[Pacific Rim] A case for transfem!Hermann
My case for transfem Hermann hinges a lot on admiration for Karla as an older sister to drive a few gender revelations.
I'd imagine Karla to be a little bit of a black sheep in terms of general opposition to the military and the discipline in which they were raised, somewhat tying into misogyny and an antagonistic relationship to authority to match Newt's. Meanwhile, Hermann has stars in his eyes about fighter pilots and astronauts and belonging (into a violently enforced hierarchy, yes, but belonging), but he can't be anything other than an outcast in those environments as someone with a physical disability.
Hermann loves Karla so, so much but resents her capacity to simply reject those promises, who can afford to be angry and loud and rough and find community in that justified anger, and Karla, who loves her soft little sibling, with his sweaters and clean mathematics and elegant algorithm programming and a yearning for the stars that glimmer in the countryside that she despises. Hermann, who yearns for all the things that were forced on her that she's kicking and screaming to be free of but never seems to get them, because humanity has to "toughen up" for the end of the world, and when mathematics and faith come in spades, it will be in a hierarchy with Hermann choking under its heel, as he always has been.
I would imagine drifting with Newt, specifically a Newt who is transmasc, who grew up in the midst of academic hierarchies but never belonged, who was loud and unpleasant in ways that echo Karla's own femininity but lose it without rejecting the rough aspects of it, might offer a belated wake-up call. Imagine experiencing the same dysphoria of your childhood, mirrored back to you, with echoes of your love for your sister and admiration for Newt. Of course, she'd have to untangle what is her own after the drift, whether that feeling of entrapment came from gendered expectation or institutional ableism, what is Karla and what is Newt's, if that anger is hers or borrowed, and if the fear of that softness comes from an external expectation of it or the opposite. But given time, given nurture, given room for those elegant edges to trace themselves, she'd come to a happiness in her post-apocalyptic life. The shine of a recently polished cane, prismatic dangly earrings (that she'd put herself through an extremely squeamish hell for, much to Newt's bodymodder delight), linen and silk and wool as well maintained as her notes, and particularly clean proofs on her grant submissions. A femininity that isn't Karla's, that Newt rejected for himself, but that suits her and is cherished by her loved ones as her own.