transgender and pronouns

This is just observational data, but in the context of LGBT matters in general, transgender issues seem to be more to the forefront in Japan than in the States. I'm not sure why. Maybe partly because there's a long tradition in traditional Japanese theater of men enacting women (see kabuki) and more recently vice versa (see Takarazuka); maybe partly because there's a somewhat higher proportion among Japanese of people whose physical type permits them to be gender-ambiguous (more than once I've sat across from someone on the train and been completely unable to guess what gender they might be); maybe other factors. Who knows. I'm cisgender and it's not my field of study, but it would be a damn interesting thesis for a grad student somewhere. (Note: the spellchecker on here can deal with "transgender" but not "cisgender." ?)
Anyway, I noticed that two of the better Japanese novels I've read in the last couple of months were on transgender themes. One, titled something like The Singing Frog Princess, is YA or middle-grade, aimed probably at younger teenagers; it's about a ninth-grade boy who realizes that he likes girls and also wishes he could be a girl. He finds out that he can sing in a girl's voice (like a countertenor, I guess) and secretly records himself doing so. The "mystery singer" becomes a hot property at school, and the expected complications and repercussions ensue. I kind of wish the author hadn't taken pains to have the boy check out GID (as it's still unfortunately called in Japan) and decide that's not exactly what he's got; but when the book ends, he's got a girlfriend and an understanding best friend and is pretty sure that, at the least, he's going to go on singing in a "girl's" voice. Various possibilities are left open.
The other novel is a mystery which won one of the bigger first-novel-mystery awards, called Disappearance/Gradation. (No, that's not a typo for graduation.) The plot, centering on a high school basketball team, is sort of complicated, but there's one character who turns out to be apparently a girl and physically a boy (due to androgen insensitivity syndrome, which I just had to look up the English for; you learn something new every day). More centrally, the two main characters present to the reader as male (the narrator) and female (the narrator's sidekick, or rather the person whose sidekick the narrator is). By the end of the book, you learn that their actual genders are the other way round. I had guessed almost right away about the latter character, mostly because of an ambiguous name for which the author carefully didn't supply pronunciation (kanji/Chinese characters which could be read as either Mayu, a girl's name, or Masayoshi, a boy's). When the narrator's gender was spelled out, though, my first reaction was "Hey, that's not fair!" and my second thought, "Oh man, this would be absolutely fucking impossible to translate." Being the narrator, this character naturally uses the first person pronoun. Japanese has a million first person pronouns, well, many, and the one the narrator uses is masculine. Likewise, his/her speech patterns in general are masculine, especially when set against his/her friend's pointedly feminine usage. Without any palpable evidence to the contrary (not even a noticeably androgynous name, like Yuki or Mizuki or something), the reader automatically takes the narrator for a boy. This effect would be damn near impossible to accomplish in English.
Anyway, at least in the fictional sector, Japan seems to be thinking hard about transgender ideas lately. Hope for the best.