The game establishes the acceptable parameters for what a body—and what a gender—should be. And these genders are virtual, unachievable ideals, a fantasy of gender with rigid rules for the body. Because the root of all this, going back to our dear Lara, is the assumption that men could never, should never connect or identify with women. She is not him. She is for him. And the sexy binary is a way of reinforcing that. And that’s why transness is so weird and limited in these games. You can’t squeeze gender diversity into a system designed to enforce a strict patriarchal binary. So if I want to be body positive and love myself in all my androgynous weirdness and create a version of me with which to enter into these fantasy worlds, I am reminded by game after game that I cannot be feminine if I am also… tall. The Sims 4 didn’t actually have any trans options to begin with, those options came later. The alpha versions of Baldur’s Gate 3 and Cyberpunk also had no trans options. All these games were built for a simple choice between a male and a female avatar, and then the trans choices were an afterthought. So the trans options become pretty minor: you can change your hair or your junk, but the sexy binary was built into those games from the start and the limits of the sexy binary persist.
