Sim Games Do Not Make Me Feel Good About My Gender

When I put out this tweet about my gender identity, I wasn’t joking, much as it may seem like a shitpost. While I identify as nonbinary when asked, when you get down to the nitty gritty, I truly just want to vibe. I don’t want to fit cleanly into any boxes or ideas of what that means, I just want to exist as myself and not be thought of as anything other than that. My body, however, makes that difficult. 

No one is required to disclose this kind of stuff to be valid, but it ties in pretty intimately with my gender angst, so I’m going to share it. I was assigned female at birth, and my body very much reflects that. All the binding in the world will not hide my chest–believe it or not I have the second highest cup size on the Uppercut team–and there’s really no way to straighten the curves of my waist and hips. If you can see my body, you’re probably going to read it as “woman.” Which, I mean, I get it. 

I don’t have a problem with my body (I mean, I do have many problems with my body, but not in regards to changing it to reflect my gender). What I do have  a problem with is how it’s read. I can’t escape being feminized, and I’ve accepted that. It’s honestly why I’ve jumped back and forth with using she/her pronouns. This forced feminization is a part of my reality and there’s no real way to shake it off, so I’d rather own it. That was the thinking. But I shouldn’t have to do that to use the pronouns I actually prefer, no one should. But as they say, we live in a society. 

Certain video games, however, are lauded for their ability to let us see ourselves freely, without the encumbrance of societal norms. People claim that this is how we can escape and really get to be ourselves. I wish I felt that way. I really do. But these sim games, like, well, The Sims and Animal Crossing come from folks inundated with normative ideas about gender, race, ownership, and all kinds of other real life issues. Much like you can’t separate the art from the artist, you can’t separate the creator from their perception of reality. 

As Autumn Wright noted, Animal Crossing: New Horizon’s character creator isn’t gender neutral, it’s at best gender agnostic. It doesn’t make you choose a binary gender, but it does make you choose a binary “style” for your character. Despite not having any gender locked clothing items, by having that initial choice, every trip to the Able Sisters’ store has now become a reminder that I’m free to wear boys’ clothes if I want, but they’re still boys’ clothes at the end of the day. My real life dysphoria is brought back to life over and over as I worry about balancing how feminine vs. masculine I look, if wearing too much pink will undercut how people perceive me, if wearing suits will make people think I’m a boy. The list goes on.

And it’s not just Animal Crossing that’s guilty of this. Recently, Jess has been creating an Uppercut house in The Sims 4 and she made all of us on stream. It asked a similar question in regards to your style being masculine or feminine. Not your body, mind you, just your style. We wanted easy access to all the floral button up options the game had, so we decided to go with masculine. This sucks in and of itself, but it got a lot worse from there. 

As we were picking outfits and customizing my character, I told Jess I wanted her to edit my avatar to be more busty, because like I mentioned, I’m well endowed when it comes to that. She was more than happy to comply, but the game was a different story. Because we had chosen the masculine body on accident when we meant to just pick the masculine style, Jess wasn’t able to edit the avatar’s chest, or hips, to match my own. This was uncomfortable anyway, but having to face my dysphoria on stream was Not Fun. 

For something meant to be an escape, these arbitrary boundaries are useless, and only serve to prove that these games aren’t fantasy, just wackier recreations of reality. I don’t need to have my Sim be told that they can’t have a body that reads feminine while having a style that reads masculine. I deal with that shit every day. Ican’t imagine how frustrating all this biological essentialism must be for intersex folks. If we really want these games to provide an escape, then they have to provide one to everyone, not just cis or binary trans folks, not just white folks, not just the norm. Because otherwise, I really don’t see the point.