The Transgenderfication of Ongezellig - 7.24.2026

This is just gonna be about Maya and Mymy bc I headcanon them both as trans

I project a lot onto Maya (as you will see more of in upcoming posts I'm sure) so I hc HIM!!!!! as a trans guy. For the sake of continuity, I will refer to Maya with he/she pronouns at any given time. If I'm talking about my AU I will call him a he. If I'm talking about the actual canon, I will call her a she. It'll be obvious who I'm talking about either way, doesn't matter. Anyways. I see him as a trans guy mostly just because I see a lot of myself in Maya. But I also see people headcanon her as a trans woman, which I ALSO totally see because I am sure the experience of being a socially awkward/inept shut-in who feels ostracized is something a lot of trans folk can relate to in general, especially when that character is a girl. So totally makes sense that people would see her as a trans girl or project their own experiences as trans women onto her. I love all trans Maya headcanons honestly, you could make them nonbinary for all I care. I'd always love it. In one of the above fics, "I'm Sorry For What I Did" by Bexotto, Maya is a trans girl, awesome stuff!!!!! Anyway, that's all to say that trans Maya headcanons are actually relatively popular. One that ISN'T very popular though is Trans Mymy

I really like to think of Mymy as a trans girl. She runs away from Japan to the Netherlands, changes her name, and starts a new life under a new identity. I think Mymy has a lot of self hate that she simply chooses not to address because she's at a point now where she just.. Doesn't need to. She has everything she wants. She's functionally Dutch and literally has lived in the country for the majority of her life at this point. And while I do have a lot of opinions regarding Mymy's story as a runaway and her relationship with her race/ethnicity, I do think that it can also be interpreted in a more positive way as well. It was a fresh start for her where nobody had to know where she came from. And I don't mean nobody had to know she's from Japan, I mean a blank slate where nobody ever had to know she was ever a boy. Her family knows but nobody at school has to, she can just fly under the radar when needed but present herself loudly in the ways that actually matter to her, AKA her bold Dutch identity

I like to think that as Mymy grows up, she stops being so hardcore about everything. She of course never falls out of love with the Netherlands, but she doesn't hate Japan as much. She reconnects with Eiko and her biological parents. She's still stealth but she's not ashamed of her journey. I dunno. I read her as a lot more of a sensitive character than I think most people do, given she was intended as comic relief. I think I just find her need to be something else entirely very relatable, both from an ethnic and gender-identity standpoint. Despite this projection, I do see her as a girl. I think just because I relate her canon story to the trans headcanon, so it's a little more grounded in reality than my Maya headcanon is. That one's really just personal

Writing Maya is so fun because I just write/draw about myself and people are like "Wow you really captured her character!" Thanks I know, I wrote half the stuff she did in her diary word for word in my own middle school diary 7-8 years ago. I was mayamaxxing when the first drawings of her were being concieved by Studio Massa on scrap paper probably