Vent: Gendered Representation

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Someone shared a Reddit post, quoted below:

Games Made By Cis Women

As the title says.

Looking for games made or designed by cisgender women. Played most of the indie games I could find that are made by women, but surprisingly few seem to be made (or are designed) by cisgender women. Wanting to expand my experiences.

I vomited the thoughts below:

i get where they’re coming from and sorta sympathize, but think they’re sorta misattributing the root cause in a way that comes off as reactionary?

i always call it tumblr/reddit culture as a shorthand/joke, but there are cultural differences between female and male spaces that rub off on even individuals who transition later. e.g., tumblr trans culture is associated with trans men and reddit trans culture with trans women.

it feels weird. attributing it to sex-assigned-at-birth reflects short-sightedness at the least and more likely implicit prejudice, but i’ve asked myself a similar question. not an insignificant number of trans women sort of grandmothered (?) into the space, but most of them have the same output that the cis men do.

so like, where’s the girlies?! where ‘girlies’ are not AFAB individuals in general (obviously) or cis women in particular (obviously)—a doll wouldn’t be into sword-and-sorcery tabletop games, if any, but that wouldn’t be because she has a homegrown vagina. it's entirely cultural/experiential. [NB: doll culture is a trans female subculture]

sorry for the wall, just been on my mind lately since it feels weirder and weirder to have ended up in my position in all this. it feels like i tripped and fell into this thing, only having started out wanting to hang w friends who listened to d&d podcasts. not sure what to do

Kinda same old. Like, I complain about the OSR having a male bent all the time—it's a consistent throughline on my blog (1) (2) (3). It's a major part of why I don't identify with the OSR play-style (4) (5); not just because it's masculine per se, but because it's centered on a specific relationship to desire which is unrelatable to me, not to mention a cultural context that I completely lack (e.g., sword-and-sorcery literature or film). Like, my mom made me watch The Lord of the Rings, and I had a crush on like three of the characters, but that's all I really got out of it.

Don't have anywhere to go with this. I guess that I feel sorta goofy and alienated being here, sometimes. But it's no one's fault that I wanted to run D&D for friends over quarantine, started engaging online, started making homebrew, started a blog, and then got caught up in OSR nonsense because people wanted to recruit me to one side or another of a clique war. None of those decisions were necessarily bad ones, either. It's just now I feel like I put myself in a weird position, having invested my time in weird things.

What I'm trying to do now is hang out with people who have a similar relationship to this hobby as I do, and it's turned out in there being a lot less pressure to perform and a lot more just getting to know each other and doing things to have fun and hang out. We're playing story games! And we're listening to Shania Twain! And we're talking about Eurovision! And communism. Overall, it feels just more like a more comfortable and casual position to be in, and I'm really grateful to my friends for sharing these experiences with me.

It feels good not needing to be OSR. It feels even better being the sort of casual "LARPer" that Gygax denigrated (and which he, like our original poster above, attributed to biology rather than socialization). I still feel like I have the burden of being too aware of what I'm doing, but I'm dealing with it. I can just get into the rhythm of not overthinking it.

Edit: Restating

Let me boil this down. The OP doesn't want a cis woman as opposed to a trans woman—or rather, if she thinks she does, that's an implicit bias she needs to reevaluate. There just aren't as many girls-girls as she, or I, would like. But that's not about gender identity or transition status; it's about cultural context. Forget trans women: not even the cis women here are doing things that most cis women would relate to!

There's something to be said about aggregate interests and that trans people sometimes have cultural birthmarks of their gender-assigned-at-birth, but identifying culture with biology is dangerous and elides the many many "exceptions" of trans people who never related to that culture at all. The relationship is arbitrary!

So: the OP is more likely prejudiced than not, but the underlying complaint is one that I share, not because of genitals but because of culture. I want more things addressed to women rather than sharing the same cultural context as men because it's assumed to be the default or because it's what most people here grew up with in one form or another (female or male, trans or cis).

Comments

  1. Hallelujah Saint HeinousSeptember 14, 2023 at 3:48 PM

    while of course it's bad form to bring up the exiled one, it's still maybe worth noting that the OSR's biggest disgraced luminary, although himself a cis man, ran a very sword-and-sorcery campaign for a very afab playgroup. like maybe we're running with different definitions of the word "doll" here? idk.

    also, obligatory rant about "socialization"-- as a trans woman, I didn't have a "male socialization"-- I had a (closeted) transfeminine one, where I could and would recognize the "masculinity" of the expectations and et cetera I was subjected to and would chafe under them largely for the reason of that perceived inherent masculinity. (ironic enough that I've ended up more or less butch-leaning in my presentation, ig? like... I hated it when my facial hair came in as a teenager because it seemed to mean I'd have to participate in what seemed like the "male ritual" of shaving, but after I came out I realized I love being able to present as a woman with a five-oclock shadow if I want to). and of course, my conception of a "transfem socialization" isn't an experience universal to all transfems either, because no elements of socialization are, because "gendered socialization" is itself a deeply reductive concept, but whatever.

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    Replies
    1. Marcia B.September 14, 2023 at 7:44 PM

      yep that's entirely the point i'm making, that cultural contexts are arbitrary wrt sex (trans or cis) and cannot be reduced to sex (as-current or at-birth). that's why i mention my joke that it's not about whether one is afab or amab, it's about whether they used tumblr or reddit---intentionally reductive as a joke, but meant to illustrate the point that it's about internalizing social norms rather than those norms being intrinsic to some sex category.

      doll culture is a trans female subculture associated w the larger ballroom subculture. the point is comparing trans women with entirely different experiences and internalized norms, to point out that none of it can be taken for granted as inherently trans-female or (god forbid) amab. ZS's play-group is a great example of this, in that cis women (not just afab individuals!) played with him because they shared a certain social context. that is the whole point.

      Delete
    2. Hallelujah Saint HeinousSeptember 14, 2023 at 9:29 PM

      ok hella mood, I definitely misunderstood your original post then lol. the trans people I'm around generally just seem to use "doll" as a word for, like... "feminine tgirl who probably bottoms for cis men and who's probably had ffs," I wasn't aware of an entire "doll subculture"...

      Delete
  2. Eric NieudanSeptember 17, 2023 at 3:56 AM

    "It feels good not needing to be OSR. It feels even better being the sort of casual "LARPer" that Gygax denigrated" <= I might get that on a t-shirt 😆

    But yep, it's definitely a cultural thing. We were exposed to D&D and other RPGs as kids because it was a part of our (middle class white male) nerd culture. Others were discouraged from joining, either by us or by the society at large. It'll take time and a lot of work to correct those decades old imbalances.

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  3. RazugeSeptember 18, 2023 at 4:46 AM

    This blog makes me feel seen. Not because I am a girlie girl (I mean, sometimes I very much am, but not-so-much in the context of D&D), but because your writing makes me feel like you understand that my experience as a non-binary trans femme is unique, composed of cultural elements from growing up aman, a longing to play with the girls but knowing that I wasn't allowed to, and also wanting to "boy-things" but feeing weird that they were considered boy-things.

    ReplyDelete

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