This post is a discussion of Shou Arai’s manga, “At 30, I Realized I Had No Gender.” However, feel free to just answer the question in the title if you’re not interested. I’m wondering if anyone here transitioned in their 30’s or 40 plus.
Shou Arai is an intersex person from Japan who is somewhat well-known in the local queer scene. Arai lived the first 30 years of his life as a woman before transitioning into a man. I’ll be using he/him pronouns to describe Arai, as those are the ones he uses in the manga. The LGBT movement in Japan is obviously different than it is in the West, so some terminology doesn’t fit exactly. Arai is physically intersex, having physical characteristics of both sexes. He is also described as trans, non-binary, or agender at times; however, in this case agender is translated from something that more closely resembles “between genders.” Having read the manga, I personally feel that the term agender doesn’t really fit in the Western sense, and I believe the title is more in reference to “I am without gender because society doesn’t have a name for people with genders like me” rather than a true absence of gender.
Like Poppy Pesuyama, Arai considers himself a manga essayist. This means that the manga is primarily expository rather than narratively driven. Unlike Pesuyama, who wove their exposition into an overarching narrative, Arai foregoes narrative all together. Instead, each chapter of the manga is based on a topic or anecdote. Some chapters are even just Q&A sessions with other queer people. Often times, Arai is just giving practical advice about being queer. Despite the title of the manga, Arai actually wrote it when he was nearing 50 years of age, so he 30 years of female experience and about 20 of male experience by that time. Quite a veteran queer!
Here's a list of the topics he covers:
As you can see, the majority of the manga is devoted to aging while queer, which is why I was drawn to it. Frankly, I think some of the advice that Arai gives might be a bit antiquated, but he is real af. I think that some of the chapters were hard to read for me not because the subject matter or presentation is heavy but because he clearly voices a lot of the small things we worry about when aging and queer. In particular, the chapters “If I had aged a woman” or “Is it impossible to be a young girl” are a little rough if, like me, you’re transitioning late in life. Other chapters just discuss aging in general like body measurements, choosing glasses, facial sagging, or having a big head lol. In general, he’ll discuss an issue and then provide a way to try to mitigate it or think about it differently, and he’s always real about what’s actually achievable.
The manga is a real grab bag of tough thoughts, which I’m gonna list here:
mild dysphoria
Having smile lines, growing unwanted facial hair, trying to manage your aging so people don’t just identify you as male, wishing you had transitioned sooner so you would’ve had better skincare, being jealous of people who started hormones early, having no memories of being young in the gender you want, being easier to present masculine when you’re older, having a weird mismatched body, using clothing to present femme but feeling dysphoria when you take them off and see your masculine body, changing your clothing style just so people identify you correctly, having a non-binary heart while still presenting in a binary manner, confusing looking femme with looking young, getting too old for sex, and many, many more!
Overall, I think that the manga is rather formalistically boring. There’re really no characters, and the art is fairly basic, so there’s nothing really to latch onto. Unlike other queer manga I’ve read, this one didn’t really move me; however, I think it’s bursting with important and helpful content, so it’s worth a read if any of this interests you.
personal dysphoria
To be honest, despite the fact that it’s really light, I found myself quite bothered by a lot of it. For me, a lot of my dysphoria comes more from my age than my gender. I’m closer to 40 than 30 these days (much older than Arai when he transitioned), and sometimes I can’t help but think I’m a man playing dress up or that I missed my window to transition or that I’m going through some midlife crisis to make me look younger. I also acknowledge that there’s more to being trans and queer than being pretty, and a lot of transfemmes are really obsessed with youth and beauty, and then I just feel guilty for boiling down gender to being pretty. Anyway, I know all of these things aren’t true, and it’s just societal ideas that I’ve internalized that are causing me dysphoria. I can’t help thinking it would be easier to just age male, though. I wish I had the awareness that kids nowadays get, but back in my day (at least where I lived), trans literally wasn’t a thing. We had no language or conception of it. In fact, I'm remembering now that when I came out to my wife while bawling, I kept repeating, "I just didn't know we could do this [transition]" >.>
Anyway, I wanna hear from the younglings too, but this post is for the geezers like me. Have any kind words? 
so i started E at 27, which i like to view as early, but this all really hits. i had a deeply fucked up complexion, testosterone puberty hit me hard, i have severe acne scarring and also fairly deep forehead wrinkles. i'm still under 30
. spoilering because this is a transfemme cognitohazard and interwoven with self-aware internalized patriarchy and transphobia:
spoiler
there's two big sides to this - part of it is missing out on being a woman for your teens and twenties, where so much life happens, and part of it is the physical reality of trying to work with the body you essentially have to "start" with. there's a pretty big intersection too.
there are so many firsts that i'm just never going to have as my true self. kisses, crushes, sex, relationships. so many life experiences with loss and victory and change and comfort. all of these memories, i (and i understand the internalized transphobia laced in this statement) experienced as a man. it's easy to say i've been a woman all along and that i was actually experiencing those things as a woman because i always have been one, but never being taught how to cry - not even having the hormones for it - changes the way you internalize and process the death of a loved one, to the point that it was necessary for me to start grieving all over again. never having shared so much as a compliment with a woman for fear that the interaction would be colored by the binary you sit on the opposite side of changes your ability to communicate with women, so much so that even casual interactions that are unquestionably positive keep me up at night wondering how much "masculine energy" leaked into the interaction because i never got to learn to interact with other humans the way that feels right for me. all these things that form your personality are altered. and you just... go on. sometimes you have energy to try and consciously change, sometimes you don't have that energy and you just have to watch as you hyper-analyze every movement and word, parsing out all the bits that feel like they wouldn't be there if you just learned to be a human right the first time.
and then there's the body stuff. i have a lot going for me - pretty wide hips for a testosterone skeleton, fairly conventionally attractive in a way that translates well in the right light. cute boobies - maybe a little pointy but it's a look. it fucking kills me knowing what i could have had. something that i believe is extremely common to the transfeminine experience is the desire to be desired. there's something freeing about living a life being praised and wanted for what you are capable of, what you can do, and what you have done, and then all of a sudden one day you get desired for just existing as you are. physical attractiveness is not the cleanest reason to be desired but there's something about the relation that feels so freeing and simple. and i could have had so much more of it had i just had the emotional tools to know earlier. physical beauty isn't worth but it changes the way you interact with the world and the way you interact with the world changes who you are. and you just have to accept what you have. this is just a distillation of the same privileges surrounding beauty standards women face, so truly in a patriarchal society, this desire is feels like part of the woman experience at its core, but it does hit somewhat different, i imagine. the reassurance that you'll find someone who loves you for you feels a different kind of hollow.
this is rambling, it doesn't cover everything and i'm not at my most articulate right now. might delete later who knows. just feeling extra down right now and needed to spill my guts
at the end of the day, the pain of it all is knowing how much better it could be any other way. but that pain is so intense because you know the intense joy of how much better things are now than they were before. there's no age cutoff to reaping the rewards of living authentically and there are euphorias at every age. every single breath you take is better now. the highs are higher and the lows might be lower but they're better for it. every day you live after coming out at 14, 30, or 75 gives you more of the little things and the big things to live even truer for the next one.
Oh hey it me
Seeing a dermatologist next week to see about dermabrasion. Gonna sandpaper my face to try and get rid of this ridiculous scarring.
At least color correcting makeup takes care of the rosacea.
It gets easier as time goes forward but I do relate to a lot of what you've said.. early transition for me I had tons of regret..
I was gonna respond to this point by point, but just know I feel it all