Game Industry Showcases Transgender and Non-Binary Characters
For the first time in history, transgender and non-binary people are seeing representation across a once male dominated industry.
Less than a decade ago, video games suffered a repeating trope of very specific representations across a swath of video games. Males were typically brutish and painfully hyper-masculine, swaddled in heavy armor, while women were traditionally scantily clad objects explicitly created for the male gaze. The imbalance of equal, diverse or even accurate representation culminated a culture clash called “Gamer Gate” wherein a movement largely rooted in misogynist ideologies pushed back against expanding the gaming industry to evolve past damaging stigmas revolving around women. Many women and girls either who were involved directly in game development or simply identified as gamers experienced significant online abuse and harassment from men who believed they were being encroached upon by social progressives or “liberal” feminists.
However, as much as the fires of that controversy have diminished over the years, many LGBTQ+ people were still left sitting on the fringes, effectively rendered invisible within the virtual worlds…
