Netflix’s release of Hideaki Anno’s seminal 90s anime Neon Genesis Evangelion, about a group of teenagers forced to pilot giant robots to fight an alien threat, has been under intense scrutiny from the start. The skepticism started pre-release, when original dub actress Amanda Winn Lee announced Netflix was recasting for a new English dub, scrubbing the work of longtime actors like Lee and Tiffany Grant. The actual release proved just as contentious, with translation foibles including rendering one character’s admission of queer love more ambiguous, as it was in the original Japanese script, and changing what the original English described as a “Sect terrorist attack” to a “leftist attack.”

But less has been said about a different feature of this new translation: the new English voice of protagonist Shinji Ikari is a non-binary trans woman named Casey Mongillo. Though this may not mean much to the show's cisgender fans, Mongillo's casting is more than just a reimagining of the classic character. For the marginalized section of the show's audience that includes trans and gender non-conforming people, Netflix's updated dub has breathed new life into one of the most important anime series of all time, taking what was once queer subtext and bringing it closer to outright text.

At first glance, Neon Genesis Evangelion is far from what you'd call a dysphoria narrative. It follows the plight of 14-year-old Shinji Ikari as he's forcibly recruited into humanity's war with the Angels, an alien race who can only be defeated by mysterious mechs (or giant robots) called Evangelions (Evas for short), vessels that only he and a select few teenagers can pilot. Yet from the beginning, Hideaki Anno's story has always been more than that. Shinji is catapulted not only into perilous battles against a diverse array of giant, unknowable monstrosities, but also into the role of a hero, a soldier, a savior, an adult, a man—one he never wanted or asked for, and has trouble fitting into. These internal struggles have allowed Anno's story to resonate with generations of disaffected young people, many of whom identify with Shinji’s inability to succeed in a structure that was stacked against him (and his mental well-being) from the start.