Despite being born a female, Takamasa “Sky” Kobayashi entered middle school officially recognized as a boy. This was not only a milestone in Kobayashi’s life, but one for Japan. The recognition of his gender identity – by any Japanese institution – was unprecedented. Though diagnosed with “Gender Identity Disorder” (GID) at 13, he had not undergone any surgical procedures for gender reassignment, as required by the Gender Identity Disorder Special Cases Act. The legislation flagrantly violates the right to privacy of transgender citizens, even requiring them to be sterilized to obtain legal recognition as their gender. This is not to mention ramifications in employment, child rearing, education and more.
Filmmaker Miyuki Tokoi documented almost a decade of Kobayashi’s journey, from the time he was in school, through surgeries and self-revelations, and through his encounters with Miyuki Yashiro (who received sex reassignment surgery at 78 years old) and Jun Nakajima (who seeks to spread awareness about nonbinary gender identity). This journey would give rise to Tokoi’s film Zero as You Are.
The GID Special Cases Act reflects a wider impulse to medicalize and ostracize gender minorities, including transgender and nonbinary individuals. In conversation with Tokyo Weekender, Tokoi reflected on our tendency to reject minorities of every kind – and how it manifests in school-age peer pressure, in tokenism and Kobayashi’s journey from “negative” to “zero” to “plus.”
In Zero as You Are, you follow Sky Kobayashi through nine years of his life – an especially formative period of time. I assume that Kobayashi had to navigate not only the “classic” adolescent rites of finding your true character and aspirations, but also his gender identity. Based on your interactions with him, do you think his journey in regards to gender affected the way his personality and aspirations developed over time?
Kobayashi-san said that it would be a negative state of affairs until he could revert to his true gender identity, a male. He said, “Everyone else is going from zero to positive, but I’m a negative, so in order to become positive, I have to go back to zero first.” Until he was back to zero, he couldn’t start walking the path of life; until he got to zero, he could not achieve his dream of becoming a voice actor. It took him a while to reach this point, but as he neared zero, he had to ask himself these questions: What does gender mean to me? What is my gender? What is my identity? What is my way of life? By doing so, by confronting these issues more deeply than many others, he learned important things about life.