Pregnancy as the pinnacle of womanhood in TSF porn

Content Warning: discussion of pregnancy as fetish, gender essentialism, dubious consent/sexual assault fantasies

It is by now common knowledge that Japan’s birthrate is in record decline. Years of economic stagnation and sexist idealizations of the nuclear family sent the nation’s population dwindling downward as having kids became less and less attractive to the nation’s younger adults. Thus, the nation’s government continues to desperately seek stability for its rapidly aging population, lest its aging population is forced to face an increasing spate of lonely deaths. 

We come to a state of a nation desperate to encourage the popularity of child rearing, and it can be seen as somewhat of a trend in its media. Sarcastically known as Abenime, these are the stories that ultimately take the very bold stance to state for the record: men and women should make babies to save mankind.

Though inherently absurd once verbalized, these are stories that speak to a nation’s plight. They are designed to manufacture consent by defining baby making as the norm. Women can make babies; ipso facto, their role in saving Japanese society lies in buffering the ever-shrinking population with young, healthy babies who will carry on the nation in the future.

And while this attitude reaches public discourse by way of popular entertainment, it also likewise prevails within narratives not often discussed out in the open.

Longtime readers may recall that I have a thing for magical sex change porn, a genre dedicated to turning cishet men into women and then having them end up in all sorts of dubious sexual situations. The core tenet of the genre is that the hapless victim of these stories are seemingly normal men who are forced into the role of women, sort of like the forced feminization fetish, but done at a biological level that physically and sometimes mentally alters a character to be an idealized woman within the cishet male gaze. And as of late, many of these stories end in pregnancy.

So many of these stories seem to consistently end with a former cis het dude reflecting on the final page: “Ahh, I used to be a dude, but now I’ve found true happiness as a mom.”

Discussing TS stories, Mashiro Yuh, a Japanese author of such stories, once opined to me that pregnancy might be the “only taboo left at the end” for such stories, as characters who were originally cishet men are rapidly desensitized to the concept of crossdressing or even engaging in sexual acts with other cishet men.

Manga such as “The Story of How I Became a Member♀ of a Tribe on an Unexplored Island and Became a Best Friend’s Wife” and other works by F constantly reiterate to the reader their hapless protagonists are male throughout the story. In the aforementioned story, Kai tells his best friend Taichi he is definitely a man, no matter how big his chest gets or how long his hair grows. Even as Taichi starts to see him more and more as a woman, Kai maintains in his mind his manhood, although his mannerisms and heart become more feminine by the day. 

It is only when Kai finally loses his penis that he at last admits to the reader, “I really am a girl.” And with that change she finds all her resolve to refuse Taichi gone and even informs him, “now I can have babies!”

The story ends with Kai breast feeding a baby child. She lives in domestic bliss with her husband.

This story is by no means unique for F, nor is it uncommon for fellow authors working in the same genre. Suraimu Kanmuri, for example, has a number of stories that follow a similar vein. “Fukushu ni Moeru Yuushasama, TS Shite Buji Maousama no Oyomesan ni Naru” (The Hero Passionate for Revenge, Gets Transformed and Happily Weds the Demon Lord) and “Jakutaika TS Dragon-san no Junan” (The Plight of the Weakened and Transformed Dragon) both end in similar fashion. Once proud male protagonists find happiness by falling in love with men who once stood as rivals to them. Their resignation of manhood is coupled with their newfound love of domesticity as a wife to the men who bested them in combat and wooed their hearts once transformed into women.

The situation is somewhat of a conundrum for a queer reader such as myself. 

On one hand, this is a wish fulfillment fantasy. Having lived with gender dysphoria, I’ve wished often for an opportunity to escape reality and just be a cis woman with no strings attached. How wonderful would it be to have society accept me as a woman — better yet, how wonderful would it be for society to want me to be a woman? Kai’s transformation is urged by the island villagers to promote a gender equilibrium and his transition is not only welcomed, but sought by those around him.

On the other hand, TS porn is awkwardly resistant to queer interpretations. As noted in my prior essay, many stories operate on a gender essentialist philosophy at its root. Manhood and power is literally represented by the presence of a penis, and womanhood is defined by breasts and a vagina. In these stories, the loss of the penis also translates to a loss of power. The newly transformed women are not only transformed physically, but transformed socially to be subservient to whoever has the dick in the relationship.

Sometimes, this interpretation is taken to the extreme and ironically comes out somewhat queer, such as in “Haitoku no Yurien” (Corrupted Yuri Garden) by Chijokuan. A domineering woman with a large penis seduces a sexually frustrated woman and also proceeds to dominate her husband. 

The story is undoubtedly queer, but it comes with baggage by portraying its central trans catalyst as a homewrecker. Misaki is unmistakably portrayed as a woman, but her domineering presentation both inside and out of the bedroom is defined by masculinity. That masculinity is power, and that power is symbolized by the size of one’s dick in “Haitoku.” Misaki defies womanhood and lords over Tomomichi, primarily by putting his dick to shame. Misaki’s possession of power is presented as an aberration and the reader is invited to relish in the taboo of Tomomichi, a cishet man, losing to that virility until he is fully “corrupted” into a submissive woman. Chijokuan portrays that complete submission by ending the story with “Chiro” happily pregnant with Misaki’s child.

Thus pregnancy can be read as rooted in the essentialist definition of womanhood similarly how a penis defines manhood.

While pregnancy porn is in itself a well-established fetish, TSF porn’s pregnancy or depictions of motherhood seem to emphasize the emotional development of the protagonist rather than the fetishization of the physical features of pregnancy alone. The final shot of Kai and Taichi’s household isn’t sexualized. It shows the two former friends, now a couple, doting over their new baby. Kai even comments for the reader, “Our lives were completely transformed from what they were, but I’m happier for it.”

So, like the gender essentialist issues at the genre’s core, pregnancy as a symbol of womanhood is also a conundrum for a queer reader. On one hand, it could be wish fulfillment for some AMAB folks to magically gain the ability to bear children. At the same time, womanhood is a social construct and it’s whatever people say it is, but within the TS genre it subscribes to a traditional cisheteronormative perspective to accentuate the taboo of losing masculine power in favor of assuming a domestic bliss centered around childbirth. Like the penis, bearing a child becomes a conservative definition of femininity, one which right wing leaders within Japanese society subscribe to.

To be fair, however, not all TS stories ending in pregnancy are necessarily stereotypically heteronormative either. Ikuya-Daikokudo’s “Seitenkan Kyoshitu” (Sex Change Classroom) depicts a world where students can choose their gender in high school, albeit it’s limited to the binary male and female genders. Gender is more fluid in this world and Uozumi, the protagonist to the series, even remarks in the epilogue he is considering becoming the mother for his second child to better understand the role he and his wife share as parents. 

Similarly, though not all authors working in the genre are necessarily queer, there are quite a few who fall within the queer spectrum. Several authors of TS stories enjoy crossdressing and others have stated they’ve felt gender dysphoria on social media. Thus, TS fiction comes from an explicitly queer voice, even if its foundations are built on conservative interpretations of gender and sexuality.

Furthermore, by depicting stories that are indulgent and affirming to trans identities, even if the author themselves did not identify as queer, many of these stories provide an opportunity for readers to feel like they are given permission to be someone else. By placing themselves in a situation where one must be resigned to being a girl by outside forces, one can find an escape from society’s rules that “you can’t” or “you’re not allowed” to be a woman. 

And pregnancy, for some, appears to drive that point home at the end of the day as a symbol of womanhood, no matter how polarizing.

That said, it’s not like stories that don’t end in pregnancy are all that rare, either. A large number of TSF stories end with pregnancy, but a good number of them don’t. But pregnancy as a trope will likely remain a final frontier for taboo within this genre so long as stories rely on traditional interpretations of gender roles. Thus, I hope that TS stories as a genre continue to diversify and welcome more queer takes on gender and sexuality in the future. 

There’s nothing explicitly wrong with pregnancy as an end cap to these stories, but, for someone who doesn’t have any interest in having children, they are stories that often remind me the body I want might also be pretty inconvenient if I ever do get to live out my wildest fantasies.