PRIDE 2021: A Brief History of Modern Trans Characters in Games

It seems hard to believe with the blowback it always entails, but gaming is gradually getting more and more queer with each passing day. Seeing trans characters slowly but surely make their way into leading roles in both mainstream and indie games is such a breath of fresh air from the rigid fetishisation and ambiguous throwaway lines we have been used to for years. Characters openly and happily being themselves - despite anyone that insists otherwise - is always a welcome change from the cisnormative experience most games lean on.

We’ve come a long way from Capcom plugging their ears for decades when Poison’s gender was brought up and Nintendo deadnaming Birdetta in every video game she’s in. Some characters have made great strides in positive trans representation, however, others were clearly written without a single queer person in the room. While I’ll happily celebrate the best, we also have to look at the worst. They are an important cautionary tale about what happens when you don't give trans characters the respect they deserve. There is a spoiler or two, fair warning!

An authentic breath of fresh air.

Tyler Ronan - Tell Me Why

I’ll admit, I had somewhat high expectations for Tell Me Why, and even bigger ones for its main character, Tyler Ronan, following the absolutely wonderful time I had with both Life is Strange and its sequel. Developer DONTNOD put a lot of effort into making sure Tyler comes across as a well written and realistic trans man, tapping GLAAD to ensure the bar was set high. This makes sense considering he is described on their website as ‘the first playable transgender videogame hero from a major studio and publisher’. It’s a level of effort pretty uncommon in terms of representation(especially compared to some of the more problematic attempts covered below). But all that reassurance also meant I was rightly prepared to be critical of them if they botched the attempt.

And yet, I think it’s fair to call Tyler the best mainstream representation of a trans person I’ve seen. The effort DONTNOD puts in to get him right pays off in spades; he comes off as a genuinely likeable human character, and not a lazy caricature hastily written for diversity points. More than anything, Tyler is a top-tier example of what happens when you put love and effort into getting your queer characters right, and I hope other developers take note when adding their own.

It’s always a good time to catch up with a friend.

Madeline - Celeste

As hard as it is to explain, I knew Madeline was trans, before the developer confirmed it, and before the DLC with the trans flag on her desk, I knew because she felt just like me. It’s rare to find a character in media you can truly relate to in this day and age, but Madeline was just as much a part of my transition as buying new clothes or explaining to people that, no, you don’t get to know about what’s going on in my pants. Her struggles with anxiety throughout the game are heartfelt and honest for a topic still criminally underrepresented or even understood in video games. That helps her be more relatable to me than any Commander Shephard or Kratos.

Seeing another woman overcome and make peace with her issues rather than try to force them away felt poetic as someone struggling with those same emotions and it was the help I needed to understand what was going on in my own head. It makes sense in retrospect, especially with the knowledge that Maddy Thorson is trans themselves, but it doesn’t change how much of a positive effect Madeline and her journey up the mountain had on myself and so many other queer people.

Lev - The Last Of Us Part II

Even the lighting in this game is almost unbearably dark.

Lev exhausts me more than anyone else on this list. It’s through no fault of the character; he’s a young boy who wants to be himself and help his sister, easily one of the few bright spots in a game I desperately wanted to end.  No, it’s the world that he lives in that exhausts me. Whenever Lev and Abby (a character you’ve absolutely heard about even if you’ve never played the game) have a quiet moment, it is almost always interrupted by an explosion of violence, so that the world can be re-enforced as brutal. It is shoved into your face every single moment it can be, resulting in a deep lack of complex character beats, other than “he is going through yet another awful thing”.

Just as I am exhausted by the brutality, the transphobia drains me just as harshly. Lev is aggressively deadnamed by the enemies you come across, and I would openly cringe whenever I heard it. To the Seraphites, Lev is the Apostate, one who pushes against their religious doctrine and must be destroyed; but to me, Lev is another reminder that we live in a world that craves trans suffering before trans happiness. As much as I enjoyed Lev’s character in the Last of Us Part II, I can’t say I want to go back and experience his journey again. I deal with enough suffering for who I am on a daily basis.

V - Cyberpunk 2077

V just barely manages to slide their way onto this list for two reasons. The first reason is that V’s status as a trans person is a choice, and one not handled very well. In Cyberpunk 2077’s character creator, you can customize V’s genitals completely separately from their body type. In theory, this is a good idea, but because pronouns are tied to voice and not able to be chosen by the player, you cannot have a femme V with a masculine voice or vice versa. Quite frankly, it’s a little insulting that my voice determines whether or not I’m gendered correctly, something that I already struggle with, in my day to day life; seeing this reinforced in one of the few video games where I can actually play as a trans woman is a hard knock against it, regardless of the intent.

Fuck it. Just burn the whole thing down.

There is a second reason is that V is insufferable as a main character, cis or trans, though. They’re an asshole to everyone, including people the script wants me to believe are their friends. The state of representation for trans people has been very lacking in the last few years, and characters like V continue to hold it back. Because there are so few characters in the first place, the ones that aren’t written well stand out more, and that makes V stand out for all the wrong reasons. I crave more trans people in my media, but I crave it done well, and not in a game that fetishizes me while claiming to stand with me.

Having Miranda deliver this line is offensively on the nose to be honest.

Miranda Comay - Watch Dogs 2

Watch Dogs 2’s Miranda Comay is the one that disappoints me the most out of everyone here because she comes so close to being perfect. She’s an openly trans woman in a position of power and has been friends with the main character, Marcus Holloway, for several years. Despite one of the antagonistic forces, New Dawn, releasing a video of her gender reassignment surgery(???), she continues to stand up to them with the help of Marcus and his hacker friends. She’s also the only black trans woman on this list.

But all the positives she has are absolutely for nought because of the fact that she’s voiced by a cis man. This is such a baffling decision to me, especially after Ubisoft took all the steps to make her so much better than she needed to be. Even if hiring a trans actor to voice trans characters is still not ideal for most developers for some reason, this feels like such a massive oversight that I’m at a loss as to why they wouldn’t at least have a cis woman voice her. Miranda is the best example of good representation ruined by a hazardous mistake.

JJ is such a fantastic character that it only makes what comes next that much worse.

JJ Macfield - The Missing: JJ Macfield and the Island of Memories

Both JJ and Lena(the following entry) are both characters created by the same developer, White Owls Inc., and were directed by Hidetaka Suehiro, more well known as the much cooler alias Swery65. I’ve never been particularly enamoured with Swery’s library; neither his obscure stuff nor the technical nightmares that are the Deadly Premonition games have clicked for me. It only impresses me more that Swery is also responsible for what might be one of the best representations of the life of a closeted trans woman in any media, not just games.

Inbetween the gruesome gameplay that involves you tearing yourself to pieces to solve puzzles, you communicate with JJ’s friends and family through text messages. The game hints at JJ’s queerness through situations that many people, myself included, can either emphasise with or have been through themselves, like having to explain clothes for the opposite gender. While it’s not overtly explained until the end of the game, her gender does not come across as a twist or ‘gotcha’ moment, but more as the final clue in her puzzle of circumstance, much like the puzzles you solve along the way. JJ is a standout trans character, which only confuses me more when compared to their most recent attempt to keep the representation going.

What’s that Zach? Yes, Swery really should have known better.

Lena Dauman - Deadly Premonition 2

I will never understand how the mishandling of Lena Dauman could come from the same developer that gave us The Missing. Swery, despite being notably pro-trans in real life, somehow made nearly every mistake imaginable with Lena, more so than anyone else mentioned here. This is not a case of the developer just dropping the ball, but spiking it into the earth’s core. Truly, some of the transphobia depicted has to be seen to be believed.

Deadly Premonition 2 reads like a laundry list of bad ideas: deadnaming your trans character to her face exactly one cutscene after defending her right to exist; her transness being a direct result of childhood trauma, up to and including an incestuous relationship with her sister; and being forgiven by her father for said trauma while he deadnaming her with his last breath. The sheer level of tonal whiplash I experienced when researching this immediately after The Missing is almost indescribable. Swery thankfully addressed this with an apology and somewhat updated the offending scenes, but the memory of the Lena first included in the game leaves a deeply troubling mark on this game. I will forever be in awe of how utterly wrong one can be with seemingly the best intentions.

Even if you haven’t heard of Hardcoded before, you should know HC is a trans character for the ages.

HC - Hardcoded

Out of everyone I’ve mentioned, good and bad, it is naturally HC, the character written and developed by a team of trans people, is the portrayal that I’m the happiest about. The intent and care in making her an enjoyable character, even before you get to the sex scenes, works wonderfully well. While she’s a droid in a cyberpunk world, far off from the world we live in now, she brims with humanity and nuances that make her enjoyably sexy, free of fetish or phobias. Hardcoded’s depiction of the eponymous HC is one so depressingly lacking outside of entirely queer-controlled spaces that I hope she’s not forgotten when the industry tries to take those tentative steps forward.

HC is a sexually progressive breath of fresh air after so many depictions of trans people being sexual predators or worse, a rigid cause of many of the issues we face today. There is a small but meaningful solace I take in having a singular piece of media that not only lets queer people be horny but celebrates them and their right to be that way. Hardcoded is not the only game that shares that sentiment, but it’s the one that stood out and resonated with me. For that reason, Hardcoded is the game I recommend you play the most if you also love trans people being people.

Though we’ve seen the lowest of lows this past decade in terms of trans rep in video games, the positive depictions still give me a sliver of hope that there are good times ahead. I don’t expect the bare minimum efforts to end any time soon, especially while triple AAA developers continue to add plot-thin trans characters and dust themselves off after a job well done.

Thankfully, the abundance of queer creators on sites like itch.io will always be serving the queer characters that the AAA industry wishes it could take credit for. The best representation definitely starts with us, but there’s no reason for it to stop with us as well.