Video games make the girl
Gaming might be stereotyped as masculine in the media, but I've never seen it that way
The image of a young girl with dyed hair and a pleated skirt with thigh-high socks, sitting in a small room illuminated by vibrant pink lighting, wearing cat-eyed headphones, a Blåhaj on her lap, and playing Final Fantasy or Fallout: New Vegas, is one of the most simultaneously beloved and ridiculed portrayals of trans femininity that exists.
Stereotypes about trans women are everywhere at the moment, ranging from the flattering portrayal of a girl who finds empowerment DJing in the hyperpop club, to the less flattering portrayal of a homeless girl struggling on the streets and scraping by through sex work.
All stereotypes come from a place of reality: hyperpop is a genre popular with trans women, and sex work is one of the few jobs we actually can often make a decent amount of money in. However, no stereotype about trans women is perhaps more widespread than the gamer.
The trans girl gamer stereotype is ripe for mockery for many reasons, from the intense lost youth-ness of it all, to the apparent juxtaposition of the extreme hyper-feminine aesthetics overlaying the “masculine” coded activity of playing video games. In some ways, this image demonstrates exactly how society sees trans women: masculine behaviour and masculine thoughts, but covered in shiny make up. How cursed!
But of course, there’s a lot to unpack here. For one, the idea that video gaming is a hobby dominated by men isn’t true. Preferences vary according to genre as with any form of media, but nearly half (47%) of gamers in Australia are female, with adventure games and puzzle games being particularly favoured by women. Women aged 18-24 in particular are a fast-growing demographic in the gaming community, even in hyper-masculine online shooter games.
But even if the stereotype was true, and gaming was still a boy’s club, does that still undercut the legitimacy of trans women who game? For me, personally, as someone who enjoys feminine hobbies such as fashion and make-up, does video gaming present a way of me harking back to my “masculine upbringing”? What does it say about my gender identity as a whole?
In search of femininity
Well, allow me to do some introspection. What drew me into gaming to begin with? My XY chromosome-riddled hands didn’t float automatically towards PlayStation controllers, and setting aside statistics, when I grew up, gaming was a hobby marketed heavily towards young boys, which wouldn’t have appealed to me. I hated anything remotely masculine and resisted any attempts to go into STEM or sports despite the peer pressure of my family and school. And yet, I still went into gaming, having been introduced to it by my dad and brother. Believe it or not, I was a young girl in search of femininity.
As a writer, I naturally love immersive worlds and puzzles that require me to think deep into my imagination. This all started with gaming. My favourite games were RPGs and strategy games, ones that pulled me deep into the monitor and refused to let go. If this sounds like an easy path to escapism for you, then you’d be right.
While many people still view being assigned male as the golden ticket of life, to a young trans girl, that label is asphyxiating. While of course, you can pursue a hobby in fashion design or writing novels like I very much wanted to, you are strongly urged to choose within a very small range of hyper-masculine hobbies lest you endure extreme levels of bullying. Thankfully, video games counts as one of those things.
Society is making strides in breaking down gender barriers, but everything techy and electronic still falls within the male-dominated ranks of STEM, so young Natalie had a box of escapism available to her after every torturous day of school, and she used it. She could escaped into the fantasy world of Oblivion or the sci-fi strategy of Starcraft for hours on end. Socially acceptable escapism, plain and simple. Sure it meant selling my soul to a computer, but what trans girl could pass that up?
Role models
But there was something even deeper at play there. I had a very rough childhood. I was never close with any of my siblings, I was bullied by my older brother, all my grandparents had died by the time I was 14, and my parents’ marriage collapsed throughout my childhood too. Making friends was hard because I didn’t have any good models for how to build healthy relationships with people. But that, on top of the fact that I never really felt like I understood myself at all for reasons I couldn’t explain, meant that I didn’t even know to build an identity either. What I needed were role models, and more importantly than that, ones that I felt spoke to me. I couldn’t explain why at the time, but I desperately needed was strong female role models.
Well, I hear you scoff, good luck finding that in the mid 2000s! Well, believe it or not, I did. It’s a little-known fact that the notoriously male-dominated video game industry has produced some incredible strong female characters, even dating back to the 1990s. Sarah Kerrigan from Starcraft is a good example of that, a former lieutenant in a terrorist organisation who gets abandoned by her crewmates and then embarks on a furious quest of revenge. As someone who felt abandoned by society as a whole, that spoke to me, and told me that I could be confident, strong and outspoken even as a depressed, dysphoric child.
The Elder Scrolls games likewise, have a roster of strong female characters in their big open worlds, and give many a young egg the opportunity to test-run being a woman and making your own story, whether that be a cunning and resourceful thief, a powerful mage, or a strong woman with an axe. The idea of finding identity through pop culture is nothing new, and video games allow for that better than no other medium. It’s not just seeing yourself in characters, it’s becoming a character yourself.
Oddly, the game that meant the most to me wasn’t even a game based in fiction, more the game equivalent of a historical documentary. Age of Empires II is a strategy game set in the medieval world, probably the least likely place you’d find strong female role models, and yet there I was, playing through the story of Joan of Arc. A genderbending neurodivergent teenage girl who decided to take the future of France into her own hands during the Hundred Years War, crushed the English army, and changed the history of Europe forever? Chef’s kiss. Video games from 1999 told me what women with conviction were capable of well before school, movies, or even the news.
Of course, I’m not saying that any of this is perfect. Feminist analyses on the story of Sarah Kerrigan have been mixed in retrospect, and you can see the cis male fingerprints all over an attempt at a strong female character. But that was 1999, and it was no worse than a lot of media around at the time. I took what I could, and I’m very glad that I did. This isn’t the dregs of masculinity leaking through a trans female coating, this is the opposite. This is a woman making the most of the trajectory forced onto her and finding the femininity and the feminism within to make it her own.
These days, I don’t game as much as I used to, but when I do, I make the most of it. It’s become something I share with the people I love. I have partners with whom I play Overwatch, Stellaris, World of Warcraft, Ace Attorney where we voice-act all the characters, and, of course, the latest Age of Empires. From a solitary experience I used to escape my traumatic home life, to something I’ve used to create a beautiful home life of my own that I’m proud of, video games will always be a part of me.
Being that we are such a marginalised and routinely attacked demographic, everything we do and enjoy gets relentless scrutiny and dehumanisation. We deserve to be able to turn that around. We should be embrace our roots, our stereotypes, and we should pick up those fluorescent controllers, put on those cat-eared headphones, and play Final Fantasy with pride.
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Natalie Feliks is a writer and activist originally from Adelaide, now living in Melbourne. She's written for the likes of Junkee, Crikey, and Overland, and spends her time listening to pop music and eating chocolate.