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the_fantastic_ms_foxI've played a lot of trans-spectrum Characters in larps and tabletop, but I have usually defaulted to the assigned-female end of things.
Why? I like being trans, or at least the brilliance and the proud gender-stretching. But I often do not, did not, like the part of it that involves being a transsexual woman: the body dysphoria, the dependance on the pity of an often sexist medical system, or the threat of violence that still amazes and sorrows me. I can hack being read and even mistreated as a butch. In part this is because I live in a pretty safe place to be a butch. It's also what I am, and I don't always like the stares and silence, but at least it is directed at me. What comes with being transsexual is often an invalidation of what I am, the presumption that I am, essentially, a feminine man - as opposed to a masculine woman. And I get treated a lot better as a presumed-to-be-cissexed butch (who has her own businesses, and hears from professionals in widely varying fields, "you should do what I do for a living, you're clearly a natural") than my highly visible transsexual Femme roommate (who gets insulted and propositioned at work, can't travel most places, considers herself lucky to have a job (an unpayable debt in in student loans for training in environmental analysis and ESL will land you a job in the produce department), and who gets assaulted about once every two months).
It seems glib to talk about improvisational storygames in the face of this. But they is my preferred media. They are first to me, before comics, verbal stories, television, paper-text, and computer games. A decent game is cathartic; a good game is moving. a great one, transcendent. The settings and the stories in them touch me, inspire me.
Before transition, there was a hint of in-gender (female, tomboyish) characters. Of course, being seen as a boy, these characters were seen as cross-gendered. While they were not the most detailed (you don't want to be seen as being too into the character, or the reputation that comes with it), the women and girls I played were the most emotionally rounded, the most integrated into their world, the spiritually whole-est, the most fully human.
Other than the tomboyishness, and being perceived as drag, the characters were cis.
But, in 2005, a year before transition, and immediately after the gender studies class that set the wheels in my head turning, there was Aleksein. In the game Werewolf: The Apocalypse, he was born to a tribe of (present-day) Mary-Daly-esque amazon werewolves. He, however, identified as a male (human) ally to said Amazon Werewolves.
In 2006, again in larp, Lichen, a talented shapeshifter whose talent had roots in having no intrinsic body/social image to contradict in becoming any bird or beast, male or female.
In 2007, tabletop, Cat, the genderqueer body performance artist who, on stage, would cut, and fauve hir own blood onto canvas.
2008. Larp. Rüt, the passing-woman pirate; June, a butch who fled Stonewall into a faerie world.
2010. Tabletop. A change. Cisgendered-ish Queer Women. Winnifred the Inspired, who found her Knightly vow of chastity pretty easy to keep, since it only related to what she did with men. Delphine Orr, asexual lunch-lady and collector of books and art banned by The Inspectors. Berg - an exception - passing as a young man with a gender-ambiguous brain-squishing travelling companion, trying to make a living in an ecological disaster, only to find their most employable skill was murder. Braid, frostbitten leader/Alpha of an new-ice-age dogsled hunting/salvaging party, who was in town to sell meat and hides, only to encounter the daughter of an old flame in the care of a single father, the object of her jealousy.
2011. Another step. Pagra. She's a caterer to the Reptillian upper crust by day, a stealthy burglar in the homes of old catering clients by night. Although skilled at navigating the doors between worlds, she stays in the interdimensional city of Limbo in part because most humans on most Earths don't treat the visibly intersexed very well - and couldn't understand her patois. But a Reptillian Nest-Alderman doesn't care about stubble or how you're built, and patois is how all proper humans talk, isn't it?
There's a step there. A body that doesn't fit in to conservative notions of female.
And now I have made Alice. And I feel that I have accomplished something. Not in the game, but in myself.
Monster Hearts is a fast-moving game of romance, danger, melodrama and the supernatural. Think Buffy, Twilight, True Blood. It's in playtesting, made by the creator of Perfect, adapted off of apocalypse world.
Setting: High school. Teenagers. Puberty. Monster-fighters. Secret powers. All this in Fort Linden Saskatchewan. Now with two grocery stores and little to do on the weekend other than go to the tire dump, burn things and drink.
A selection from an email
Circumstances beyond her control have marked her as different, and besides her friends, she has no social or familial support in surviving this. While Dale is born to stake vampires, Liz can conjure and destroy the undead, and Ben can does casually kill (and eat)... pretty much anyone, Alice is afraid to walk from school to home, to be at home, or to be in school not because of monsters, but because of groups of perfectly mortal assholes. If she had powers, she'd be safe, or at least be a cool freak instead of "a tranny" or "a fag." There's no secret in her past to be unlocked that will fix this, no magic ring or secret powers that run through the family. She'll have to find an alternative.
In other words, Alice's goals are:
1st. get protection
2nd. get some of these superpowers that everyone else seems to have
I like this. In a world of dangerous monsters, you're not a werewolf, or a sorceress, or a chosen child of fate or anything cool or to whom status and strength come simply and easily - because of how you were born. Or rather what options were given to you by others who saw how were were born. In this world of monsters, you are the monster that doesn't have any powers, the one anyone can hunt. What do you do? Do you accept the label that was put on you, the skin you live in, and how others treat you? Or do you deny it and erase yourself? Or do you fight it, and those who would stop you?
And when you're done your change, do you finally feel human even though no-one else will see you as such?
To me the term "my hero" means something in a tabletop rpg. A character you can relate to because you built her. You might not like how your people are portrayed on television, and you might not find a text or comic book that works for you, so you make your own media. Your own heros.
Why? I like being trans, or at least the brilliance and the proud gender-stretching. But I often do not, did not, like the part of it that involves being a transsexual woman: the body dysphoria, the dependance on the pity of an often sexist medical system, or the threat of violence that still amazes and sorrows me. I can hack being read and even mistreated as a butch. In part this is because I live in a pretty safe place to be a butch. It's also what I am, and I don't always like the stares and silence, but at least it is directed at me. What comes with being transsexual is often an invalidation of what I am, the presumption that I am, essentially, a feminine man - as opposed to a masculine woman. And I get treated a lot better as a presumed-to-be-cissexed butch (who has her own businesses, and hears from professionals in widely varying fields, "you should do what I do for a living, you're clearly a natural") than my highly visible transsexual Femme roommate (who gets insulted and propositioned at work, can't travel most places, considers herself lucky to have a job (an unpayable debt in in student loans for training in environmental analysis and ESL will land you a job in the produce department), and who gets assaulted about once every two months).
It seems glib to talk about improvisational storygames in the face of this. But they is my preferred media. They are first to me, before comics, verbal stories, television, paper-text, and computer games. A decent game is cathartic; a good game is moving. a great one, transcendent. The settings and the stories in them touch me, inspire me.
Before transition, there was a hint of in-gender (female, tomboyish) characters. Of course, being seen as a boy, these characters were seen as cross-gendered. While they were not the most detailed (you don't want to be seen as being too into the character, or the reputation that comes with it), the women and girls I played were the most emotionally rounded, the most integrated into their world, the spiritually whole-est, the most fully human.
Other than the tomboyishness, and being perceived as drag, the characters were cis.
But, in 2005, a year before transition, and immediately after the gender studies class that set the wheels in my head turning, there was Aleksein. In the game Werewolf: The Apocalypse, he was born to a tribe of (present-day) Mary-Daly-esque amazon werewolves. He, however, identified as a male (human) ally to said Amazon Werewolves.
In 2006, again in larp, Lichen, a talented shapeshifter whose talent had roots in having no intrinsic body/social image to contradict in becoming any bird or beast, male or female.
In 2007, tabletop, Cat, the genderqueer body performance artist who, on stage, would cut, and fauve hir own blood onto canvas.
2008. Larp. Rüt, the passing-woman pirate; June, a butch who fled Stonewall into a faerie world.
2010. Tabletop. A change. Cisgendered-ish Queer Women. Winnifred the Inspired, who found her Knightly vow of chastity pretty easy to keep, since it only related to what she did with men. Delphine Orr, asexual lunch-lady and collector of books and art banned by The Inspectors. Berg - an exception - passing as a young man with a gender-ambiguous brain-squishing travelling companion, trying to make a living in an ecological disaster, only to find their most employable skill was murder. Braid, frostbitten leader/Alpha of an new-ice-age dogsled hunting/salvaging party, who was in town to sell meat and hides, only to encounter the daughter of an old flame in the care of a single father, the object of her jealousy.
2011. Another step. Pagra. She's a caterer to the Reptillian upper crust by day, a stealthy burglar in the homes of old catering clients by night. Although skilled at navigating the doors between worlds, she stays in the interdimensional city of Limbo in part because most humans on most Earths don't treat the visibly intersexed very well - and couldn't understand her patois. But a Reptillian Nest-Alderman doesn't care about stubble or how you're built, and patois is how all proper humans talk, isn't it?
There's a step there. A body that doesn't fit in to conservative notions of female.
And now I have made Alice. And I feel that I have accomplished something. Not in the game, but in myself.
Monster Hearts is a fast-moving game of romance, danger, melodrama and the supernatural. Think Buffy, Twilight, True Blood. It's in playtesting, made by the creator of Perfect, adapted off of apocalypse world.
Setting: High school. Teenagers. Puberty. Monster-fighters. Secret powers. All this in Fort Linden Saskatchewan. Now with two grocery stores and little to do on the weekend other than go to the tire dump, burn things and drink.
A selection from an email
Circumstances beyond her control have marked her as different, and besides her friends, she has no social or familial support in surviving this. While Dale is born to stake vampires, Liz can conjure and destroy the undead, and Ben can does casually kill (and eat)... pretty much anyone, Alice is afraid to walk from school to home, to be at home, or to be in school not because of monsters, but because of groups of perfectly mortal assholes. If she had powers, she'd be safe, or at least be a cool freak instead of "a tranny" or "a fag." There's no secret in her past to be unlocked that will fix this, no magic ring or secret powers that run through the family. She'll have to find an alternative.
In other words, Alice's goals are:
1st. get protection
2nd. get some of these superpowers that everyone else seems to have
I like this. In a world of dangerous monsters, you're not a werewolf, or a sorceress, or a chosen child of fate or anything cool or to whom status and strength come simply and easily - because of how you were born. Or rather what options were given to you by others who saw how were were born. In this world of monsters, you are the monster that doesn't have any powers, the one anyone can hunt. What do you do? Do you accept the label that was put on you, the skin you live in, and how others treat you? Or do you deny it and erase yourself? Or do you fight it, and those who would stop you?
And when you're done your change, do you finally feel human even though no-one else will see you as such?
To me the term "my hero" means something in a tabletop rpg. A character you can relate to because you built her. You might not like how your people are portrayed on television, and you might not find a text or comic book that works for you, so you make your own media. Your own heros.