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Why not?
There exists some fraction of the population which experiences gender weirdness. Trans or at least nonconforming. Making a modern-era game where they’re conspicuously absent would be…editorial. Not reflective of the world around us. Like making a medieval game without religion, or a Wild West game without rifles. It’s something that happens, but I can see why one would prefer to be accurate instead.
Because of the huge quantity of transpeople or because of them being the flavour of the month minority and therefore temporarily very culturally salient? If the latter, calling their "conspicuous" would be kind of circular.
Even if you mean the former, I would see leaving them out more like not mentioning people sick with leprosy in a medieval game, instead of leaving out knights. They exist in some quantity, but are very concentrated in specific areas.
A little of both?
Cultural salience is the main reason. A medieval peasant knew about leprosy, even if they didn’t see lepers on a daily or even yearly basis. I can’t blame a game for not including lepers or even writing relevant dialogue, because dev resources are limited. But when one does include a throwaway mention, I think it’s fair to call it slightly more true-to-life.
I also don’t think they’re as concentrated as it might seem. Again, I’m in a red industry in a red city in a red state, and I know several trans people. About half of them from college.
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I have met literally one trans person in my entire life. And that was at a university so not exactly in neutral territory.
Lucky. I've got a handful work in my building.
The problem is that they don’t even slightly pass and you know you’re going to slip up eventually. If you’re interacting closely with them in public you’ve got that hanging over your head constantly.
Plus all the usual issues with compelled speech, of course.
Eh, this really depends on the person. About ten years ago one of my co-workers announced they were trans and asked us to use new pronouns and names for them, but acknowledged that we'd been working together for years and we'd slip up occasionally. So we did our best, but we slipped up occasionally, and she corrected us when we did, and we said "shucks, sorry", and she laughed and said "don't worry about it", and we gradually got better at it.
There's definitely people who are dicks about this but there's also people who are not dicks about this.
This was in a university context. Even if the person in question had been more accommodating than she in fact was, the fact is that a bystander would very likely have reported it to HR.
In short, in that context there was no way of making it a request rather than an order even if she’d wanted to. I was forced to lie every single day. I hated it then and I still resent it now.
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This sorta rubs me the wrong way, but I find it difficult to articulate why. I've had similar encounters with a trans worker in my office, and my occasional slip-up with their pronouns never raised to the level of being harangued about it or being threatened with HR. I did indeed "get better at it", and we continued to work together as well as anybody else until one of us transitioned to other projects.
But what precisely did I get better at? Being polite about something that I think is frankly ridiculous. And while there are many beliefs or opinions I find ridiculous wether religious or political, they never come up in a professional context or require an update to my language model. I have a lot of negative things to say about Islam, but that's neither here nor there when I'm working shoulder to shoulder with a Muslim peer. It just doesn't come up, and neither of us can make any demands of each other.
No matter how much it was prettied up, a falsehood (IMO) was being imposed on me, and there is no escaping or ignoring the sword hanging over my head if I were to continue to misstep, or politely respond that this preferred pronoun business is not my bag, but I still fully respect you as a fellow coworker. Basically, I reject the idea that I am 'slipping up' at all when I refer to them with the pronouns that historically correspond with their birth sex. Even a well-intentioned "No foul! You'll get the hang of it in time" gets my hackles up, as if there is a deficiency on my end requiring shoring up.
I wouldn't say they were being dicks - that's far too strong a word. But I don't think "not being a dick about it" lets them off the hook for what they're doing, because it still boils down "do it or else" in the end. No amount of smiles or soft chuckles about my faux pas changes that.
My coworker seemed fine in all other respects. We could crack jokes about other topics, talk vidya, bitch about work. But I never stopped being on the backfoot about their pronouns, because continued absentmindedness or deliberate refusal would be a road to catastrophe. I could say I used their pronouns because I respected them, but it was also inseparable from the motive of self-preservation. And when the motives are mixed up like that, I don't know if I'm being fully honest with myself regarding my intentions.
Thinking it over, I think part of the reason I don't have an issue with it is, ironically, because of the close working relationship. If there's someone I'm interacting with in a professional capacity every day or two, yeah, I don't have any problem making a little room in my brain for pronoun and name; hell, I'm already making some room in my brain for their name, I've just got to change which name is stored in there. (And for what it's worth, they passed reasonably well, so the pronoun wasn't a big deal either aside from the transition period.)
Whereas if it's someone I only intereacted with every few months and every time I talked to them they had a new pronoun/name, my answer would be "dude, pick one and stick with it, or at least stop bugging me about it". And I can kinda understand if someone who hadn't worked with her more closely had more trouble with the transition.
I think nicknames work the same way. There's a few people I've worked with who, quite frankly, I never found out the "real" name of, because they kept using a nickname. But that's okay! As far as I'm concerned, that was their name, so, hey, no sweat.
It's all a lot less fraught in personal relationships. "Am I willing to sacrifice a friendship over this issue" is a lot more clean precisely because it doesnt have the spectre of having my career derailed by a professional superstructure hovering around it. I wouldn't be anywhere near as bugged by a pronoun request from a friend, in the same way it doesn't bug me to abstain from certain topics or off-color jokes in some people's presence. Of course, this all gets more complicated since most people do form personal relationships with professional peers to some extent. How could one not?
I guess my frustration is that I always felt there were pretty obvious, bold lines that I knew not to transgress in work contexts, and expected others not to in turn. Trans identity is the first time (that I can think of) where this boundary was transgressed. The current formulation of trans ideology necessitates said transgression, I guess. But I am dismayed by the degree it has seemingly bowled people over.
Yeah, that's fair. And honestly, this did all happen before the culture war kicked off at full force - I'd have to check to get an exact date, but I'd say 2014 or so. We were not in the same climate of fear that we arguably are today.
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Drawing from this anecdote, it's worth examining what other groups get to impose this sort of compelled cooperation with their mental idiosyncrasies. I recall people really, really not liking public prayer, for an example. It's hard to imagine any level of enforced cooperation with Christian preferences under our current norms, for example.
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It's the "some fraction". At the moment, for all the figures we can get which are not particularly great, the transgender etc. percentage of the world population is estimated anywhere from 0.1% to 5%.
So that is more like "making a game without Zoroastrinians it it would be editorial". Yeah, if I'm setting the work in the Middle East in classical times, it would be, but not if I'm setting it in 13th century Florence.
Certainly "if you set something in San Francisco and have no trans people" that's 'not reflective of the world around us', but for a lot of places "maybe somebody is trans but the population here is likely to be 98% cis" so it wouldn't be editorial. That's the problem with adaptations of books for TV fantasy, it's been pointed out that the small village in Wheel of Time which is noted to be isolated and off the beaten track was put on screen with a racial mixture more akin to 21st century New York.
That's where the pick-n-mix approach to "make sure you have Representation" falls down, because you're ticking off "do I have at least one of each racial, sexual, and gender minority?" boxes instead of developing the characters organically, and you have to make sure you have your characters labelled for easy identification so the critical hordes don't descend to scream about -phobia and -ism. We've already had this kind of kerfuffle in YA publishing.
I'm aware of this issue and have heard about it extensively from other people; but do you happen to know of any good write-ups about it?
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I tried to be careful about that with the qualifier, “modern-era.” Yeah, if someone goes for modern trans dynamics in a Jane Austen setting, they are definitely making a political move. It was jarring enough that HogLeg imported modern tropes, and I can’t even tell how serious they were being.
But OP was talking about anything that wasn’t sci-fi. For modern, urban, American settings, I think it’s justifiable. As @Hyperion correctly points out, that constitutes a lot of today’s media.
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I think Razib Khan said it best when he said they cast these shows like they are demographically the same as a major midwestern city. Even if it's in fields like medicine that are overwhelmingly south/east Asian. It feels like people think casting in major films is just a jobs program for whatever demographics are common in Hollywood and New York at the time, without regard for how they actually contribute to the final product.
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Is your contention that the vast majority of all creative output prior to the mid 2000s fails to be reflective of the world around us due to the paucity of trans representation? You're right when you say that some fraction of the population experiences gender weirdness, but there's no actual justification for assuming that this weirdness will manifest as a trans identity throughout all of time and space (it certainly didn't for the majority of recorded history, and for large portions of the world today).
I think the vast majority of content set in $CURRENT_YEAR got it a little wrong, yeah.
There are perfectly good reasons for this. I don’t blame the average dev for not wasting time on modeling every niche detail of today’s culture.
It’s like raytracing for mirrors, or other graphical improvements. I don’t judge a game for using screen-space reflections or the old “copy your stuff behind the mirror” trick. I’m also not going to complain when someone adds the feature. Some fan will no doubt have a wonderful time posting screenshots to Reddit and marveling at the inclusion.
I'm sorry, I misunderstood your first post and missed the "modern-era". I still disagree, but this is now a matter of personal preference so there's no point discussing it.
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Because the kind of trans person he is describing doesn't exist in the real world. So its not representative, if you were to do it that way it would be "editorial" to use your word. It would be a form of extreme pro-trans-ideology propaganda.
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They’re like 1% of the population, although probably overrepresented among the sorts of people who make decisions about what characters are in video games. Unless your video game has 100 named characters, it’s not conspicuous that they aren’t there:
Well, in some ways, that's sorta the point, right? Imagine I decide I'm going to turn 1% of my NPCs trans, and I end up with "that weapon shopkeeper in the third village". How do I make them trans without making a big deal out of it? Is there a way?
Going back to Borderlands 2, which I honestly think did a marvelous job of gay characters, there's an audio tape you can find where a female character casually refers to her wife. Again, it's not emphasized, it's just sorta dropped in there and the world moves on. I can do that in a video game by having some characters be married and having this one character married to a same-sex partner. But what's the equivalent of this for trans people?
The Emperor's New Clothes defence. Don't include any trans people at all, and when questioned...
"Of course our game has trans people in it - what, you didn't recognise them? Thinking you could identify a passing trans person by sight alone is kind of transphobic, buddy..."
I mean, I get the joke, but that doesn't really solve the issue, it just sort of snarkily bypasses it.
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There is a way, but it would get you cancelled.
Depict a small,very depressed, woman with a short haircut and removed breasts.
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Make him a 5’1 dude with a trans pride flag hidden in his shop somewhere and endorse the fan theory.
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There is not.
You can paint a picture all you want, but you can't ignore the canvas. Fiction nowadays trying to include such elements just come across as obnoxious political screeds that after a certain point makes me throw them in the trash.
Just because I can read Eclipse Phase doesn't mean I don't roll my eyes at some of the elements they include, and despite my initial interest in the webcomic 'O Human Star', once I realized the analogy they were going with some of the setting elements made me severely pull back in my interest in seeing where it was going to go.
I'm sick a tired of people trying to force obvious modern age propaganda down my throat, and it's gotten to the point with most modern fiction that I default assume they'll include it until I learn otherwise.
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I suppose the hoary old device of pronouns? Your weapons shopkeeper looks like a guy, but everyone refers to them as "she/her" and she has a husband, refers to him as her husband, and the spouse refers to them as my wife? Nobody makes a big deal out of it in-game because hey, trans is just how we roll round here.
It's an older book now, but it still makes a huge difference with pronoun use in Samuel Delany's "Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand" where the default pronoun for everyone is "she"; there are important historical characters who are only referred to as "she/her" and you have literally no idea is this a woman, is this a man, what? Delany is a good enough writer to get away with that, and it does make you more aware of default attitudes and assumptions when you go along unconsciously thinking 'oh yeah, this is a woman' and then hit up against 'wait a minute, maybe they're a man!'
I do have a story I'm tinkering with that has an alien species who use gendered pronouns for indications of authority. Biologically, their males are mobile tool-users, their females are mammoth sessile immobile creatures who are used as housing and who act as leaders. This particular hierarchy hasn't remained intact through spaceflight, but the terminology has stuck; every member of their species uses "she" to refer to superiors, to homes, and to leaders, while every member uses "he" to refer to subordinates, tools, and workers. This also means that gender is contextual; the captain of a scout ship refers to their ship as "she", the commander of the fleet refers to their ship as "he".
None of this even has anything to do with the story, I was just staying up late and writing paragraphs about random aliens that didn't mean much to the plot. It just sorta happened.
(part of this is also so I can punt on figuring out what the hell gender the other species are; the story takes place from the captain's perspective, and this lets me just use "he" for everyone, even the insectoid hivemind and the sentient dimensional rift.)
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I don't think there is one, which is why attempts at implementing trans characters in media feels so conspicuous.
Gays and lesbians can be outwardly identified by their behaviors - who they flirt with, like to hump, or get married to. A female NPC sharing an abode with their wife is self-explanatory.* 'Transness', at least as modernly conceptualized, has fully anchored itself to self-identification. The jocky bro who lifts and the uber-feminine waif in a cocktail dress could both conceivably identify as the gender opposite of what their visual markers would have you assume, hence why it's polite to ask their pronouns instead of assuming - such is argued. And trans-women can still prefer natural-born women as partners since the self-ID is apparently disconnected from sexual orientation in addition to the commonly understood gender signifiers. Thus you get the "Hi! I'm trans" meme, since there is nothing inherently communicable about this condition short of probing their minds.
There's no simple trick or shortcut to indicate a character's transness without making it a significant part of the story or hamfisting it. And I think this just attests to the impossibility of dealing or negotiating with trans ideology. Celeste and The Matrix need to rely on metaphor to explore or acknowledge the subject matter. When you don't have that, but you're insistent on doing something any way, you're left with odd people who stick out like sore thumbs ala ME Andromeda, Hogwarts Legacy, and Siege of Dragonspear.
*Even this gets obnoxious when overdone or becomes pervasive enough. When every game dev, author, and showrunner justifies including non-hetero relationships because "it's reflective of the real world", we get an ocean of (often token) lesbian couples that are extremely over-represented relative to what the average person ever sees in real life.
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How about "questgiver sends PC on a mission to pick up a collection of several different drugs, some already familiar to the character, some not, and later on the character can find out more info about the drugs, a few of which are sex-linked hormones"?
This premise could spiderweb into several plotlines (someone later gets poisoned by an overdose of one of the other drugs--did questgiver do it?), most of which shouldn't be linked to trans-ness. Both of the fictional series that I can think of that handled trans-ish characters well gave the characters a whole lot more plot and drama to focus on that wasn't just one-note trans angst (Safehold series by David Weber; TWI by pirateaba).
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