Belated translator note
Hi there, I'm the main translator for the group. We've noticed there's been a bit of confusion about why we've chosen to translate the pronouns in the manga the way we have, so I thought I'd show our reasoning a bit to try help clear it up.
Japanese as a language does have gendered pronouns similar to "he" and "she", but they're hardly ever used and don't appear in the current chapters of XX. It is, however, heavily gendered in terms of women's language and men's language being significantly different. Both Aoi and Sakura use masculine language (for example frequent use of "da" without anything to soften it, the question ending "-kai", and using "kimi" for "you") and Aoi at least refers to himself with the masculine pronoun "ore". While the language people use isn't so gendered in English, we decided that the most accurate way to keep that feel in English was to use masculine pronouns for them.
Yes, they know they're physically female, but they've been raised to be masculine in every way. The question of their actual internal gender hasn't been answered and may well end up being a significant part of the plot but for now at least they definitely seem to think of themselves and each other as psychologically masculine. If that starts to change as the story progresses we might end up changing pronouns.
Japanese as a language does have gendered pronouns similar to "he" and "she", but they're hardly ever used and don't appear in the current chapters of XX. It is, however, heavily gendered in terms of women's language and men's language being significantly different. Both Aoi and Sakura use masculine language (for example frequent use of "da" without anything to soften it, the question ending "-kai", and using "kimi" for "you") and Aoi at least refers to himself with the masculine pronoun "ore". While the language people use isn't so gendered in English, we decided that the most accurate way to keep that feel in English was to use masculine pronouns for them.
Yes, they know they're physically female, but they've been raised to be masculine in every way. The question of their actual internal gender hasn't been answered and may well end up being a significant part of the plot but for now at least they definitely seem to think of themselves and each other as psychologically masculine. If that starts to change as the story progresses we might end up changing pronouns.