What Gender Is Yamato: Male, Female, or Trans?

Yamato, also known as the Oni Princess, is the daughter of the former Emperor Kaidou. Trained from a young age to be Kaidou’s heir, Yamato instead developed a deep admiration for the samurai Kozuki Oden. After his death, Yamato decided to “become” Oden, posing as him and adopting his mannerisms. After meeting Monkey D. Luffy, she joined the Alliance in order to defeat the Beasts Pirates and get out of Onigashima. Yamato is by all standards the next member of Luffy’s crew, but – how do refer to Yamato? Which pronoun do we use? In this article, we are going to tell you whether Yamato is male, female, or transgender.

Yamato was born as a female and has female physiology. Yet, after Kozuki Oden’s death, Yamato began referring to herself as a man and has since called herself Kaidou’s son, instead of Kaidou’s daughter. Now, Oda hasn’t really solved this one for us – she refers to herself as a male, yet is biologically female and it doesn’t seem like Oda intends to change that aspect. Until Oda clarifies it, this one will remain a mystery.

The rest of this article is going to focus on Yamato and her/his gender. We are going to tell you all the known details about this issue, which still remains as one of the biggest issues in the current One Piece narrative. You have to be aware, though, that there are going to be some spoilers in this article, so be careful how you approach it.

What does Yamato look like?

Yamato is tall, almost twice Luffy’s height, but not as tall as Kaidou. She has long white hair that is tied between orange rods in a ponytail at the back, the color of which fades to a shade of aqua green then blue as it progresses, ending in rectangular locks similar to Kaidou’s. Yamato also has large orange eyes with prominent eyelashes, she wears gold earrings on both ears, and has red horns.

As for her clothes, she wears a pair of red hakama pants and sandals and, like Oden, wears a large purple and white nio-daisuki behind her back. Yamato’s current outfit is a sleeveless white garment with a diamond-shaped design on both sides and an indigo patterned lower half. This garment was originally a kimono with long white sleeves, but these were later torn off, leaving the garment sleeveless and making it more form-fitting.

Additionally, while she was in costume, she also wore a hannya mask, which had a blue wig with an extremely long, wild mane attached to the top and a long blue goatee attached to the bottom. About four years ago, Yamato wore a similar outfit with long sleeves, but with different symbols on the chest area.

The symbols resemble an oden skewer. At eight years old, Yamato’s attire was almost identical to today, except with a slightly different mask with shorter horns and beard and without the nio-daisuki. In the manga, her outfit lacked the diamond-shaped design.

What is Yamato like?

Yamato greatly admires the legendary samurai Kozuki Oden above anything else, to the point of emulating every aspect of him. She has referred to herself as Oden on multiple occasions and has even emulated her gender, referring to herself as the “son of Kaidou” due to Oden being male. Although she was initially hesitant about presenting herself as Oden, Yamato has been expressing a direct attitude towards this identity over time, even proclaiming herself as such to Momonosuke, Oden’s son, much to the boy’s horror.

Although she has fully embraced this identity, Yamato has not let go of her original persona, referring to Yamato as her “another name of her.” Yamato doesn’t seem to like people getting her name wrong, as she quickly corrected Luffy when he referred to her by a nickname. After reading the great deeds documented by Oden in his logbook, which she considers his “bible”, Yamato dreams of leaving the confines of Wano Country and setting sail with the Straw Hat Pirates, just like Oden did with the Whitebeard Pirates and the Roger Pirates decades ago.

Yamato also wishes to fulfill Oden’s goals, namely to open Wano’s borders, in direct defiance of her father’s wishes for the country. Yamato has shown to have strong willpower, having put up considerable resistance to Kaidou’s imprisonment despite not being fully freed. Though she initially seemed more subservient to him, her fight with her Ace led her to destroy Kaidou’s dragon statue in an act of defiance that has since led to more outright rebellion.

Yamato has engaged in combat with her father on numerous occasions and has openly expressed her opposition and defiance of her plans for her, accompanied by insults. When the Ninja-Pirate-Mink-Samurai Alliance invaded Onigashima, Yamato was immediately willing to help them and had no qualms about attacking her father’s crew members, making her intentions and positioning clear when she was facing them.

Yamato is also willing to go to any lengths to achieve her goals, having basically kidnapped Luffy to get a talk with him and continuing this tactic even after Luffy responded by attacking her. Yamato is more than willing to risk his physical integrity and her life to protect the people he cares about, as she believes that Oden would never abandon a partner in danger.

She staunchly resisted a barrage of powerful artillery attacks by the Armored Division to protect Momonosuke, and later faced Kaidou alone to keep him occupied until Luffy returned, despite knowing that she was no match for him. However, Yamato also enjoys participating in combat; even though her plan to separate from Momonosuke was a decoy strategy to trick the Beasts Pirates, Momonosuke and Shinobu observed that her Yamato seemed to be mainly interested in going to fight.

Is Yamato male, female or transgender?

Now that we’ve given you all the information you need, you can… no, you cannot deduce anything for yourselves as the answer to this question remains unknown. We can confirm that Yamato was born female and that she is, biologically, a female. As things stand now, Oda does not intend to change that in the future. We can also confirm that Yamato refers to herself as male because she wants to be Kozuki Oden: “Oden was a man, wasn’t he? So I chose to be a man too!”.

Still, regardless of these facts, she has been referred to as both female (“Oni Princess”, Kaidou’s daughter) and male (in Chapter 1052 of the manga, Yamato is seen in the men’s bath along with Luffy and the others, whereas Nami was denied access because it’s not a mixed bath). Since Oda has introduced transgender characters in his works, we don’t think that she is actually transgender; from what we can deduce now, she is a female that refers to herself as a man and until Oda-sensei decides to clear it up officially, she is going to remain like that.