Got into an argument with someone over whether a character is "non-binary."
The character's name is Zoe Hange, from Attack On Titan.
According to this other guy, in the manga in Japanese, for some reason Zoe's sex is apparently never specified, thus this guy insists on referring to her with they/them crap--he also uses this as justification for that whole Yamato thing. "See? Other series do this. Get educated."
The anime, however, explicitly makes Zoe female, and voiced by women in both Japanese and English--were she non-binary, she likely would have been voiced in English by someone who claims to be such, like Michelle Rojas or Marianne Miller (now calling herself Marin Miller), but instead she is dubbed by Jessica Calvello, who is a normal woman.
Yet this guy only refers to Zoe Hange as "they" and crap like that.
I am not into Attack On Titan. Not my thing. But unlike One Piece's Yamato, I can't find word from the original creator on this, and I don't trust sites like TV Tropes to tell me the truth here. Thus, I turn to you.
If the mods feel the need to remove this, I will understand. I'm just not sure who else I could ask this.
Japan has multiple gendered pronouns per gender, and often times people will use the wrong gender as a point about personality. Mion from Higurashi literally calls herself oji-san (old man/uncle), for an example.
That's why them never specifying or even what they do specify is meaningless. Japan isn't afraid of making traps, or joke trannies, or even just actual gender swapped characters. They'd let you know outright if that was intentional.
Crona from Soul Eater is a great example of what it looks like when they deliberately are trying to not specify. Its obvious they are doing it, the characters in universe note that they don't know, and the creator tells you outright nobody knows. Heck some series will have entire episodes about it, just to drive the point home.
At the end of the day, he is just a retard. You can't take a language so different from English and try to apply English cultural norms to its usage. Japan is filled with untranslatable details that English just straight up can't handle and then get lost even in the most faithful translation. It either gets dropped or gets made so heavy it feels cumbersome.