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AlteredTundra
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Simple UnicycleLet's! After all, trans people deserve to be treated like everyone else. Plus, I'm talking about the valid criticism of a highly anticipated game coming out this week. I think it fits fine with the thread. I highly suggest that everyone read these articles that talk about the problem that the game has with trans representation:
CD Projekt Red catered to its edgiest fans with Cyberpunk 2077's marketing
Cyberpunk 2077 is dad rock, not new wave
I also suggest that everyone read this thread: CDPR is a transphobic company. It's time we stop making excuses for them, which includes this post that highlights more articles that talk about other valid criticism of the game.
CD Projekt Red catered to its edgiest fans with Cyberpunk 2077's marketing
CDPR’s marketing arm already had a history of transphobic incidents before the poster got revealed. In September 2018, Cyberpunk’s official Twitter account, back in its edgiest, earliest stage of public existence, tweeted a tired “Did you just assume my gender?” joke in response to an innocuous compliment. A month later, the Twitter account for the digital storefront GOG (owned by CD Projekt, parent company of CD Projekt Red) hijacked a trans-positive hashtag to make a joke about PC games. Earlier in 2018, that account had tweeted a gravestone marked “Games Journalism, Dead By Suicide,” with the date of death corresponding with the launch of GamerGate. After criticism, the account deleted that post and apologized.
Because of all of that, Mix It Up has arguably become the single most divisive, most controversial moment in the entirety of Cyberpunk 2077’s marketing, yet it’s the one they’ve decided to build around. Since then, the game’s official Twitter account has joked about canceling their FIFA 78 pre-order due to the lack of vagina options, a joke which pokes fun at their own potentially progressive non-gendered character creator, again tying any positive representation of trans people to mockery, exploitation, and humiliation. CDPR also included a cisgender cosplayer as the Mix It Up girl among their cosplay contest finalists. Even if you buy the company line that the poster represents how queer bodies have been appropriated for marketing, their entire argument is negated when they have a cis person dress up in that queer body as part of their own video game marketing.
If you’re thinking perhaps the model was well-meaning, attempting to create a trans-positive cosplay, trying to further highlight queer commodification CDPR spoke of originally, or just a misguided ally who got it wrong this time around, I have bad (yet predictable) news for you. Yugoro Forge, the cosplayer in question, tweeted that her costumes are “beyond politics,” and when pushed on the fact her Cyberpunk 2077 costume dehumanized trans people who are already subject to violence so frequently, she replied, “many cis men and women face acts of harassment and violence on a daily basis as well.”
Defenders of Cyberpunk 2077 may point to its character creator— one of the most heavily showcased features in pre-release — which doesn’t tie gender to genitalia. It’s true that this means the game provides the opportunity to create a transgender protagonist. However, gender in the game is still tied to voice, meaning if you want to be referred to as a woman, you need to select the voice actor with a typically feminine voice. For me — and in my experience, many other trans people — voice is far more important than genitalia. No one sees what’s in my pants, but everyone hears my voice. To truly create a character who is trans like me, I would want a more typically “male” voice in a more typically “female” body. The junk, especially in a first-person game, isn’t that important to me. The fact that Cyberpunk has fixated on the junk as the ultimate feature of a trans person, yet given no consideration for voice, and then repeatedly joked about customizable genitals in its marketing efforts, shows the complete lack of a trans perspective in both the design and in the advertising of the game. It’s also worth noting, that for a character creator which prides itself of inclusivity and depth of customization, there’s been nothing said of a non-binary option.
Cyberpunk 2077 is dad rock, not new wave
Thankfully, your character’s gender is not tied to your choice of genitals. You can create a dude with a vagina or a lady with a penis, that’s no problem. But because of everything else about how the game handles trans identity, this hardly feels like the progressive step it should be. Rather than just letting you pick your pronouns independently of all your other character creation choices, your pronouns are assigned based on your selection of voice: Pick the “feminine” voice and your pronouns are she/her, and vice versa. (There are no nonbinary pronoun options.) As a trans woman with a voice that many would not describe as “feminine,” this direct linking of gender identity to having a voice that sounds “masculine” or “feminine” feels weirdly essentializing.
I could have forgiven it if the rest of the game took strides to humanize trans identities, but boy, it sure doesn’t. Ubiquitous throughout Night City are ads for a beverage called Chromanticure that feature a female-coded model with a penis visible through her skintight clothing, making it clear that in Cyberpunk 2077, trans bodies are objectified and commodified. Some cis bodies are, too, of course, but the crucial difference is that, as V, we constantly meet, interact with, and form relationships with cis characters who have far more dimension than the surface of any sexualized image on a billboard. The same can’t be said of trans characters. Even if you opt to play as a trans V, she’s not particularly well-defined. The game is about what you see through her eyes and what she goes through, not about who she is as a person.
In my 40-plus hours in Night City, I never met a single character of any significance whom the game made clear was trans, and one of the only queer-coded characters I encountered was an extremely unsavory cybernetic surgeon who does extremely unsavory things. I did spot a trans flag on one character’s vehicle, though that hardly counts as positive trans representation and doesn’t even necessarily mean the character is trans. It felt more like a way for Cyberpunk 2077’s creators to say they had included positive trans representation without actually putting thought into it or making trans people a visible part of the makeup of Night City.
I get that Cyberpunk’s dark future is intended not as a goal, but as something for humanity to avoid. As Mike Pondsmith, creator of the Cyberpunk tabletop game, has put it, “The Cyberpunk future is a warning; not an aspiration.” There’s real potential for a grim world like the one Cyberpunk 2077 offers to serve as a lens through which our own world is critiqued, but the developers at CD Projekt Red failed to do anything with the trans options and identities they incorporated into the game to make them function in this way, and as V, you never have the option to say or do anything about it. The objectification of trans people is just background texture, nothing more.
For elements like the inescapable dehumanization of trans people on imagery throughout the city to function as any kind of critique of transphobia, the game itself would need to create tension around those images by showing us humanized trans people navigating that world. But it doesn’t. The result is a game in which transphobic players (of which there will be many) can just laugh at us by using the character creator to generate models they consider worthy of mockery and derision and by gagging at the Chromanticure ads they see everywhere, or perhaps by fetishizing the model while continuing to see trans people as objects of desire but not as full human beings. Meanwhile, we trans players are left wanting in its world for depictions that humanize us.
Here in 2020, people boldly and bravely hack gender all the time. And yes, I know that Cyberpunk 2077 takes place on a separate timeline in which the year 2020 looked very different than it does for us, but it’s still a world in which people push their bodies to the extreme of technological modification, sometimes swapping out eyes or limbs like they’re changing clothes. You’d think transgressing gender norms would be pretty commonplace, too, and that as a result, a fundamentally different understanding of gender and of trans identity would have taken root in the world.
I also suggest that everyone read this thread: CDPR is a transphobic company. It's time we stop making excuses for them, which includes this post that highlights more articles that talk about other valid criticism of the game.
