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All I know is that my friend was doing a rotation in child psychology and whenever one of her patients was a teenage boy who was having gender issues, she would think "so he's autistic and spends all his time playing Minecraft and watching anime". And she was always right.
I don't know why watching anime seems to set so many people on the trans pipeline, I just know that it does. I know that being trans and watching anime both have very large overlaps with autism (in both boys and girls). I also know that there is an awful lot of hentai which depicts extremely feminine and sexualised women who also have very large penises, which perhaps instils in teenaged boys unrealistic expectations for how their own transition will go.
Autism causes watching anime because the sensory interpretive circuits in the brain don't work the same way.
I suspect it's being autistic, not the anime-watching, that causes the susceptibility to transsexualism; I saw anime as a kid, of course, but I hadn't gotten into hentai, or started downloading anime, when I went GID.
Surely the type of anime plays some effect? I don't think that standard shonen battle animes like Dragonball, Demon Slayer, Naruto, etc. are making people trans, or encouraging them at all. But there's a particular subset of anime that really plays up the "girls are so cute!" schtick. And another, smaller niche that really delves into genderbending stuff in a way that most western media avoids.
I don't think we even know there's a correlation between anime-watching and transsexualism after controlling for the obvious confounder of autism (if you have evidence there is, I'm all ears). No point reaching for hypotheses to explain something until you know whether there's something to explain - especially not when you're thinking of reaching for a notorious false friend like the Jack Thompson argument.
This feels like one of those things where you're like "you got a source for that?" and i'm like "isn't it obvious? There's tons of examples all over the internet!" and you're like "yeah but none of those is an official peer-reviewed source (TM) so it doesn't count!" and the argument dies down into nit-picking.
This isn't about credentials. This is the third-variable problem: if A and B are correlated, then either A causes B, B causes A, or something else C causes both A and B.
I'm willing to take at face value that there's a correlation between anime-watching and transsexualism. But we already know that there is a third variable that causes both of these - autistics tend to like anime due to how our sensory processing works, and we tend to be susceptible to going trans although I'm not certain of why. (There's another obvious confounding third variable, now that I think about it; young people are more exposed to anime due to globalisation, and also are more exposed to pro-trans messaging due to greater Internet use and the rise of SJ.)
If the correlation is fully explained by causation from third variables, then there's no need to hunt for reasons A might cause B because it doesn't cause B. Folamh3's friend's noticed correlation was the preponderance of all four of teenage/autistic/anime/trans, which is totally consistent with "autism and youth tend to cause both anime-watching and transsexualism". If you have evidence that autism and youth do not fully explain the correlation between anime-watching and transsexualism, then yes, time to look for more complex explanations. Until then, there's nothing to explain.
(To give an example: Lung cancer is correlated with peripheral vascular disease. Neither causes the other. The correlation is because smoking causes both lung cancer and peripheral vascular disease, so an unusually-large fraction of the people with one are heavy smokers who are also at high risk of the other.)
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Who doesn't play Minecraft and watch anime? These were the default hobbies of the older zoomers.
Is anime that popular among older zoomers? I would've thought the default form of non-interactive entertainment among older zoomers would be American TV shows or streaming.
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It isn't just futa hentai, there's also a disturbing trend with non-sexual yuri (lesbian) stuff.
It attracts boys and failsons who are struggling to be men, feeds them "cute girls doing cute things with other cute girls", barrages them with anti-male propaganda, and sorts them into toxic groomer communities.
Do you remember that famous Tumblr post that went "for all my lovely trans-girls who need to hear this: you do not have the Male Gaze, you cannot Sexually Objectify women, your love is Pure, you are not Gross for looking at women because you are not a man"? Millions of poor boys who fell into the manga/anime tumblr-sphere grew blasted by a firehose of that shit, usually backed up by groomer teachers.
Tumbler's long past its peak now, but the scene has mostly moved to discord, where kid-games-for-autist servers have softcore porn and roleplay channels, and being "queer" gives predators total immunity to rules.
Those communities were actually a lot worse than the porn ones, because A) they didn't exclude minors, B) they enabled predators who pulled the "heckin wholesome trans-girl egg-hatcher uwu" act, and C) got a ton of institutional support from e.g. school librarians trying to bait kids into reading "queer affirming comics' (you can see endless examples of this on librarian reddit)
Source: I knew people in Yuri manga translation, and saw the browser history of a few boys who were getting their first porn from /r/egg_irl reddit predators they met on minecraft discords.
And I know far less about it, but I'm confident there's an equivalent "boys love" pipeline for girls. They're all the same types of awkward weeb girls who read that stuff back when I was in school, but now with support from teachers who groom them into "oh you must be a boy if you like reading about boys so much. Let's get you a haircut and some jeans but don't tell your parents tee hee"
TL;DR if you have a kid who spends too much time on the PC and has started reading weird tranny-adjacent stuff, literally just check his discord account. It's an invasion of privacy, I know, but a potentially lifesaving one. And of course if you see anything furry, it's too late.
Yeah, I have no idea why men would ever latch onto a movement that tells them that. Maybe I was wrong about the trans-feeders: you take any alt-right figure and make him incapable of directly saying women are at fault for this, and I think "just claim you're a woman, then you'll be allowed to act fucking normal" is what comes out.
Maybe the trans-feeders were directionally correct about men needing to be less accommodating. Shame they can't use any of it if they go all the way into eunuchry.
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You'll get that if you interact with the fandom. But as for the works themselves, a lot of yuri anime/manga will strenuously avoid depicting or even mentioning men as much as possible. The recent Mahou Shoujo ni Akogarete for example appeared to take place in a world entirely without men. This was never an explicit plot point and no one in the show ever pointed it out. There were simply... no men, anywhere in the world, as though it were taking place in a parallel universe that had just always been that way. Is it anti-male propaganda if you simply ignore men entirely?
I didn't particularly like the show (made it 4eps before dropping), but the English "community" around it is the perfect example of everything in that post.
Just looked the series up on reddit, check out /r/yuri_memes and users like /u/CuteNervousLesbian for what I mean. Literally has the "umm yikes men have the gross male gaze, unlike wholesome me wanting to fuck them with my heckin girlcock" thing. Just impossibly creepy 30+ year old men grooming kids on reddit.
English "nerd" communities have poisoned a lot of media for me. Thank God most of my actual hobbies gatekeep creeps like that.
Is the show itself to blame? Not sure where I fall on that. Depends on the intent of the authors I suppose, which I don't have much insight into.
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Is it racist if there are no people of race X in the work?
I certainly don’t think so!
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Yeah, it's not the works themselves but the surrounding culture which the works are an escape from.
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My sons used to play Minecraft (and Fortnite, and currently Mariocart or some soccer game) and also watch anime. They're like most boys their age in Japan. If there were something in these that were correlated to being trans, I'd have expected it to have manifested more clearly by now. Your friend doing child psychology rotations may have noticed a trend with "western" kids, but that, as has been said, is probably correlation rather than any kind of causal mechanism. Even within anime there are many, many styles and genre, and just as many in manga if not more. (Manga = print or otherwise cel-based drawn 2D comics, and Anime cartoons, in other words moving, as the term animation suggests.)
I don't think there are any good stats on this, but most estimates of trans people in the population put it at around 0.5% or less. If anime increased the likelihood of identifying as trans to just 0.75%, that would represent a gigantic increase in likelihood while still making it vanishingly unlikely that any given anime fan is trans or even seems trans.
I do buy into the theory that whatever correlation exists is due to them being both downstream of autism, though.
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I'm assuming neither of your sons is autistic or on the spectrum?
Not that I've noticed.
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I think it's correlation rather than causation. i.e. I think both are caused by some underlying independent cognitive/personality trait. I was having sexual fantasies about being a woman years before I started watching anime or interacting with the online anime community (and certainly long before I knew what futa was!).
I can certainly agree though that both autistic and trans people are overrepresented among anime fans and in other adjacent socially reclusive hobbies.
A futa for those not aware, is short for futanari referring to a character with male and female physical characteristics, usually female anatomy and male genitalia.
Futa is futatsu or two. Nari seems to be derived from naru or 成る "to become". Futanari is therefore "dual form" or similar. It is not the accepted term for "hermaphrodite" but has a similar meaning. It's mostly an anime term.
Like most Japanese terms futanari gets shortened by the Japanese. I guess those extra two mora are just too much.
And more specifically/notably, hyper-exaggerated female physical characteristics (and also hyper-exaggerated dicks). Futa without these things is rare (though more generally that is what traps are, and why "draw a girl call it a boy" is a standard criticism of that subject matter).
I think that's the result of them starring in Japanese cartoon pornography, where almost everyone has hyper-exaggerated female/male physical characteristics (or they look suspiciously underdeveloped).
Honestly, no, not really.
Non-dickgirls do have slightly exaggerated proportions, but there’s a lot more variety there. By contrast futa tends to universally be much more exaggerated than that.
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Seeing a clarification like this in the comments feed makes me dread scrolling down to see the context of why it was necessary. Good job.
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