I’m coming out again as a transgender person because we still have such a long way to go.

Many teenagers and younger people struggle with feelings of gender dysphoria but have been taught that such feelings are shameful and wrong. Carrying such difficult feelings privately with a sense of shame is emotionally and psychologically excruciating. Here in the U.S., things are getting better. There are more support systems in place now than ever before for those struggling with these feelings. But there are still too many who don’t have such support systems in their families or schools.

Too many transgender adults live in fear of employment discrimination or violence, and deny their true selves as a result. This is no way to go through life.

For too many, the costs associated with transition are prohibitive. For others, they simply take many, many years to save up for—years that you don’t get back once you finally have the “luxury” of living as your true gender. Yes, more companies are covering or helping to cover the costs of employee transitions, but so many still offer no such assistance. Feeling the need to live life as your true gender but being unable to do so is very painful. And transition doesn’t just benefit the individual. When the pain of gender dysphoria is gone, she (or he) is likely to be happier, more comfortable, and more productive. With less emotional and mental energy eaten up by the day-to-day struggle of gender dysphoria, there’s so much more to devote to other people and things. 

If you’re ever in a position to make a young person who is struggling with the pain of gender dysphoria feel some hope for his or her future, please do so. If you’re ever in a position to make the place where you work more inclusive toward transgender people, or to support financial assistance for transgender employees, please do so. We have a long way to go, but we are making progress, and every step on this journey counts.

Thank you.

I don’t want to brag or anything, but I’m in Captain America.

It’s true! Skip to about 6:11 in the clip below and you will see me set some dishes on a table.

Yep, that’s me. Or, I suppose you could say, that’s the boy I was. Though in the truest possible sense, I wasn’t ever really him.

I remember the way I felt that day, filming at that house down in Redondo Beach. It was much the same as I’d felt nearly every day for a few years prior, and nearly every day for years and years to follow.

Words always fail me when I try to articulate what that feeling is. People sometimes argue that transgender people are living a lie, pretending to be something they’re not. There’s no way I can make them understand this, since I can’t open up my soul and let them step inside and experience what I’ve experienced for years and years, but they have it backwards. It was being a boy that was the lie. Every day, it weighed on me, this feeling like I had to pretend to be someone I wasn’t. The emotional pain was so acute that it was often almost physical, like a little knife twisting in my heart. This has made me withdrawn for much of my life—It’s hard to feel the normal joys and sorrows of everyday life when a source of pain is always so immediate. And of course, others were hurt as well, as I tried and failed to behave in ways that were expected of me, and as I pressured myself to act the part in the misguided belief that maybe I was just crazy and maybe someday it would all go away.

Things are better now. I’ve accepted who I am and I don’t hide it from others. But I still have a long way to go. And it still hurts. Some days are harder than others. Gender dysphoria is real, and it is painful. That’s why the American Medical Association recommends that treatment be provided for it.

Occasionally, someone will post a comment about me that’s along the lines of, “If you identify as a female, why do you still look like a dude? Why not finish with your transition before publicly presenting yourself as Carolyn?”

That’s a fair question. If you had told me even a few years ago that I would one day be in this position, being publicly out as a transgender person at this awkward stage of my transition, I would have said you were crazy. Nothing sounded more terrifying to me than the prospect of being out before having fully transitioned. In fact, my plan (or at least my fantasy) was always to go “stealth,” as it’s sometimes called in the T community. To transition and then maybe start a new job in a new place where most people didn’t know about my past and accepted me at face value as the person I am.

But when push came to shove, denying my true identity was more painful than acknowledging it was scary, and so here I am.

The reason why I remain at this awkward stage, and will for at least a little while yet (much to my dismay) is money. Not every person who makes the MTF transition needs facial feminization surgery, but I’ve been cursed with a particularly masculine facial structure, and so I consider facial feminization surgery absolutely necessary. (Other surgeries are necessary, too, but FFS will have the biggest impact on how I’m perceived in my day-to-day life, and as such, it’s easily the top priority for me.) You may not think that FFS can really have a dramatic impact on a transgender person’s life, but indeed, for many transgender women, it makes absolutely all the difference in the world. Most who undergo FFS don’t make the results public, for understandable reasons. They want to be seen by the world as the women they really are and now appear to be, and often, images of the time before are painful reminders of a time they’d rather forget. But some do opt to demonstrate just how dramatic the results can be. For instance, in the video below, FFS is an essential part of Meghan’s transformation.

It’s also extremely expensive. I had one consultation with a surgeon here in San Francisco, one of the most well-respected FFS surgeons in the world, but at close to $40,000, surgery with him was prohibitively costly for me. I am now looking into having the surgery done in Thailand. Going to Thailand for a surgical procedure may sound foolhardy and dangerous, but this particular surgeon has an excellent reputation. He is more affordable, but far from cheap, and while I might be able to afford having FFS with him within the next year or two (I hope), it will cost every penny I’ve spent years saving.

I’m on the brink of turning 35, which is much older than I’d hoped to be to still be dealing with these issues, but these vital services remain far more costly than they should be. More U.S. companies are covering or assisting with the costs of surgery for their transgender employees, and that is a wonderful trend, but it has a long way to go. If you’re ever in a position where you have the power to speak up and nudge this trend in the right direction, I urge you to do so.

There’s a great line in the film The Edge. Charles Morse, the millionaire played by Anthony Hopkins, says, “Never feel sorry for a man who owns a plane.” In my head, that often gets changed to “Never feel sorry for a woman who reviews video games for a living.” In fact, my life is full of blessings and good fortune. I am one of the lucky ones, and I never forget it. But that fortune in so much of my life doesn’t eliminate the pain that results from looking in the mirror and seeing someone who I know isn’t me looking back. Sometimes, I just need to talk about it. Thanks for reading. And if you have any ideas for how I might be able to do some fundraising and tackle the financially daunting next step of my journey a little sooner, well, I’m all ears.  

I think this brilliantly sums up a particularly knotty and important aspect of the awkward, adolescent crossroads we are at culturally with regard to how we view games.

gamejournos:

fyeahprivilegedenyingdude:

[Picture: Background: 8 piece pie style color split with red and teal alternating. Foreground: White, cisgender guy with glasses and light shadow wearing a sweat shirt over a button down and short black hair. Has a smug, arrogant facial expression and crossed arms. Top text: “Video games are an art form and should be taken seriously.” Bottom text: “Sexism? Sheesh, it’s only a game; why do you have to get so worked up over it?”]

Oh look, it’s a privilege-denying game journalist.

In this video review for nail’d, a new extreme off-road racer, I take just an instant to mention that, while male racers are sensibly outfitted in protective gear, if you choose a female racer, your only clothing options are extremely revealing ones. (This bit of the review is at 3:45.)

Obviously, the primary purpose of reviews on GameSpot is to help people make decisions about which games to spend money on and time with, not to be culture police. Sexism, and particularly the presentation of men as human beings alongside women who are presented as sex objects, is so common in games that it’s more surprising when a game bucks the trend than when it reflects it, and it’s not something I would point out in each and every case. I mentioned it here because I felt that it was blatant enough that it would have a negative impact on the experiences some potential players (most of them women) would have with this game. (It’s pretty hard to ignore the objectification going on when you’re on the rider customization screen and there’s such a stark difference in how the men and women are presented.) And while I would love it if everyone thought critically about the way women are portrayed in games, I know that’s not how it is, and I figured that those who don’t mind (or perhaps enjoy) a little objectification of women in their extreme off-road racing games could just disregard that one brief bit of criticism as irrelevant to their interests. 

Instead, this seems to be by far the aspect of the review that Youtube commenters are discussing most (with the possible exceptions of those perennial favorites: my voice and my gender identity). While most come down pretty strongly on the side that says things like “the female outfits are revealing and not realistic?… MOTHERFUCKER you got boost, the game isn’t meant to be realistic” (which completely misses my point), I’m pleased to see that at least there are two sides to this discussion, with some voicing the (in my opinion much more reasonable) viewpoint seen in comments like “The developers are making a game clearly for guys and alienating girls. That’s why its a problem.”

However, the objectification of women in games matters not just (or even primarily) because of how it may turn off potential female players. It matters because all of us, and younger people in particular, absorb notions of what labels like “male” and “female” mean from anything and everything, and most of us are never properly taught to question these messages.

Below is a video by Feminist Frequency that’s only tangentially related to this topic—it’s more about how incredibly male-dominated games are than about how they often objectify women—but I think that, as indicated by the games shown at the 0:47 and 1:00 marks, the issue of objectification and hypersexualization of women in games is “easy to fix.”

In my opinion, there needs to be an ongoing conversation about the portrayal of women and men in games, and people need to be encouraged to think critically about the messages games send about what it means to be a man or a woman.

“faggot”

That solitary word makes up one of the comments on Youtube for one of my video reviews. It also appears in plenty of other comments, in delightful turns of phrase such as “this guy sounds like fuckin faggot.” Never mind that the video clearly states my name as Carolyn within the first few seconds. Yes, I am a transgender woman, and okay, I certainly still have some room to improve where my voice is concerned, but really, calling me a “faggot,” which is never an acceptable word to use under any circumstances, is just wrong on so many levels. Youtube comments: You will never find a more wretched hive of idiocy and cruelty.

Once upon a time, such language would have wounded me. In fact, even very recently I couldn’t have imagined putting myself in a position where I can be so easily targeted for such comments. But now, I am too secure in my knowledge of myself and in the casual acceptance of those who matter to me most to be shaken by those who voice their own ignorance and misunderstanding. Now, it doesn’t hurt at all. It just makes me a bit sad. I am sad for those who feel this kind of hate—I believe it needs to be taught, that it’s something that’s absorbed from society (I certainly knew very early on to hide who I was, that certain expressions of self that felt natural were to be repressed and to be ashamed of). And though this commenter is still presumably quite young, escaping from the gravitational pull of such pitiable ignorance is something that only occurs in rare circumstances. There’s a very good chance that he has a life of closed-minded hatred to look forward to. It saddens me to know that he is not a rare example of prejudices we are rapidly leaving in our past, but instead is giving voice to a fear, an ignorance, a hatred that is still deeply woven through so much of our society.

But more than that, I feel sorry for those young people who encounter such ignorance, be it on the internet or in their schools, at the mall or at church, and who may internalize it, feeling that there’s something deeply wrong with them. Young people who learn from the verbal and physical lashings of their peers, or perhaps the disapproving glances or stern words of their parents, that some aspect of themselves is wrong. They will learn that it is to be denied and hidden away, curled up and caged in some remote corner of their souls, its starved cries echoing under the surface of every aspect of their lives. Yes, it gets better, and some day, if they are lucky, they will learn to set free and to embrace this part of who they are. But the scars these experiences leave may never fully heal.

For my part, I am thankful, not for the cruelty directed at me, exactly, but to be in a role where some people are brought into contact with the reality of someone like me, and though it may make some of them uncomfortable, well, the spreading of understanding and acceptance has always been a long, awkward process. And while I am unaffected by the criticisms leveled at me (except for one comment I read, “why is this reviewer sound like the dead michael jackson,” which made me laugh heartily), I am moved by the kind messages I’ve received. One was from a transgender teen in a small town, who says it’s “extremely encouraging” to see me in this public role. Another was from a young man who had just finished celebrating Transgender Awareness Week at his school, and thanked me for “representing.” It’s not something I ever set out to do or saw myself doing, nor is it something I’m consciously doing even now. I’m just being myself as I do my job, which is greatly preferable to being someone else as I do it.

There have been many more very kind, supportive comments. I’ve been touched by each and every one of them, and I am truly thankful for them.

And I am hopeful. I believe we are moving in the right direction, and that LGBT people of future generations will have an easier path. There is a strength found in freedom, in love and acceptance and honesty, that the lashings out of ignorance and hatred cannot shake.

After 28 years, Tron is finally getting a sequel.

I don’t think Tron is a great film, but it’s an important film that’s worthy of admiration for its visual and storytelling ambition. It had a profound impact on me as a child, and, I think it’s safe to say, on many members of my generation. Misunderstood at the time, it’s a surprisingly complex film for one marketed and released by Disney as a family adventure. It left parents, who weren’t prepared for a science fiction film with political and religious undertones that actually takes place inside of a computer, scratching their heads, while the children who were dragged to the film (like me) were deeply affected by it, but in ways that we wouldn’t fully understand or be able to articulate for years to come. Now, the things Tron deals with—video games, computer programmers, software companies, cyberspace—are all a much bigger part of our collective social consciousness than they were in 1982. In that sense, Tron is almost a bit prophetic, or, at least, ahead of its time.

Before seeing Tron at the age of five, I was already an avid player of video games, and while the experience of playing games has changed so dramatically in so many ways since then, in my mind one difference is more significant than all the others. In the early 80s, you had to engage your imagination while playing games. If you were going to become invested in the Atari 2600 game Adventure, you had to meet the game 98% of the way, agreeing to accept that the little dot you moved around was a brave hero and that the duck-like creatures who attacked you were fierce dragons. You created the world of the game in your mind. Today, for the most part, games are so richly detailed that you don’t have to put your imagination to work at all. It’s not unlike the difference between reading a book and seeing a film. When you read a book, you collaborate with the author in creating the movie of the book that plays in your mind. The author’s words form a basis, but you cast the parts, you do the set design, you direct the film, and the film that plays in your head is different from the film that plays in the head of any other reader of that book. With a film, we all see the same thing. With games today, all players see the same world, but in 1980, one player’s imagination may have been engaged by Adventure in very different ways from the next player’s.

The point of all this is that, when I stepped into that movie theater in 1982, I had already spent a great deal of time imagining that the actions happening on the screen when I played video games were, in some sense, real, that stuff was happening inside my Atari (or, if not there, then in some unknowable place). So when Tron showed me computer programmer and video game hotshot Kevin Flynn (Jeff Bridges) playing an arcade game and then cut to the action “really” happening inside the machine, I was ready for it. I was thrilled by it. And although I came out of the film with only the haziest understanding of its plot, its visual style shaped how, for many years, I envisioned what was actually happening inside of computers, to the point where even when I read William Gibson’s landmark sci-fi novel Neuromancer as a teenager, Tron’s depiction of a realm of computerized information influenced how I imagined the cyberspace of his book.

The years since have tried to provide us with other cinematic cyberspace messiahs. The Matrix trilogy’s Neo, in particular, is a cinematic Christ figure for the cyberspace age. But in my own heart, nobody has ever been able to compete with Kevin Flynn. Terrific at video games. A brilliant and somewhat arrogant programmer with a rock star charisma. He’s like Bill Gates, if Bill Gates were cool. (Neo, on the other hand, doesn’t even have the charisma of Bill Gates.) And it’s no stretch to call him a messiah figure. Tron is replete with religious undertones and imagery. The relationship between users (people) and their programs is a spiritual one for the programs—when one program mentions his user, he’s called a religious nut, and Flynn, a user called down from on high, walks among the programs, for a short time, anyway.

Now that those my age, the first generation to grow up with video games as a normal part of life and who saw Tron as young people, are adults, the time has come for a sequel. (How fortunate that the actor to play Flynn wasn’t some actor who would soon be forgotten, but was Jeff Bridges, one of the very best film actors of the past 30 years.) Of course, the sequel could be terrible, but I have to admit that, when I see that they’ve taken the concept of Kevin Flynn as a messiah figure seemingly as far as it can go—in one trailer, a character calls him “the creator”—I get very excited. I hope that Legacy is the sequel Tron deserves; not just a sci-fi action spectacle, but a serious piece of cinematic mythmaking, one that may influence the next generation as much as the original influenced mine, or, at the very least, provide for me and my fellow Tron fans a rich and satisfying continuation of the story that has resonated in our minds for so long.

In the trailers, I especially love the shot of Sam, Kevin Flynn’s son, returning to Flynn’s arcade, a location bustling with life in the original film, and seeing the machines shut down, their screens covered in dust.

The era of arcades, sadly, is over.

But the era of games has only just begun.

I’ll see you on the game grid.

My video for the It Gets Better project. It really does get better. But for suffering LGBT teens, our society needs to start taking steps to make it better now. No young person should need to endure bullying, or the pain that comes from denying who you are to yourself and everyone around you.

Note: This was written for my GameSpot blog. But it represents a significant moment in both my personal and professional lives, so I am posting it here as well.

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As some of you may know, I’ve been privileged with the opportunity to freelance for GameSpot for the past few years. As a publication that I’ve read and respected for more than a decade, this has been a great honor for me.

You wouldn’t know it by looking at my latest review, which was for Sengoku Basara: Samurai Heroes, but this was a special review for me to write. That’s because it’s the first review I’ve written as the newest member of GameSpot’s in-house reviews team. I can’t tell you what a thrill it is for me to be here, working with Justin Calvert, Kevin VanOrd, Tom Mc Shea and Chris Watters in the offices of this site that has meant so much to me for so long.

This may seem a strange shift in topics, but it’s something that must be addressed, at least once. Those of you who have been reading my blog for many years will know this already, but it’s not something I’ve talked about often, and it’s not something I intend to talk about very often in the future. I’m not here at GameSpot to change the world or to make any kind of political statement. I’m here because I love games, I love GameSpot, and there’s nothing I’d rather be doing than busting my ass for this site. But soon I’ll start appearing in video reviews and making other appearances here and there, and this will no doubt raise some questions that need to be answered. So here goes.

I’m transgender, or as I usually prefer to say, TG. What this means is that, although I was born with a Y chromosome, in my mind, heart and soul I’ve always identified as female. The process called “transition” is, at least for me, a long, slow, expensive one, but in the meantime I’m not going to pretend to be something I’m not. Being true to oneself is essential for one’s happiness. Take it from me, I know. So if this should make anyone uncomfortable, I say: I’m sorry it makes you uncomfortable. I’m not doing it to make you uncomfortable. I’m doing it because living a lie sucks, and because I’m so much happier just being honest about who I am, and not hiding it or apologizing for it or being ashamed of it. Also, with the tragic wave of bullying and suicides of LGBT teens, I don’t think this is any time for any member of the community to hide in the shadows, and I add my voice to the chorus of voices that are saying to young LGBT people in pain, “It gets better.”

Here is a goofy video I made two weeks ago, my first in years, for National Coming Out Day. If you want, you can watch this to get a glimpse of the face you’ll soon be seeing in videos on the site, and perhaps a better sense of what I mean when I say I’m TG.

So that’s it. Again, it’s not something I intend to discuss often. If you have respectful questions, feel free to ask. (I won’t tolerate or respond to hate.) I am TG but being TG is not who I am, and it’s not what I want to be known for. It’s a fact of my life but it doesn’t define me, and it’s not nearly as interesting as video games, or as working for GameSpot, which truly is a dream come true for me.

In conclusion, let me just say: Super Meat Boy is amazing. I grew up with the Atari 2600, and later, the NES, which, along with the arcades of that era, provided many games that were just pure, simple, challenging tests of skill. Super Meat Boy is like that, and it’s one of the very best of its kind, ever. Using only the simplest and most familiar elements of video games—you run and jump your way through 2D levels—it creates something that constantly finds new and surprising ways to challenge you, and the gameplay is just about perfect.

Yeah. Video games are awesome.

I don’t address this topic very often because it’s not what I want to be known for. I like to be taken at face value as the person I am, and I think this issue often just overshadows that. But I also think, particularly with the tragic wave of suicides and violence that’s happened here in the U.S. of late, that this is no time for any of us to be silent.

WARNING: This post discusses the endings of the film Inception and the game Limbo.

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The only detail in Christopher Nolan’s Inception that struck me as truly dreamlike was not an intentional one on the part of the director. Actress Marion Cotillard famously played Edith Piaf in the film La Vie En Rose, and here, the Piaf song “Non, je ne regrette rien” is featured. This struck me as the sort of association our subconscious might make while we sleep, and suggested to me that cinema might be akin to a shared societal dreamscape. On the whole, though, while I found Inception to be a fascinating mechanical puzzle, I also found it cold, lacking in both genuine human emotion and in a willingness to embrace the full potential of the concept of dreams, presenting dreams that seem much more like levels from a richly detailed but sterile video game than from anything I ever encounter while sleeping.

In another bit of purely unintentional cultural intersection, the term “Limbo” is very important in Inception, referring to a state of pure subconscious, and it is also the title of an exceptional new game which creates an experience that’s infinitely more dreamlike than anything in Inception.

One thing Inception gets right about dreams is the idea that we just find ourselves in them, never really knowing or stopping to think about how we got there. In Limbo, you find yourself in a forest; spooky, hazy, geographically only somewhat defined, a far cry from the elegant precision of Inception’s dreamstates. As you press on, the landscape slowly shifts and you encounter new areas and obstacles, all with a simple, dreamlike iconography to them—boats to cross little pools of water, shadowy, malevolent figures, terrifying spiders. The simple but beautiful visuals and the sound, creating moods with menacing tones but rarely if ever forming into what most of us might call music, create a kind of reverie. Each time the boy dies, it shocks me awake, Inception-like, but immediately I’m transported back to the dreamworld of the game.

Never in my journey through Limbo did I find anything as symbolically straightforward as an elevator down into the deeper levels of the mind, or some documents locked in a safe. And I found its ending—which I thought was perfect—shared a surprising parallel with that of Inception, leaving the same questions open at the moment of being reunited with loved ones: Is this moment real, or still a dream? And does it matter?