9/18/2023 0 Comments Teamspeak avatars![]() Image: Arturb/Flickrīurkholder's experience is not unique. "If you're not white and male and you're a gamer, you're going to be made fun of, made the target of abusive and sexist language, ignored, passed up over your guildmates for lead positions and generally treated like shit, especially if you're in a male-dominated guild or team." It's not even a female-friendly place," he said, noting the abuse suffered by many women at the hands of the GamerGate movement. "Gaming is not a safe space, it's not a trans-friendly place. "We tell them it's OK, that we'll properly gender you and that they're in a safe space" Riordan James Flynn, a trans man who plays World of Warcraft, League of Legends, and several text-based online games, says that it's much easier to play the text games without experiencing discrimination than the ones where voice chat is necessary. And that hostility is often most vitriolic and most frightening when a trans gamer picks up a microphone. At the highest levels, that may be slowly changing thanks in no small part to Sasha Hostyn, a trans Starcraft II player who goes by the name of Scarlett online and has become known as one of the best players of all time.īut many trans, androgynous, and nonbinary gamers who I spoke to said that online gaming is still a fairly hostile place, at least when meeting new people. But, transgender and androgynous people still suffer plenty of discrimination in online gaming. "It's offensive on levels that I can't even begin to describe, and the only reason they would even consider a policy like this is because they think LGBT people are 'icky.'"Īt the very least, League of Legends developer Riot and others roundly criticized the move. "It's dumbfounding, really," Jessica Janiuk, who wrote about single-player games being her safe haven as a transgender gamer in an article for the gaming site Polygon, told me. (The decision has since been overturned.)īut trans gamers I spoke with suggest that the proposed rules were simply an extension of the discrimination and bigotry they face every time they play games online. The idea, on its face, is the ridiculous notion that trans gamers are inherently better than female gamers. The discrimination trans gamers face came into focus earlier this week when one of the world's largest League of Legends tournament organizers said that its upcoming all-female tournament would place restrictions on the number of transgender and lesbian people who would be allowed to participate. ![]() "It's easiest to pass in -I tell people I'm a guy, and they don't have any choice but to take me at my word" Most every single game has voice now, and lots of trans gamers end up pretending they don't have a mic." "When it comes to voice, that's where it comes out. "You get all the flack of being a girl online, plus you have the stigma of not actually being a 'girl,'" Abi Burkholder, a 22-year-old androdgynous League of Legends player who is in the top eighth percentile of all players, told me. ![]()
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