Several recent controversies have taught us that the public has a great deal of trouble remaining calm the moment anyone utters the word "transgender." A certain percentage of you involuntarily tensed up the moment you saw what this article was about -- you could sense a fight coming. Combine that controversial subject with the video gaming community, which has a tendency to, well, get worked up about things, and it's easy to guess what happens whenever a trans character shows up in a game.
Recently, a game called Baldur's Gate: Siege Of Dragonspear included a blink-and-you'll-miss-them character who makes reference to being transgender. The response?
YouTube
We talked to Amber Scott, the writer of Dragonspear, and Sheva Gunnery, who recently conducted a large survey of transgender gamers, to try to understand this. They said ...
5
Games Aren't Exactly Chock-Full Of Trans Characters
Femhype.com
To be fair to the gaming industry, its portrayal of transgender characters hasn't been any worse than Hollywood's, in which trans people have historically been either punchlines (Ace Ventura) or murderous monsters (Silence Of The Lambs). If you want an unintentionally sad snapshot of the situation, look at Out's "7 Trans-Friendly Video Game Characters." Their list includes Birdo, a dinosaur creature tennis enthusiast who started off as "a boy who thinks he's a girl" in 1988 and was almost immediately changed to just a girl ...
Nintendo
They were worried she might be too out there for a game full of doors to the netherworld, malevolent sentient masks, and ghosts with social anxiety.
You also have Guilty Gear's Bridget, a tween who produces a suggested Google search of "Trap," along with a lot of jokes about how gross he is ...
PsychoLaugh/DeviantArt
Sprite, via Knowyourmeme.com
... and whatever the fuck Final Fantasy IX's Quina is.
Squaresoft
"I self-identify as a turnip."
So it's not a terribly inspirational landscape if you're trans and looking for a character you can relate to. That's too bad, because that's part of what makes gaming so appealing -- you can control someone who's like you, but more interesting, because they're a professional demon killer and you had to spend half of last weekend doing paperwork at the DMV.
With that in mind, Amber's motivations for including a trans character, Mizhena, in her game seem uncontroversial. "I think everyone deserves to play a game that represents them in a fun fantasy setting. That's how imagination and wonder develops." There's also the issue of variety in an industry that has largely defaulted to "strapping white dude" or "voluptuous babe" for its protagonists. "Creating a wide range of characters also makes settings more complex and believable. There's a certain amount of willful blindness you have to have to believe in a video game world where the entire population is made up of one or two character models in one of five outfits. The more diverse a game world can be, the more like real people the characters become."
So Mizhena wasn't an elaborate ploy by Big Social Justice -- just one writer trying to flesh out the world she was building with a couple of quick, completely optional lines of dialogue. And yet ...
4
There Was A Ridiculous And Terrible Overreaction
YouTube
So here's a typical reaction to Dragonspear:
Steam
"Blatantly scream personal information at the player"? Shit, what did Mizhena do, not let you continue until you built a float for the first mandatory Baldur's Gate pride parade? She was a minor character, you had to ask her about her name before her being trans even came up, and then you got back to business. She has four short sentences about being trans, which most players probably miss because they want to hurry up and get back to the magical combat ...
Beamdog
... And now here are some players reacting to that brief conversation as if the game required them to pledge allegiance to ISIS before proceeding. You can play a fun minigame right here. We call it "count the hand-wringing hyperbole"!
Steam
Gog
Steam
Any attempts to "protect video games" might be a bit undercut by 74 percent of readers considering "Hurr durr!" valid critique.
Sadly, we could spend all day finding examples. Someone made a video in which they killed Mizhena and called it "Tranny Abuse," and serial killers would find the comments a bit much.
YouTube
YouTube
YouTube
YouTube
YouTube
"LMAO: homicide."
Did you guess that Amber was personally targeted too? If so, give yourself a depressing pat on the back.
Oh, and someone rushed out to make a mod solely to remove that one conversation, so they could enjoy the game without "propaganda." It's called Siege Of Dragonspear: Corrections, because apparently there was a competition to make the Skyrim horse vagina mod look classy.
Moddb.com
"Suck on it, world-building."
The flood of anger focused almost entirely on this one brief and easy-to- miss conversation, to the point where people with real criticism had to preface their reviews with "Sure, transgender character, whatever. Can you fix these bugs, please?"
Steam
Despite all that, Amber has remained upbeat about the whole thing. "I have [been harassed], but I prefer not to dwell on the vile stuff. I've gotten as much thanks and support as I have abuse, and that's what I try to focus on. One message from a person saying, 'I saw myself in the game, and I want to thank you' means more than a hundred messages calling me unprintable names."