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But even this is a culture war move--this is the classically liberal "color blind" approach. I think it's a great approach! But I am assured by the badly-named "anti-racism" crowd that the "color blind" approach is bad. We get this in the recent "Secret Invasion" scene where Fury leans on Rhodes for some color-based solidarity--using aliens as a stand-in wasn't enough, we had to get some explicit discussion of segregation so everyone knows that the only message that matters is (as Scott recently put it) "re-enacting the 60s civil rights struggle."
Sometimes, yes, but I remember someone in the last ten years (Yudkowsky?) pithily observing that it is almost impossible to write an engaging story about mature individuals making responsible choices. Without conflict, where is the catharsis? In fact I have seen (and personally very much enjoyed) a growing number of counterexamples in recent years, mostly in anime, indie games, and Nintendo titles (especially stuff like Animal Crossing)--a sort of "comfort food" genre that (for probably obvious reasons) attracts more women to traditionally masculine media. I note that even, say, Stardew Valley does not quite meet this mark, given the pressure imposed by the clock and the calendar. But many "overpowered protagonist" anime titles do seem to hit this mark--Farming Life in Another World, for example.
I think Key & Peele's "Office Homophobe" helpfully illustrates the difference--except that there are real, fairly serious disagreements about this, often discussed under the heading of "visibility." The point of "Pride Parades" is often explicitly articulated as visibility. During the "sexual revolution," the winning legal argument for pornography as "free speech" was that pornography is a special kind of argument for a different kind of world--a world where people are less perplexed and uptight about sex.
I feel like you make some good observations here but you only seem to be thinking about one half of the discussion, namely, the half where you want to know how you are supposed to "decide what [human characters should] look like both in terms of dangly bits and skin color." The other half of the discussion is, why do you need to decide that? Not in the trivial sense (you have to decide that because, if you're going to have human characters at all, they must be plausibly human), but in the deeper sense of how your artistic choices are going to be driven. Do you "need to decide so your game is marketable?" That will give you a different answer than if you "need to decide so you don't offend your development team," or "so your plot makes any sense," or "so your game meets your/someone else's threshold of realism," or whatever.
So if you want to include a "trans" character in a game, my first question is, "okay, why?" And to be clear--"I just feel like it" is perfectly acceptable as an explanation, if all you care about is art for the sake of art. But in most contexts, either your "trans" character is going to be "invisible" in just the sense you observe, or they are going to be so visible that your cultural milieu makes it a "thing." For it to not be a thing would require a world (either the one we live in, or the one in the game) where "gender markers" are slim-to-nonexistent. Feminist scholar Sally Haslanger once wrote, "when justice is achieved, there will no longer be white women (there will no longer be men or women, whites or members of any other race)." She (and many feminists) seem to really believe that the biological differences between men and women can be of no particular moment in an egalitarian world, to the point where we don't even have language to distinguish such things. Gender eliminativism, however, runs strongly counter to the gender essentialism expressed by most transsexuals today. To create a fictional universe where being trans is not noticeable, and yet trans characters are also not invisible, you can't create a universe where some characters are trans, you have to create a universe where there are no socially constructed gender norms.
I guess what I'm bringing myself around to is the idea that transsexuality just is a political identity, as surely as "Republican" or "Democrat." Either a trans character is noticeably violating gender norms (in which case, they are calling attention to themselves) or they are living up to gender norms (in which case, they are invisible). Just as you'll never know whether that background character is a Catholic or a monarchist or a /b/tard unless it comes up in the storyline, you'll never know a video game character is trans unless it gets advertised in some way.
But probably you should care about that approximately as much, and for approximately the same reasons, as you care about making sure there are enough Muslims or women or incels in your game (which, depending on your game, might matter anywhere from "not at all" to "a whole damn lot"). Depicting an in-game society where nobody cares about race is pretty easy, given the medium of video games; you see characters who look wildly different, and you see that nobody cares. Forget Uhura; check out the friendship between Han Solo and Chewbacca! But depicting an in-game society where nobody cares about gender requires you to build an in-game society where nobody cares about gender, which like... as long as we're a sexually dimorphic species for whom pair-bonding is (at least temporarily) necessary for procreation, that's probably flatly impossible. But in a transhumanist society where body-swapping is feasible and the act of sex has been obsoleted by an infinite variety of pleasure-generating technologies, basically everyone is going to be "trans" by contemporary standards.
In short: why? If you want to make propaganda, make some propaganda. If you don't want to make propaganda, then either non-attention-called trans people or an allegory for trans people will be varying shades of possible depending entirely on what else you're demanding from your game. A realistic 1920s noir thriller where one character happens to be openly and noticeably trans and nobody cares will fail to be authentic, and this will invite totally understandable criticism (in fact, it will obviously be propaganda, even if you prefer it not to be propaganda). A cyberpunk RPG where you can give your character breasts and a penis, by contrast, is unlikely to attract the same kind of attention (even though it will still probably attract some complaints).
Because if I can prove it can't be done, then I can use that to explain why people don't do it. Because if I can prove it can be done, then I can do it and gently show people how to politics better.
Because to me, "the existence of trans people" isn't propaganda any more than putting angels or nazis or bikers or forest rangers in a game is propaganda. Having things in a game does not imply support for those things, nor does it imply disapproval of those things. Having a larger palette makes for more options, which lets me make better games. And the more ways I can use parts of that palette, the better off I am.
Because it's a challenge.
So, to be sure I'm understanding: when you say "prove it can/'t be done," it seems like "it" here refers, not to including a trans character in a game--since you already know that trans characters have been included in games--but to creating either "trans characters that are never called attention to" or "characters that are an allegory for trans people."
In the case of the former, you are stuck on the "invisibility" problem: "The point of Uhura is that she is obviously black and nobody cares. But you can't have someone who's 'obviously successfully trans' - it's contradictory!" To this I can only respond that contradiction is the beating heart of transsexuality. If gender essentialism is true, then a male who is wired to pursue the Platonic Feminine will always fall short in some way (until we unlock transhumanist body-swapping in the tech tree); because males cannot bear children, there is no such thing as being "successfully" trans, only varying degrees of failure.
(Note that this is also true for infertile women, many of whom struggle emotionally with infertility and regard themselves at some level as failures as women. I observe in passing: how many pregnant women have you seen in video games? Conversely, does infertility strike you as like transsexuality in terms of how difficult it would be to depict in a video game "without calling attention to it?")
But if gender essentialism is false, then it's not even clear what being "successfully trans" can possibly mean, because there is no Platonic Feminine--there are only varying degrees of conformity or nonconformity to socially constructed gender expectations. Either a male who perfectly presents as feminine just is a woman by definition (if gender is inessential and divorced from sex, then there is no such thing as a "transwoman," just people behaving in ways that society arbitrarily dubs masculine or feminine) or there is no gender binary at all, no "men" or "women" in truth but only a whole bunch of people behaving in a diverse array of ways.
The contemporary practice of transsexuality can only even exist in a society that maintains a fairly strict gender binary but also makes sociolinguistic accommodations for people who transgress that binary. For a trans character to be a trans character, you either have to commit to gender essentialism and accept that "it can't be done," or you have to eschew gender essentialism and accept that "it can't be done," or you have to situate your character within a game setting where transsexuality is as explicitly noticeable as race but also never remarked upon. (This might be done, for example, through widespread use of neopronouns, or trans flags, or ubiquitous nudity.) But here I'm basically repeating myself: the disposition of a trans character will depend substantially on the trans-ness you put into your worldbuilding.
Allegories I think should be much easier, in part because queer theory is absolutely drowning in them. An intimately-told story of a woman's struggle with infertility could very easily be an allegory for transsexuality. There are also many, many stories of gender-norm violation throughout history, including women sneaking into Plato's Academy, women dressing as men in Shakespeare's plays, and so forth. "Are these characters actually trans?" is a common topic in writing in the humanities.
Whether any of this rises to the level of showing people "how to politics better" I leave an open question.
This seems like a bit of a motte to me, along the lines of "putting black people in a game (or movie) is not propaganda." Well, no, not all by itself. But there are settings where it makes more and less sense to do, and ways it can seem more or less like propaganda. Including a "successfully trans" character in your 21st century horror RPG is a very different thing than including a similarly-situated trans character in your 16th century open world samurai simulator (Uhura would also not go well in such a game!). Incongruously imposing 21st century American notions of sex and gender on historical settings is propaganda no matter how you might care to protest the contrary. Imposing those same ideas on a fantasy world of your own devising, much less so.
Again--if I've understood you--the "challenge" you have in mind does not seem to be the mere inclusion of trans characters in games, but the presentation of trans characters at the level of Uhura: visible, but unremarkable. What I think I am trying to suggest to you is that Roddenberry's artistic success in this regard (as distinct from his strategic success in the world we inhabit) was not his inclusion of the black Uhura character, but in his construction of a world where it makes sense for her blackness to pass unremarked. You have asked a character-crafting question when you are actually facing a worldbuilding problem.
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I'm unaware of any particular importance asssigned to hair color aside from a couple of jokes and maybe a few genuinely obsolete beliefs about gingers, yet we still have language to distinguish hair colors.
Well, I certainly don't endorse Haslanger's argument, but I think the most charitable interpretation is probably that we would still have words like "male" and "female" (and still use them in most of the contexts where we tend to use those particular words today) but that the words "man" and "woman" (and in racial contexts, the words "white" and "black") are packed with social meaning we must discard if we're ever going to live in an egalitarian society.
And to be blunt: I think this is absurd, and Haslanger's having written the words I quoted substantially decreases my ability to take her seriously in other ways. But this is the kind of thing you find when you dig into all the "critical theory" schools, be that gender or sexuality or race or whatever. The best I can do to steelman such arguments is to acknowledge that if we ever do have the technology to move our minds into manufactured bodies, then concepts like "race" and "gender" and "sexuality" are likely to in fact face annihilation. But since we do not have such technology, almost nothing said by these people makes any sense if their goal is to apply it to the world we actually inhabit.
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