There are so many falsehoods perpetrated about what it means to be transgender, so many scare tactics employed by people who fear those who are different, that it’s important to highlight any authentic own-voices narratives that are published. My Journey to Her by Yūna Hirasawa is one such book. Hirasawa’s single-volume autobiographical manga discusses her decision to undergo gender-affirming bottom surgery in Thailand, frankly discussing the steps she went through, the procedures themselves, and the hoops she had to jump through to have her gender legally acknowledged upon her return home to Japan.
If this sounds like a lot, it is. There’s no getting around the fact that Hirasawa went through some harrowing experiences, but a major strength of the book is that it’s not about wallowing. Hirasawa acknowledges that things weren’t always easy, but ultimately her story is one of reaffirming who she is. Unlike a lot of similar narratives, this isn’t about the anguish, coming out, or transphobia. That’s not to say those things aren’t present, but they aren’t the point.
That said, this book may absolutely make you squirm. One of the things I most enjoyed is how open Hirasawa is about her surgical procedures. For her, bottom surgery was something that, at the time of the book’s publication in 2016, was required for a legal gender change in Japan. As of July of 2024, things may be beginning to change on that front, with a court in Hiroshima ruling that requiring bottom surgery may be unconstitutional. But in 2016, she needed to have at least the cosmetic appearance of a vagina, although Hirasawa opted for a vaginoplasty that would result in a functional vaginal canal.
As you may guess, the process of turning a penis into a vagina is intense. Hirasawa gives a detailed explanation using sausage, tofu, and a bean curd pouch with quail eggs for illustrative (and presumably ratings-related) purposes. It’s fascinating, and absolutely a marker of how far modern medicine has come, with Hirasawa able to make decisions about which form of vaginoplasty she wanted and how long she wanted her vagina to be. (Reminder that the vagina is the interior; the exterior is the labia, with the whole area being the vulva.) Hirasawa’s choice of surgery uses a piece of the intestinal tract to form a vagina that can self-lubricate, and her honesty about why this was important to her is part of what makes this a good book. Hirasawa doesn’t shy away from using real words for body parts rather than couching things in euphemisms, and if she uses food to illustrate, it’s only the thinnest of censor-blocking veils so that she can adequately explain things to her readers.
Although it is not the point, there’s a lot in Hirasawa’s discussions of her first weeks as a vagina owner that may resonate with cisgender women. Aftercare involves dilation, the insertion of a rod so that the new vagina (regarded as a wound by the body) remains intact. The pain Hirasawa describes sounds horribly familiar, like a terrible pap smear or any gynecological procedure if you have a tight hymenal band or another hymenal condition, some of which are treated with dilation. Hirasawa also describes some of the urinary issues she experiences, which may be at least a little familiar to cis women who have had postnatal urinary retention. Although the cause isn’t the same, the discomfort is, and it’s important to talk about these issues, no matter whether you’re cis or trans, not only medically, but because it helps to realize that we’re all just people and that bodies can be weird and painful.
For some readers, the sheer invasive nature of what Hirasawa is required to go through to be legally recognized as a woman will be upsetting. She is required to undergo multiple genital examinations, not as part of her actual surgery, but to confirm that she does, in fact, have female genitals. She needs two separate diagnoses of gender dysphoria, still (as of the book’s writing) commonly referred to as gender identity disorder in Japan, which pathologizes gender identity. While everyone she meets in Thailand is supportive of her, she briefly notes that people in Japan are not, although her siblings and sister-in-law all go out of their way to let her know that they love her and support her decision. Even though Hirasawa glosses over these issues, choosing instead to focus on clinical details and her happiness with her choices, they are still present in the text. This leads her to ask, at the end of the book, what gender even is, and to wonder why society places so much value on it, specifically in a binary sense.
That, I feel, is what Hirasawa wants us to take from the book. While she was able to afford the trip to Thailand and the expensive procedures, not everyone could. She’s happy with her decisions, but she can make them. At one point a nurse in Thailand, who had learned Japanese from watching One Piece and The Seven Deadly Sins, is shocked that there would be prejudice against trans people in the land of Shounen Jump, whose stories she equates with love and friendship above all else. Hirasawa doesn’t quite know what to say (apart from being bemused), but again, maybe that’s the point. These decisions should be personal and nobody’s business, but that’s not the world we live in. Hirasawa was able to do what was best for her, despite the obstacles in her way. The question she poses to us is whether everyone will be so fortunate.
