” Dario tells me. He’s a 32-year-old contemporary art curator from Quintana Roo, Mexico. I contacted him after seeing his Twitter posts about the “yaoi to trans pipeline,” a term he (along with others) has used explicitly on Twitter. In describing the motivations of writers in the genre, he said “it’s not designed to appeal to the masses, it’s supposed to appeal to other deviants like you, other rotten people.” 

“I’ve been talking extensively about the pipeline for the past three years,” he said early into our sprawling, two-hour conversation over Zoom. He said that, like many others, boredom during the pandemic inspired him to revisit media from his childhood. “It was my first revisitation of yaoi ever since I came out seven years ago as a transgender man, well —” he corrected himself, “I define myself as transexual, but terminology’s not that important to me.”

Dario said revisiting the topic led him to create a Discord channel where users shared “vintage queer media,” largely yaoi/BL material. He estimates membership is around 40 percent trans. “But not just transmen. There are A LOT of transwomen,” he said, “we even have jokes like FTM meaning Female-to-Fujoshi and MTF meaning Male-to-Fujosh because it goes both ways. There’s something going on in yaoi that I can see now as an adult. There was an androgyny in all the works, there were not only masculine men but bishōnen.”

The term bishōnen literally translates as “beautiful boy.” But the aesthetic it describes is strictly androgynous, sometimes verging on the extreme. The character type is nearly ubiquitous in yaoi/BL but is rooted in kabuki theater. A close equivalent in Western culture would be the “beautiful boy” archetype deployed by art historian Camille Paglia in her book Sexual Personae to describe Adonis, St. Sebastian, Donatello’s David, and Dorian Grey, among others.

But those in the so-called yaoi-to-trans pipeline seem hardly interested in the androgynes of the Western canon. They prefer the Japanese bishōnen. Perhaps it's because teenagers prefer, as a general rule, comics and anime over Renaissance statues and Oscar Wilde novels. But there is another factor at play. The relative intensity of the bishōnen’s androgyny, compared to its Western equivalents, comes not merely from artistic choice but also from creative constraints. Particularly in earlier yaoi, Japanese obscenity laws necessitated the obfuscation — and sometimes even elimination — of genitalia. This absence and/or distortion of anatomically correct genitalia, Dario said, allowed people to “explore erotica in a way that takes away anxieties, specifically regarding genital dysphoria.” He later added that the androgyny of the characters — clothed or otherwise — allowed anyone to project themselves onto them.”

Nevertheless, Dario stressed at several points in the interview that the yaoi/BL fanbase today is much more diverse — i.e., more biological males are reading it, including ones perfectly comfortable with their sex — than is popularly acknowledged. Caveats aside, he is not alone in his conceptualization of yaoi/BL is a valid way for people to explore their identities. A tweet expressing virtually the same sentiment (and, in effect, acknowledging the same “pipeline”) garnered over 27,000 likes on Twitter (MLM or men-loving-men is yet another synonym for yaoi/BL).

I sent Dario Mondgreen’s article before the interview. Over DM before the interview, he told me, “None of these ideas are new, as an ‘elder’ (he used air quotes) in both anime circles and trans circles, these ideas have been present for decades.” He later elaborated, using his own experiences as a reference point:

It was at 25 that I decided to transition regardless and had completely forgotten about yaoi until I was sitting in a chair with a psychologist and I realized that [the source of] a lot of the shame that I had was because I had told myself that I was not trans, that I was only a fetishizer. These conversations were happening before the internet, in the 90s when people were exchanging VHS tapes with translations written on paper — when there were no online communities, where there was no trans-panic as there is now. These notions were already present because — if you research the discourse around yaoi happening around that time — they were present in the 70s and 80s in Japan. Ever since yaoi was a thing there have been people worrying about its effects on young women. In Japan, it was not only about them becoming transmen, but it was also about them becoming lesbians and tomboys — anything but a traditional woman. These anxieties were more attuned to the 80s — with less trans-panic — but it was mostly [the idea] that yaoi would make them “deviant” women — that’s where the connotation of “rotten” (fujoshi) comes from.

However, based on my conversations with people living in Japan, it seems that, unlike an increasing number of their Western counterparts, female fans of yaoi/BL in Japan may be “rotten women,” but they usually call themselves women nonetheless.

In an episode of the art podcast I’m So Popular, Tokyo-based American drag queen Zach Langley ChiChi, in conversation with a Japanese fujoshi friend, described frequently spotting “50 year-old ladies,” in the BL section.

“Yeah, yeah,” his fujoshi friend said.

Zach continued, “Its like ‘oh you like to see the boys do the —” he slaps the table a few times to mimic the sound of thrusting, “but they don’t think about, like, gay marriage or anything ever.”

I asked Zach and our mutual friend Nick, another American living in Tokyo, what they thought the difference between Japanese and Western yaoi/ BL fans was and whether they thought the yaoi-trans connection was mostly a Western phenomenon. Nick admitted that his understanding of the subculture was limited but said, “My feeling is that it’s normal girls and women who are maybe a bit too into male idol culture. I don’t think it’s necessarily something that is frowned upon like it would be in the states so you could have those interests and still be accepted by your friends and family. I would contrast that with the states where I feel like you almost necessarily have to be a little weird to really get into it.”

Zach said he agreed with Nick’s sentiments, saying, “Lots of relatively normal girls get into it here. Most of them do it in private.”

When I asked Dario why he thought the “yaoi-to-trans pipeline” was more a factor in the West than Japan, he rejected the premise, saying: “I don’t think it’s a bigger phenomena in the West than in Japan, since I don’t have data to compare. In my opinion, I would guess it’s around the same. Anti-fujoshi rhetoric in Japan has some similar anxieties, but not exclusively about FtM, and rather, in a wider sense of the fear of women rejecting traditional gender roles, including transness.”

If Dario is right and the yaoi-to-trans pipeline is just as relevant in Japan as it is in the West, this makes the elephant in the room smaller, but doesn’t cart it off to the zoo. The rise in transgender identification in the West is well documented, nearly doubling in recent years in the United States. Whether this increase can be attributed to broader awareness and acceptance of non-traditional gender identities or social contagion is at the heart of all trans discourse today, including the proposed yaoi-to-trans pipeline. Transmen like Dario, who have experience with the art form and are happy with their transitions, are inclined to see the pipeline as positive. “It’s very similar to saying that drag is a pipeline for being trans. It refers to [yaoi] being a space that allows for that kind of exploration,” he told me. 

The destransitioner who wrote that she believes her obsession with yaoi from an extremely young age left her unable to imagine herself as a woman in a relationship — only as a gay man — from the age of 12, likely thinks otherwise. 

Personally, I do not see these ideas as mutually exclusive. Dario, who is bisexual, was similarly obsessed with yaoi from a young age, but he is happy with his transition and clearly isn’t “only able to see himself as a gay man in a relationship” — he has a wife. I have no reason to doubt a redditor who went through the psychological pain of detransition, just as I have no reason to doubt the erudite 32-year-old transexual art curator with whom I spent hours of my weekend talking. I’m not sure it matters whether the conclusions young yaoi/BL readers come to are enlightening or damaging in the long run. People who have not even reached adolescence yet shouldn’t be consuming erotica of any kind — and preventing the consumption of age-inappropriate material is, as always, primarily the responsibility of parents.

In our conversations, Dario expressed a great deal of sympathy for de-transitioners. He emphasized the need for better psychological healthcare and alternatives for people experiencing dysphoria beyond the hormones and surgeries he ultimately decided were best for him, after utilizing several optional free sessions at a gender clinic’s psychologist's office in Barcelona. Helping people come to their own conclusions about whether or not to transition — medically, socially, or both — would be an improvement over the current state of things in the US, which sees hormones and surgeries as the sole course of treatment for gender dysphoria, and where, in some states, “conversion therapy” bans essentially require that therapists and psychiatrists affirm the gender identities of trans minors. This leaves little room for professionals to encourage their young patients to reflect on the causes and nature of their gender dysphoria and question whether or not transitioning is the answer. For example, if a psychologist suspects that their young patient might be adopting a transmasculine identity because they fear being labeled a fetishizer, having a frank discussion about that might be edifying.

Gender-questioning yaoi/BL readers might think that their obsession is enlightenment. They could be right or wrong. Imagine a 19-year-old yaoi fan who struts into a gender clinic with bound breasts, a new name, and new pronouns to tell a doctor with his full chest that he wants it gone. He might be motivated by a desire to look like the bishōnen he’s been watching, reading, and drawing since he was 10. Perhaps he will get the mastectomy only to realize in a few years with profound regret that beautiful boys are not beautiful forever in real life. Or, perhaps the same yaoi fixation was merely a medium in which he coped with deeply felt and innate gender dysphoria whose etiology is unrelated to bizarre Japanese subcultures; perhaps it is even neurological, and he will get the surgery and live the rest of his days a happy, actualized adult man. Both those who claim people know they’re trans “from the womb” and those inclined to think all trans identity is a byproduct of social contagion should be willing to accept that either of these possibilities is true.

-River Page