In Baldurs Gate 3, trans identity is no longer a forgotten realm

Queerness isn’t obscene or transgressive in Larian’s take on the Forgotten Realms - it’s normal and everyday.

It’s not every day that the release of a new video game represents long-overdue social progress, but in early August, Baldur’s Gate 3 was released by Larian Studios. The game represents something particularly special beyond being a well-crafted new entry into a classic franchise: it was a welcome, glorious next step in a long legacy of transgender people using video games to explore and express our identities. It allows us to not just play as our gender, but to play as someone transgender.

Larian developed Divinity: Original Sin 2, one of my favourite role-playing games in recent years, and I was excited to see their take on Baldur’s Gate. Baldur’s Gate 3 is a role-playing game set in the Forgotten Realms of the classic Dungeons and Dragons pen-and-paper games. You create a hero from one of the various fantasy races of the setting, gifted with fighting prowess or magical powers defined by their class, and gather a group of companions around you as you search for a cure to a magical parasite that has invaded your brain.

My first step on opening the game was to make Tiluna Celestine, a Human Paladin sworn to the Oath of the Ancients. This wasn’t the first time Tiluna had graced my monitor. Tiluna has been with me for years - since I graduated high school 17 years ago, and bought myself a subscription to World of Warcraft in my new adult freedom. It was one of the first times I’d felt compelled to make multiple characters in a game, to try out all the classes, and it made perfect sense for some of those characters to be girls - no other reason, of course. Tiluna has stayed with me all that time, first as a Mage and later Warlock in World of Warcraft, my magic-wielding player character in Skyrim, my Guild Wars Elementalist, my Viera Gunbreaker in Final Fantasy XIV and now my Paladin.

For the first time in her long and storied history, though, Tiluna is more than just someone I want to be, she’s like me. In Baldur’s Gate 3, Tiluna is explicitly transgender. And the developers have finally given me the tools to make this happen.

As you customise your character, among hair colour and skin tone, one of the many options you’re allowed to tweak are their pronouns and their genitals. Your choices aren’t limited by other choices - you can pair a feminine frame with a penis and they/them pronouns. This is important because as well as aiding you in delving dungeons and solving monsters, your companions can bond with you and, if you treat them properly, fall in love with you. Your choices don’t gate the spread of relationships available in the game - your whole cast of companions can be romanced regardless of your identity or anatomy. The only other game franchises of the size and influence of Baldur’s Gate I could think of that allowed similar creative freedom were Cyberpunk 2077 and The Sims. It made me stop for a moment and consider just how far we’ve come in being able to use video games to express ourselves.

Video gaming and transfeminine people are famously associated. You can’t go two steps on the internet without falling over memes about trans girls playing Fallout: New Vegas, or Celeste or, for some reason, Hearts of Iron IV. Celeste makes sense, with its eventually-confirmed transgender protagonist and developer, but much of the association with transfeminine people and particular games is far less straightforward. It is a fact, though, that video games are often one of the first places transfeminine people like me encountered the idea of thinking of ourselves as someone of a different gender. It gave us the opportunity to sit down and put ourselves in the shoes of someone else, with built-in excuses for why (“she has the best powers”, “her voice actress is better”, “haha if I’m going to stare at a character’s butt for hours and hours it might as well be a girl’s, right?”) that had nothing to do with the feelings it brought up. Games gave us the opportunity for a socially-acceptable and readily accessible way to play with gender unlike anything else.

When I transitioned, a lot of my earlier gaming experiences started to make a lot more sense, why certain things just felt right. Why, when I played Golden Axe and Streets of Rage on the Mega Drive with my friends, I would exclusively choose the warrior princess Tyris-Flare and ex-cop turned dance instructor Blaze Fielding. Why it was important to me that people knew the protagonist of the Metroid series, Samus Aran, was a girl. Why, when I first booted up The Sims, I got bored with my first Sim Michael, but the game suddenly clicked when I deleted him and made Alexis instead. Why it felt so nice when someone complimented how pretty Tiluna was in the starting zone of World of Warcraft. Why I felt so connected to April, my farmer in Stardew Valley, my Shadowrunner Valentine in Shadowrun Returns or Seraphina, my Jedi Knight in The Old Republic. Why it was so important to me, even when I had no idea that I was trans, that I could play female characters. The Internet is full of stories of trans people whose player characters in video games were their first taste of gender euphoria.

More games leaving themselves open to the options that Baldur’s Gate 3 presents, though, is a leap forward for this kind of self-expression. We have the capacity not just to play women, but trans women, to see what we know we are reflected in something other than our own heads - or even to see what we don’t even know we are yet, to prompt questions that would go otherwise unasked. One of the common problems that trans people have in learning the truth about ourselves is lacking the language and framework to even describe ourselves. In a cisgender-centric society where gender transition was until recently only ever seen in popular culture as a joke or a danger, games where playing someone like us is not just possible, but expected and normal, can help give us that framework.

Baldur’s Gate 3 isn’t just pro-trans, either. Queerness is in the game’s DNA. Normally, role-playing games assign specific sexualities to companion characters, restricting storylines and romance options based on the gender of your player character. In Baldur’s Gate 3 your companions, described by the designers as “playersexual,” flirt and respond to your character’s advances regardless of the configuration of anatomy and pronouns you assign them. Queerness isn’t obscene or transgressive in Larian’s take on the Forgotten Realms - it’s normal and everyday.

The game’s stance on trans people isn’t just good for us - Baldur’s Gate 3 is currently the highest-rated PC game of all time on Metacritic, and second only to Super Mario Odyssey across all platforms. It’s led Steam sales charts since its release, even beating out the free-to-play games that continually top those charts. This isn’t solely because of its trans and trans inclusivity, of course - Baldur’s Gate 3 is a masterpiece by one of the best studios in the business - but it’s clear that being one of the best experiences for trans people to control someone like us as the heroic protagonist of an epic story has done nothing to dull the experience outside of that.

I’m hopeful Larian’s example hasn’t just shown the rest of the gaming world how to make an excellent role-playing game, but particularly that they can make one that’s unapologetically queer and trans-inclusive without sacrificing any quality or appeal. Gaming is at its best when it’s for everyone.

Erin Moroney is a nonbinary, transfeminine writer from Dharawal land in Sydney's south-west. They enjoy being trans, being gay and playing video games, not necessarily in that order, and think far too much about all three.

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