Proud Pixels - Trans Identity And Character Creators
I came out to myself in video games first.
We should really go back to character creators like this.
To be specific, it was via Star Wars: Jedi Academy, a 2003 classic (at least in my books!). You create a fictional counterpart to attend Luke Skywalker’s aforementioned academy and fight Stormtroopers, Sith and the Empire to your heart’s content while trying to shut down a galaxy-conquering megaweapon in the process. To a teenage girl growing up in the middle of nowhere in rural Ireland and running this on her family’s shared PC, this was a grand adventure out of this world. The game also had a greater, personal significance.
I had played as female characters before, in the Tomb Raider games and Metroid Prime but I had rarely been able to choose an avatar that looked like me. I was still in the closet at this point and would only dip a toe out of it a decade later so I still felt the pressure to conform to the gruff, masculine video game archetype I was meant to aspire to. I was supposed to want to be a space marine, not a girl! 2003 was a very different time for games, the industry was still mostly catering to the male audience it assumed was the majority of its customers and so, most of the protagonists reflected that.
Fighting alongside other lasersword wielding badasses certainly beats watching Ace Ventura or some other transphobic crap.
Some would argue that things haven’t really progressed much beyond this point nowadays but that’s a discussion for a different article. My point being, that getting to choose how my character looked and playing as her was a revelation for me. She reflected how I felt internally but knew I couldn’t express myself externally. At this point, trans women were mainly represented in TV and film through re-runs of Jerry Springer with transphobic bylines or the butt of long-running comedic punchlines that established them as laughable and embarrassing in the eyes of the general public. There were very few aspirational public trans women to look up to or at least not ones that managed to catch a glimpse of from my tiny town, which had few openly queer people as it was.
Images that go hard ^
This meant I spent a lot of time looking for validation from other sources, characters in TV shows, books, games etc. that could be read as trans or experienced stories that were directly or symbolically about identity. There were explicitly trans characters like Birdo or Poison but what I found more profound was discovering myself in characters like Samus Aran who embodied a strong, resilient form of femininity, tasked with surviving hostile worlds where she is almost constantly under attack. It’s not difficult to see why trans people could relate!
Thankfully, we have more direct examples of trans stories to draw from in 2022 in video games, even if the narratives where we are the main characters of our own stories tend to (though not exclusively) be in smaller games made in the indie or AA scene. Not all trans inclusion is made equal but we are finally able to see ourselves in the gaming space in a way that was unthinkable in the 90s-00s, even if we have a long way to go. Even so, many years after coming out, I still explore my own identity through video games.
Miqo’te getting a lot of play on startmenu during Pride. I am sure it is a coincidence.
I boot up Final Fantasy XIV and start playing as my character, a Lancer class Miqo’te (A catgirl, naturally for a trans woman!). I remember the day I used the character creator to pick out her features from the various categories. She was and still kind of is, an extension of my own identity and sense of self. Idealised, of course, but also an embodiment of everything I admire and seek to reflect in my own femininity. Video games have that kind of power. Like all forms of media, they can speak to the kind of people we wish to be. I’m now nearly ten years into my transition and though a lot of the novelty has faded, I still find myself occupied with the person I am, who I’ll become in the years ahead and how video games (and all other forms of media) can inform and illuminate who I want to be moving forward.
