A quick note: I’ll be using the term trans as an umbrella term for all people whose gender identity does not conform to the one they were assigned at birth. So, this term encompasses others, including trans men and trans women, but also agender, genderqueer and nonbinary (that’s me!), genderfluid, bigender, and many others. Some people like to use trans* , with asterisk, as a more general term. I don’t use trans and trans* as exclusive terms, but some people do. Cisgender or cis, on the other hand, refers to people whose gender identity does conform to the one they were assigned at birth. If there is any uncertainty about any of the terms I may use or what sort of scope I’m using at times, please let me know..!
Some of my initial thoughts about the different narratives were that I thought they portrayed varying levels of tangibility of trans narratives. (I tried to talk a little about this in class but I don’t think I was being too clear…)
The vast majority of trans narratives that are familiar to cis people involve feelings of being “born in the wrong body,” and many culminate in the climax of the transition itself. Trans people are often flippantly and publically asked extremely personal questions about the nature of their genitalia. This voyeurism exploits bodies that are imagined to be grotesque. It “otherizes.”
In some ways, I can see the way that people might think the opposite of an exploitative trans narrative is one that brings about empathy, as was brought up in this post. I disagree. Trans people will continue to exist whether or not cisgender people have empathy for their stories.
One of the common ideas that is brought up regarding women writers is that such narratives are not “universal” enough. Unmarked means white cis-male. In the United States, people of all genders and backgrounds are expected to interact with narratives written by white men about white men as if they are representative of everybody’s stories.
I do not think that narratives should ever be expected to be universal, but especially in a way that transverses the power hierarchy backwards… but beyond this, I think it is not only a weak criticism of a game, but also a highly problematic one, to assume that trans people who craft trans narratives are doing it to provide empathy for white men by perhaps highlighting some universal experience of humanity. It is not a failure of the game that a white cis man does not begin to feel empathy for trans experiences.
Jean’s post from several weeks ago I think has some great discussion that contributes to my points… I particularly like this part:
“The core point of Empathy Game, according to Anthropy, is “the farce of using a game as a substitute for education, as a way to claim allyship” (and, implicitly, that people should stop reading Dys4ia that way). “It seems like the people with the greatest investment in the ’empathy game’ label,” she writes, “are the ones with the most privilege and the least amount of willingness to improve themselves.”
hee-hee!
The LGBTQIA community has grown since the proliferation of the internet. People are more able to access resources and communities that mediate feelings of loneliness and unintelligibility.
The three games that we played for today I think are really wonderful examples of the ways that a trans experience has levels of legibility.
Mainichi focuses intensely on the everyday (quite literally– “mainichi” is the romanization of the Japanese word 毎日 [まいにち], which means “every day”), which is, in some ways, very legible. In the beginning of the game, the avatar does not wake up with a big sign saying “TRANS!!!” above her head– she starts by going through motions of not wanting to wake up– you’re given the choice to grapple with clothes, makeup, hygiene, games, food.These are moments that are fairly typical to domestic life for most who would be playing a game like this. The outside world is different– people who may have not realized this, too, is a trans narrative, will likely realize by now. The struggles are still on a smaller scale, an every day one. We see many small encounters. We can choose to avoid some, we can prepare for them. We think “I should try to be more positive today.” Yet, society remains the same around us, day after day.
Mattie Brice writes, “it stands as a commentary of how we currently use game design for broad strokes of universal experiences instead of the hyper-personal, and often exclude minority voices.” about Mainichi.
In many ways, the legibility of the gameplay makes it easy to brush off. They seem trivial. It is not exhibition of the grotesque, and it isn’t the familiar dramatic moment staged around a medical transition. This may make it seem like a “shallow” experience, as Michael said in his post. But trans people exist when they are not transitioning (many do not ever transition, or transition and de-transition). Trans people exist every day!
Dys4ia plays with the legibility of the transition genre specifically, but filling it full of mini games that are full of dynamic, featuring changing avatars, disembodiment, and a variety of mechanics. The personal experiences are abstracted by creating poignant moments that reference various games and riff off tropes. The narration doesn’t spend time justifying its trans-ness in search of empathy.
Problem Attic is perhaps the least legible at all, both in terms of its gameplay and where it stands as a trans narrative (and one that is placed in opposition to a critically acclaimed white male narrative).
I thought this comment that was on the game page was very amusing:
hee-hee-hee!
I was not raised in an extremely trans-friendly environment, and I was not blessed at birth with a vast toolkit to understand myself and my gender. Trans narratives, especially those that go beyond typical memoir, are a unique opportunity to explore the interplay of feelings that are induced by engagement with a narrative and feelings that perhaps have been with you for a long time but you had no idea what they were. They are an essential part of the trans community and combating the isolation and mental anguish that can often come from growing up without a structure for understanding gender/sexuality, or without others to relate to.
It’d be great for people to have empathy for trans people, but the responsibility for developing this lands squarely on the shoulders of the cis. Always good to think about ways that a narrative might be pushed in different directions, but I think it is extremely problematic to push a narrative to value proving ones existence to a white cis man.
(do want to throw in: I think it’s not the duty of a trans narrative to provide a universally empathetic trans experience, either… I think that, the more people experiment with different ways of expressing their identity and personal experiences, the better it is for the trans community to understand and engage with different needs and barriers etc)
DIGITAL STORYTELLING 
didn’t mean to post as “Mess” initially, I think I had abandoned an effort to summarize what I was going in with mid-word and forgot to change it…. whoops! Edited to add a slightly more descriptive title
yo! this is great, I think empathy and digital identifications are heavily under-discussed in games. the act of role-playing can become extremely fraught, especially when categories like race and gender are in play. I’m about to post about To The Moon and ask some similar questions, so feel free to hit me up there too :)
one of my concerns with the “empathy” discourse around trans games (i.e. “dys4ia conveys the frustration of transition,” or “mainichi shows us just how hard daily life is for ur average tgirl”) is that it actually reinforces the trans/cis binary in this very identity-politicsy way that I think solidifies in the mind of the abstract “player” that they are definitively one or the other. while empathy is ostensibly about being able to “identify as” someone else, I think in practice it might actually intensifies distinctions between experiences. maybe we recognize empathy as something that we necessarily do to Others, and when we do it we set ourselves up as Different but somehow peering over the fence to imagine a foreign experience. yet, we never seem to be particularly successful and crossing the fence and bringing back anything useful.
In the context of trans narratives, this is especially problematic because it relegates the confusion and incoherence of “gender bullshit” to the openly trans community, alienating closeted or potential trans people and rendering invisible the gender bullshit that literally every single person has in their head. this is my issue with the *discourse* around mainichi and dys4ia (not the games themselves), and why I love problem attic—by refusing to mention gender explicitly, it drags everyone into the bullshit, not just trans people, and saves us a bit of that discursive burden. what do u think?
Thanks for the comment! I agree about Problem Attic– one of my favorite things about that game comes from its refusal to ground the game in the mess of how ~gender bullshit~ interacts with the “real world.” Many people still feel alienated by its abstractness, but my perception is that it is in a different way than people might feel alienated by more intelligible games like dys4ia and mainichi. I think your bit about the trans/cis binary and being able to “identify as” has been one of my main experiences of many of the texts we have engaged with this quarter– I was often engaging with texts in a way that felt like it was intensifying distinctions, like you said.
I really liked your To The Moon Post as well, I feel like I’ve been thinking about the Sick Woman Theory constantly….
I’m just going to drop a quote from the Hedva writing on the Sick Woman Theory that you linked: “The most anti-capitalist protest is to care for another and to care for yourself. To take on the historically feminized and therefore invisible practice of nursing, nurturing, caring. To take seriously each other’s vulnerability and fragility and precarity, and to support it, honor it, empower it. To protect each other, to enact and practice community. A radical kinship, an interdependent sociality, a politics of care.”
I’m really interested in experimenting and seeing other people’s experiments wrt care and nurturing but also the rare moments where perhaps people do find themselves “crossing the fence and bringing back anything useful,” as you said so nicely!
( I’ve been slowly working on a personal project that relates to all this, [well now that I think about it it really seems like all my personal projects relate to this ha] … hope maybe you could one day take a look at it! )