This is a bit of a rant, but please try to stick with me through the whole thing
So recently OSRS (Old School Runescape) has joined a list of games that have replaced “Male or Female” with “Body Type A or Body Type B” with you selecting your pronouns secondary.
And it made me furious, but I had to sit down and ask why such a small meaningless thing that I only see during the character creator pisses me off. After all, isn’t this giving a seat at the table for Gender Non-Conforming/Non-Binary individuals?
So I tried thinking about this issue from the perspective of a Non-Binary individual. See I myself am female (Transgender MTF for what it’s worth), so the only thing I’m ever going to pick is the female option unless I’m doing a challenge run where I try to roleplay Guybrush Threepywood (Mighty Pirate!) while playing Fallout 3…
That’s when I realized why I absolutely hate Body Type A/Body Type B
This is not a solution to a problem, this is highlighting the issue.
As a woman, I look at “Body Type A or Body Type B” and think “Well, I’m a woman, not a Body Type B, and isn’t it kinda misogynistic that the secondary option is the female one? Like A+ for Men, B- for Women?”
As someone is very much not cisgender, I look at it and go “Well, isn’t every FTM going to pick Body Type A with male pronouns while MTFs like myself go with Body Type B with female pronouns? Who outside of a Far Right Troll trying and failing to be funny is gonna pick the buff bearded dude and select the she/her pronouns?”
It was only when I went “Let’s pretend I don’t exist in a male/female binary and see how I feel about it.” that I realized why I absolutely DESPISE Body Type A/Body Type B
Because when I look at it from that angle, I realize that if I am a non-binary individual, my options are to look like an overly buff dude but occasionally NPCs will refer to me as a They/Them, or like an overly curvy chick who again sometimes gets called They/Them…
That’s when I realized why Body Type A/Body Type B doesn’t do it for me.
Games that do this aren’t being progressive or inclusive, they’re changing the color of the cup that my drink comes in and pretending it’s an entirely new beverage.
I realized that if the choices in Body Type were something like
A - Buff Dude
B - Slim Dude
C - Fat Dude
D - Skinny Androgynous Individual who doesn’t need a bra/binder
E - Fat Androgynous Individual who doesn’t need a bra/binder
F - Skinny Androgynous Individual who requires bra/binder
G - Fat Androgynous Individual who requires bra/binder
I - Curvy Chick
J - Buff Chick
K - Fat Chick
L - Slim Chick
Maybe have also an option for a big buff masculine dude who has big tits, because that’s just how he rolls, I dunno just thinking aloud here…
My point is that gaming could abandon “A/B” in favor of something more like an actual spectrum of Height, Weight, and Gender Presentation instead of just awkwardly renaming the binary? I wouldn’t get so up in arms about gender replacing body type.
I don’t know what more I have to say on this. I guess it’s just a revelation I had about something in gaming that bothers me…
So, wider gaming community. What do you think? Am I onto something or is this all crazy talk?
What I’m hearing right now is that you think my preference to have a character that looks like me in video games isn’t worth pursuing because of camel toes, and because a troll might conceivably use the same features that help me, to make a character you don’t like. I already told you the nonbinary perspective on this issue. I’d just like to take a moment before I offer counterarguments to ask… what on earth is your intention with offering these arguments?
Now, as to camel toes: I cannot remember ever seeing a visible camel toe on a character in a video game. Maybe this is just because I don’t make a habit of staring at the crotches of women and femmes in games. But if I did notice a camel toe in a video game that was not about sex, my first thought would be “what the fuck game developers” and I would immediately be on the look out for misogyny in other aspects of the game. Maybe I’m completely off base here and I’ve actually been playing characters with camel toes this entire time and not realised it because I’m not a creep. But in that case, revealing this information to me would increase the gender dysphoria I feel in these games. Why do you want to do that?
And as for trolls? I saw someone in this thread respond to you say they like bearded ladies. You might have read that as a joke, but it wasn’t. Popular streamer JoCat is also a fan of bearded ladies, and I know this because he was cancelled by a bunch of TERFs for playing one in Baldur’s Gate while singing a controversial song. He decided to quit making his YouTube videos because of the harassment. JoCat is not a transphobe. He’s used his platform to raise money for LGBTQ charities in the past, and he was previously embedded quite firmly in the queer D&D youtubers community, friends with a lot of queer people who had nothing but positive things to say about him. I think that you’re confusing your trauma around transphobic representations with other genuine queer people who just wanna live as themselves, and you’re circling back around to transphobia as a result.