The Fall 2024 Manga Guide

I Cross-Dressed for the IRL Meetup

What's It About? 

"Cocoa" has made three best friends in her monthly meetup group, where girls get together every month to quell their sweet tooths by meeting up at the cutest and trendiest new dessert cafes. Cocoa is in it for the sweets--really!--but she's also harboring a few secrets: Not only does Cocoa have a crush on another one of the girls in the group, Opera, but she's actually a guy named Satoshi who's been cross-dressing in order to attend the all-girl group! During one meetup, things come to a head when Opera discovers that Cocoa is cross-dressing--and to Cocoa's surprise, Opera confesses that he is too! But Cocoa realizes that his attraction to Opera is more than clothing-deep, and as the two grow closer, they'll learn more about each other--and their own selves--than they could have ever imagined.

I Cross-Dressed for the IRL Meetup has a story and art by Kurano, with English translation by Jocelyne Allen. This volume was lettered by Paige Pumphrey. Published by Kodansha Comics (September 17, 2024).

Is It Worth Reading?

As a cis-gender woman, I don't always feel like the best person to talk about gender identity. But on the flip side, I have plenty of experience being told I'm insufficiently girly because I don't like to use makeup or shop, so it's clear that most if not all of us out there in the world have faced assumptions based on preconceived social ideas of gender and gender expression. This manga does its absolute best to give us a story about a group of people with varying gender identities and expressions, and that, I feel, is worth a lot.

The story follows a group of online sweets fans who decide to start meeting up IRL. Satoshi decides to come as Cocoa, a woman, for certain reasons, one of which seems to be the (patently ridiculous) idea that men don't like sweet foods. Cocoa has a crush on Opera, another girl in the group, but it turns out that Opera is Chiyoda, a young man who enjoys dressing as a woman and so is Lemon, a third group member. The fourth member, Kantentaro, is a woman, but AMAB, so there's some discussion of how that's different from the other three, who identify as male but enjoy presenting as female. In all honesty, I wish that had been delved into a little more, but seeing a trans woman unequivocally accepted as a woman more than makes up for it. And her being trans doesn't need to be a plot point; it's just who she is.

It was a good plan to publish this in a two-volume omnibus because it takes a bit to get into the meat of the story. It feels like the series starts with the idea of being a comedy before shifting over to a discussion of gender expression and identity with comedic elements. If this had been released in single volumes, readers might have gotten the wrong idea about the overall series, which settles down into an exploration of Opera and Cocoa and why they enjoy being those people. Cocoa's reasons feel much more tied to her self-esteem than Opera's; Opera appears comfortable no matter which gender is being presented. But Cocoa is far more comfortable than Satoshi; as Cocoa, she feels like she's got less to worry about in terms of public perception, and she feels less burdened by the gaze of others. A lot of this is tied up in what Satoshi does for work, and that's an interesting conversation about costumes making people feel like their real selves more than their “regular” everyday look.

This may not be the best LGBTQIA+ manga out there about the topic, but it's still a good one. It keeps the tone light without brushing the more serious elements under the rug. That allows room for the story beats to hit readers, giving everyone space to digest what the characters have to say on their own time.

Adorably drawn, joyfully queer, and gut bustingly funny: I Cross-Dressed for the IRL Meetup has it all. The story of Cocoa, who can be their true self while cross-dressing, begins tense and uncertain before exploding into a celebration of gender expression. Aside from the titular cross-dresser, diverse characters abound: they include a transgender woman and a self-described femboy whose gender identity might be best explained as “yes, and?” This hilarious story of hidden identity hijinks also includes tender moments where characters find the acceptance they've craved. My one nitpick is that I kept thinking it was heading toward a romance only to veer away at the last moment.

“What the hell even is gender?” This verbatim line from the book could be its mission statement. Cocoa is the alias of Satoshi, who feels best when he attends a monthly IRL dessert-eating meetup in drag. Really, he's there to see Opera, a cute fellow sweets fanatic, but could Opera have a secret of her own? As it turns out, everyone in the IRL sweets meetup is concealing something, and sometimes it doesn't even have anything to do with gender! Silly banter combined with the characters' meme-ready reaction faces help unravel all the genderbender mysteries, but the process is half the fun so I'll refrain from describing any further than that. As the IRL meetup members grow closer, Cocoa is time and again rewarded with the acceptance they've craved for so long, making this a story with both humor and heart. I also loved how, amidst all the concealment, these characters have never been shy about their genuine love (and bottomless appetites) for fancy desserts.

This story was originally published in two shorter volumes in Japanese, but we English readers are lucky to receive it all in one go. No need to wait on a cliffhanger (well considering this story's drill tone, it's more like a small, gentle hill) to uncover the SECOND big secret Cocoa's been hiding all this time. From its cute characters to its spot-on comedic timing, this book was a gem. I didn't get the love story that I thought it was building up to, but I got everything else in this rollicking celebration of a full spectrum of gender expression.

I Cross-Dressed for the IRL Meetup is a strange beast. Its subject – men dressing as women to go out and eat sweets – intentionally invites discomfort yet does it in a gentle, cozy way rather than confrontational. Satoshi Nakagawa joins a meetup group devoted to eating sweets under the handle Cocoa and decides to dress as a woman. He's passing well, until another member, Opera, notices he left the seat up and chastises him. Not because he's cross-dressing, but because he left such an obvious tell. You see, Opera is also a man!

Spend any significant time in queer communities, and you'll quickly learn that the intersection between gender identity, gender presentation, and sexual orientation is messy. For all that I've grown mostly comfortable navigating those choppy waters with more trans friends than cis, every so often something comes up where I just don't know. This is one of those cases, and while I don't have space in this review to unpack everything going on here, I'll express appreciation that Kodansha's release includes a note from the editor acknowledging that the conversations between the characters hold equal power to comfort and hurt different readers.

I mention that upfront because you can't divorce the experience of reading this series with that discomfort. However, it helps that at its heart, it's as sweet as the cakes the characters regularly go out to eat. It doesn't matter if Satoshi/Cocoa or Chiyoda/Opera is a man who likes wearing women's clothing, or has a different kind of gender identity; what's important is that they're exploring who they are and expressing different sides of themselves via how they present. At least at this present stage. I Cross-Dressed for the IRL Meetup is the kind of series where in the end, the characters' self-conception may very well shift from where they started.

What does it mean for Satoshi's sexual orientation that he's attracted to Opera? Who knows! Maybe we'll find out, and maybe we won't. Maybe there won't be a clear answer, and you know what? I respect that.