Yeah, same as sexuality, our understanding of things now is different than it was then. And there’s still cultural differences.
At the same time there have always been trans people. Not just ‘third genders’ either.
Most of the time games aren’t medieval, they’re fantasy, and they’re brimming with anachronisms anyway. When you’re dealing with magic, and different gods, and other races, and strange cultures, why is it that having transgender characters is considered unrealistic?
While I get what you mean regarding the application of modern labels to historical trends, that logic has commonly been used to erase queer and trans history and support the idea that queer and trans people are a relatively new concept. As a history major and fan of archaeology and anthropology I can’t tell you how exhausting it is to have someone say that we can’t describe someone like Alexander the Great as possibly having had queer feelings and then in the same breath argue for why he had to be a heterosexual.
The question of choosing a gender in a medieval setting can be easily implemented, just as easily as implementing a question about one’s sexuality. How many medieval WIPs and COG games have included sexuality options?
Precisely because it’s anachronistic, I suppose, rather than simply fantastic. It betrays a lack of imagination, that one can’t bear the depiction of a culture different than the one with which they’re familiar.
It might be interesting to see a game that actually took advantage of the range of historical conceptions that existed, that had something like those Albanian sworn virgins who could play the social role of men, or the idea of a eunuch as a gender in its own right instead of just a castrated man, or that a man who desires other men is not the standard ‘male,’ something actually distinct. I’m not sure how great or necessary of a story element it would be, but I wouldn’t immediately roll my eyes.
Instead we get the Sea Eternal, asking which and what combination of male or female you “identify as,” with, god forbid, a “write in your own answer” choice as well, which is planting a cultural flag in the 21st century so large you could see it from space.
Wasn’t the Sea Eternal modern though? I vaguely remember cars.
Yeah, it actually was set in the 21st century.
The society also is established as being different from human concepts and the openness of gender identity was a legitimately important plot point and I’m not sure why this is being described as a bad thing?
Oh, it very possibly was. It didn’t grab me enough to play beyond the intro. I give it only as an example of that kind of a choice being offered, not of anachronism per se. (Though it did seem like it was trying to be ‘fantastic,’ in that general sense, and so could have done something more.)
…which is why it so precisely echoes the 21st century Western progressive concept of gender?
I won’t be continuing this conversation since I don’t believe you have any true desire to understand the desire and wish for representation in these games, but I do question why the Sea Eternal’s approach to gender is something to focus your criticism on for following Western gender concepts (I must confess to envying that you live in a version of this society in which the mockery and derision of identifying outside of gender norms do not exist) but not any other game in the COG line that features aliens or mythical beings outside of human society that follow the traditional Western gender concept of men and women.
I sincerely hope you understand why this is so important to people but I realize that I am not going to be the person that convinces you to.
As I explained a short while ago, it’s because it’s not actually fantastic, in any meaningful sense. It’s precisely the cultural attitude of a large segment of contemporary western society. It’s not a perfect analogy by any means, but I’d very roughly compare it to the bit in the Star Wars prequels where they explain that the Queen of whatever planet that was is an elected queen, because we are apparently so enamored of our present mores (democracy, in this case) that we cannot bear to imagine a fictional setting without them.
In this case, of course, there’s another element in play - the standard is not universally accepted within our present culture, so the projection of it into these settings serves as a sort of wish fulfillment. Which is…what it is, I guess. I can understand the desire for it, but it all feels a little too ‘on the nose’ to make the setting pop, when I’m not the one whose wishes are being fulfilled.
I thought The Sea Eternal meant well. It had good intentions and the idea was interesting. I’ve not played the finished version though so it’s probably not fair for me to comment on the version I did play.
If the only examples we can give where it’s possible to play trans binary characters are flawed, I think that’s more of an argument for giving us some more to choose from.
There’s nothing wrong with wish fulfilment. It’s one of the aspects I love about Choice of Games. Trans people deserve wish fulfilment fantasies too!
There’s so many other stories out there that cater to straight, white, cis, male, wish fulfilment fantasies. Often they’re not all that realistic either. There’s lots of anachronisms.
Never said there was! All of them are wish fulfillment, really. That’s the appeal. Just that when it’s not your wishes being fulfilled, the absurdities jump out at you much more strongly. And the more blatantly it serves that purpose, the more…I guess ‘tasteless’ might be the word…it seems to those others.
I think another problem with it is that, for what is theoretically a rather weighty matter, it rarely seems to actually matter to the story, does it? In a way, there’s something of a paradox of choice here. If you allow someone simply a choice between male and female, you can, reasonably, provide a few places where that causes a divergence in the story or the mechanics, since it’s only a twofold split. Providing more choices increases the difficulty of acknowledging those choices, much like the choice of, say, hair color that games sometimes offer always feels to me like so much cruft, since it’ll never amount to more than one word changed here or there.
If, then, providing extra choices at the beginning for whatever multitude of genders one might feel it proper to include ends up eliminating a meaningful choice between simply male or female, then I would say it’s actively worse - perhaps even for those trans individuals who could otherwise have happily picked the gender to which they feel they belong anyway.
I think what there is in terms of games with trans representation is scraps. They’re flawed scraps. They might be imperfect, but they’re all there is.
Can you imagine that? Having so very little representation. So very few examples you can point to. No role models. Nothing.
And here you are saying you find it tasteless? You’re saying it’s absurd?
We’ve to defend these flawed scraps as all we have, and hope that people will make more. I’d much rather encourage people to continue improving things than to criticise and chastise.
Those choices matter to some people. Just to know they’ve not been erased. Just to have their existence acknowledged. It’s scraps but it’s better than nothing.
Maybe you should ask that as a question instead of assuming? I think that’s actually an interesting question.
The assumption is that trans people don’t want to be trans, they want to be cis? If there’s the option to play a cis character, why would they want to play a trans one?
I think you miss my point. If the game asks if you’re a boy or a girl, and you answer, say, the former, what makes that mean “a cis boy” rather than “a trans boy,” other than your own intent in choosing it? The games only rarely make an issue of what’s actually inside the MC’s pants, in my experience.
Thank you for clarifying.
It feels off to me to offer cis male, trans male, cis female, trans female, during chargen. (Actually not a huge fan of chargen to be honesty.) I don’t like it there, as a list, as separate things but it’s hard for me to put my finger on why.
I was hoping that this thread would come up with some better alternatives, or at least tell me “actually we love it when it happens like this” or something, so I could put aside my own thoughts and just go with it.
I used to privately beta-test the games where I’d provide extensive feedback about what I perceived to be flaws. That was the best time.
As far as that kind of thing goes, it seems to me (from my admittedly ‘outsider’ perspective) that it may be better off with a certain degree of subtlety. I think of Tin Star, for example, which simply asked how you wanted to be addressed, as Mr, Miss, or Marshal. The last, if selected, gave you a choice between being Mr Marshal, Miss Marshal, (both of which set you as being treated male or female respectively, but addressed by others as Marshal), or “Just Marshal,” which set you to be treated as ambiguous gender, more or less. It felt fairly simple and elegant to me, and if approached with an attitude as I suggested above, also seems as though it allows people to make a character which internally feels however they wish, since they are after all literally choosing how they are addressed, not what genitals they have.
Moreover, it avoids that issue of anachronism in a historical setting.
And that’s the issue I’m having with this. It affects nothing whatsoever. It’s a nice choice, and way better than no acknowledgement whatsoever, but it isn’t anything substantial. What makes the Sea Eternal one of my favorite releases is that the author does acknowledge that trans people exist, and that we are more than a single background choice to determine pronouns.
Some may dislike that a trans character and her being trans were so prominent, arguing that it affected nothing, but I’d say the opposite. It brought the topic of trans people forward, and it made her dysphoria more subtle, less flashy and showy (Which, while I love that Zachary acknowledges us and makes us characters, I think Hero Project and Versus are more flash and less substance). It actually showed an example of a real trans person. I felt more close to Faye than I have towards any other CoG character. This isn’t because she’s trans, it’s because she is an actual example of a trans person who initially has to deal with her dysphoria.
Tl;dr actual characters who are trans are preferred to giving a choice of identity that is really just he/she/they/he/she without showing anything beyond an extra text blurb for the latter answers
It’s not. It’s really not. Don’t speak for me. I go outside and I get enough problems for being trans. I do not want a “trans-based” choice. I want being trans to be normalised. I do not want my gender to have to have a “meaning” in the plot.
I live off headcanon, personally. Which the cis masses commonly argue “well the writer didn’t write them as trans”. 
Stevonnie makes me cry sometimes out of joy.
Yeah, rude.
Ew. Ew. No, I don’t want this. I don’t want some sicko asking me ever about my damn junk or making a deal of it!
It’s true that these games’ gender choices don’t affect much, but we can make gender-exclusive scenes or lines without the need for sexism, transphobia or being rude. Done it myself.
We can talk about community, clothing, remembering to take tablets or dysphoria if any, makeup, mirrors (I avoid them), we can talk about cis doctors and their terrible biases, and pride events. We can talk about shops where people buy their nice trans-related items, we can have a character reminding another to take off their binder every couple hours.
We can talk about characters in shows and representation and who we identify with and why. Is it the way they look? How they speak? Their pronouns? What they like or do? We don’t have to talk about the damn bathroom or the “op” 24/7, people. 
Surely, then, simply answering that you are what you feel you are is an adequate response. In that way, it is treated normally, it has no special meaning in the plot, and the details of your genitals are left, properly, as an off-screen affair. I’m not sure why it otherwise sounds as though you’re disagreeing.
It’s not “what I feel I am”, it’s what I am. But yes. I’m happy with what we have; as FG says, it might be scraps, but I’ve had to work with less.
I’ve read through this thread several times, I suppose in hoping to get an insight for my own story and the trans character I have written (with the help of a transgendered friend - which I don’t know why I feel compelled to mention every time other than fear of being told a “cis male” should not write a trans character).
While I feel empathy for many of the responses here, in particular with @LanaRose and her desire to be represented both adequately and significantly without the trans issue being a plot-point, I agree with @Dominic on every point made above. If you are transgender and you want to be acknowledged as the gender of your mind regardless of the genitals of your body, is not the simplest answer to simply choose your true gender? The gender that you know you are?
If you’re male, choose to be male. If you’re female, choose to be female. Your genitals have nothing to do with who you are in regards to literally every CoG or Hosted game.
EDIT: The point made directly above, of course, excludes the gender-locked games.