Warning: spoilers for 'Blue Eye Samurai' series

Have recently binged the new Netflix animated series Blue Eye Samurai. Really good show, totally recommend if you aren't squicked out by a lot of violence, full frontal nudity and sex.

I had a speculation about how people were going to react to a character though and I was right...

The main character, Mizu is a mixed race, self taught samurai who is a woman. She disguises herself as a man for the entire series, including binding her chest, because the series is set in 16th century Edo Japan, where women had no rights or autonomy, and couldn't even travel without a man (there is a scene in the first episode that illustrates this). In addition, we have a hefty dose of foreshadowing/childhood trauma shown in a flashback scene, where Mizu's mother shaves her head and insists 'you need to be a boy' so that 'the bad men' (who want her dead for being mixed race) can't find her.

Just in case this wasn't enough, we have another later scene where Mizu is discussing her male disguise with her husband who asks 'you wanted to be a man?', to which Mizu responds 'I HAD to be a man'.

But we're here, so you already know what the gender cult's response was... 'Mizu is clearly a transman/gender fluid/non-binary!!'

FFS. SHE'S CLEARLY A WOMAN YOU MORONS. The whole point of the series is exploring misogyny through the lens of 16th century Japan and there are several female characters who explore the confines of their sex and societal imposed gender roles throughout the series in very different ways. To insist that this woman isn't a woman simply because she's androgynous, gender non-conforming and presenting as male for her own safety/ambition is frankly insulting and infuriating, and completely flies in the face of the main struggles and key themes of her character. Ugh, I hate the gender cult. :/