Welcome to Trans Tuesday! This week we’re diving into what seems like a niche hobby, but it’s one way a whole lot of trans people, myself included, first got to explore our complicated feelings on gender. Let’s talk TRANS TABLETOP ROLEPLAYING GAMES.
First, let me note that a version of this essay first appeared as part of VISIBILITY: An RPG Magazine from the Trans Community. A group of trans creatives made a gaming magazine for Trans Day of Visibility, to raise money for trans charities. It’s still available and well worth picking up. It supports important charities and includes multiple essays, a comic, and several ready to play complete games! So hit the link get great trans gaming stuff and support good causes!
If you’re not familiar, table-top roleplaying games (better known as TTRPGs) are things like the most well-known example, Dungeons & Dragons, where players make up characters to exist in a fictional world, and the person running the game (game master, better known as GM, or sometimes the dungeon master, aka DM) run players through the story and world they set up.
They’re sort of a combination of collaborative writing and acting, where you’re all getting together to tell a story about these characters in a certain world, and there are stats that represent your character’s abilities, and dice rolls thrown in for a randomization element, to determine whether your character succeeds or fails at what they’re trying to do.
All right so how exactly are TTRPGs trans? For me, as a kid pre-transition, it began with one sentence:
“Okay fine, I’ll be the girl.”
It was always said under fake duress, and I’m not what I’d call a good actor. Would my friends believe me? Or were insults and worse just around the corner? I mean I didn’t think they would assault me, but they were certainly homophobic and transphobic in that way everyone is when you’re raised in a society that teaches you to be exactly those things.
And with media reinforcing that at almost every turn, mixed with the blinding toxic masculinity that worms its way into young teen boys in the exact same way, you can just never be sure. Anytime I displayed any hint of femininity or girliness I was mocked and punished for it, sometimes physically. Sometimes by my own family.
But sometimes the implicit biases of society can work in our favor. Well, rarely. They’re very bad actually and should be flung into the sun (if one could fling an implicit bias, anyway… listen, someone should get on that. For science.). If you need more on what those are, see IMPLICIT QUEERPHOBIA.
The same society that told this group of young teen boys (I was never actually a boy, of course, but you know what I mean) that the only valid emotions were lust and anger, the same society that told this group of young teen boys that anything feminine was to be derided and mocked because who could ever want to be that way… also told them that you had to have “the girl.”
The token, the one who’s not a boy, just to have someone to do what the boys couldn’t. Like flirting with or seducing a man as a distraction, for surely a man could never do that (btw that was categorically the worst part, because I am hopelessly gay for girls).
In those days of heady hormones and confusion, made extra unpleasant for me by the fact that I was going through the beginnings of the unimaginable body horror of the wrong puberty, when the darkness and the oppressive weight and silence and loneliness and abject misery and terror of my GENDER DYSPHORIA were growing worse by the day, there was the smallest bit of light, the tiniest hint of hope… in a little thing we discovered called Dungeons & Dragons.
The tabletop roleplaying world is so much more than just D&D. There are hundreds of different games, maybe thousands. My wife Susan and I actually officially write for two games, Star Trek Adventures (based on the Star Trek franchise) and Fallout (based on the videogames of the same name).
But the ubiquitousness of D&D means it’s a lot easier to find for kids who know nothing about TTRPGs. And I instantly fell in love, not just with D&D, but with the entire concept. You mean… I get to create a character, some weird variant or amalgam of myself and things I’d like to be or things I want to explore, and I get to basically live as them for an afternoon?
To clarify, there was no live-action gameplay going on, this wasn’t LARPing (live-action roleplaying, where you dress and physically act as your character). This was dice and pencils and papers and mountains of D&D sourcebooks we all began acquiring, and entire Saturdays spent utterly buried in them, having the time of our lives.
But for a trans girl who didn’t know she was trans, and one that has hyperphantasia to boot (basically, my imagination is wildly overactive and I can see, smell, taste, feel, hear absolutely everything I think about, and it goes even further than that…), it’s not hyperbole to say that I lived those game sessions as my characters.
I didn’t actually know I had hyperphantasia, I thought this was just how every brain works. But then I saw the aphantasia meme about “what do you see when you picture an apple in your head” going around.
On that chart, I’m not a 1. I’d be a 0, because if you ask me to picture an apple I can instantly see, smell, feel, taste, and hear it all. And not only that, I can tell you that her name is Beatrice and she wields a thorny rose stem as a sword and is off on an adventure to save the orchard.
And to be clear, I do not actively come up with that little story in my head, it just happens. All the time. It’s why I’m literally almost never bored, and why I say if I lived for a thousand years I could never write all the stories that are in my head. I thought everyone was like this! But no, turns out I’m just a weirdo (I embrace it, yay).
But given my hyperphantasia, our TTRPG sessions all played out like reality in my head. I could smell the leather of those magic boots I just found, I could feel the dust from the road caking their folds, I could hear that delicious leather rustle as my character put them on and became immune to sticky webs (those feel so gross, don’t even ask).
The first time I played “the girl” in the party, it was like sticking my fingers into an electrical socket (complimentary). My heart raced, I was sure my friends would notice and wonder what the hell was wrong with me, but they never did. They were always too busy consulting die tables in books and plotting strategy for how we were gonna take down this ogre and save the village.
And I didn’t sit those things out, but I did them… mentally feeling what my wizard’s robes felt like around her as she walked. Or as close as I could imagine, because I’d never worn a dress or a skirt and it would be more than a decade before I did, before I even knew that trans was something a human could be.
I almost always played wizards, because I love the creativity, that ingenuity you need to know which spell to cast when. But a wizard has to wear a robe, right? It’s just required, yes, that seems right. It’s not my fault wizard robes are basically a dress! Nobody could punch me for putting my wizard in a robe, that was just expected.
I’ve lost a lot of memories of my pre-transition life from all the dissociating I was unknowingly doing just to cope and get through living with my dysphoria, so I don’t remember my first character’s name. I don’t remember any of my character’s names from back then, they’re entirely lost to me.
But I remember the feelings they gave me. Inklings that something was there, some synapse in my brain was firing on overdrive, sending jolts through my body that I didn’t understand and wouldn’t comprehend until I’d more than doubled my time on earth. They were my very first hits of GENDER EUPHORIA.
So as I watched my body contort and warp from the wrong puberty, and become everything in the world that I hated and never wanted to be, I lived for these games, because they let me live. If only for half a day at a time, eight-to-twelve hour marathons fueled by way too much caffeine, because those were the only times I felt alive.
TTRPGs let trans people explore the seemingly impossible, even if we don’t yet know we’re trans. They’re the only way we can try out a new gender, a new pronoun, a new name, in an entirely “socially acceptable” setting, because society deems it “only a game.”
But that only goes so far. When our group found the first cis girl who was into D&D and wanted to join a game, to everyone’s credit she was welcomed in, but… ah, the implicit bias I’d found a loophole in loopholed me back. Now that we had a cis girl in the game, there was no need for me to play one. Because the token girl could be played by the (seemingly only) actual girl. You can’t have two girls in the same adventuring party, what is this, Themyscira?! (That’s where Wonder Woman’s from and where the Amazons live, listen, my nerdinesss is large-huge.)
And this lifeline I’d had, this secret joy and first doorway to my true self, was slamming shut in my face. So I rolled up a dude character, and my heart broke. In our first session, I was so disinterested and didn’t understand why I was no longer into this game that I loved. It didn’t make sense.
Until the loophole that loopholed me back… got loopholed again. Because toxic masculinity and implicit transphobia said a perceived boy doing something like, or being like, a perceived girl was hilarious… and so my friends thought it would be so funny if now that I “finally” got to play a man, my “real gender,” they conspired for the DM to have a magic belt come into my possession. (For more on just how much the idea of a perceived boy or man doing something feminine is a thing to be mocked, see my 2022, 2023, and 2024 TRANS REP IN MEDIA REPORTS).
None of us knew what this belt did, and I’m a very “throw caution to the wind” player, so I just put it on. You D&D heads know where this is going, I can see you nodding through space and time because it’s so obvious.
It was a Girdle of Femininity/Masculinity, a “cursed” item which changes the sex/gender of the character who puts it on. Suddenly, my dude was a lady again. Ha ha ha, surprise! Oh man we got you!! They laughed and they laughed. Even our new player, the “actual” girl, laughed. So funny!
A smile crept across my face. They all thought I was a good sport and also found it funny, but inside…
That synapse was firing. A reprieve. An escape. A blessing! My lifeline returned. I could make it through the horrors of dysphoria through this tiny crack in the walls of reality. He was a she. Again. For real. He was always a she.
Our world isn’t full of magic and dragons, so it’s only a dream. I could never actually be a girl, could I? What I wouldn’t give. If only. So let’s enjoy it while we can.
I played that character until she was level 25, I think. She, uh, “just never got around to” removing the curse of that girdle. Listen, there were monsters to slay and innocent villagers to save! Adventuring is a busy life.
And I never let her go. Because she wasn’t the one who started as a girl, she was the one who the world thought was a man but then, suddenly, a woman! She was me. I wish I could remember what I named her.
So as my friends sat there laughing at what society told them to laugh at, I imagined the skirt of the wizard robe flowing around me again. I felt it on my legs. I wonder if it would spin if I twirled? I bet it would. Wouldn’t that feel cool?
Let’s vanquish evil and make the world a better place, and if our skirt goes spinny in the process, well… all the better.
My smile grew.
“Okay fine, I’ll be the girl.”
Tilly Bridges, end transmission.
tillysbridges@gmail.com