(Also /u/1donteven )

Maybe I'm not explaining my case well. Let me try this again with a thought experiment. Imagine you do not care about nor know anything about anime, you simply like hentai and like jerking off to it. You have already been a fan of hentai for many years, and it has made you interested in some things you wouldn't have imagined being interested in or aroused by before. You sit down at your computer, open gelbooru and browse for pictures. You come across a picture of Astolfo. You look at it. You see a face that, were it real, would be one of the most feminine faces any woman has ever had and even for anime girls - who are already drawn in a hyperfeminine style - is unusually feminine. You look at the body, which is slender and feminine and features a flat chest - a staple in hentai. You look further down and see a penis. "Ah," you think. "A dickgirl. Why not!" and you begin to jerk off. Later images only serve to cement your idea of who this character is (in the context of hentai, at least): a hyperfeminine, submissive dickgirl.

Only when a person knows the source material does the character suddenly become a "boy."

For the last few years, leftists have often tried to apply the concept of postmodernism to literature by way of the concept of the "death of the author," which seeks to tell us that authorial intent is equally as good as anybody else's interpretation of the work. I've often argued against this. At the same time - as with anything else - an issue can be taken too far in either direction, not just the one. This here is a case where authorial intent actively runs counter to perception: a character who looks more womanly than even a very feminine woman and at least in depictions in hentai - which for most people are the only ones they are exposed to - behaves like a stereotypical anime girl is supposedly a "man."

Yet, the only thing that differentiates this from this is the tags. So, if there is anything you take away from this post, it's to please ask yourself the question what differentiates these two characters in these two pictures and whether whatever you deem the difference actually matters to the people who consume this content.