"it makes less practical sense even if it makes moral sense. People tend read them because of their fetish, not because they walk with their lesbian friend in the lgbt pride walk or something usually. "
That's new to me. I don't read yuri because it's a fetish but because I'm a lesbian, same reason why I write f/f content....
Again, it might not be that common on scribblehub, but there are plenty of f/f stories involving trans women even if you can't find them. And I do know from some of my other trans friends that there are yuri manga involving us as well. Not a lot but it exists.
Not sure why any of this means GL and BL should be the same genre? (I mean, they're both romance so they already kind of are anyway, but still). They've got different contents (love between women vs love between men) and it's not exactly uncommon for some people to like the one but not the other (I don't read BL for example). There's no logical or practical need for it.
it makes less practical sense even if it makes moral sense. People tend read them because of their fetish, not because they walk with their lesbian friend in the lgbt pride walk or something usually.
This is definitely wrong. While women certainly make up the majority of the BL fandom, and a great number of them are straight, that's by no means the same for the GL fandom. In may even be untrue for the BL fandom - we would need facts and figures.
First and foremost, the history of GL is very different from the history of BL. BL is said to have been started by and for women - but GL wasn't invented by men.
GL, as it exists in Japan, stems from a genre of fiction known as "Class S". These were stories depicting close, near-lesbian (or even true lesbian) friendships set in boarding schools that Japanese girls were attending at the time. It was written for and consumed by women, and had many queer ladies writing it.
The first yuri manga were by women for women, and yuri has expanded from there.
Unlike BL, yuri isn't tightly tied up with strict cliches like the seme/uke dynamic, and there's not one demographic that all yuri is designed for. Some are marketed as shoujo, some josei, some seinen... And all types are pretty widely read by all types of yuri fans.
Not all GL is smutty either (in fact, a majority of it isn't) and, even when it comes to porn, there's a range of options from fluffy romantic sex to bad quality hentai.
But can we prove the diversity of the GL fandom? Damn right we can!
In 2017, Comic Yuri Hime - one of the largest yuri magazines in Japan - conducted a survey of its readers and found that they were approximately 60% men and 40% women.
Verena Maser surveyed Japanese yuri fans as a whole and found that:
among 1,352 respondents, 52.4% identified as female, 46.1% were male, and 1.6% were “other.” ... 30% “non-heterosexual” females, 15.2% “heterosexual” females, 4.7% “non-heterosexual” males, 39.5% “heterosexual” males, and 1.2% “other” (9.4% of data did not apply to these categories).
She found that 47.2% were women, 44.3% were men, and 8.5% fit into neither category.
96% of the women were not straight, and 23.4% of men weren't.
There are similar results in our Yuri Garden's annual surveys. In the most recent, found here (https://forum.novelupdates.com/blogs/the-yuri-gardens-2020-survey-report.3437/), 73.7% of participants did not place themselves in the category of "men", 78.9% were LGBT+/had the potential to identify as LGBT+, and 10.5% of participants identified as transgender.
In relation to yuri porn, Zeria notes that
The plurality of people didn’t care about whether the works they read are pornographic or not, with people who read both but prefer non-pornographic works coming in just behind them. A fairly small proportion prefer pornographic works, followed by an even small proportion of people who only read non-pornographic works. While it got responses, basically no one only reads pornographic works. Perhaps somewhat surprisingly, there was no major difference between gender for this category. Guess everyone has a fairly equal interest in sex.
(Only 9.1% of respondents read both but preferred pornographic works, and only 0.6% only read pornographic works.)
When asked to pick between plot-focused yuri, romantic yuri, and sexy yuri in the Yuri Garden 2020 Survey, 100% of men who answered preferred plot-focused. Only 1 participant (8.3%) chose sexy yuri, and they were a woman.
Zeria also asked for everyone's favourite GL that year and arranged them in order of popularity and split by gender and sexuality.
"Kase-san" was everyone's favourite that year, barring straight men, for whom it came in second place, after the very dramatic "Girl Friends" by Milk Morinaga.
You can have a general scan of that list and see how alike everyone's tastes are.
So, from all of this, we can draw some pretty neat conclusions.
First: Next to nobody is reading GL just for a fetish. It's a myth.
Secondly: About 50% of the fandom, at minimum, are the people for whom Pride is marched in the first place. You are surrounded by queer people.
What's not practical about giving the queer community a truly queer experience?
will a yuri reader who is utterly against BL read a story of two transwomen? I don't think
in a practical sense, people may not like stories like that.
Secondly, you'd be surprised how popular the trans GL here on Scribble Hub is in the Yuri Garden. Kammi Ketu is on my to-read list because it was so strongly recommended to me by the Gardeners.
There are actually many beloved yuri with trans characters. Here's a list:
"Ayumi and Aika" - A heartwarming manga in which a woman's boyfriend comes out as a trans woman. Part 1 Part 2
"Childhood Friend Yuri" - A much-loved, no-text collection of shorts about two childhood friends who meet again and fall in love, with one of them having come out as a woman in the time they were apart.
"Joshi teki Seikatsu/Life as a Girl" - A short Japanese drama about a trans woman dealing with various crazy new occurrences in her life. She's a lesbian with a sort-of girlfriend.
"Mage & Demon Queen" - This one is a highly popular GL webcomic. The princess (and Velverosa's incompetent love "rival") is trans. She's a particularly lovable character, and the only people in the fandom who really have a problem with her are the people who don't like her because she's the "love rival".
"I Favor the Villainess" - An extremely popular GL novel which is been licensed in English.
The MC's best friend is in love with a trans woman, and the MC speaks about one of her old friends being a trans man.
"Cotton Candy Love" - Honestly a miserable, tragic oneshot manga, but it has a cute and wholsome subplot with a little trans girl.
"Band of Misfits" - A cute oneshot in which one of the MC's friends is non-binary.
As for BL, the very popular BL webcomic "Novae" has two trans characters: a trans woman who's a supporting character for the main plot, and a genderfluid (I think?) character who was Raziol's lover in the prequel. Both are loved by the readers (even though the latter's a bit of a fuckboy).
And, while there's not a lot of original BL content with trans men, you can find plenty of it in fandom.
In my most recent fandom, "Promare", there are a 106 BL fanfics where characters in the pairing are written as trans men.
Kingdom Hearts has 154 such works, just based on my shoddy clicking around (some could easily be excluded here; I don't know a lot of the characters).
Basically, GL and BL with trans characters are not just welcome, they're being actively sought. People wanna read this stuff.
and it's not exactly uncommon for some people to like the one but not the other (I don't read BL for example). There's no logical or practical need for it.
Its getting conflicting here, not sure you will support a GL story if it has a biological male phallus in it. what i mean is transwomen. Sure they can get surgeries and stuff too, but if they don't...
See, what i mean is as simple as that.
and well those are your opinions, i read both gl and Bl and among the decent ones, i find them similar. There is no need for war and a huge conflict among the two fandoms in my opinion
And sure I am a straight ass person with a straight ass bf and hence you can take my words with a grain of salt because these are straight ass opinions by a person who doesn't even like straight stories >.> Oh well. I don't read bl or gl for education. I read it as support, sure.
This is definitely wrong. While women certainly make up the majority of the BL fandom, and a great number of them are straight, that's by no means the same for the GL fandom. In may even be untrue for the BL fandom - we would need facts and figures.
First and foremost, the history of GL is very different from the history of BL. BL is said to have been started by and for women - but GL wasn't invented by men.
GL, as it exists in Japan, stems from a genre of fiction known as "Class S". These were stories depicting close, near-lesbian (or even true lesbian) friendships set in boarding schools that Japanese girls were attending at the time. It was written for and consumed by women, and had many queer ladies writing it.
The first yuri manga were by women for women, and yuri has expanded from there.
Unlike BL, yuri isn't tightly tied up with strict cliches like the seme/uke dynamic, and there's not one demographic that all yuri is designed for. Some are marketed as shoujo, some josei, some seinen... And all types are pretty widely read by all types of yuri fans.
Not all GL is smutty either (in fact, a majority of it isn't) and, even when it comes to porn, there's a range of options from fluffy romantic sex to bad quality hentai.
But can we prove the diversity of the GL fandom? Damn right we can!
In 2017, Comic Yuri Hime - one of the largest yuri magazines in Japan - conducted a survey of its readers and found that they were approximately 60% men and 40% women.
Verena Maser surveyed Japanese yuri fans as a whole and found that:
She found that 47.2% were women, 44.3% were men, and 8.5% fit into neither category.
96% of the women were not straight, and 23.4% of men weren't.
There are similar results in our Yuri Garden's annual surveys. In the most recent, found here (https://forum.novelupdates.com/blogs/the-yuri-gardens-2020-survey-report.3437/), 73.7% of participants did not place themselves in the category of "men", 78.9% were LGBT+/had the potential to identify as LGBT+, and 10.5% of participants identified as transgender.
In relation to yuri porn, Zeria notes that
(Only 9.1% of respondents read both but preferred pornographic works, and only 0.6% only read pornographic works.)
When asked to pick between plot-focused yuri, romantic yuri, and sexy yuri in the Yuri Garden 2020 Survey, 100% of men who answered preferred plot-focused. Only 1 participant (8.3%) chose sexy yuri, and they were a woman.
Zeria also asked for everyone's favourite GL that year and arranged them in order of popularity and split by gender and sexuality.
"Kase-san" was everyone's favourite that year, barring straight men, for whom it came in second place, after the very dramatic "Girl Friends" by Milk Morinaga.
You can have a general scan of that list and see how alike everyone's tastes are.
So, from all of this, we can draw some pretty neat conclusions.
First: Next to nobody is reading GL just for a fetish. It's a myth.
Secondly: About 50% of the fandom, at minimum, are the people for whom Pride is marched in the first place. You are surrounded by queer people.
What's not practical about giving the queer community a truly queer experience?
Secondly, you'd be surprised how popular the trans GL here on Scribble Hub is in the Yuri Garden. Kammi Ketu is on my to-read list because it was so strongly recommended to me by the Gardeners.
There are actually many beloved yuri with trans characters. Here's a list:
"Ayumi and Aika" - A heartwarming manga in which a woman's boyfriend comes out as a trans woman. Part 1 Part 2
"Childhood Friend Yuri" - A much-loved, no-text collection of shorts about two childhood friends who meet again and fall in love, with one of them having come out as a woman in the time they were apart.
"Joshi teki Seikatsu/Life as a Girl" - A short Japanese drama about a trans woman dealing with various crazy new occurrences in her life. She's a lesbian with a sort-of girlfriend.
"Mage & Demon Queen" - This one is a highly popular GL webcomic. The princess (and Velverosa's incompetent love "rival") is trans. She's a particularly lovable character, and the only people in the fandom who really have a problem with her are the people who don't like her because she's the "love rival".
"I Favor the Villainess" - An extremely popular GL novel which is been licensed in English.
The MC's best friend is in love with a trans woman, and the MC speaks about one of her old friends being a trans man.
"Cotton Candy Love" - Honestly a miserable, tragic oneshot manga, but it has a cute and wholsome subplot with a little trans girl.
"Band of Misfits" - A cute oneshot in which one of the MC's friends is non-binary.
As for BL, the very popular BL webcomic "Novae" has two trans characters: a trans woman who's a supporting character for the main plot, and a genderfluid (I think?) character who was Raziol's lover in the prequel. Both are loved by the readers (even though the latter's a bit of a fuckboy).
And, while there's not a lot of original BL content with trans men, you can find plenty of it in fandom.
In my most recent fandom, "Promare", there are a 106 BL fanfics where characters in the pairing are written as trans men.
Kingdom Hearts has 154 such works, just based on my shoddy clicking around (some could easily be excluded here; I don't know a lot of the characters).
Basically, GL and BL with trans characters are not just welcome, they're being actively sought. People wanna read this stuff.
Its getting conflicting here, not sure you will support a GL story if it has a biological male phallus in it. what i mean is transwomen. Sure they can get surgeries and stuff too, but if they don't...
See, what i mean is as simple as that.
and well those are your opinions, i read both gl and Bl and among the decent ones, i find them similar. There is no need for war and a huge conflict among the two fandoms in my opinion
It's not clear whether this is hetero (a trans man and a trans woman), or an out trans woman with a more closeted or less feminine trans woman. There are good arguments for both.
However, it was shared on Dynasty Scans and various other yuri groups under the belief that it was the latter, and it was well liked.
Trans x trans has already received positive feedback by the community.
Its getting conflicting here, not sure you will support a GL story if it has a biological male phallus in it. what i mean is transwomen. Sure they can get surgeries and stuff too, but if they don't...
Perhaps I am, and sorry for that, but I always assumed people didn't like BL because it's two (biological) male. (Well I don't mean the rapey stories, they deserve it)
Though inspite of all these debate I do agree that we need more trans stories. And I don't mind which genre they fall under, I am just afraid of potential hate, I tend to think in negative terms... Sorry...
Perhaps I am, and sorry for that, but I always assumed people didn't like BL because it's two (biological) male. (Well I don't mean the rapey stories, they deserve it)
There are a lot of straight men who won't read BL because they don't like men and don't want to read a completely men-focused romance. Some of them may forget about trans men and say, "I don't want to see another peepee, lol". But I doubt that they'd suddenly read a BL just because the two characters had vaginas instead.
There are many people who like futa but who don't like BL.
Also, there's "Love DNA XXX", a yuri manga which focuses on a group of cis women who are forced to look and act like men. Can be found here: https://dynasty-scans.com/series/love_dna_xx
It's apparently supposed to be social commentary about how stupid gender roles are but, without that knowledge ahead of time, plenty of yuri fans dislike this because it's almost identical to reading BL.
In general, I wouldn't solely blame the bodies that cis men have for people not liking BL. That's much less of an issue than people like to think.
(Not to mention that there are many gay/bi/pan men who don't like BL because it's heteronormative.)
Regarding the genitals thing: even if two characters have penises, if they're both girls, as far as I'm concerned they're girls and its GL, not BL. There are definitely people who get repulsed by seeing penises in any depiction of sex between women, but they're certainly not a majority from what I can tell, especially if the character is explicitly trans. But hey, for full disclosure, I'm a trans woman so perhaps that skews my view, though considering the stuff moonpearl posted I doubt it.
I haven't really looked at the forums in the last few weeks so I'm sorry for jumping in on this so late and pulling it back up but I wanted to add a thought or two to these two statements:
Honestly, I can see where you're coming from with that. BL does often work with a lot of stereotypes (as most romance does, I'd almost want to say).
Funnily enough (in terms of these two statements, of course, it's not funny in regards to the actual problem), rape and sexual harassment are happening quite a lot in the gay community and there are actually parts of the community that don't see any problem with that because apparently if you get drugged and raped you're at least attractive so you don't have anything to complain about.
Actually, just take a look at the reaction even heterosexual men get for telling their stories of being sexually harassed, abused, or raped. They're very often laughed at and belittled because apparently men want it all the time anyway so it couldn't even be rape in the first place. So in a sense, BL is - unfortunately - very much depicting a problem that exists in real life.
In the same vein, the heteronormative approach of having almost exclusively tops and bottoms that @Moonpearl mentioned is in parts problematic because it does portray the community in a very limited way. On the other hand, I have also seen some people in the community complain that these days, they feel they can't openly state even if they want to exclusively top/bottom because there's just such a push for leaving heteronormative norms behind us and embracing their sexuality. Which ... well, they do. They just like it a specific way which should be alright.
So, having characters in BL that do exclusively top/bottom isn't actually wrong. It's just that there are currently just not enough vers characters to show the whole width of possible relationship scenarios. I think we're slooooowly getting there though with more content being published.
I also think that depending on what exactly you read, there are lots of things you can actually learn about the community and everything having to do with it. There were already stories with trans characters mentioned in this thread and I'd like to throw in that there are definitely some BL stories out there with gay aspec characters, for example, and the struggles that they face (I don't know any on SH apart from my own but I know there are some on Tapas, although quite a few are comics, not novels). It's another part of the community that you can get to know by reading BL and I have actually seen people comment that they never read a story with an ace character before or didn't even know it existed so I'd dare say there is quite a lot BL can teach us.
It could be that you don't necessarily see what's "educational" about those stories if you're straight and maybe don't know much about the community. Like, if you don't have anything to do with the community itself, you won't recognize that the portrayed harassment/rape is a problem in the community as well even if it was written well. So I think that this "educational" part is in there even if it's not the main goal of the story. Because evidently, if there is a story dealing with non-het and/or non-cis characters, I'm pretty sure that there will be at least a small bit of information about that in there even if it's just in the way the characters are faced with others or even each other. This might be more prominent the further you stray from the mainstream path of what's at the top of the popular stories and maybe you'll need to read a bit between the lines but it's definitely there. It's maybe just in the smaller things.
