My Hero Academia Settles the Debate About Thirteen’s Gender

As part of a celebration of My Hero Academia‘s fifth anniversary, a new guidebook has been released in Japan featuring many new tidbits about the series and its characters from series creator Kohei Horikoshi. One of the major standout new bits of information has been the gender from many of the series’ transgender characters, and one of the most hotly debated has been for the Pro Hero Thirteen. While it was implied that the pro was a woman, translations had seemed to imply Thirteen was male. But My Hero Academia: Ultra Analysis has settled things once and for all.

@aitaikimochi on Twitter, who has been translating some of the most interesting bits from My Hero Academia: Ultra Analysis, shared the following confirmation of Thirteen’s gender, “It’s hard to tell due to the size of the costume, but Thirteen is, in fact, a woman.”

Given how many characters are in the series thus far, the Ultra Analysis guidebook has been key in revealing many of the extra bits of information about these characters that probably won’t get time in the main series. Characters like Class 1-B’s Monoma had more of their personality clarified, there was more insight into Ochaco Uraraka, and several of the heroes in training had their official hero names revealed.

As for Thirteen, the debate about their gender had begun when some English translations had cited the pro as a male character, but the voice performance behind the character (and their pronouns) suggested the pro was a female character. Regardless of where you sat with this debate, the official guidebook for the series has confirmed Thirteen as a female. Now perhaps Thirteen will play another role in the series since the pro hasn’t appeared in the series for quite a while.

My Hero Academia was created by Kohei Horikoshi and has been running in Shueisha’s Weekly Shonen Jump since July 2014. The story follows Izuku Midoriya, who lives in a world where everyone has powers, even though he was born without them. Dreaming to become a superhero anyway, he’s eventually scouted by the world’s best hero All Might and enrolls in a school for professional heroes. The series has been licensed by Viz Media for an English language release since 2015. My Hero Academia will also be launching its second big movie, Heroes Rising, in Japan this December.