Trans issues and Bisexual panic in Coffee Prince

Who hasn’t heard of a coffee shop AU?

Not long ago, a coffee shop was the perfect place for fanfiction writers to place their characters in order to foster romance. Back then, black-clad baristas serving white ceramic cups and cakes to future love interests was all the rage. One show that promoted the beautiful coffee shop image was Coffee Prince 2007 (Keopi peurinseu in transliterated Korean). In this show, the grandson of a food distributor is forced to prove himself by taking over a failed coffee shop. He hires a staff of handsome young men, and one woman who he thinks is a man. This leads to a budding, and confusing for him, romance. The show was meant to show the humor of a man falling for a woman who he thinks is a man. Not the newest trope in the world. The show, however transcends some of the triteness by taking the subject seriously and showing the main character go through a case of intense “bisexual panic”.

Sometimes shows from the past just don’t ring the same now as they did then. I guess that we were supposed to watch this show in 2007 and say, “he is obviously in love with her because he sees the woman inside the menswear”, but that’s not how it feels in the second decade of the twenty-first century. The main female character, Go Eun Chan, does not feel like a woman dressed as a man to get a job. She feels like a woman who has many characteristics that others label as male, so she is used to letting people mistake her for a man if it makes her life easier. She feels to me like a trans-man, or even an a-gender person who is comfortable being herself.

The show doesn’t shy away from showing that Go Eun Chan will enter female bathhouses as easily as male toilets. She boast of standing with her legs out in front of a urinal many times to make men in the room feel at ease. She identifies as female, but she takes a job as a male if needed to support her family. One of the things that I noticed while watching the show on Viki, a platform that allows commenting during the show, was how many people asked when she would stop cross-dressing and start wearing women’s clothes. ( She doesn’t.) This reminded me of how women wearing men’s clothes is usually simply a plot device to allow the female lead to get close to the male lead in a story. The women in those shows usually dress up nice as a woman once they have completed their assigned task, and live happily and traditionally once they are mated. The women are suppressing their gender, not expressing it. An example of this is the show “Sungkyunkwan Scandal” where the lead dresses as a man to enter college, but wears female clothing when she goes home to visit. She does not naturally act male, other than to fit in with male society. It is a role that she plays.

In Coffee Prince, Go Eun Chan eats huge portions of food. Talks in a crass manner. Carries heavy weights, and tends to get into fights. All actions that are acceptable for a boy, but considered suspect for a girl. When the male lead, Choi Han Kyul falls for her, he undergoes a panic as he realizes that loving “him” will make him gay in the eyes of his society. This is particularly ironic since he first hired Go Eun Chan to act as his male lover to thwart all of the dates that his grandmother set him up on.

So his fake male/male romance became a real male/male romance, except it wasn’t, because she wasn’t really male. But even when the deception was revealed, it still didn’t change the fact that Go Eun Chan looked better in pants than skirts, and had characteristics that distinguished her from the pretty society wife Choi Han Kyul was supposed to bring home to his family.

Choi Han Kyul went through a real crisis trying to understand how to deal with his own emotions in a way that would be acceptable to his society and family. He was supposed to like girls. He did like them, but he loved a person who fell outside of what it was acceptable for him to love. His struggle to find a way to deal with the bond (such as calling them sworn brothers and having them wear matching earrings) were humorous, but also heartbreaking. The reveal of her sex didn’t magically remove his pain for the deception or erase his personal struggles.

The show made me think of how arbitrary our rules about the sexes are. What should it matter how she cuts her hair or how much she eats. What should it matter if he walks down the street holding her hand. Even sex segregated bathrooms seem arbitrary and archaic.

It also made me analyze my own culture. We still have businesses which hire only single-sex waitstaff despite the laws. Trans people have a high incidence of abuse from strangers, and even murder for the simple crime of not looking stereotypical male or female. This show is classic for a reason. Behind the humor of the gender bender plot, lies serious societal issues that we often fail to address. That makes this romantic comedy certainly worth a watch.