One of the most problematic parts of this horrible game is the ability for players to upload their own "skins" – essentially, each player can create a character for themselves in simple photo editing apps such as photoshop. This means that the selection of characters is limited only by the players' imaginations. On the surface, this seems to be a positive of the game, but it turns out that it is not.
This unlimited customization dangerously blurs the boundaries of gender and sex, and, especially considering the predominantly young player base of Minecraft, can be very confusing in terms of gender. One of these confused young people is my son, now 21 years old, who, it turns out, had been using the default "girl" skin of Minecraft, often shown in marketing alongside a more fitting masculine character. While this is not concerning on its own, having done so since the age of 11 will surely have contributed to his gender confusion.
Ever technically minded, my son set up a multiplayer server to play with his boyfriend when they were 14 years old and just started dating. Unfortunately, due to Minecraft's neglectful failure to include any filters or safeguards against dangerous and confusing ideological statements, it served as a funnel for the two of them to encourage each other in their "transitions." Yes, that's right – my son's boyfriend is also gender confused. What's worse is that these two, who are perhaps the worst possible people for each other, are engaged to get married in a "lesbian" wedding later this fall. I, of course, was not invited. Heaven forbid I try to save my son from his horrible confusion.
Big oof, it's impostor syndrome time. I'm trying to remember when I first started playing femme characters as my mains in various games, and I don't think it was very long before my egg started to crack. At the time, I explained it away by pointing out that I had a much easier time coming up with feminine names to fit a specific character/build (because of fucking course I am a nerd with a copy of the Silmarillion on my desk, and I'd thumb through the Elvish dictionary at the end to combine root words and suffixes to come up with names for characters). At least back in the WoW Burning Crusade/Lich King era, those were usually alts and all of my mains that I rotated between for raiding and whatnot were still male. (I mean, honestly -- how the hell are you going to come up with an appropriate avatar for a death knight named "Goofus" with Blizzard's femme orc options? To say nothing of the femme Tauren models not really fitting the Masters of the Universe villain vibe that is implied by the name "Burgor.") My first Skyrim character was an Imperial named after
. In ESO, I just made one of my (male) cats as a derpy Khajiit. I don't think I switched off of the regular Steve body in Minecraft until a few years back; I always play first-person, so the avatar never really mattered much to me.
My first fem main character that I can remember was a hobbit Valkyrie build that I slapped together for my brief stint in Lord of the Rings Online, and I think I did something similar in Guild Wars 2. I also remember liking the female Barbarian voice actor better than the male one in Diablo 3; when I came back to D3 several years ago to try out the seasonal mechanics, I pretty much exclusively played femme characters, aside from my original monk from 2012 who was still decked out in his auction house yellows (no, I did not pay real money for them). The D3 femme Necromancer may have been the first time I experienced extremely intense gender envy. This was also around the time I started almost exclusively playing female Breton builds in Skyrim, ostensibly because I was min/maxing for magic resist for runs on Legendary (but also because the Skyrim male Breton model has a really fuckin' weird hairline). But yeah, this was all within the past 5-6 years or so, and I didn't start identifying as trans or even genderfluid until 2020-2021.
Looking waaaaay back, though, I suspect that I was getting some low-level gender euphoria from playing as a femme blood elf fire mage back in my WoW days. I remember feeling this giddy sense of contentment, like my male mains were a day job that I dreaded and this was a nice break. Has anyone else had that?
Back in the day I had a Tauren Druid alt that was named Posilac. Very few people got the reference.
See, kids these days will just name their Tauren "Mommymilkers" and pat themselves on the back for being clever. And by "kids," I mean grown-ass adults who should know better than to steal Zoomer valor and just show a little damn creativity, you know?