When I entered school, when I progressed through the grades, I made friends because of shared interest in games. We could talk about these experiences that only we had. We could relate to things only we knew. We could challenge each other to be better, to overcome challenges, to test the boundary of the game and by extension our own limits.
I wasn’t someone who grew up knowing they were transgender. I grew up with extreme anxiety and depression, but I was an introvert who’s parents divorced and those things are expected. My gender identity took a back burner to my other issues and situations, while remaining invisible and the cause of them. I think if I knew when I was a child that a person could be born in the wrong sex, that gender dissonance could wreck you, I would’ve realize what was going on. But, like playing Zelda as a child, I didn’t know the words. I had to discover the relationships through trail and error.
Video games let me play as a women, let me pilot an avatar congruent to internal ideals I didn’t know I had, but at the same time I saw the perception around me in gaming culture. When my male friends played a female character, in fighting games or any other, they treated it as a cute joke. I knew it was something important to me, but I didn’t want to be teased or bullied and I repeated the joke. Ha Ha! I’m playing a girl!
I knew it mattered to me more than my peers. I knew something was there, but I repelled those feelings because they made me feel like a freak. They made me feel different than everyone else. If I was able to explore those feelings authentically, I might have found my answers, but at the time it was a horrifying paradox to me. Games tried to tell me who I was before I could ever begin to suspect and I rejected their help through my adolescences and most my teenage years.
The internet came next and on it the ability to be anonymous. Games offered me a way to play a scripted female character and pretend at some level I was them, but massive multiplayer online role playing games offered me a way to actually be female. I could control a female avatar, who nobody knew I was, and be treated for the first time in my life as female.
But it wasn’t long before I was keenly aware of an old adage: The internet; where all men are men, all women are men, and all children are fbi agents. Men were using female avatars as a scam or joke, pretending to be hyper-feminine and mocking their limited perception of what they thought of women. Something that interestingly parallels what endocrinologist first demanded in their gatekeeping decades ago and something terfs still claim today.
I was afraid I’d be seen like that. I was afraid this strange feeling I had was some perversion akin to those I saw around me. Again games allowed me the room for a personal growth I couldn’t get anywhere else and again I tried to reject that possibility. But gender dissonance doesn’t go away. Without even consciously knowing what I was doing, I started to play more and more female characters on games. I started to role-play and interact as though I was female and it gave me for once in my life a sense of fulfillment.
I still remember when everything finally clicked into place. I was playing World of Warcraft with some friends. We were running heroics non-stop and I was the healer, a female blood elf paladin, when I had to take a break. I came back a few minutes later and a person in the party asked where I had gone. My friend responded, ‘She’ll be back shortly.’
I was She. I was refereed to as She and nothing felt so emotionally right for me my entire life. Nothing validated me so much. And while I always feared I was the same kind of perversion of those posers who abuse the use of female avatars, I realized my desires were never about what I’d “get” playing a female character, the reward was in itself. The reward was simply being able to be myself.
That experience was profound in constructing and expanding my current identity and would’ve been impossible without games helping along the way. They provided me not only the escape from a harsh world, but an authentic way to explore my own identity in a safe way, so that I was ready for the world when I came out. And looking back it’s easy to see all the clues. I thought Link’s name was Zelda for years and in OoT Zelda straight up genderbends. And whereas I don’t have the time to play them like I did as a child, I love and support their continual growth.
Spiritual Humanism 