Imma Youjo: The Politics of Trans Dehumanization ★
(Posted October 29, 2025)
CW: Nudity, Corrective Rape, Fascism, and Violence Against Trans People
“Men will be drawn to her and start desiring her greatly. She can have anything and anyone with her magical power. Men will hurt and kill each other until everything is destroyed. Nobody can stop it. Even if they know something is wrong.” - Imma Youjo, Episode 4
I never expected that helping a friend digitize a few old hentai VHS tapes would leave me musing, “that was a haunting dissection of what happens when trans people are stripped of their personhood.” But Imma Youjo is not your average hentai. Each episode “is a tale of a different Maya in a different world” where each “Maya” has destructive powers and can control everyone around them, especially men, to do their bidding. It deconstructs the concept seen in many hentai that women are purely there to have sex with in fascinating ways across its various settings.
What Is This, Revolutionary France?
Its fourth episode in particular is what caught my eye. On the surface, it looks like a twisted riff on The Rose of Versailles. Instead of the backdrop of revolutionary France, it is set in a vague European country during the witch trials of the early modern period. The Oscar François de Jarjayes of this story is Mayatola, a stunning blond with long flowing locks who is living as a man but was secretly born “as a woman.” His skills with a sword, his unparalleled handsomeness, everything right down to the obnoxious shoulder fringes on his uniform, makes it clear to those with a bit of anime knowledge what character this is an homage to. Mayatola even has a brown haired best friend and companion, though the André in this story, one of the few people who know Mayatola’s true sex from birth, is a lady maid named Anne. This gender subversion is a vital part of the themes explored in this story.
Quick spoilers for the now 46 year old series The Rose of Versailles—an all time anime classic that you should make it a priority to watch as it’s free legally on YouTube if you haven’t seen it—but Oscar’s closest friend and trusted confidant André has always loved her, though he hasn’t had those affections returned to him. In episode 28 of the series, Oscar ends up leaving the Royal Guards, wanting to take on more dangerous work. “I want to live more like a man! I’m going to return to those days when I believed I was a boy.” André, clearly dismissing Oscar’s feelings on the matter, tells her, “A rose could never become a lilac.”
For those who may not know flowers and miss a bit of the symbolism here, flowers, and quite often roses, are used to symbolize vaginas in art and poetry. Their soft, layered petals, the act of blooming, and their association with beauty, sensuality, and fragility all contribute to this parallel. Lilacs when on bushes grow in such a way to look slightly like bulbous rods. In simpler terms, they can grow to look exactly like a cock and balls.
“André, do you mean to tell me a woman will always be a woman?” When he refuses to reply, Oscar slaps him across the face. André grabs Oscar’s hands, forces a kiss on her, and rips off her shirt. He regains his senses once he sees Oscar crying. “I’m sorry. I swear to God, I’ll never do something like this again. A rose could never become a lilac. Just as you Oscar… Could never stop being Oscar.” He confesses his love to her and leaves the room, with her trembling and crying under a blanket.
One of the most infuriating parts of the series is that in the end, Oscar ends up having a romantic arc with André despite this horrific betrayal at the time. Despite how independent and strong Oscar has been shown to be throughout the show, a large part of her arc is “woman who loves man” and “she was always meant to be with him” as the series closes. To add insult to injury, it’s all over a guy who literally assaulted her.
Imma Youjo was clearly interested in exploring how strange that narrative really was, and wanted to show what actually happens when a man like André attempts to reinforce the patriarchy and attempts to use tools like corrective rape to keep that gender hierarchy in place—magically enforced authoritarian fascist rule. Okay, maybe the magic part doesn’t happen out here in the real world, but the rest is true. When attacks are made against gender diverse people, genocide and fascism always follow. This has been true from modern day attacks on trans people in the United States, to the looting of the Institute of Sexology, and all the way back to the witch trials where the setting of this episode takes place.
Sexual Violence Against Trans People
Trans men and trans women face different kinds of gendered sexual violence. Attacks on trans women often come from people trying to prove their own masculinity or straightness to others and thus take place in public so these acts of violence have an audience. While trans women are forceably penetrated during assaults, they are more likely to face other forms of degrading sexual violence, such as being forced to expose their genitals.[1] In contrast, trans men are attacked for not being “sexually available” in a way that is meant to please heterosexual men and thus the “punishment” for this crime doesn’t have to take place in public as a performance to others. Especially for trans men that have vaginas, these assaulters use corrective rape as a way to say their victims “are women after all, and they will be treated as such.”[2] They attempt to enforce what they assume is a biological destiny upon trans men.
Imma Youjo curiously manages to depict both of these forms of sexual violence against trans people. Count Pickingel has been repeatedly emasculated by Mayatola—first at the beginning of the episode when he stops him from literally raping and pillaging a village in the name of witch hunting, and later when Mayatola thoroughly defeats him in a fair swordfight, leaving Pickingel with a wound on his face. Pickingel arranges for the assasination of Count Calvin, Mayatola’s father, pinning the murder on Mayatola. Once Mayatola is arrested, Pickingel parades him through the town in front of everyone.
Pickingel then claims that Mayatola is a woman, which he fiercely denies. Pickingel presses further, “You hid your real identity because you were scared that people would find out you were a witch.” Pickingel then proceeds to use a knife to rip through Mayatola’s shirt, violently exposing his chest to all onlookers. This is reminiscent of what André does to Oscar, down to Count Pickingel having brown hair, though with enough differences to not make it too obvious what is being called back to. I know all writers who use subtext are cowards, but the team behind Imma Youjo did its homework in so many other ways as you’re about to see, we’re going to give the team behind it a pass just this once.
In the Malleus Maleficaruma—one of the most misogynistic and sexist pieces of literature in all of history[3]—and elsewhere, it was claimed witches could, through “prestidigitary illusion,” transform or conceal genitalia—potentially rendering them invisible or seemingly absent from the body itself. Gender or sexual expressions puritans didn’t understand, like in the case of Madam Galt, often resulted in charges of witchcraft as that was easier for them to wrap their heads around than the idea of queer identities. In this case, it seems how Mayatola bound his breasts gets to count as “witchcraft.” Breasts are supposed to be ogleable by straight menfolk, so clearly this illusionary magic must be punished.
The next phase of punishment takes place away from the public in torture chambers. Mayatola still refuses to back down, confidently stating “I am a man” even while being chained up and facing threats of torture. Even as Count Pickingel attempts to exert his power over Mayatola by having two men whip him, all he gets is spat in the face and laughed at by our protagonist for his efforts. Pickingel’s manly facade breaks immediately and he begins to slap Mayatola repeatedly out of frustration over being emasculated even in this situation.
This is when Isabel appears—the King’s appointed overseer of Pickingel’s witch hunts, who has not only endorsed his actions but also derived sexual pleasure from watching him torture women. She has been using her proximity to patriarchal power to force other women, or anyone that doesn’t comply with cultural norms like Mayatola, to literally suffer for her pleasure.
Women in Witch Hunts and Upholding the Patriarchy
Robin Briggs, author of Witches and Neighbors: the Social and Cultural Context of European Witchcraft, has stated that most accusations of witchcraft against women came from fellow women. “The historical record suggests that both men and women found it easiest to fix these fantasies [of witchcraft], and turn them into horrible reality, when they were attached to women. It is really crucial to understand that misogyny in this sense was not reserved to men alone, but could be just as intense among women.”
Unfortunately, women often play a large role in upholding structural patriarchy. Oftentimes, it’s due to beliefs that these social hierarchies keep them safe and are needed for their protection. For others, they embrace the power, even if it’s just symbolic, in a movement that puts them on a pedestal and claims to be fighting for their best interests, even if that isn’t true.
Seyward Darby, author of Sisters in Hate: American Women on the Front Lines of White Nationalism, explained it this way in an interview. “The far right believes in very distinct genders and traditional gender roles. But they also believe that those roles are complementary and equal to each other. Separate but equal, if you will. From their point of view, men are willing to put their lives on the line. Men are the builders and protectors of civilization. Women are the protectors of the home.”
Even worse, when men try to break the hold that patriarchy has on their own lives, as these rigid gender roles hurt men deeply too, these women are often the ones trying to put them back in their place. As Bell Hooks wrote in The Will To Change: Men, Masculinity, & Love, “Most women do not want to deal with male pain if it interferes with the satisfaction of female desire. When feminist movement led to men's liberation, including male exploration of ‘feelings,’ some women mocked male emotional expression with all the same disgust and contempt as sexist men. Despite all the expressed feminist longing for men of feeling, when men worked to get in touch with their feelings, no one really wanted to reward them.”
We can see this behavior when Isabel teases Pickingel for his emotional, “unmanly” outburst, and decides to make her own attempt at subduing Mayatola. In absolute TERF-like fashion, Isabel says, “Even if the mind is a man, the body is still a woman.” Isabel tries to focus on Mayatola’s breasts sexually while stimulating his vagina, doing what she considers something that any “woman” would enjoy and let herself fall into pleasure over. When Mayatola denies her, shoving her away with what force he can muster, she then forcibly penetrates him with a sword before instructing all the other men in the room to correctively rape Mayatola all while misgendering him. “Here… You can stab her with your swords as much as you want.”
Mayatola fights back, despite being orally and vaginally penetrated by several men. “I won’t give in… I’m not a woman.” After all of those men ejaculate all over Mayatola, leaving him humiliated and crumpled on the ground, Pickingel reaffirms what Isabel said. “Even if you try to think you are a man, your body is a woman.”
Only after the crowd disperses—mocking Mayatola and leaving him humiliated, his body desecrated and his spirit seemingly broken—does the true curse of his bloodline awaken. His eyes flare crimson, and he begins his internal transformation into Maya. In their attempt to strip him of manhood and force their own cruel vision of gender upon him through the violence of corrective rape, his tormentors unknowingly summon something far darker. From their violation rises a being who can bend will itself, dictating the words, movements, and desires of others—a living embodiment of control. The kind of power found in a fascist’s wet dream. The story’s grim irony is unmistakable: when you try to rob others of their personhood, you invite your own destruction. To impose rigid gender norms, especially upon trans people, is to awaken the very horrors of domination conservatives claim to fear.
During this time, Mayatola’s friend Anne, has been facing her own horrifying trials. Clory, a deranged assassin, the man who murdered Count Calvin, was given Anne as his sexual plaything. As she finds herself in nearly the same state as Mayatola, lying on the floor, covered in semen, she cries out for her friend to save her. This is Anne at her most low, feeling desperate, quite similar to how André was feeling when he assaulted Oscar. You see, to have a dramatic reveal later on in my essay, I conveniently forgot to mention that André learned he was going to go completely blind in the episode where he assaulted Oscar.
It’s here that we see the striking difference between our two brown-haired companions. When André falters, he crumbles—his pain twisting into doubt and anger toward Oscar, the very person he claims to love. He cannot see her for who she is or trust her to become what she longs to be. Anne, however, in her own moment of despair, does the opposite. She never stops believing in Mayatola’s strength or her eventual return. Her faith becomes her anchor, a form of love that endures where André’s could not. And while Anne’s path forward is difficult, that devotion, in its own warped way, is rewarded.
Mayatola does manage to break free from his imprisonment and with a sword in hand, immediately goes to kill Count Pickingel. The only reason he doesn’t succeed in taking the count hostage and escaping is that Isabel and Clory have Anne held hostage. In the end, Mayatola agrees to get branded as a witch in order to protect her. He is then forced to have sex with Anne, Isabel, and Pickingel in various sessions. Clory also has his way with Anne alone.
Time passes. Pickingel, while having his dick sucked by Isabel, grows bored of her and decides to leave. It’s quite clear he’s more interested in fucking Mayatola, and Isabel tries to call him out on it. “You are going to see Maya, aren’t you? What do you like about that hermaphrodite?”
Conservative Fetishization of Trans Identities
It feels prudent now to mention one of the most famous trans “witches” of all time, one charged with transvestitism alongside crimes of witchcraft: Elano de Céspedes. Elano’s story is incredible and deserves full exploration, but to keep this essay at a reasonable scale: Elano was born into slavery, eventually became free, married a terrible man that abandoned him while he was pregnant, and yet was still able to work his way up from being a farmhand to being a soldier and eventually became a licensed surgeon. He dressed in men’s clothing, buried his dead name, and went by Elano.
He married María del Caño, was examined by doctors as a vicar thought he was a eunuch, but the doctors found he had genitals close enough to a man to let the marriage go through. Elano took complications from his childbirth and combined them with his own surgical brilliance to perform bottom surgery on himself. He was eventually arrested under sodomy charges, which should be noted at the time simply counted for “unnatural sex.”
The Spanish Inquisition tried to claim this marriage was wrong, but Elano argued that both of his marriages were valid. For his first, he was a woman married to a man. For his second, he was a man married to a woman. Doctors and even lady lovers Elano had over the years all testified they had seen him as a man. Like the TERFs of today, the Inquisition refused to believe the concept of the gender someone was born into could be changed in any way as it was tied directly to sex. Even as Elano used his knowledge as an expert surgeon in the field of medicine, cited some of the greatest thinkers of all time like Aristotle and Pliny, they refused to see that intersex bodies or different expressions of gender could exist. They did all of this while having, “an almost fetishistic interest in Céspedes's genitalia” according to Lisa Vollendorf, a women’s social history scholar.
They performed several experiments related to his genitalia, including having midwives try to penetrate it with a candle and having doctors once more examine him for a penis, of which this time none was found. Though this was not due to “prestidigitary illusion” of any kind—Elano had simply had to perform an amputation of his member after a particularly terrible riding accident prior to his imprisonment before trial.
In the end, Elano was convicted of sorcery and disrespect of the sacrament of marriage. Despite the court declaring he was a woman, he was given the same sentence any male would be given if they disrespected the sanctity of their marriage—200 lashes and 10 years of imprisonment. Even back then, the hypocrisy of conservative thought reared its head as it does today. During his ten years, he was forced to wear women’s clothing while looking after poor patients in a public hospital. Many came specifically to get Elano’s services, so much so it was considered an “annoyance and embarrassment” by the hospital administrator where he worked.
Throughout generations, the obsession the far right and all religious conservatives have with trans people is the mirror they can’t bear to look into. They hold the banner of family values with one hand and type secret salacious messages to the very people they publicly condemn with the other, betraying their own families in the process. They roar about protecting women while indulging in porn that objectifies and dehumanizes trans bodies. They outlaw what they secretly crave, waging war against the reflection they fear might look too much like themselves. Because they long to have the freedom to express their innermost desires like trans people do but can’t handle how bright and beautiful that light is. Thus, they do their best to drag gender diverse people back into the dark caves they force themselves to live in.
When Count Pickingel goes to Maya (who is now referring to herself as such so we’ll be changing names and pronouns from here) to have sex, she taunts him with this knowledge. “The reason your wound aches is because you don’t love Maya as a woman. Here is the place you love very much.” Maya shows off her asshole, because as we all know, all gay men fuck each other in the ass.
In case you think I’m just being sarcastic, Maya points out this symbolism immediately. “You love Maya as a man… Now, don’t you really want to put it in here?” Way earlier in the anime, when Pickingel was stewing over Mayatola emasculating him, he forced himself into Isabel’s ass while having sex and saying Mayatola’s name. So it may come as little surprise, what with that earlier foreshadowing, that Pickingel does want to shove it up Maya’s ass. He ends up orgasming so hard and loud it looks like the entire castle tower shakes.
When Siding With Patriarchy Fails Women
As that happens, Isabel is captured by loads of male guards under Maya’s control and is forcibly stripped and raped herself. She thought her proximity to power could protect her from losing her personhood, but that’s not how it works when you deny personhood to others. However, she is suddenly saved by Clory, a man she literally sacrificed the dignity, sanctity, and the ability to consent of a fellow woman in hopes it would give her power over him, over Pickingel, power within the patriarchy. This is why she decides if Pickingel has to rely on her once more, she’ll have the power and safety she previously enjoyed again. “After Maya dies, Pickingel will begin the witch-hunt again. And he will need my help again.” She orders Clory to kill Maya. If only she knew how wrong she was, ojosama laughing loudly while surrounded by dead bodies.
Isabel behaves like how many women do who fight for the patriarchy against their own interests. In being afraid of not having men to protect them anymore, not having the power of those men on their side, they end up hurting themselves and their allies. They view trans people as a form of unsettling competition—trans women, as rivals for the desire and attention of men; trans men, as embodiments of the freedom and authority they themselves can’t quite claim. To them, trans men possess the “real” power of masculinity that they must constantly perform and plead for. That envy curdles into resentment.
We see these scenarios play out in the hentai as well. Pickingel, fully under Maya’s power, murders Clory with ease. As the count approaches Maya for more sex, Isabel stabs him through the chest with a sword all while screaming, “How dare you betray me for this hermaphrodite!” She literally collapses under the weight of Pickingel’s body, falling to the floor with him on top of her. A literal symbol of how her allegiance to patriarchy crushed her spirit and was the ultimate reason for her downfall.
After the end credits roll, we get to see Isabel is now on a stake, about to be burned as an audience calls her a witch. No matter how much you lend your power to patriarchy and fascism, it will turn on you the moment it is most convenient. She gets to suffer in the exact same way she made other innocent women suffer. Because if even one person doesn’t get to have personhood, no one does.
Maya declares that after this execution, witch hunts must be abolished as there are, “so many other fun things to do in this world.” She does this with a smiling Anna by her side. We are left only with our imaginations to conjure up what horrors Maya will make those around her undergo into the future.
An Adult Flavored Morality Tale
Hentai, like any other pornagraphy, is just as capable of providing social commentary or teaching valuable lessons to those who enjoy it as any fairytale one might read to children. Just as those classic tales for kids often ended on somber, or even terrifying notes in their original incarnations, this story for adults ends in a way that is meant to haunt the viewer and make them deeply consider what they just watched.
This is all packed into just one episode of Imma Youjo, an OVA series with five total episodes. While I plan to write about at least one of the other episodes in the future as well, I hope you will consider looking into this hentai yourself and seeing all that it has to offer. While this story and its morals and themes have been grim, let me leave this essay on a final note of hope.
Conservatives and TERFs, or at least people with their exact kinds of ideologies and practices, have existed as far back as the era of witch hunts. In countries where more women were convicted of witchcraft than men, we even see higher rates of TERFs pushing their ideologies today. TERF island, where 90% of executed witches were women, oddly enough is not populated by the daughters of witches that weren’t burned, just the daughters of previous fascist betrayers of women to the patriarchy. While many died pointless deaths simply for being different, many also survived and passed on their knowledge. No matter how hard the Nazis tried to literally burn all the research that had gone into learning about trans people and surgical treatments, some of that expertise escaped into the world and was used to better queer lives.
While I’m sure all those queer people, as we do now, wish these events had not happened in their times, as J.R.R. Tolkien so eloquently put it, “That is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.” We can still fight, do all we can to pass down knowledge, and share interesting new ways to educate people about the struggles we face. I can only hope this little discussion about hentai might be that unique spark some people needed to learn, or a source of knowledge that can be used to educate others.
Thankfully, magically enforced fascism really doesn’t exist in the real world and those that wish to enact this harm upon innocent people have names and addresses. These people can and will be prosecuted for their crimes and condemned by the world at large. Let us do all we can to survive until that moment takes place.
1. Florence Ashley, Don’t Be So Hateful: The Insufficiency of Anti-Discrimination and Hate Crime Laws in Improving Trans Well-Being, 68 UNIV OF TORONTO L.J. 1, 19 (2018).
2. Ki Namaste, Genderbashing: Sexuality, Gender, and the Regulation of Public Space, 14 E NV’ T AND P LAN. D: SOC’ Y AND SPACE 221, 230 (1996).
3. This quote from Malleus Maleficaruma that starts off the chapter titled, ‘Concerning Witches who copulate with Devils. Why is it that Women are chiefly addicted to Evil superstitions?’ begs to be shared. “What else is woman but a foe to friendship, an inescapable punishment, a necessary evil, a natural temptation, a desirable calamity, a domestic danger, a delectable detriment, an evil of nature, painted with fair colors!”
