Why was X-jendā Self-enforced?: Focusing on the Social Contexts that Regulate the Abilities of a Category

Abstract

Through narratives from magazines and 14 interviews, this paper examines how, from the late 1990s, a gender identity category, X-jendā, was formed and spread with self-enforcing abilities. We clarified how X-jendā was utilized in the sexuality mixed self-help group as a transgender subcategory to enable differentiation from the norms of existing categories. In addition, the abilities of X-jendā seemed to be changed in the process of spreading, partly separated from the usage of transgender categories. These results show that the abilities of self-enforcement were regulated differently in the local settings of the self-help groups and in the internet sphere.