I would. Because it would be a uniquely bad experience.
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That is true. At the end of the day, writers should ultimately be writing for themselves. Still, I thought it was important to know because I’d be changing the game to make it unique for trans/NB players and if, collectively, all of the trans/NB players say, “I don’t want to play a game that is written this way” then it’s kind of counter productive.
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Off topic again, but I definitely don’t agree with this. There are plenty of writers who, for whatever reason, don’t want to share some (or even any) of their writing with the world, and write for themselves and themselves alone. At the end of the day, anything is worth creating if you get enjoyment out of creating it.
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This, I’m not really sure I understand. What message do you think it’s trying to send? While I do appreciate that some people would prefer that gender related issues not be tackled in the game because they might find them upsetting, I’m not really sure how any of these scenes could be considered sending a bad message.
I mean, in a scene where a character either misgenders the MC or asks the MC about their gender, the message that’s sending is, “Not everyone can tell a person’s gender just by looking at them.” A scene in which a character discriminates against the MC because of their gender sends the message of, “This particular character is a massive dick.”
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That is a good point. (I guess I wanted to phrase the first option more favourably because I was kind of hoping that people would choose it.) Unfortunately, you can’t edit polls after they’ve been posted for more than 5 minutes. (Which I discovered to my dismay after posting a poll that included spoilers.) 
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Well, what I would assume if I read a scene like that (with someone misgendering the mc) is that the author finds it important to point out that the mc is not passing, and that it’s so obvious that everyone can see that.
And then I would wonder why the author felt the need to point that out.
And the conclusion I would come to (knowing nothing else about the author) is that the author thinks that trans people will always be instantly recognizable on sight, and well… then I would have some more assumptions that is not polite to say here.
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And what if the pc is the one that misgender and is corrected. I mean the pc is almost unconscious in middle of the road. Pc made same mistake with a cis girl. Is still seen as bad as it doesn’t have anything to gender is about player being hallucinatory phase
Agreed. I mean, the polls might be swaying one way, but if the votes are all contributed by cis people, then it’s not really helpful 
The game will definitely include a warning if it contains bigotry and discrimination. (It already has several warnings for other completely unrelated issues.)
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Again, that depends on your point of view. Judging by the polls and the comments, there are at least a few NB/Trans people who would consider it a uniquely good experience.
As an nb,
- I am quite fine with scenes where other characters are just like ‘yo dawg what are we supposed to call you?’ because they really just can’t tell, or scenes where someone call you your physical gender and you get to correct them, and they understand.
- I am quite fine with incidental one-scene assholes you run into that you have the opportunity to do something about.
- I am sick and tired of stories where the subject matter is ‘the struggles of gender’, and if that’s a major theme of a game, I’d be very wary of it. It’s quite hard to do it in an emphatic way and yet not come off as trite. There are plenty of ways to write about the experiences of noncis people instead of just focusing on the struggles.
Kinda unrelated but not really, in a multiplayer game that I play, I’m known as that weird guildie who never, ever speaks in voice chat even though I’m pretty talkative in text chat. This is because I cannot afford to let my guildies hear my real voice and possibly peg me as a man or a woman, and I don’t know if they would react in a good way if I say I’m neither. The idea is too distressing, even if I really want to talk to them. This sometimes works to the group’s detriment when I can’t type out a warning in time before we got ganked, and I can’t multiplayer with games that only support voice chat except with a few close friends.
In the great schemes of things, this isn’t something that even registers as a blip on the Great Oppression Chart o’ Misery, and I don’t feel that it’s something that affects my life that much. In a story, it’d be worth a throwaway line at best about how ‘the computer doesn’t have a mic equipped since you don’t talk into it’. But it’s a little thing that came out of being an nb…and you can find those little things, those little lines, things that are not really about our struggles but came from how we approach our identity and write about it. If that’s what you want to do.
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Yeah, there’s a great point here. There’s a massive variety in gender presentation and presence of secondary sex characteristics in both cis and trans people. Theres always the assumption that trans people “look trans” as in that they look typically like the gender they were assigned at birth but I have a friend who is a trans man and started hormone replacement therapy about a year or so ago if I remember correctly, but when I first met him about three years ago I assumed that he was a cis man and some of our mutual friends have said the same about him. And as for the “you can always tell by their voice” assumption, I didn’t know he was trans for several months and also there are people out there with huge vocal ranges as well as women with deep voices and men with high voices. I try not to make assumptions so quickly anymore, but there has been many other people I’ve met in passing who I’d thought the same about
There are a lot of potential factors like if a person is pre- or post- surgery and/or hormones or if they never get surgery and/or hormones, just how their body happens to look, and if they’re closeted, or stealth, or gender nonconforming for example. How people’s bodies are shaped are more difficult to control, but how a person dresses, wears their hair, and wears makeup or not can often easily change whether they’re read as male, female, or ambiguous and that goes for everyone, not just trans people
For nonbinary people in particular, there is no real norm for what mainstream society thinks they should look like, though there have been more people coming out as nonbinary including some celebrities. The way some present might be read as traditionally feminine, traditionally masculine, or a mix. I’ve seen a lot of cis writers describe nonbinary characters as just “looking androgynous” when what that means exactly can change wildly depending on culture and besides that, it’s often treated as an inherit trait to that character and leave it at that when in real life, androgynous presentation is a conscious choice and what it would look like depends highly upon what that person considers to be considered androgynous
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Here is the problem I have with singling out the non-binary or trans MC for this:
The reason is simple: Even cis people get misgendered all the time.
I had a friend who was on the USA Women’s Olympic Basketball team, so she is quite tall. She used to be called “Sir” and “him” all the time just based on her height.
Other cis people get misgendered over the phone (often unintentionally) because their voice may not be within expected norms
The simple fact is that “Not everyone can tell a person’s gender just by looking at them” applies to all people and not just trans or non-binary people.
The underlying presumption of this whole thread seems to be: this only can happen to you if you are trans or non-binary.
YMMV.
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Soooo… That’s given me a lot to think about, and at the end of the day, I’m still not sure what direction to go in.
On the one hand, the silent majority seems to be swaying in one direction, while the vocal majority seems to be largely swaying the other, and a lot of people have made a lot of very good points in favour of all three.
Endmaster keeps making the very good point of “writers should write what they want to write instead of worrying what other people think” which I completely agree with, but then, trans and non-binary paths are written solely for the enjoyment of trans and non-binary players, so it’s kind of important whether or not they will actually enjoy them.
That said… The game isn’t exactly intended to be “enjoyable”, in that it’s a very dark and gritty game. There’s going to be a lot of warnings anyway, because there’s going to be a lot of scenes that some people won’t enjoy reading. The overall tone of the game is largely depressing, so the game definitely isn’t intended to be “enjoyable” in the sense that it makes people feel happy.
So, to sum up… It’s something I’ll have to think about. I think the only thing I have decided is that I don’t want to do what @MadMinnie said, and add an option for both. It was a good suggestion (And would probably have completely solved the situation if I wasn’t so stubborn) but I kind of feel like I should just pick a style I want to write in and stick with it.
Ultimately, whichever option I’m going to go with, there’s going to be plenty of people who don’t want to play it for all kinds of reasons (whether they don’t want to see certain upsetting themes, or whether they don’t like the game’s setting or tone, or just generally think the writing is shitty) so at the end of the day, there’s no point in trying to please everyone. 
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Well you could add an option to the mc to as “Are you passing or not?” And if not, have those encounters, and if yes, don’t have them.
If that feels too intrusive to ask a player (both as cis/trans), then that’s usually a clue.
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Look Avery, I don’t know if you’re asking this for a brand new project of yours or if you’re changing stuff in The Lawless Ones, but if it’s the second, I was a beta tester of your game and if you like me to, I would gladly give you inbox feedback about a few scenes where I actually thought “huh, this would be a good scene to talk a little about this matter” (with no prejudice and bigotry tho, the scenes would be friendly). But if you ask me now, I really think the game should stay the way it is about this matter. For MANY reasons that I will say soon bellow, but I must say that one of the reasons is: I got happy reading scenes where my MC and the other characters were just children playing together and going through bad stuff together and being a family together. No gender matters. there except for the one we know but again, my feedback would be exactly about this one character
But the first thing I’m gonna say is… Are you really listening to what we’re saying here? The impression I’m getting so far, specially after seeing who gave likes to whose answer is that, I don’t know, it seems like you’re being defensive about your position as a writer in terms of doing whatever you want because it’s your story. What I’m trying to say by this is, I can’t even believe we still having this conversation after what @DreamingGames and @HomingPidgeon said. My position as whole stands 100% with what they said and many of what they said was said more than once but I’m still here repeating some of this. I’m really sorry, I don’t mean to be rude, but that’s what it’s looking like to me, it kind of seems that you’re reading more and more opinions from trans people but somehow are standing more to what cis people are saying.
I’m really thankfull for the writers and non writers that are stooding helping us in this matter but it really shows how the poll itself won’t work. In fact I think even if you clarified that you only want trans people voting, I’m sure some cis would appear and think “well I’m not trans BUUT I THINK I CAN VOTE ON THIS EVEN SO” and boom, there it goes our speech place anyway.
I could repeat what many has said about how it depends on what your story is about because I trully think it does but I’ll try to focus more on other things…
One of the is what Eiwynn just said. Many cis people are misgendered, it is not a trans-only experience. An example I ALWAYS give since this kind of topic ALWAYS appears is an artist from my country, called Ines Brasil.
For her strong features, MANY people thinks she’s trans but she’s not. So what could stop me from making an cis MC like her? Nothing, right? That’s my headcanon, like every other character I make. Yet, why would my MC not be misgendered while a “”“cis looking”“”" trans character would? It just doesn’t make sense at all.
Another thing: is it really that hard to write something positive about us? Why does it have to be always some dickhead meaning to misgendering us instead of, I don’t know, somebody saying that’s cool to learn that there are more than two genders?
From this, I’ll say, once again, what I ALWAYS say on this sort of topic: I’ll praise the game Heart of the House untill the day I die. Speaking for my own experience with this game, this is the best game with trans stuff being told that I ever played so I highly recomend you to play it as a trans, binary and non binary if you really ARE wanting to study more on the matter. OBVIOUSLY I can’t speak to every of us but so far I haven’t seen any trans, binary or not, saying the opposite of what I am about this game. Trying to not give much spoiler, there is a character there that doesn’t respect the pronouns and gender of a non-binary character. And we can see how Loren, this nb character gets hurt by it. If you’re playing as a n-b, you can relate to them. But my favourite scene is where Loren offers to help you to get dressed. If you’re n-b, the scene is described as a good moment where none of you have to worry about the other’s body and stuff, because obviously none of you would say shit or being intrusive about each other. That scene warmed my heart in a way that no other scene in any game has. I also recomend you check the author interview, but I’m even pasting a part of it here:
On a more personal note, there were certain things I felt strongly about portraying in Heart of the House – like mental health issues and certain elements of gender and sexuality – that are particularly challenging in a Victorian setting. Not because the Victorians were unfamiliar with them, but because the vocabulary was often absent, and social norms were so strict. A panic disorder could be considered an embarrassing but acceptable nervous affliction (if you were fortunate enough to have money and family support) – and at the same time, not meeting society’s ridiculously stringent requirements for gender presentation might well be considered a sign of madness.
Thankfully, since the game takes place in an isolated community with its own unusual norms, I could give my characters much more room to breathe and be themselves than might be realistic in a story that takes place in, say, London during the same era.
To finish what I’m more eagering to say… Yesterday I was reading some old comic books of characters of my childhood. I was having fun until I read a story that heavily attacked my body dysphoria. I continued to read some stories but nothing would make me forget about that one. I got sick the whole day and I even got a fever. The day has changed and I’m still not well.
Even if now, after so many experiences and having people on my back to help me I’m feeling like this, I was thinking of the burden it would have been if I had read that story when I was a kid that was all by themself, confused and that at age 9 took a knife and thought seriouslly about ending that there. I love that comic books and all because of that story, I’m not being able to look at my comic books, I can’t look at the characters anymore. Is this permanent? I don’t know, we can’t just control traumas.
What you write is much more than just stories and can affect much more than just people getting somewhat bothered by it (as if it wasn’t bad enough…). We’re talking about peoples lives here.
So I really ask you to think DEEPLY about this. A good number of players here are trans.
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Having only trans and nb players have to deal with something that could be actually uncomfortable or even triggering for them for sake of “realism” could accidentally send a message that their comfort and enjoyment isn’t important to you as an author. If you add transphobia in a game setting that doesn’t need it you can accidentally send a message that “trans people will always be looked at in a negative way no matter the history or world.” Sure someone can read a jerk character misgendering a trans or nb MC as just that character being a jerk but some could also read it as the game taking cheap shots at them.
This is what I mean about thinking about what message you’re sending. If you only include things that make playing a trans or nb MC unique in a positive way, that’s one thing but including things that can make the actual players uncomfortable is another. If a game is supposed to be an uncomfortable experience all around then maybe there’s a merit to it but if it’s not… why add characters being misgendered if it doesn’t add anything to the story? Why single out those players?
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Adding my voice to the “vocal majority” (as someone who didn’t vote, because as @TSSL pointed out, the options are hella value-loaded, and none really reflect my thoughts):
Creating “realism” and acknowledging trans and nb player characters doesn’t have to be done in a negative way. Shockingly, my favorite way to be acknowledged is positively! Many people have pointed to Heart of the House as an example of a way to do that (the scenes of solidarity with Loren), and I strongly agree. (On the opposite side, Loren being misgendered in a place that was generally safe for them was crushing, and I really could have done without it.) Especially if your universe is going to be generally dark and depressing, small moments of affirmation and solidarity and acceptance can mean a lot.
Furthermore, characters don’t have to “automatically know” gender in an “unrealistic” way for gender to be addressed. Pauses for pronouns, or just being introduced by another character who knows your gender (“This is Tom, they’ll be your cleric”), are both neutral ways to get it out there. Character creation details about presentation, etc can be done separately and addressed later, if that’s something you want to include.
As a final note: please consider why, in your worldbuilding, this is an axis of identity on which people will be mistreated. You’re creating the world! You’re choosing what biases and attitudes to import from ours. The assumption that of course trans and nb folks will be discriminated against for that fact, in any universe, has some fairly ugly implications.
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Let me try to use an example.
About 50% of the world’s population deal with menstrual cycles every month or so. I have never played a game where that gets addressed. Ever. Including it would be realistic but I’ve never seen people push to include it and I would never want that in a game because they suck and people don’t like them.
Having a trans or NB MC have their gender questioned might be “realistic” but its sucks and people don’t like it.
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It is entirely possible an author includes discrimination so that readers might feel empathy or at least learn something about what it’s like to walk in another’s shoes before they open their mouth.
Avery,
There is a lot I’d like to say about this, but I’ll keep it short though you’re free to message me if you’d like. What I think you really need to do, as someone who possibly shares some of the same thoughts and feelings, is really ask yourself what including discrimination of any kind is going to add to your story. Is it important to the story? Is the story built around it?
If it’s not important and doesn’t add anything besides a sense of realism, I think it is best to not give a gender/sexuality option at all (so you don’t feel you have to address it) or to simply give an option for everyone to be who they want to be (as many options as you can) where the experience is largely, if not entirely, the same.
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Sure, but in this case I don’t think trans and NB players need to be reminded what’s its like to deal with disrimination.
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