Vernis & Sécateur

Version française ici.

(Yeah, since the subject really is of the uttermost importance, I really needed to translate this post and not other ones.)

Birdo

Birdo, is a Super Mario Bros 2 character that also appeared in some other titles of the franchise, such as mario super smash football and that sort of games.

Honnestly, I played Mario 2 at the time, and it wasn't really obvious that the character was a tranny. Yet, in the english booklet there was some note on the character: "He thinks he's a girl and he spits eggs from his mouth. He'd rather be called Birdetta".

I have some difficulties understanding if it was really wanted or not. It would seem that in the following games Birdo was then called "she" but that they want back to "him" in the latest football game featuring Mario.

Personnally, I'm quite sceptical at all this. Ok, you could say it's pretty cool to see a trans character in a video game, especially in 1988. On the other hand, it still is just some strange pink egg-spitter beast. And the booklet's sentence... "He think he's a girl" is typically the sort of sentence that makes me want to hurt its author with some huge pink egg.

Poison

Now if you think the tranny pink egg-spiter monster is weird, wait for the continuation.

The other trans character (at least, the only trans character that I heard) of the 80s is called Poison. She appeared in the first Final Fight and also made some apparitions (without being a playable character) in some Street Fighters.

If I understood her history correctly, but from what I read things aren't really clear either, Poison wan't supposed to be trans at the beginning, but just a "normal" woman, that is, normal according to fighting video games: really sexy, with more "agility" than "strenght" and, most important, clothes reduced to the minimum: it looks like pixels were expensive at this time (and now, it stills look like, when it comes to female clothes, polygons stay expensive).

However, there was a problem: after being distributed on arcade stations, the game was also supposed to be released on a Nintendo console. At that time, Nintendo's policy was really strict: games were forbidden to contain violence against women (princess sequestration were obviously OK, though).

So, an argument (which actually didn't work) from the game editors was that the character was not a woman, but a non-operated trans.

As on Birdo, I'm a bit sceptical on all this, since I am not even sure the character was really trans. The positive value of a trans character in those condition isn't obvious either. But, on the manner, I think it still was showing some creative bad faith which should be noted :)

Faris

Faris is one of the main characters of Final Fantasy V. and is the captain of a pirate crew.

At the beginning of the game, the other characters think Faris is a man, and Faris indeed lives as a man. It is then revealed that she was dressing as a man to be accepted from the pirates.

After being outed Faris is considered as a woman and she doesn't seem to define herself as a man. Still, it's some interesting example of character since even after that she still stays as she is: she doesn't start wearing female clothes (I think there is a scene in the game where she has to put an evening dress but she doesn't like it and doesn't keep it) and keeps her rude manners. I don't know if she counts as a transgender character but i still remember it as a really cool female character portrayal.

Bridget

Bridget is a Guilty Gear X character.

It's a bit the opposite situation of Faris: he's a boy who has to dress as a girl because he has a twin brother and in his village, two twin brothers are bad luck.

While I think it is some improbable story, it's also a playable character in a fighting video game who happens to be transvestite, and I think it's pretty nice.

Conclusion

I don't have the pretention to cover all trans characters. I know there are some other cases: in Chrono Trigger, Flea is a boss who seems to be a transgender ; in Final Fantasy VII the main character, Cloud, must crossdress in order to get in a place, and so on. There are also some examples of characters, specially non-human ones, whose gender isn't really defined.

The global impression I get, however, is that while some games features some more or less (for some, you really have to look at it on the right angle) trans characters, it mostly is for the "exotic" aspect. I also feel that their portrayal sometimes feature some rather transphobic stereotypes ("he think he is a girl", "is that a man or a woman ?"). On the other hand, when I started to look at this (limiting my search to wikipedia) I tought there would be actually less cases, and there is some positive or at least neutral portrayal, so I guess that's not so bad, specially given the sexist aspect of most videogames.

Post-scriptum (added december 14, 2007): Since I blogged this, pictures of Poison and Bridget from this post have been highly referenced in google images and I got lots of refferers from blog posts, etc. which use the image.

And, well...I think it is a bit representative of general transphobia. Takes this one for example, which apparently says that Poison's transgenderism have definitely been confirmed. The commentary is "it's a trap" and "Have fun fapping to "her" in the future.". Because, yeah, guys, being attracted to a cute trans-girl will render you sick, rotten and will destroy your virility; because yeah, trannies are deceiving you.

Too bad I don't have real control on the server where this blog is hosted, I would have loved to display different images for transphobic pages :)

That being said, I found the information interesting: "In North America, Poison is officially a post-op transsexual. But in Japan, she simply tucks her business away in order to look like a girl". So, we already had Schrodinger's cat which was be both alive and dead at same time; now we have Poison who is both "pre-op" and "post-op" at the same time :)