NOTICE: This article is intended for 18+ audiences due to parts including descriptions of 3D modeled genitalia.

Despite the accusatory subtitle I don’t intend this post to be an attack on any of the mentioned games. Instead I want to comment on the way in which transgender and gender non-conforming people are sometimes included mechanically in games but often not included within the narrative. This is somewhat inspired by verilybitchie’s excellent video How Bisexuality Changed Video Games which I recommend watching if you want to know more on the subject of mechanical queerness, as her video is about mechanical bisexuality and bi representation and it goes very in depth into those topics. I also don’t think a game having a they/them option is somehow a bad thing, that’s obviously awesome. But ultimately I feel it is a baby step in regards to having trans characters in video games when the vast majority of media either doesn’t have any trans characters, or if it does, it’s poorly handled. This is not to discount the work of countless indie developers who have made games about trans characters or being trans (some of which I’ll highlight near the end), I’m focusing more on mainstream games or games with more publicity in general.

Cassette Beasts Case Study

I’m starting off with Cassette Beasts¹ because it’s what got me thinking about all of this in the first place. It’s character creator does a lot right, you can pick pronouns instead of sex, no clothing options are gender locked, you can be a catboy, and no other aspect of appearance are tied to whatever pronouns you choose. As far as I can tell there are no instances of the game accidentally using the wrong pronouns for you either. But the only way to make your character textually trans is to pick they/them as your pronouns. What if I want to be a trans guy? I’m not saying a T rated game needs the option to pick genitals, nor do I necessarily think that it should take the Sims 4 approach where you can select sex, pronouns, the ability to get pregnant, and the ability to stand while using a toilet, it’s not a game where you get pregnant or use the toilet (the latter of which seems inhumane. What does my avatar need to do to relieve themself). If I pick he/him or she/her pronouns, I can pretend my character is trans in my head, but there will be nothing in the game to prove or disprove this, like I’m in some kind of Schrödinger’s gender box. My character is effectively neither trans nor cis, and while I do think blurring the line between those definitions is worthwhile, I doubt that’s what the Cassette Beasts devs were doing. Therefore, the only way to be trans is to use they/them within this specific character creator’s framework.

I also find it weird that all of the characters just know what my pronouns are. I have never been they/them’d by a stranger in real life. Why can’t Kayleigh (the first character you meet) like, ask me what they are? Like she meets me, I am a silent protagonist, and she somehow looks directly into my soul and correctly genders me. This is a nitpick for sure, but having characters ask wouldn’t be a crime. If anything it would add a layer of realism. There are also canonically nonbinary characters in the game that use they/them pronouns, but they’re extremely minor and don’t play much of a role in the story other than being gym leader type boss fights for you to spar against. It would’ve been neat if one of the companion characters had some kind of gender going on. It could have been especially interesting to explore gender non-conformity through the character of Viola, who is literally from the Shakespeare dimension.

To elaborate on that insane statement, Viola is textually from a dimension where the plot of Twelfth Night happened, and she is searching for the ghost of her brother, as the character of Viola does in that play. The premise of Twelfth Night is that Viola is separated from her brother, Sebastion, during a shipwreck, and is taken in by the captain of the ship. She then disguises herself as a man named Cesario to get work, and starts working for Duke Orsino. Duke Orsino is trying to court a woman named Olivia, and then Olivia falls in love with ‘Cesario.’ Shenanigans ensue. Shakespeare was getting pretty silly with this one! With that context in place I really wish that stuff was brought up at all in game. The game mostly uses her Shakespeare origin as a source of internal conflict so she can overcome an existential crisis and as a reason to insert funny Shakespeare-isms into her dialogue. I think they could have done a lot with the 4D chess gender fuckery that was going on in the original play without having to break the mostly lighthearted tone of the game. Maybe I’ll have to write that fanfic myself.

Nintendo Games and “Style”

Something people were pointing out about Splatoon 3² and Animal Crossing: New Horizons is that instead of having the player pick a “gender” option you pick “style” instead. Neither of these games have gender-locked clothing/hair styles and picking gender has no impact on gameplay whatsoever. While these elements are good, it really begs the question: why have the player choose a “style” in the first place? In Animal Crossing there is absolutely no difference, and in Splatoon 3 the only noticeable change is that picking a male “style” will give the player character a deeper voice. In both of these games the player should feasibly be able to make their character look however they want without having to pick a gender in the first place, as there is literally no visible difference. I’ve seen people jokingly say that these games have destroyed gender, but I don’t think it counts if you still have to pick a gender anyway, even if the question is rephrased in a more neutral tone. Recent Pokemon games have a similar habit of having the famous “are you a boy or a girl?” question replaced with “what do you look like?” but to my knowledge still have gender-locked clothing and haircuts, and it’s likely that wording was picked to accommodate for being able to choose between different skin tones starting in Pokemon X and Y. This is a very recent development, at least in mainstream games, and it’ll be interesting to see if/how wording around gender in character creation changes in the future.

Nonbinary as the “Third Gender.”

It’s common for RPGs to not have character customization but allow you to pick between a male or female avatar. Some games have added “nonbinary” as an option along side man and woman. This is cool and all but unfortunately it creates a problem where said game can only depict one version of being nonbinary. Which kind of defeats the purpose of the term. The semi-recent Harvestella is one of them. I will be upfront about this being the only game on this list that I haven’t played. I’m just using it here as a pretty blatant example of the problems that come up when trying to include mechanical transness. I simply am not a big farming sim enjoyer and I don’t want to drop 60$ on a game in a genre I’m not usually a fan of </3. But based on this article on Gfinity by Josh Brown, it seems it works similarly to previous games mentioned that there are no gender locked hairstyles or anything, and picking a gender simply changes the pronouns used for your character, with the nonbinary option using they/them. The thing about that is that not all nonbinary people use they/them. Some people use she/her and/or he/him anyway, others use it/its, and others use neopronouns like ze/zir or xe/xir, and that doesn’t even scratch the surface. There’s a ton of neopronouns out there! I could not reasonably even attempt to list all of them, and that’s awesome. But most games default to using they/them for nonbinary characters, and that will represent some people, but far from all of them. And of course it goes beyond pronoun usage, there are countless ways that people present, but mechanical transness can’t really account for that, at least through the examples I’ve used so far.

The Cattails Approach: Gender Simply Isn’t Real

Both Cattails games have a unique approach where every single character is referred to with they/them and nobody has a canonical gender except for maybe god. Objectively this is hilarious however it raises so many questions. Because the reason for this is likely so the main character can romance anyone AND have kits with anyone, and the developers likely didn’t want to complicate this by having any of the cats have canon sexes. This feels like an outlier example… but it isn’t. This is actually a very common phenomena in games, particularly in animal breeding games. Hell, this is technically true of Minecraft: there are countless cows that can reproduce with each other despite all of them visibly having udders and no bulls whatsoever. All chickens can lay eggs and can also seemingly reproduce the same way mammals can??? This isn’t meant to be something to think about, it’s just a way to make games with breeding mechanics less frustrating.

It’s more noticeable in the Cattails games to me because all of the cats in those games have established personalities. They aren’t blank slates or simply drivers of game mechanics, they have roles, jobs, and character interactions with each other. And in Cattails: Wildwood Story, Ember is a single parent. Also in Wildwood, there are “rival marriages” where certain NPCs will pair up with each other if you don’t marry them instead, and they always will eventually have children. Because there are no canon genders/ sexes, and the same applies to your character, we are once again trapped in Schrödinger’s gender box, except there actually are cats involved this time. And I know for a fact that if the Cattails games were about humans, and all of the mechanics around marriage and having children were the same, this would be downright revolutionary. Any character could have any sex and you would never know, and nobody has gender. Somehow, this game that’s two steps away from being a Warrior Cats fan game (affectionate) has envisioned an entirely agender society.

But of course there’s a catch here. This way of doing gender within the game is what allows for freedom of choice in order to create a kitty nuclear family. Again, the genderless cats here only exist to avoid making one mechanic of the game too complicated. You could rightfully play the game assigning genders to the characters, not assigning genders to them, or just not thinking about it at all. Ultimately this mechanic ends up meaning that any character can be any gender, but what that is doesn’t matter, the only thing you have to assume is that they have the respective reproductive organs between them to have kittens. I really don’t know how to feel about this. It’s a mechanic that’s friendly to trans people, but it’s not by any means an attempt to represent them. And I think that’s the issue with a lot of these examples I’ve brought up regarding mechanical transness.

The Complicated Ones

This is the part of the article that is exclusively games I’m not super familiar with. Now for the tragic part where I have to compliment EA. I briefly mentioned the Sims 4 earlier but the way it handles gender in character creation is genuinely fascinating to me. I don’t think it’s by any means perfect, but the team that worked on this game clearly put a lot of time and effort into allowing the player to create trans/nonbinary sims. I’m getting the following information about how this works in game from Autumn Kelley’s article on how making your sims trans works, “The Sims 4 CAS Guide: How To Create Transgender Sims” and Hope Bellingham’s “Long-awaited The Sims 4 Pronoun Update³ Finally Here.” Read those for more detail.

For the simpler part of this out of the way, I actually think the pronoun implementation is really good. You do get the basic options of he/him, she/her, and they/them, but you can also enter ‘custom pronouns’ (no issue with that phrasing I just think it’s funny) if you want a sim to use neopronouns. You can also apparently do this with the pets which is also pretty funny. I think this is the best possible way to have a pronoun entry, especially compared with the extensive options the Sims 4 has for creating trans sims. Bellingham mentions that the developers worked with GLAAD and It Gets Better on this and it shows.

But the options on creating trans sims are a lot more complicated and while I generally feel positive about them, I also think there’s some room for improvement. Being able to select if your sim can get pregnant, get others pregnant, or not be able to do either and not have that tied to gender is cool, having the toilet standing option is also fine though I wouldn’t have jumped to that one personally lol. But there’s things like needing to select "male” to have your sim grow facial hair, and having to select “female” for your sim to have fully grown boobs, which I personally take some issue with. First of all, there are cis women who grow facial hair and cis men who grow breasts, so I don’t see why there’s a need to have those specific options tied to sex. What about having breasts is more gendered than being able to stand while peeing, or implicitly having a penis, and what about having facial hair is more gendered than the ability to get pregnant, or implicitly having a uterus? Just because something is more visible in day to day life doesn’t mean that it is more powerfully masculine or feminine, when in real life these lines are quite blurred. Cis women might even lack breasts either due to an underlying condition or having them removed for reasons related to breast cancer (and in the latter case their femininity is often put at question for that procedure, even though breast cancer is extremely deadly and getting a mastectomy is often life saving in those cases!), and some men just don’t grow much facial hair for like no reason. For all of these reasons, I believe it isn’t necessary to tie facial hair and breasts to sex, especially when in all other regards the Sims 4 takes precautions to avoid gendering many other bodily features.

The last game I would like to go over is Baldur’s Gate 3, the ultra mega big money graphics, endless hours of story content boasting, bear sex scene having, everyone is mysteriously bi game. It is like, the most AAA game ever made in all regards except for the fact that it was released in a finished state and doesn’t have micro-transactions. This includes a robust character creation screen.

There are things about this screen that have already been criticized, such as the fact that there are no options for creating fat characters (which there isn’t any journalistic writing on but I’ve seen plenty of people talking about it online) but I would like to focus solely on the gendered aspects. The gender identity options are man, woman, and non-binary, which correlate to the pronouns he, she, and they, and I’ve already talked about how that “third option” method has its issues. I’m a bit more forgiving of Baldur’s Gate 3 in this regard because it is fully voice acted, so I understand that it wouldn’t have been reasonable to record voice lines for every pronoun variation possible, but at the same time, it isn’t uncommon for games that even simply have male/female options to just avoid to referring to the protagonist with pronouns or by their name at all costs to prevent voice acting discrepancies. However, it does have the epic win of having absolutely nothing tied to gender or sex, so there are ways in which it excels.

With that out of the way, it’s time to talk about genitals in a strictly educational way (beehiiv I just got here please don’t be mean to me). Unfortunately I can’t provide pictures of these due to terms of service, so I will do my best to describe and critique the customization options for Baldur’s Gate 3 as best as I can. Despite the fact that writing about genitals can seem eye-brow raising and perhaps uncomfortable for some people, I want to avoid sensationalizing this feature despite joking about some of the game’s sexual content earlier. They’re just body parts that everyone has some variation of. I see the option to create characters with specific genitals as an entirely neutral concept, it is how the game chooses to utilize genitals that can potentially have meaning. Baldur’s Gate 3, as previously mentioned, avoids tying any bodily traits to gender at all, and this includes what genitals your character has. As for what the options actually are, for as big of a deal that people made about it, I feel that there’s more that could’ve been done here. If you’re making a penis, you have options to pick between whether or not it’s circumcised along with shaving, whereas if you pick a vagina you can only pick if it’s shaven or not. I just feel like that’s not very impressive. I imagine this was done for budgetary reasons, I don’t know much about 3D modeling other than that it’s really complicated and difficult, but there is a lot of variation in genitals beyond penis, vagina, foreskin, and hair.

Unlike The Sims though, Baldur’s Gate 3 has a narrative, a massive, spider webby one in fact. You can make your player character trans easily, but none of the major party members are trans themselves. There are trans NPCs, though that doesn’t change the fact that none of the characters the player will be spending the most time with are. Considering how chill this game is with depicting queer relationships and giving the players the opportunity to do so, I just wish that transness was a more prominent aspect of the game. I feel that Baldur’s Gate 3 would have been a fantastic game for trans characters to be included in more broadly, especially given how many trans people are into Dungeons and Dragons as well as table top RPGs as a whole. And even if you do make your character trans, that isn’t going to be commented on or reflected in the story. Escapism for trans people is definitely important, especially with how dire the current political state has been for us, so I’m not suggesting that Baldur’s Gate 3 should have depicted realistic transphobia. That’s the last thing most people playing it would want to see, realistically. But if there were times for a character to experience or express trans joy, I think that would’ve meant a lot.

Conclusions?

The ways that trans people are represented in games are still very complicated and fraught. When it comes to the options for trans people to attempt to represent themselves in games, specifically with player avatars, things become even messier. I don’t know what the solution is, or if there is a perfect solution at all. There probably isn’t. But still, I think it is important to think about and consider the ways that character creators can be inclusive, but not necessarily create adequate representation. This ended up being about 4,000 words, which is like 3,000 more words than I thought I was going to write, and I still feel that I’ve only scratched the surface. I would love to see more people talking about this, which I guess was my primary goal in writing this article. In a landscape where trans people are hyper-visible, it would be nice to have games where we are given options to play as ourselves in kinder, more fantastical worlds.

Fun bonus: Some games with cool trans characters. Yippee!

Now for a few shoutouts, just for funsies.

1. Ikenfell: A turn based RPG where combat takes place on a small grid. Every action requires a real-time action command in order to go off correctly. It is a light-hearted fantasy school setting where the main character is looking for her missing sister with the help of her classmates, and she suddenly develops fire powers. This game features an entirely lgbt cast, and three of the characters are nonbinary. Those three characters also use differing pronouns, which is something I rarely see. Very cute, short and sweet. I enjoyed it! It kept me company on a string of long car rides.

2. Gnosia: Basically a werewolf/mafia sim in a sci-fi setting. You, the main character, are trapped in a time loop with a bunch of other people on a space ship, and find out that one or multiple of them are infected with the “gnosia” virus, which makes them evil. You are guided by Setsu, the deuteragonist, who gives you a mysterious device that exists to collect data on the crew. You can pick your gender at the start of the game, and this actually affects what romances you can pursue and how certain characters respond to you, so there are characters who are bi without having the mechanical bisexuality issue. Also Raqio is there and they’re awesome. Unfortunately there is one uncomfortable scene where Raqio’s assigned gender at birth is revealed through another character peeking in on them in the shower, but thankfully it isn’t sensationalized in any way beyond that. Both Setsu and Raqio are nonbinary characters who play major roles in the story, and you can make your avatar nonbinary if you wish⁴ , though the only other customization is picking your favorite color. Great art, interesting story, banger soundtrack.

3. In Stars and Time: Another time loop game lol. Admittedly haven’t played this one yet but I have watched part of a playthrough and it seems to be a very interesting exploration of mental health with the time loop as a mechanic to explore this topic further. Super unique visually and the music is great. The main character is non binary, uses he/they, and is a silly little guy, so I love them. There also is another character, Isabeau, who is a trans guy which is cool. Also there’s a non binary gremlin child who is one of the few child characters that doesn’t get on my nerves, which is a stellar achievement. I definitely want to check this game out further, though not any time soon because my backlog. It’s a turn based RPG with relatively simple but competently implemented combat.

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As of writing the DLC is out but I haven’t played it yet. I’ll get there eventually but for now I’m prioritizing other things in my life such as having a job and being a college student. So it’ll be a while. Noting this here in case the DLC randomly has a trans character or something.

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Finally. Pronoun Update. Sorry that phrase is really funny to me

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This took me so long to write that Side Order released, and in it is Acht, who is referred to by all characters with they/them. I still stand by my point in this section though. There is also the more ambiguous case of Captain 3 in this game. The game uses they/them and has a set design for them unlike Splatoon 2’s Octo Expansion having you pick a gender for them. But the way Splatoon in general handles the silent protagonists of previous games when representing them later is really weird, so I have no idea if Captain 3 is meant to be non binary representation or if the use of they/them is to keep the original gender the player set to them as canon in some way.

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Unfortunately this kind of falls under the “nonbinary as third gender” issue here, but it’s a bit more forgivable to me here because the game does depict two major nonbinary characters who have wildly different designs, vibes, and personalities, so it adds a bit of nuance. Raqio even explains the meaning of nonbinary at one point in the game. Also Raqio is nicer to you if you’re nonbinary which is objectively hilarious.