Talk:Makoto Chano/@comment-7155189-20160304005957

Heyo! My name's Ivan. I'm not the person who made that edit earlier, but I am aware of the situation. I ask you hear me out.

To begin with, I'm a trans person myself, and in an ideal world trans people would be allowed to handle this conversation and draw their own conclusions (having them respected), but I'm willing to accept that that's not going to be possible without a hopefully friendly discussion between the people involved in this wiki and, well, me, at least. That's fine, as long as it can happen.

Moving on to the next point, in my experience with trans people in manga, authors typically do not handle it in the most respectful of ways. Not that that's out of malice! Rather, it's about ignorance/not knowing how to handle such topics. It is my genuine best guess that the meaning of the author's statement was that Chano was meant to identify more as a boy (to the author, that likely meant crossdressing, to me, that means trans - either way, I think it's a likely interpretation and I personally have yet to hear of any other) but it was scrapped as an idea for being troublesome. If my interpretation of the original intent is close, "troublesome" probably means that the author was unsure of how to handle such a topic and decided to scrap it to avoid possible criticism. Personally, I don't see that as lazy, more of cautious, but I was very disappointed that the idea was scrapped still.

So, it's as likely as not you disagree with my interpretation. Being as nobody has asked the author, my word certainly isn't concrete and could be criticized by people who don't agree. I considered this, and I think a compromise is possibly in order. After all, I know of many trans people who are irritated at the wiki, so it's not just a one time problem. Here's my proposal: We change the pronouns for Chano in this article to "they/them" (as a singular gender neutral pronoun, they was recognized as 2015 word of the year, so there can be no complaint about grammar errors. It's not.) and, possibly, change his gender to "ambiguous (possibly a transgender man)". It's not what I would like, it's probably not what you would like, but if we can agree on it it'll probably shut everyone up.

I'm going to go ahead and change his pronouns to they/them for the article - I know it's forward of me but it's not like you can't change it back if you really can't stand the idea - and leave his gender alone. Maybe you can reply to this and we can discuss what to do from here? I'm betting this kind of discussion is one you were anticipating but didn't really want to have, so I'm gonna try to make it easy for everybody if you're willing :9