Video Games Made me TRANS! (and there's nothing you can do about it).

We need to police EVERY piece of content!

Dear conservative heroes of the internet, video games made me trans!

The veil has been lifted from my eyes. For years I denied your home-spun truth constantly bellowed into the digital void, but now I’ve come to beg your forgiveness. I now see the wisdom of your warnings. All that clamoring about the woke-mind-virus? How modern interactive media was twisting “men” into shadows of their former selves?

We should have listened.

The deep, critical research you conducted is peerless. The sole act of listening to that one podcast made by that guy who used to host the show where people ate bugs is all we needed. You, and you alone, identified the curse that’s become a plague upon us. A curse with victims tallying into the millions! Chief among these victims is me… or more to the point what I WAS. For once I was the pinnacle, a strapping, heavily tattooed man with a glorious voluminous beard but now… now I’m a strapping, heavily tattooed woman with a glorious voluminous rack.

It’s clear: straight cisgendered white men are history’s most threatened minority!

I’m betraying the secret trans-video-gamer code by admitting any of this. In the next twenty-four hours I expect to find my save files deleted and my estrogen pills swapped for laxatives. No matter! While I lay huddled, crying about having to yet again restart TES:Oblivion, while also shitting myself into oblivion, I’ll be comforted that you now know the truth: you’re right to be terrified of video games.

And do you want to know what makes this all worse?

It isn’t even the current generation of soy-boy wokification video games that did it! The memes and message-boards, your main sources of objective game industry news, are decrying the current round of masculinisation and uglification of magnificent, animated titties. But it didn’t start there. My brain, my very identity has been awash in the stew of destructive thought-altering interactive media for decades. I’m of that supremely susceptible age group. The age group that experienced the tail end of the 8-bit home-console generation. Sure, it may have been via the surrogate of older siblings who actually held the game controllers, but I was there. The sleeper agent conditioning had begun. Just sitting and watching a 2D Mario leap barrels on his quest to rescue Pauline from the clutches of Donkey Kong was enough. The brain-washing kicked into turbo-mode in the game era of bullet-bra’d archaeologists. I got my hands on a controller, and truly the damage to me was irreversible. I was playing at BEING A WOMAN, and a sexy British aristocratic one at that. So, while I spent all that time failing to deliver any artifacts to a museum, black-flipping and shooting tigers in the face guns akimbo, I was also….

Destroying. My. Gender. Identity.

That was all it took. One hit of that glorious low-poly bosom and I was trans’d!

Oh, and while I’m giving you all the secret confessions, I’ll also confirm that you were right about all the video game violence too. Not only was I trans’d, I was radicalised! I long for the lawlessness and casual disregard of authority that all those other games manipulated me into loving. All those games about the theft of automobiles while running from the cops have only made my lust for violence greater. Between that and now being trans, I yearn to be able to walk down the street showing off my bazookas while also showing off my bazookas.

These games are dangerous.

It doesn’t matter that they were a refuge for me as an awkward child. It doesn’t matter that they were a way for me to form connection with others. Those friendships are tainted now. My relationship with my brother? All those teenage years spent pitted in uproarious animated combat? I can see them for what they are. Indoctrination. I need to push them all away, my friends, my brother, even my own mother, blind to the damage being done, occasionally helped me solve puzzles in tombs I was raiding.

Like my entire collection of video games, she too will be dumped on the curb!

In fact, I think all media where an individual can experience a perspective other than the faith, race, ethnicity, and yes GENDER of their birth should be banned! That’s the safest option. We need to police every single scrap of entertainment to ensure that the main protagonist and the viewer are in lockstep in every facet, otherwise we run the genuine risk of harm. I know, I know, it sounds extreme, but we must do it. For the sake of the children!

Unless… you want to take a more nuanced look at the situation?

I mean, where would we start? How could we possibly even begin to examine such a thing as the idea that a video game could “make you trans”? I suppose that the best place to start would be with the games that people absolutely say DID “make them trans?” Seems like as good a starting place as any.

Enter Fallout: New Vegas.

Of course, I’m going to choose this pastiche of the 1950’s Americana. Full of crooning lounge singers, silver-screen cowboys and a story of vengeance set in the clicking radioactive desolation of an atomic age Las Vegas… why wouldn’t I chose this rich tapestry to talk about? For those of you who’ve never played it (and risked your gender identity) this game allows you to decide the fate of the city and surrounding townships. Do you go with the “good guy” New Californian Republic who strive to bring peace to the Mojave? Or do you sign on with the “bad guy” Caesar's Legion and their encampment of post-apocalyptic MRA’s cosplaying as Roman Centurions? How about the enigmatic Mr House (who always wins) in his casino fortress? Or perhaps… You as the final arbiter of what is right and just?

Seeing any hints about what turned all those gamers trans yet?

I’ll give you a clue… there isn’t any. Zip. Bubkiss. Nada. Unlike games such as Celeste or The Last of Us: Part 2, that explicitly feature trans characters, there’s nothing overtly trans about Fallout: New Vegas. Nothing in it that even comes close to being a trans allegory and yet, time and again people cite it as significant in their “awakening”. The best theory I’ve encountered is that unlike the hugely popular predecessor Fallout 3, this iteration of the franchise’s offering of multiple final outcomes is to blame. The game has a faction system, and thus vastly different final outcomes based upon your choices. This can mean only one thing… replayability.

Turns out “first runs” of games are pretty consistent. People select an avatar that matches themself. They explore the ethical quandaries of a world using their own morality as a compass. With games like Fallout, where the morality is at best murky and at worst deliberately challenging, this leads people to want to play it over and over again, trying different paths and solutions. This is by design. The writers expect the first-run player to make timid choices based in “real-world” thinking, only to pull the rug out from under to highlight some moral hypocrisy. So people replay it to see the different ways their morality and ethics can be bent and all the things they missed in this lovingly crafted world.

Often that involves playing as the opposite gender.

But unlike in their first-run, the player isn’t blindly stumbling through the game now. They understand the mechanics, they know where the sweet loot is, they have the edge in combat and the foresight to be prepared. They are empowered… and all through the avatar of a gender they’d never experienced before. It wasn’t the content of the game that “trans’d people’s genders”, it was the structure of existing as something other than who you thought you were and finding it more enjoyable.

And so the legend goes, that’s what cracked all those trans eggs.

It’s gonna take some significant research to confirm if the New Vegas theory is true, but it does present a compelling suggestion. Sometimes the question of “who you are” can be prompted by the most innocuous things. Isolation during Covid gave me the space to wonder why I was trying so hard as performing masculinity. I stopped shaping this body to meet others expectations of it. I turned the critical eye inwards to examine oneself and when it started, it started out small.

So, regardless of if you believe in the protean transgender legend of Fallout: New Vegas the simple truth is that representation matters, and I don’t mean in the “I’m trans so I want to see myself represented” way. All art, all media is an exercise in expressing new perspectives and discovering how you overlap with someone else in unexpected ways. Yes, the presence of trans identities is vitally important for trans people to feel acknowledged that we exist, but it’s also important for cisgendered people to see that we exist too. It’s important that they see that THIS is an option, and not one that they should be afraid of, not one that is strange or weird or deviant.

The commonplace is only seen as aberrant if it’s been hidden from you your whole life.

So, despite my obnoxious ramblings and attention-seeking tabloid headline, yeah, video games “made me trans”. They made me trans insomuch as they gave me avenues to realise I’d been trans all along. Of course it wasn’t just video games. Books, films, TV, music, all art, all media that showed me an existence that wasn’t my own softened the ground for me to make this discovery.

There are plenty out there who’d seek to eradicate us along with any media that dares to suggest we are entitled to exist. Sure, they’re limiting our access to hormones and medical care. Sure, they’re refusing to amend our paperwork unless we leap through a thousand, ever harder hoops. But they’ll no easier eradicate transness than they can police all people from never experiencing a perspective other than their own.

Eggs will crack. They always have, and they always will.

–S