Talk:Tooru Mutsuki/@comment-31190419-20170226033102/@comment-24071195-20170226040245

The thing is, I don't think she wanted to be a male. Not exactly. Rather, living as a male was her way of escaping the "gaze of a man". The trauma of the abuses she experienced at the hands of her lecherous father left her disillusioned to the point where the idea of remaining female meant living with the risk of repeating the experience, something that ironically did sort of occur with Torso despite her countermeasure of "becoming a male".

I don't think Mutsuki honestly wants to be a man, nor do I think she ever did. She knew that she suffered because she was a girl, so becoming a "man" was a means of escapism. In her head, being a girl was the sole reason that led her to suffer, so she stopped being a girl. This is expressed in a few different ways, such as this quote: "For me... it's not that a fact that I "have" the [heart of a man], but... I hate them. Men's eyes are so disgusting". She acknowledges that she's not a "man at heart", so it's not like she became a man because she thinks that's the gender she identifies with. She is still, at her core, a woman, but she simply can't stand the idea of being on the receiving end of male lust.

Naturally you could say "what's the distinction? she's still choosing to be male over female", but I feel like the distinction is important, because rather than choosing to be male it's more like she was choosing not to be female. She doesn't want to be a man per se, it's just the simplest way of escaping what she views to be the source of her problems. To summarize, I don't believe Mutsuki wants to be a man, and I don't think she's against the idea of being female. She simply can't come to terms with her childhood trauma, and rejects it by rejecting the thing that she views as its cause.

I went into way more detail than I was planning on, but these are just my interpretations. Think of it as you will.