I remember watching 1984’s Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind for the first time. A young woman flies in, early in the film, on her white glider, into a vast forest of beautiful yet toxic plants and takes a sample from one into a beaker. When I hear her voice, something makes me shiver. When she takes off her brown oxygen mask under the protective molted shell of a beetle’s eye, poisonous pollen falling around her like snow, it happens again. I know she’s the girl on the cover of the movie case, yet here she is: alone, exploring, unafraid, androgynous. I’m a tween, and I don’t process my thoughts clearly at the time. But I know, suddenly, that she is different from everything else I’ve watched up to this point. She seems to wear power like a coat. She lingers in my thoughts after the movie is over.

I’m transgender. I grew up in the Commonwealth of Dominica in the Caribbean, where the idea of being openly queer was almost unthinkable to me. Our laws from the days of British colonialism made buggery a crime, and there are still no governmental protections from anti-LGBT discrimination. Growing up, I felt lost. I saw myself as a woman due not to what I liked or disliked, but because that was how I felt in my mind—as if a switch in there had simply been turned to girl instead of boy. For many years I neither had the language to fully understand what this meant nor the courage to tell anyone this secret.

On bad days, I felt like I was wearing a mask I couldn’t remove, and on my worst days I considered drinking poison to stop hearing the calls of the girl who seemed to be imprisoned inside. The environment of me was falling apart, growing toxic like the one Nausicaä inhabited. In Miyazaki’s Spirited Away, the protagonist Chihiro loses her name; I felt that in a sense I had never had a real name in the first place, having always been called by others a male name that did not accord with the person I wished to be.

When I watched Miyazaki, something changed. For the first time, I saw representations of girls and women that seemed real and attainable, yet mythic all the same. Here were female characters who were vulnerable and independent, who defied gender norms in the way they looked and behaved. Partly because our detractors often reduce trans women to caricatures of femininity, rigid depictions of female beauty in Western animation and some Japanese anime can seem even more inaccessible to us than they already do for many cisgender girls. But Miyazaki’s films reinforced for me what many women come to learn eventually: that being female is not about fitting one superficial ideal or another. It is ultimately not about how you look or how you act, but who you are.

Miyazaki’s characters seemed real, too, because they were shown even in their least triumphant, most ordinary moments. In all of his films, the director includes the quiet scenes and mundane daily acts that many other movies, animated ones in particular, eschew. Characters gaze at streams or brush their hair, not to advance the film’s plot, but to add a sense of realism—the kind that makes fictional people feel less like tropes and more like human beings. This sense of humanity is so often missing from other animated portrayals of characters, female characters in particular, which made Miyazaki’s films even more meaningful to me.