Why Raiden is Trans.
[A thread]

Yoji Shinkawa, main designer of many MGS characters, designed Raiden to be unisexual. This falls under the trans umbrella.
1/9

Raiden also has a generally feminine appearance. He has thick thighs, a big ass, and his voice is pretty high. He's even mistaken for a woman by the president at one point in the game.
2/9

When Raiden is naked in MGS2, you can see some sort of barcode-like tattoos on his skin, and given that the Patriots injected Raiden with nanomachines and gave him different blood, this skin could have even been altered as well to support the transitory effects on him.
3/9

Rose is pregnant with Raiden's baby in the end of the game, which could mean that much like how Raiden was injected with blood, he could have been injected with semen. This is a universe with a telekinetic practitioner and giant robots, this doesn't seem very far fetched.
4/9

There is the fact that Raiden was a little boy in the "Small Boy Unit" from Solidus' Army of the Devil. If we look at young Raiden in the flashback image, he looks like a little girl. For comparison, he looks a bit like flashback Emma.
5/9

He is referred to as a boy because he simply hadn't fully transitioned yet. They [Solidus, the Patriots] refer to him as boy to respect his pronouns.
6/9

Raiden being trans also works well with MGS2's theme of the deconstruction of a perfect man. Through creating a soldier who is just like Solid Snake, the Patriots essentially customized Raiden into becoming a man so he could be closer to Snake.
7/9

The ending also involves the idea of choosing your own destiny and defying society's expectations of what you should be.
8/9

"The game never explicitly calls him trans!"
The game never explicitly calls him cis either, and given all I just brought up, I'd say the odds are stacked in favor of Raiden being trans. Especially since Shinkawa himself stated that Raiden was intended to be unisexual.
9/9

End of thread.

Do you agree with this?

To any Trans followers, if this thread came across as insensitive, feel free to let me know.

I hesitated making this thread for awhile since I knew it would get a lot of backlash. This is a thread about a fictional character that is merely pixels on a screen, so don't take this so personally.

If it makes you happy, this is a head-canon/theory. Look at Raiden however you want.