Talk:Luka Urushibara/@comment-67.166.14.140-20190319165227/@comment-29853679-20190319173901

>Honestly, there are points that that Pika person was correct, and a few others pointed it out, that sociologists and many psychologist generally accept that gender is a social construct (eg: what to wear, how to act), and sex is a biological construct. However, even sex doesn't fully match up as 100% binary (eg: intersex/hermaphrodite are a testament to this). Overall, while it may be acceptable to say what the author says as truth, it also completely miscontrues the overall sociological impact of what the writer did.

I'm not going to go into a debate on whether or not this is the case in humans, since, quite frankly, it's irrelevant to the case about Luka.

>One could say that Luka is, by all accounts of sociological study, trans across the worldline. While it does mearly state they physicially changed due to a worldline change, Luka's character themselves states they feel they should be female. That is the feeling that a trans person would have. Regardless of how that change was made, they requested the change while male. It didn't change the personality of the character. It didn't change the look. They merely changed from one to the other.

Until you consider the context where the request was made. The request wasn't made because he truly felt like he wanted to be a girl, as is clarified later in the VN, it's clarified that it's because he has feelings for Okabe, that he doesn't feel would be accepted as a guy. As Kurisu said: Okabe raised a romance flag.

If you want to read further on this, see Steiner's answer on Ask.fm that goes into a lot of the same things I'm going into in this comment: https://ask.fm/SciADV/answers/134817454903

>Okabe's "Reading Steiner" would be a mental disorder

It is. Read Steins;Gate 0. Well, an illness regardless. Same with Gigalomania in the ChäoS; franchise. Same with the stuff going on in Robotics;Notes. This is not a theory, but directly confirmed within each game (although in the case of Gigalomania and Reading Steiner, it was only expanded to be clarified as such in ChäoS;Child and Steins;Gate 0 respectively). Before any arguments about mental illnesses and respect for them is brought up, I'll add that I myself am (profesionally, not self) diagnosed with autism.

>Ultimately, by many sociological standards Luka would be classified as trans. And that isn't really a bad thing. Luka is Luka, after all, regardless of worldlines. Same as you or I, really.

Honestly was hoping the general community was a lot better about handling the discussion of that sort of thing, maybe it's just this article's comments, but it is disappointing to say the least.

Except Luka continues to use masculine pronouns even after his supposed gender change? Prior to the gender change, he also goes out of his way to correct people about his gender (as in, clarifying he's a guy when people mistook him for a girl)?

We also need to take the time the game was written into account. It was written during 2009. The focus on transgender  issues wasn't really much of a thing back then. Especially not in Japan, which is generally quite a bit more conservative than the west. Thus, it probably wasn't the focus when writing the game either. They, too, have had plenty of chances to remedy this and change it up. They could have done it with the release of the 0 game, the movie, the OVAs, the 0 anime and Elite. It wasn't referenced in the movie, 0 VN and the OVAs, but the 0 anime deliberately went out of its way to add a "But he's a guy" joke that wasn't present in the VN, and Elite didn't change the scenes either.

Quite frankly, I don't care if a character was *actually* trans. As long as it's a well written character,  I don't care much about those specifics, but when it's so clear that it isn't the case, I don't see a reason to force it.