not enough

on videogames, stolen valor, and the need for roots

I keep trying to play RPGs, and I keep being disappointed. If SF/F videogames are an extension of genre fiction, Bioware is your average producer of pulp— when it’s good, it’s great, but most of the time, it’s mediocre at best. This would be fine if every story did not take 40+ hours to experience and cost $250 million to produce. All the same, I am sort of hoping that Dragon Age: Veilguard becomes a historic moment for videogame writing, just not for any of the reasons it wants to be.

Veilguard is a big deal among my people because it is supposed to signal a new high water mark on “trans representation.” You can make a character with top surgery scars! Your customized protagonist can look in a mirror and say three different variations of “I just gotta be me!” while a tooltip tells you Click Here To Become Transgender. There’s even a companion character, Taash, whose entire story revolves around coming to terms with their nonbinary identity. If you like, your trans protagonist can advise them from personal experience. New frontiers, baybee! Consider that glass ceiling broken!

“Does not affect gameplay.”

Several of my friends have been playing it and gushing about how good the writing is for Taash’s story, and I was curious what that might look like, so I went on youtube and watched all of the scenes from Taash’s personal story and romance arc. Unfortunately, it was not good. I went looking for reviews, and I found exactly what you’d expect— trans people love it because we go wild when a blockbuster hit Says The Line, and conservatives hate it because something something identity politics virtue-signalling le wokisme!!! etc.

I somehow found zero reviews of this game from trans people who were critical of how Taash is written, so I went about writing some very basic literary analysis of their character and how the series handles gender within its fictional world. (Maybe eventually I will finish and post this analysis somewhere, if the nerds ask nicely for it.) But then I remembered that nothing I say is going to alter the way that big-budget videogames get written and focus-tested and re-written ad nauseum because the c-suite does not give a shit about anything but metacritic scores. I am also not going to put a dent in the brand loyalty of fans willing to pay $70+ for a videogame less out of a desire to read a good fantasy story than to stave off gamer-FOMO. So, y’know, why bother?

My primary point was that bad writing about trans people is worse than none at all, and using your fantasy story as transparent cover for an after-school special is unequivocally bad fucking writing. The game spends so much time giving coy nods to the audience that its head rolls right off its shoulders. It reeks of desperation. But more than a few trans people have looked at this and said, Yes, this is good actually! This is what we want! I saw one trans reviewer praise the game for calling Taash “non-binary” (rather than coming up with some fantasy term for an equivalent concept) because it means the devs are “saying the loud part loud,” and I had to stop reading and go have a cigarette.

It seems that we do not want fantasy literature, something which might explore in any depth what trans identity means by transporting it to a different setting from our own. We want costume-party propaganda, something which gently holds our hands through how we ought to think and feel about the world, using simple parables and contemporary language to avoid the need for interpretation. We want to read stories about ourselves, and we want those stories to be some combination of comforting and flattering. We asked for this! Fervently, pleadingly, like a dog begging for table scraps.

IMPOSTOR SYNDROME

When I was researching reviews of the game a month or so ago, one conservative critic stuck out to me. He complained that Taash exemplifies the difference between “real” trans people (diagnosable, dysphoric transsexuals) and “fake” trans people (whiny, internet-addled children).¹ This is relevant beyond the sphere of videogame reviews and fandom bickering because it touches on a schism in trans culture which can be roughly described as “transsexual vs transgender.”² Without rehashing in detail some thirty years of discussion and academia, here is my best swing at a short version:

Transsexuals are a specific type of person who wants to go through life as a different (presumably “opposite”) gender/sex, and seeks out medical intervention to achieve this; transgender is an adjective which covers both transsexuals and a broader variety of people whose sense of identity may be harder to pin down, and who may-or-may-not do any medicine about it. “Transgender” came into usage in the 90s to both complicate the rigid, mainstream understanding of trans people via the medical model of transsexualism, and to draw a circle around all sorts of gender-variant people for the sake of building a stronger political coalition and supportive community. Since then, there has been much debate about whether this was a good idea, or whether it has worked out as intended.

Trans people are an extremely varied group, and of course it is rather difficult to get people to agree on what their shared politics or culture ought to look like when they do not share the same stakes, the same goals, or the same understanding of what gender even is or is-for. Since the 90s, some transsexuals have felt that their material, political concerns about access to healthcare, housing, and basic safety have been sidelined in favor of promoting a more philosophical goal of abolishing gender as a cultural concept. I can’t say I disagree. Jules Gill-Peterson makes the case (correctly, in my opinion) that trans culture’s decades of fervent insistence that you don’t have to transition to be trans have left us totally unequipped to resist the ongoing legal challenges to trans healthcare access, mostly to the detriment of trans children. Henry Rubin said similar stuff back in the 90s, advocating that transsexuals must separate themselves from the broader morass of philosophical transness if they are to have any hope of furthering their own political interests.

I am not interested in doing that, but I understand where this sentiment comes from. I have written before about how other trans people do not seem to give a shit about any of my social or material needs, and how this has made me feel exhausted-by and alienated-from other trans people. They fuck up my pronouns on purpose as a political statement and then tell me to my face that gender is meaningless and trivial and caring about it is stupid, and wouldn’t the world be better if the idea of “man” and “woman” were outmoded, etc. They balk when I talk about organizing to get testosterone removed from the scheduled drugs list, or petitioning WPATH to change their standards of care so that you no longer need a therapist’s official blessing before you can get surgery. It sucks! It feels very bad to hang out with the people who are supposed to Get You and Care About Your Problems and then they do not, at all.

As a piece of fiction, I find Taash to be an irresponsible, trivializing take on a nonbinary coming-out story, but I cannot deny that I have personally met a lot of trans people who are exactly like them. People who have not struggled to build a comfortable life for themselves and still cannot tell the difference between external bigotry and their own impostor syndrome. People who approach trans community not as a safety net to make up for their inability to thrive, but as a crew of cool kids who might grant them permission to wear flag merch. So, as badly as I would like to live by the principle of caring about whatever we call “trans issues” today, I can’t help but sympathize with the transsexuals who look at this behavior and call it stolen valor. What could these people possibly want that has not already been provided to them? If adopting a new gender does not enable you to live a different kind of life, what is a transgender identity even for?

ROOTS

In 1949, French philosopher Simone Weil wrote The Need For Roots: prelude towards a declaration of duties towards mankind. In it, she sought to explain what was missing from the cultural and spiritual landscape of her contemporary world, what she calls “the needs of the soul.”

She opens by explaining that if we are going to talk about rights, we must first talk about obligations. In order to have a functional social contract, we must agree that we owe each other something, or else be left with nothing but a cacophony of unfulfilled demands. She takes for granted that certain physical needs are part of what we owe each other— of course, every religion advocates that you should feed the hungry, be generous hosts to travelers, etc— and instead sought to outline how a society might fulfill the more ephemeral need for purpose and meaning. Hearts starve as well as bodies, as they say.

She says: people need to feel useful and honorable and responsible-for-something. They need to feel both liberty to live as they please and the chance to follow rules that they agree serve a worthy purpose— the ability to both be who you are and have the satisfaction of fulfilling one’s duty via agreeable, consensual limits. People need to not feel as if they are pulled between conflicting obligations— such as, say, the need to demonstrate respect to trans people of all paths and also give appropriate gravity to specific political challenges in the spheres of medicine, employment, and housing.³ Acting this out can look like anything that fits the bill, but it cannot be obviously trivial (like receiving the ~participation trophies~ conservatives loved to complain about when I was a child). Your sense of your place in the world has to feel tangible, and in some way it has to feel earned.

I think Simone was very wise, and I want to consider how I might take her advice. How do I meet my obligation to fulfill my cousins’ needs of the soul, when our society’s existing gestures— educational PSAs and pronoun round-tables and trans merch— are clearly not doing it for them?

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Right now, if you feel restricted by or disconnected from the male/female paradigm, adopting a nonbinary identity is one way to rationalize this feeling, but not resolve it. We have spent so much time discussing how nonbinary people feel like they don’t belong anywhere that we have failed to provide them a place where they belong. I am not pissed off about Dragon Age: Veilguard’s terrible writing because I think nonbinary people ought not be given such a spotlight, but because it strikes me as deeply unfair that, whenever that spotlight is given, “nonbinary” is so consistently defined only by what it is not.⁴

Nonbinary people have been constructed as a cohort who have nothing particular in common besides feeling like an outsider— a feeling which is so universal it offers no distinction from simply being cis and self-aware, and no promise that you will find any shared meaning with anyone who shares your identity. We do not have much to say about how non-binary genders might be delineated by what they have that others don’t, what they may aspire to become, or what inhabiting a nonbinary identity offers you beyond a nebulous reframing of the things you were already doing anyway.

People notice that this is trivial and uncool because it is. I do not worry about whether I am a “real” trans person because I have gone through the ritual of testosterone shots for ten years now— my body has been forever changed by it, and I am proud that I wear the evidence on my skin that I did not balk in the face of risk and change for the sake of my identity. I feel satisfaction about my painful ritual of stabbing myself in the leg every week because hurting yourself in pursuit of masculinity is, in itself, very masc. When I look at trans people whose transition is contained within the realm of the social, what rituals do they have to mark their change? What, an announcement of your new pronouns to your social media, a mass email to your coworkers? Wow that’s so lame! No wonder so many nonbinary people feel trivialized and insecure, and no wonder cis people find them so unserious.

This does not tell me anything inevitable about the actual depth of nonbinary identity, though— only that trans people have collectively accepted a meager existence. If gender is a social construct, we have to actually put some elbow grease into our own construction projects in its endless empty lots. I am less interested in abolishing gender than I am in creating more, so much that you might have your pick of what sort of meaning you might pursue through it, at every level of abstraction. I am no more interested in abolishing gender than I am in burning down all of America’s art museums— there is no shortage of creative potential in building on what has been made before.

If we are to claim that something as intangible as changing your pronouns is such a big fucking deal— if a social transition supposedly carries as much weight as changing your body, public opinion be damned— we ought to act like it. What I owe to my cousins is to offer those transitions the seriousness and communal participation that would not only mark them in memory as significant milestones, but also teach them something about what a new identity is supposed to mean for their path and purpose.

So, I don’t know, can we please get more creative? Since so much of trans discourse is obsessively focused on coming-out stories, why don’t we make an event of it? Ask your loved ones for a scrapbook which resignifies your baby pictures as the gender you feel you always were, or do a ritual to join the masculine and feminine within you in holy union before the north star. Go into the woods, shave your head, and burn your old life in effigy with a vow to pursue genderlessness at any aesthetic cost, wherever that might lead you. Paint your face in symbolic colors and walk through a crowd, making eye contact with warm smiles to as many people as possible, to embolden yourself to inhabit a new and confronting strangeness. Figure out what a new gender might actually be in the positive, mark your entrance with vows and ceremony, and invite other people to show up and bear witness. When you feel alone and afraid and unreal, they can help you remember that what you did really mattered.

Whatever you do, you have to do something, and you have to make it important— whatever a new gender might mean to you, it ought to count for more than merely an escape into your own solitary, indefinite unknown. My job as a transsexual, whose trans identity is unquestionable, is to show up and act like I have some skin in the game of whether you are taken seriously— because I do. So let’s make it serious. Send me an invite, I’ll be there.

Art is supposed to inspire us here— SF/F is an excellent place for exploring the actual substance of what it is to have multiple genders, a null gender, or any number of possibilities outside the binary— but the art of corporatized blockbusters isn’t getting the job done, and at this point trans people should be embarrassed for our own lack of imagination, our eagerness to accept so little. If trans people are to call ourselves a community, we have to participate in one another’s becoming— enable it, beautify it, enrich it with actual meaning— and we have to be more creative about what all that becoming might actually entail.

1. Suffice to say that I don’t think he was projecting— it is in the text, plain as day. The primary purpose of Taash’s character is to represent nonbinary people and experiences, and the writers have distilled the nonbinary struggle to little more than mommy issues. Taash’s conflicted feelings about identity and belonging do not seem to have limited them in any way, and resolving those feelings does not seem to change anything about the way they live their life. It comes off like I am watching Taylor Swift sing about feeling like an outsider— like, gurl, you are Millennial Billionaire Barbie, get a grip. This story which harps on “being yourself” centers on a character who is already themself, which is absolutely the last thing that I would write if I were looking to tell a nonbinary coming-out story with even a shred of gravitas or sympathy.

2. If you were very online ten or so years ago, you might think of this as the “truscum vs tucutes” feuding, but this conflict is much older than tumblr. Sometimes the borders are reshuffled into “binary vs nonbinary,” with the implication that nonbinary people do not do hormones or get surgery. In case it needs to be said, lots of nonbinary people are also transsexual, and (for the time being) you can absolutely approach the suite of procedures we call “medical transition” like an a la carte menu. The point of using “transgender” as an intentionally-vague unifying term was to acknowledge that plenty of people have done exactly that. I am sort of allowing myself to conflate nonbinary with non-medically-transitioning here because those who live in that intersection are the most-visible examples of nonbinary existence in our media and the most-numerous members of just about every trans scene I have ever been a part of.

3. It is also worth noting that fulfilling the needs of the soul is one way we sustain ourselves when the needs of the body are out of reach. I care a lot about demonstrating respect to people because I do not have any money to give them, and providing cultural meaning to people who want to transition medically and can’t is one way we might help soothe the unfairness of their position.

4. I feel sympathy for this as a man— “good” masculinity and male identity are likewise defined by what they are not. Not toxic, not violent, not demanding, not like other boys, etc. Whatever it might mean in the positive is left up to individual self-determination, which I guess is fine if you are already extremely sure of yourself and do not care about developing cultural meaning in tandem with other people.