Daily Signal Misunderstands Trans Pride, How to Game
An odious writer sneers at the idea of having pride in oneself, but MORE IMPORTANTLY misses the point of what the Sims video game is.
by Evan Urquhart
Today, we’d like to take a second to explain how to play the video game The Sims. While many video games involve the player guiding a single protagonist through an adventure, The Sims is a game series where the player acts more like a disembodied God, reigning supreme over the ant-farm like world in which Sims characters live and work and play. Unlike other games, you’re not playing as any one Sim, but directing the lives of several different Sims.
That’s one reason, and by far the most important reason, that a piece of commentary that appeared in the Daily Signal yesterday is ridiculous. The writer wants to know why a trans person might want to play as a character with top surgery scars, but you don’t play as a single character in the freaking Sims!
screenshot from the Daily Signal (ugh)
In Sims 4, (which recently release a major update that allows you to create a Sim with top-surgery scars among other additions to the game), as in other games in the series, the player makes a bunch of characters, often a family, sometimes multiple families, and alternately torments and reward them, according to their whim. There’s no single character that serves as player self-insert. It’s just not that type of game!
The Daily Signal writer being wrong about a video game is by far the most important thing here. But, just for fun, let’s also answer their stupid question about making trans characters as if it applied. As if it were being asked about a video game, nothing like the Sims, where it’s typical to make the game’s protagonist into an idealized self-insert. In that type of game, why would a trans person make a character with a body that looks trans rather than an idealized cisgender body?
There are two reasons. First, some trans people like themselves. They like their bodies as they are, and wouldn’t prefer their body to be cis at all. While it may be shocking to conservatives, everyone doesn’t have the exact same tastes. So, not everyone who is trans spends their entire life wishing they were cis. Some trans people like being trans and wouldn’t trade it for the world. Wild, huh!
The other reason why a trans person might want to make a trans video game character is the concept of “pride.” Having “pride” as a trans person involves making a conscious effort to embrace things about yourself that the mainstream tells you ought to fill you with shame. It means praticing radical self-acceptance and letting go of the idea that all trans people are flawed versions of a cisgender ideal. It means rejecting the notion that the best trans person is the most cis-passing trans, and that even the most cis-passing trans person still falls short because being cisgender is better than being trans. While the Daily Signal writer takes it as a given that being cisgender IS better than being trans, not all trans people adhere to this mindset. Rejecting this mindset is, in fact, something that many trans people draw stregnth from.
Of course, trans people aren’t a monolith. Many trans people would prefer an idealized cis-gender self-insert. Some people, including this reporter, don’t like to make their video game characters a self-insert at all, preferring to make them as outlandish in appearance as possible, or else to make a character with a different race or gender from their own. But yes, some trans people do like to create characters that are trans, not to signal their transness to others or declare that being trans is superior to being cis, but for the same reason anyone likes to make a character in a video game that looks like them: Because it looks like them.
Hope that helps.
