Welcome to #TransTuesday! We’re going to start off 2021 talking about: REPRESENTATION (again), but a different aspect than before. Specifically, today is about CYBERPUNK 2077.
And this is probably not going to go the way that you think.
Note: There will be SPOILERS for some game content and some images are adult-ish, so gird thy loins and prepare thyself.
As a fan of the tabletop game this was based on, and of the genre itself (hi, the first creator-owned comic we wrote was cyberpunk!), I’d been looking forward to this game for YEARS.
To say I was dismayed when reviews came out deriding the game’s handling of trans people is an understatement. I was crushed. I eventually decided to give it a try anyway, and decide for myself. At the very least maybe I could talk about it for #TransTuesday, and here we are.
Quick primer for those who need it: Cyberpunk 2077 is an action role-playing game, where corporations, advertising, and crime have basically taken over civilization. There’s a lot of futuristic technology, and cybernetic implants and body modifications are commonplace.
These are all hallmarks of the cyberpunk genre of science fiction. To understand this version of 2077 however, you have to understand that back in the 1980s, this game began life as the tabletop role-playing game called Cyberpunk 2020.
It envisioned the hell-year we all just lived through… as imagined by people in the 1980s. For example, there were these things called “scream sheets” which were basically fax machines, out on the street, that would spit out the news for people passing by. FAX MACHINES. Ahaha.
So what Cyberpunk 2077 presents to you is a 2077 based on a version of 2020 dreamed up by people in the 80s. Which is maybe a weird choice, but it’s not altogether different from the Fallout games where their world diverged from ours somewhere in the 50s or so.
To begin the game you create your character, who will be known as “V”. You can choose different origins, select your face and look and hairstyle and the statistics that will define how good (or poor) you are at certain tasks when the game begins. This is my V. She says hi.
(that’s literally Keanu Reeves blurry at a table in the background btw, he plays this asshole whose personality gets stuck inside the software in your brain and he kind of heckles you as you play, it’s a trip)
Right from the start, there are two things this game does that I’ve never seen before, and there are good and bad aspects to each of them.
The first is that while creating your character… you can choose whether they have a penis or a vagina (which you will see as they stand there naked before you). You can choose this regardless of an otherwise typically cis male or female body.
Even during the game’s few sex scenes your genitalia is never seen, they’re no more explicit than you’d find in an R-rated movie. Even if you try to walk around naked in the game, it puts underwear on you.
There seems to be no in-game mechanic or reason for it to exist (which is probably for the best!), which means the only conclusion I can come to is that it was added so that people could choose to play a man with a vagina or a woman with a penis.
That is, of course, the actual reality for a lot of trans people before gender confirmation surgery (and for a lot of trans people who never have or don’t want said procedure). It didn’t particularly make me feel more seen, but was a nice gesture. Maybe?
You can also choose which voice you want for your character. There are two options, a cis man and a cis woman. The game here mentions pronouns others will use to refer to you in the game (amazing! First time I’ve seen that in a AAA game) is based on your voice selection.
If you choose the cis man voice, no matter your appearance or chosen genitalia, people in the game will refer to your V as “he”. If you pick the cis woman voice, “she.” And we certainly DON’T want your genitalia to define your pronouns. So why is that a problem?
Because there’s an awful trend of people “clocking” trans people based on our voices, or saying something along the lines of I’m not really a woman because I sound like a (cis) man. And tying pronouns to voice perpetuates this stereotype. I mean I’m in voice therapy for a reason.
I can’t tell you how awful it is every time I have to talk to someone on the phone and they call me “sir” because, to them, I sound like a man. It sucks. And so the way the game has set this up isn’t ideal.
Sure, trans lady, you can play a woman with a penis, but she needs to sound like a cis woman or nobody will gender you correctly. It’s… not great. There should be an easy fix, though? @cdprojektred, if you’re listening… just give us a pronoun toggle button.
None of the dialogue already recorded for the game would have to change. Every bit was already recorded with characters in the game world referring to you as “he” and “she,” and the game just plays the one it’s told to. The mechanic is already there.
Just make it a separate option the player can choose, and use that to decide which dialogue audio to use rather than the selection of voice. I’m no programmer but it seems to me that’d be a very easy (and so much more inclusive) change to make.
So let’s talk about the game proper. One of the things early reviews calling out problematic trans issues focused on, in addition to the voice/pronouns I mentioned above, was the sexual objectification/fetishization of trans women.
It’s actually kind of a big problem for us trans ladies in a lot of ways, but I can’t get into all of that here. It’s maybe another post on its own, but just know it is most definitely A Thing. And I was heartbroken to hear this game would treat us that way.
It all seems to revolve around this one advertisement that appears on vending machines, billboards, televisions, etc. throughout the game.
The ad is for a drink called Chromanticore, which regularly shouts at you to “mix it up!” and has varied flavors I guess it wants you to combine. So you’ve got the image, which is obviously an overtly sexualized and cartoonishly fetishized image of a trans woman…
And putting “manticore” in the name, a mythological beast known for having parts of different animals (generally part human, part lion, part scorpion) blended together, suggests that someone that looks like a woman but has male genitalia is somehow “mixed up” and unnatural.
So it’s not great. But in playing the game, I’ve come to realize that I think it was intentional but in a weird way makes me feel… included? Because you have to take it in the context of the world. It doesn’t just exist in OUR world on its own, where it would still be horrible.
This exists in a world that has devalued EVERY member of society who isn’t rich. Everything and everyone is sexualized and commodified. Sex and violence are commonplace. (this is only a sampling, there are a TON of different ads)
And it’s EVERYWHERE, because people are a resource to be used up and discarded. @bryanedwardhill, in talking about the game, said it best: the city doesn’t care about you. It presents good and bad and you can decide what to do about it, but it. Doesn’t. Care.
That’s the dystopia the game is set in. And frankly knowing that the city cares as little about trans people as everyone else has some weird backward equality to it.
There’s also the fact that if the people who made the game felt the way this one ad does, it would appear in full everywhere to make its point. But it doesn’t. In fact, it just as often has the only identifier that the image is a trans woman blocked or missing.
And roughly 70 hours into gameplay, it is the ONLY instance of its kind I’ve found. That’s it. But we haven’t yet got to the most important part of all of this. In the game there’s a bar called the Afterlife, and it has a bartender named Claire. Everyone say hi!
Claire is a higher tier of NPC (non-player character, basically everyone in the game who is not you) that has their own missions, who will GO with you on missions, become friends and companions, and in some cases, romantic partners.
Claire will serve you drinks and name one after your friend and eventually you find out that she participates in street races when she’s not at the bar. But this is a cyberpunk dystopia, so they don’t just race, they also all try to kill each other.
Claire has a great truck ready to go, but she prefers to be the one firing hot lead at the competition and she needs a driver. Why? We’ll get to that in a minute. When you travel to Claire’s garage, on your way in you pass her truck. Do you see it?
That’s a trans pride flag! On her truck! In a huge AAA video game. You poke around a little (sorry to everyone in Night City, but if I’m in your house I’m going to your computer and reading your emails) and find messages from her husband about some unspecified surgery.
So you do some races, and you learn Claire’s a total badass. Just as much, if not moreso, than any other NPC in the game.
During a quiet moment, she finally opens up to you. She talks about her grief over losing her husband, who was her previous driver. At one point she talks about something from her past that happened “before her gender transition,” confirming why the flag is on her truck.
And you learn her husband died in a race. And she blames another driver for intentionally killing him when it wasn’t necessary for them to win the race. And she asks you to help her get revenge… throw the championship if you need to, she wants this other driver dead.
Just before the final race, they have a confrontation. There’s yelling and fighting and the guy’s an asshole, and a pit formed in my stomach. Here it comes, he’s going to fucking misgender her and I’m going to feel like shit.
But it never happened. The horrible dickhole of a character created for this game, antagonist of a confirmed and out trans woman, still did not misgender her. Not even once.
So we race and I do as she asked and got the other driver off the course and we confronted him, but I tried to talk her out of killing him. I can see at least three different outcomes of this quest line, maybe four. I don’t know what all of them are.
But mine? She was so grateful for my help that she gave me her truck. So now it’s mine.
So let me paint a full picture for you: in one of the biggest AAA games of the year made by a major studio, there is a trans woman who’s not objectified, not fetishized, doesn’t get killed and isn’t the victim of violence.
She doesn’t have a story about coming out as trans, she doesn’t have a story about BEING trans (so there’s no appropriation), she doesn’t even get misgendered by the guy who hates her most.
It could have been the flag and nothing more, and it’d be a hollow gesture. She could have just been a mission-giver you never got to know, and would have been more of a token character, a superficial pandering nod. But she’s not. She’s so much more.
She’s nuanced and wonderful and fully realized. AND SHE’S VOICED BY A TRANS WOMAN (yo @MaddieTaylor418 you killed it, you’re so good!). I only wish I could romance her in the game, but no, Claire’s still grieving, she’s not ready for it, and I respect that. 😌
And now I get to drive around the game, forever, in a kickass truck with a trans pride flag on it. And every player who drives her truck sees it (there’s even one inside the cab, so if you drive in first-person perspective you still see it).
This isn’t a fan-made mod someone uploaded to increase the representation in a game. This is the game itself, and I’ve never seen anything like it before. And who knows when I will again. This should happen a lot, right?
People should get to see themselves in all our media, and know it’s for them too. And if you want to know the damage that BAD REPRESENTATION can do, see the trans tuesday on that very topic.
The aforementioned sexualized ad may still bother you too much to play the game, and that’s understandable and fine. Everyone has to decide for themselves. I’m not trying to convince you to play it.
But for me, Claire and her entire storyline means SO. MUCH. I want to personally thank everyone involved in it. It healed me. This the game saying to me… you can exist in this world, as yourself. We see you, and you belong. And to me that’s fucking PRICELESS.
Tilly Bridges, end transmission.
tillysbridges@gmail.com