This post is a discussion of Shou Arai’s manga, “At 30, I Realized I Had No Gender.” However, feel free to just answer the question in the title if you’re not interested. I’m wondering if anyone here transitioned in their 30’s or 40 plus.
Shou Arai is an intersex person from Japan who is somewhat well-known in the local queer scene. Arai lived the first 30 years of his life as a woman before transitioning into a man. I’ll be using he/him pronouns to describe Arai, as those are the ones he uses in the manga. The LGBT movement in Japan is obviously different than it is in the West, so some terminology doesn’t fit exactly. Arai is physically intersex, having physical characteristics of both sexes. He is also described as trans, non-binary, or agender at times; however, in this case agender is translated from something that more closely resembles “between genders.” Having read the manga, I personally feel that the term agender doesn’t really fit in the Western sense, and I believe the title is more in reference to “I am without gender because society doesn’t have a name for people with genders like me” rather than a true absence of gender.
Like Poppy Pesuyama, Arai considers himself a manga essayist. This means that the manga is primarily expository rather than narratively driven. Unlike Pesuyama, who wove their exposition into an overarching narrative, Arai foregoes narrative all together. Instead, each chapter of the manga is based on a topic or anecdote. Some chapters are even just Q&A sessions with other queer people. Often times, Arai is just giving practical advice about being queer. Despite the title of the manga, Arai actually wrote it when he was nearing 50 years of age, so he 30 years of female experience and about 20 of male experience by that time. Quite a veteran queer!
Here’s a list of the topics he covers:
As you can see, the majority of the manga is devoted to aging while queer, which is why I was drawn to it. Frankly, I think some of the advice that Arai gives might be a bit antiquated, but he is real af. I think that some of the chapters were hard to read for me not because the subject matter or presentation is heavy but because he clearly voices a lot of the small things we worry about when aging and queer. In particular, the chapters “If I had aged a woman” or “Is it impossible to be a young girl” are a little rough if, like me, you’re transitioning late in life. Other chapters just discuss aging in general like body measurements, choosing glasses, facial sagging, or having a big head lol. In general, he’ll discuss an issue and then provide a way to try to mitigate it or think about it differently, and he’s always real about what’s actually achievable.
The manga is a real grab bag of tough thoughts, which I’m gonna list here:
mild dysphoria
Having smile lines, growing unwanted facial hair, trying to manage your aging so people don’t just identify you as male, wishing you had transitioned sooner so you would’ve had better skincare, being jealous of people who started hormones early, having no memories of being young in the gender you want, being easier to present masculine when you’re older, having a weird mismatched body, using clothing to present femme but feeling dysphoria when you take them off and see your masculine body, changing your clothing style just so people identify you correctly, having a non-binary heart while still presenting in a binary manner, confusing looking femme with looking young, getting too old for sex, and many, many more!
Overall, I think that the manga is rather formalistically boring. There’re really no characters, and the art is fairly basic, so there’s nothing really to latch onto. Unlike other queer manga I’ve read, this one didn’t really move me; however, I think it’s bursting with important and helpful content, so it’s worth a read if any of this interests you.
personal dysphoria
To be honest, despite the fact that it’s really light, I found myself quite bothered by a lot of it. For me, a lot of my dysphoria comes more from my age than my gender. I’m closer to 40 than 30 these days (much older than Arai when he transitioned), and sometimes I can’t help but think I’m a man playing dress up or that I missed my window to transition or that I’m going through some midlife crisis to make me look younger. I also acknowledge that there’s more to being trans and queer than being pretty, and a lot of transfemmes are really obsessed with youth and beauty, and then I just feel guilty for boiling down gender to being pretty. Anyway, I know all of these things aren’t true, and it’s just societal ideas that I’ve internalized that are causing me dysphoria. I can’t help thinking it would be easier to just age male, though. I wish I had the awareness that kids nowadays get, but back in my day (at least where I lived), trans literally wasn’t a thing. We had no language or conception of it. In fact, I’m remembering now that when I came out to my wife while bawling, I kept repeating, “I just didn’t know we could do this [transition]” >.>
Anyway, I wanna hear from the younglings too, but this post is for the geezers like me. Have any kind words? 
I had “the realization” when I was about 40, and then started dabbling in DIY HRT when I was 41 and had to go back off of it within about three months because of health issues. I went back on DIY (via a less problematic approach) just before I turned 43, and I’ve been at it ever since. Since then, I have definitely developed femme waist/hip/chest proportions compared to before, but body hair growth is as bad as ever, and home IPL zappers only do so much. Ravages of testosterone exposure, I guess.
I still present as masc because I don’t feel safe to come out publicly while living where I do; I absolutely do not want to jeopardize my job or get assaulted by local CHUDs. Apparently the baggy t-shirt + MILF jeans combo isn’t cutting it anymore though, because I may have been clocked by a 7 year old. It’s possible that the little shit has just never seen an aging metalhead with long hair, but it’s still pretty fucking jarring when a kid just looks at you and blurts out, “ARE YOU A BOY OR A GIRL?” before hearing your voice.
Wall 'o Text/disjointed infodump
This is my experience to a T. A large part of it was never possessing the vocabulary to articulate what I felt deep down, but I think some of it was also quite literally beaten out of me by my teenage uncles when I was little. It got to the point that I hid those thoughts and images from myself and buried them so deep that it took decades to de-program that latent trauma response.
Maybe it’s the [extremely probable] undiagnosed autism/AuDHD, but I was always an outcast as a kid, was constantly bullied, and never felt comfortable around the overwhelming majority of boys in my age group. That said, I really don’t feel like I ever fit the mold of the “I ALWAYS KNEW I WAS A LIL’ GIRL TRAPPED IN A MALE BODY” stereotype that medical gatekeepers treated as a requirement back in the 80s, 90s, and 00s, so it’s not like I could have medically transitioned or even gotten on puberty blockers if I had possessed the vocabulary. (And if your lived experience meshes with that “stereotype,” that’s fine! You’re valid!) All I knew at the time was that I always felt a little “off” and, after puberty, always had this low-level sense of being grossed out by my own body.
Looking back, I wonder if it would have changed anything if I had known why I always felt so out of place and why I had so many self-destructive and self-sabotaging impulses well into my 30s, or if it would have been a case of being able to identify the issue with no path available toward resolving it. That being said, even just getting on HRT the past several years has done me a world of good psychologically. I can look in the mirror without disassociating, so that’s something.
I definitely vibe with the stuff about agonizing over picking out eyeglasses, but I’d like to add another: hair styles for the low-key boymoder, and learning to love your frizzy gray streaks.
I am beyond human comprehension
Jokes aside, it’s better to be safe, I grew up in a fairly conservative place. I also got bullied and alienated when younger too. I also mostly knew about trans people from the few snippets I’d see on TV or I remember watching the Crying Game when it came out… so that’s when I had some idea of who I was or at least… I got it then but I knew from around 8 I wasn’t “normal” in the typical cis sense
Big oof, jokes about that film (and the ending to Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, which is itself a lazy Crying Game reference) are about the level of exposure that I had growing up. And maybe Silence of the Lambs. Not exactly ringing endorsements of embracing one’s non-cisgendered identity, lol
I remember from around age 5 or 6 always wanting to grow out my hair, but my mom and grandparents always threatened me: if I ever actually did it, my uncles would hold me down and shave my head. When I was 12, my mom actually did completely shave my head in the summer in a misguided attempt to treat a chronic skin condition. Someone got me on video tape back then, and I absolutely could not recognize myself in the video footage that they shot at whatever family gathering that was. It was to the point where hearing my own voice come out of that was enough to make me feel physically ill.
As for that little kid, he’s the son of a CHUD from a CHUD part of a mostly-CHUD town in a CHUD state that is among the worst in the nation for LGBTQ rights, anti-trans legislation, and hate crimes. I expect absolutely nothing, and yet I am still disappointed. I really need to get myself and my family out of here.
I’m so sorry that happened to you comrade, thats such intense and unfair way to treat anyone, especially a child