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Hey, I just remembered that I learned something pretty important about Koyoharu Gotōge at Anime Expo that English-speaking fans might want to know about. According to the producer on Demon Slayer, Yuma Takahashi, Gotōge is not comfortable being referred to with female pronouns.
According to Takahashi, fans have made many assumptions about Gotōge's gender based on their writing style or other stray details, but Gotōge would like to be referred to with gender-neutral terminology (much easier to do in Japanese) and isn't publicly known as a female mangaka.
Sorry it took me a while to mention this, but it came up in passing at a busy time, and it escaped my memory until now. Anyway, if you could make this known through the English-speaking Demon Slayer fandom, I'm sure Gotōge would appreciate it. They prefer gender-neutral pronouns.
Since this thread has asploded, two points of clarification.
1) This is not to imply that Gotoge is nb. It’s certainly possible, but all I know is that they want to keep their gender private, which is different.
1) This is not to imply that Gotoge is nb. It’s certainly possible, but all I know is that they want to keep their gender private, which is different.
2) Some people have been asking for proof, and I do have recorded audio of producer Takahashi explaining this to me, but I’m not going to disseminate that. You’ll just have to take my word for it, he was very emphatic about the gender-neutral thing.
3) To be honest, there’s a long-standing trend of anime fans gendering private Japanese creators as female to suit their political ideologies going back decades now, and we should probably cut that shit out. Always double check when you hear someone say things like that.
Over a year later, and this thread still gets Discourse, so I think it's time to share the actual audio of the conversation I had with Takahashi-san about Gotoge-san's gender. Enkidu is mentioned as an example of NB! Hopefully this will set some bickering about this to rest.
