DAILY MANIFESTO

How Video Games Saved A Transgendered Gamer

Posted on Friday, August 26 @ 14:18:51 Eastern by Nicholas Tan

On the tumblr blog "How Games Saved My Life", transgender gamer Morgan McCormick shares her testimonial on how games helped him accept herself. I would blockquote this entire passage, but it's just not necessary. I also know it's kind of a cop-out to just copy and paste excerpts (or pretty much everything) that she wrote here; still, I would rather just let her words speak for themselves.

I’d felt like a girl ever since I was three, and yet all around me there were boys happy being boys, and girls happy being girls. Everyone seemed to belong in their skin, and that’s a huge thing to take for granted, believe me...

That changed when N64’s Perfect Dark came out, where I played James Bond’s distaff counterpart, a redhead named Joanna. Whenever I hated my body, I could step into hers and boom headshot my problems away. But still, she was just an exception that proved the rule. In the land of the X chromosomes, the Y was still king. Enter Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem, and its blonde, heat packing heroine Alexandra Roivas. Did she ever complain, or whine, or live life like she was a second class citizen? No, she bound the power of ancient gods to the slug rounds in her shotgun and proceeded to wholesale maim the hell hoardes living beneath her home. She Quantum Leap-style took over the bodies of men throughout history to accomplish her mission, because that’s how she do.

The coup de grace, the real freedom was when Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic was released... SW:KotOR basically let you be as badassly benevolent or foaming-at-the-mouth Sithy as you pleased, and, thanks to the character creation system, you could be a chick while you did it. One who you got to design head-to-toe. I real, live lady, with girl parts and everything. I would swing my double bladed lightsaber, go VWUM, WUM, WUM, and I’d do it as a girl. I could go between singeing [sic] my nails with force lightning or the more manicure-friendly force choke. And that’s how everyone in the game treated me, like a strong woman. I looked how I felt...

Even when I couldn’t play the girl, video games were beginning to tell stories about three-dimensional women I could appreciate or look up to. The gal cast of Drakengard and Metal Gear Solid featured a lot of women who everyone thought was evil or insane, but who were always confident what they were doing was right, no matter what anyone else thought. Killer7’s Kaede took the serious out of suicide by playing it for laughs: she used her wrist slitting to open hidden passageways. Games let me believe in a world so crazy that a guy could even become a girl, and that that would be the least nutty thing that could happen.

It’s years later, and last week I celebrated 16 months on estrogen and, if you can forgive my ego a moment, I turned out to be a hot B... last week my girlfriend and I celebrated two years of love, and five years of friendship, by curling up next to each other on the couch and playing through Shadow of Destiny, Katamari Damacy, Dead Space and Saints Row 2.

So, thank you, video games. For keeping me company and seeing me through that 22 year storm... And for making life significantly less lousy for a whole lotta people.

Tags: Goodies

Comments

Guernica
Joined: Mar 2009

Posted: Aug 26th, 2011 at 3:38 pm
What is this?... I don't even...

I guess good for her if video games made this experience less horrible.

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MaryC1
Joined: Aug 2011

Posted: Aug 26th, 2011 at 3:57 pm
I'm not sure how to describe it except imagine being trapped in someone else's life, and then whenever you try to break out of that existence, you get punished for trying.

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MaryC1
Joined: Aug 2011

Posted: Aug 26th, 2011 at 3:55 pm
Like Morgan, I'm also a transgender gamer, and while gaming hasn't quite had the same effect on me as it did on Morgan, I can certainly relate to where she's coming from.

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MaryC1
Joined: Aug 2011

Posted: Aug 26th, 2011 at 4:04 pm
Alrighty, thats quite enough. No need to keep repeating myself. Can somebody please nuke the ditto comments?

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Anthony_Severino
Joined: Oct 2010

Posted: Aug 26th, 2011 at 4:11 pm
Took care of it for you. Not sure why that's happening. Thanks for your patience with that.

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acdibble
Joined: Jul 2007

Posted: Aug 28th, 2011 at 3:24 pm
When someone comments then refreshes the page it posts the comment again. You have to go back to the homepage and come back here if you don't want it to happen or go back in your history before you posted the comment.

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Lien
Joined: Feb 2008

Posted: Aug 27th, 2011 at 2:25 am
See, i'd probably make fun the fact she is a tranny, but then i'd realise she say she has a girlfriend... So now i am jealous.

Also she makes a pretty hot lady, THERE I SAID IT!

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CaptainPicard
Joined: Sep 2010

Posted: Aug 27th, 2011 at 3:12 am
Video games helped me to accept my drug problems, rather than fight them lol

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Stickyellowsock
Joined: Oct 2009

Posted: Aug 27th, 2011 at 5:06 am
...Tits or GTFO.

2 2

tinymhg
Joined: Jun 2011

Posted: Aug 27th, 2011 at 6:35 am
Leave to you to say that.

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Stickyellowsock
Joined: Oct 2009

Posted: Aug 27th, 2011 at 7:36 pm
Hey he wants to be a she. that's cool with me but now she must be held to the rules of the internet.

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Diabolus
Joined: Nov 2008

Posted: Aug 27th, 2011 at 3:12 pm
Is that Longo?

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LawnGnome
Joined: Apr 2007

Posted: Aug 27th, 2011 at 4:17 pm
So, let me get this straight.....This is a boy who wants to be a girl, yet has a girlfriend? He wants to be a lesbian? I don't understand.

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Diabolus
Joined: Nov 2008

Posted: Aug 27th, 2011 at 4:22 pm
Yes, it's...retarded. I was on some "other" boards a couple years ago, and this guy was doing the hormones and stuff because he wanted to be a girl...but he liked women. So he was going to be a lesbian. That's some Jerry Springer **** right there.

1 0

OdiousLupous
Joined: Jul 2011

Posted: Aug 27th, 2011 at 5:27 pm
That is the allure of women, even when you want to be a woman you still desire to sleep with them.

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sandineyes
Joined: May 2008

Posted: Aug 27th, 2011 at 9:06 pm
For some reason, whenever I read that comment I think of it being said with a French accent.

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LawnGnome
Joined: Apr 2007

Posted: Aug 27th, 2011 at 10:12 pm
I guess a man can love ***** so much that he wants to have one of his own.

1 0

SorrowsNeptune
Joined: Aug 2011

Posted: Aug 28th, 2011 at 11:00 am
No, it's a girl who was born a boy, who happens to like other girls. Thus making her a translesbian. Dating woman is not nearly the same thing as actually being a woman.

These are not hard concepts to understand.

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stylekiller
Joined: Jul 2011

Posted: Aug 28th, 2011 at 9:45 am
This was real cool to read, I'm not transgendered nor do I feel like I need a new body (well if it was Iron Man or a sentinel maybe) but I do have empathy. That gamespot guy did it a while back and the anonymous immaturity was pretty bad, given 99 percent of the **** talk would have never been said face to face, but at least here it's just crummy one liners not targeting anyone but the subject matter. I say good for him/her and Maryc1 it's rad that you guys can find a place to be accepted as yourself. Still the turning into a girl and dating a girl still makes me scratch my head, but you know, "Dollar heart, penny head" I suppose.

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OdiousLupous
Joined: Jul 2011

Posted: Aug 28th, 2011 at 11:22 am
If she didnt have a penis Id give her a go, always did like redheads.

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SithSpectre
Joined: Jun 2011

Posted: Aug 28th, 2011 at 1:13 pm
Nice read good to see video games had a positive impact on accepting herself, i'm also glad to see no one is going over the top with hate remakes like they were on gamespot. I genuinely feel bad for people who were born into the wrong body because we live in a very ignorant and frightened society that has been corrupted by the morals of religion which was concocted thousands of years ago by people to back up their simplistic ways of living and to alienate things they couldn't explain by naming them as evil, sad to see after this much time has past we still haven't crossed the ignorance hurdle...

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acdibble
Joined: Jul 2007

Posted: Aug 28th, 2011 at 3:14 pm
Estrogen still won't give her a soul.

1 2

OdiousLupous
Joined: Jul 2011

Posted: Aug 29th, 2011 at 3:37 pm
She can play Shang Tsung then and we'll call it even.

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Diabolus
Joined: Nov 2008

Posted: Aug 28th, 2011 at 9:05 pm
Visit my ass with your lips.

2 0

tinymhg
Joined: Jun 2011

Posted: Aug 29th, 2011 at 7:49 am
Now with the spambot gone this comment makes you look like a raving lunatic.

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UghRochester
Joined: Jun 2006

Posted: Aug 29th, 2011 at 12:54 am
Yes, it's great people like Morgan and Maryc1 are getting accepted. I don't like to be rude or cruel towards transgenders. If I see a transgender for an example, a male changed to a female, I would be polite and say, "Ma'am, miss, etc." Maryc1 could correct me, but is it not best to accept who they want to be? I'm glad video game had a great impact on this person.

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