Assessments
The 2004 Japanese-language script is mixed, conflating being a transgender woman and a crossdressing man/femboy. Vivian does seem to behave as though transgender, invariably acting like a woman and wanting to be identified as one in an early character-establishing scene, yet the menu text and Tattle Log consider her a boy, and Goombella can call her the “youngest brother” without, apparently, being considered a jerk for doing so. However, at the same time, the villainous Beldam is depicted as a cruel bully for calling Vivian a man. This seems to be a case of friendly intentions somewhat bungled, as opposed to a deliberately disrespectful treatment of a trans character, as Vivian is written sympathetically throughout. The 2004 English script definitely loses depth, to the degree there is any, by removing this aspect of Vivian’s character.
In The Thousand-Year Door+, a desire to respect Vivian as a transgender character butts up against the edgier misgendering that was considered less unacceptable in 2004 and the writers often stating Vivian is a crossdressing man. Griscuit found ways to blunt the writing’s edges while also preserving the structure and tone of the relevant dialogue. However, the menu text that specifies Vivian was “born male, but she prefers being a girl,” rather than someone who “looks like a girl but really is a boy,” is a case of just rewriting.
The 2024 Japanese remake scrubs scenes of more explicit transphobia and the previous references to Vivian being a boy and gives her additional dialogue depicting her as transgender with no ambiguity. The writers understand her to be a trans woman and want to portray her with more care and respect than the first attempt did. The 2024 English script follows the 2024 Japanese script, unambiguously depicting Vivian as transgender. Where the Japanese script may emphasize this to a degree that risks overshadowing her other character traits, the English script is subtler, only including a few references in the dialogue.
I had hoped to find a script in which the character is unimpeachably trans. However, interpreting the 2004 Japanese Paper Mario RPG version of Vivian as a crossdressing man instead of a trans woman is reasonable, not a misreading or misinterpretation. (Not that it makes a difference in this case, but at risk of redundancy, and given that it’s a point of discussion online, Vivian is never clearly called 男の娘 “femboy” instead of the phonetically identical 男の子 “boy” in any of the text I have examined.) In this context, though Beldam remains a bully, her red-text insult in Boggly Woods may be intended to be comical rather than especially cruel, a kind of punchline revealing an unexpected silly aspect of the situation. It may also follow that Vivian’s love for Mario is meant to be slightly comical, particularly in her final scene when she feigns that she is happy he is together with Peach. Though this would mean there is a Mario game in which he has a gay kiss.
However, the 2004 version is still amenable to the trans reading. Vivian is introduced wanting to be considered a woman and speaks, acts, and looks like a woman from start to finish. She comes across as transgender based on the actual dialogue and story instead of less important supplemental text such as the Tattle Log or the Catch Card in the sequel. The confusion between crossdressing and transness seems to not be so much a deliberate writing choice as a reflection of a less socially aware climate. In 2004, people outside of LGBT spaces would tend more often to conflate crossdressers, transgender people, drag queens, etc. out of ignorance there was a difference between these kinds of gender variance. The 2024 releases of The Thousand-Year Door forced Intelligent Systems and Nintendo to return to the old script in a time when there is more public awareness of and respect for queer identities. So now they consistently depict Vivian as trans, a more plausible characterization, giving official clarification to the 2004 portrayal.
As with Bridget from the Guilty Gear franchise, the conservative “culture war” desire to regard Vivian not as a trans woman but as “just” a man who looks like, dresses as, speaks like, and is treated as a woman is fueled more by a desire to erase transgender visibility, even in innocuous corporate children’s entertainment, than by a hallowed respect for effeminate men. In any case, while the femboy reading is reasonable in the 2004 GameCube game, it is certainly not supported by the 2024 Switch game.