The convention season is drawing to a close and while it has been an extremely exciting season due to the new consoles coming out this year, it certainly wasn’t a season without its struggles. From Gamescom, to PAX Prime, to E3 the shortcomings of the video game industry in respect to its handling of gender/racial issues continue to be a source of pain for those of us fighting to straighten it out. Recently, a post was brought to my attention via a group on Facebook that discussed a transgendered woman’s claim that she was humiliated by the presenter of the Xbox One Event at Eurogamer Expo this past week. While the details are somewhat fuzzy, it appears as though this woman is a journalist and was specifically picked out of the audience to be made fun of by the presenter, a British comedian, getting called things like “he,” “it,” “thing” and “this one.” Needless to say she was upset and brought attention to it on her Twitter account.
Since Kotaku covered the story this woman, who I am choosing not to name, has asked that Kotaku take the story down because of the immense amount of hate she has been receiving on her Twitter account. Kotaku has a policy against removing articles from their page, but tried to oblige her by removing the link to her Twitter and issuing a small statement about realizing the person on the other side of your hateful messages is indeed still a fellow human. After a brief visit to her Twitter account I also noticed that she has received multiple requests from journalistic sites other than Kotaku to run the story and has so far continued to refuse because of her interest in keeping the hateful messages to a minimum.
There are so many awful things going on here that it’s hard to pinpoint just one to even talk about. While I do not blame her for not wanting people to cover the story due to the rash of hate mail she has begun receiving, her voice has been added to an issue and she has a real opportunity to bring to light the kind of hateful things that are being said/done against her. She obviously has no obligation to do so and like I said I do not blame her for not wanting to, but I feel like transphobia in the video game industry is something that gets much less attention than other gender/racial issues. Even if she does not want the attention brought down upon her, this is an opportunity for journalists or people like us to have an open discussion and bring the matter to light.
The biggest problem I have taken with this issue has been the response from people in the community. I know we always say DO NOT READ THE COMMENTS, but sometimes it’s helpful to discuss what’s wrong with the ideology when you know exactly what the naysayers are saying. One of the biggest reasons people felt she was wrong to feel humiliated was because the presenter was a comedian and they heckle people all the time at stand-up comedy events. Here’s what’s wrong with that thought process: this woman, a journalist, attended an event at Eurogamer Expo where Microsoft hosted an event for the Xbox One. Nowhere in that sentence do I see that she chose to attend an event where heckling was known to occur. Yes, many developers choose to have celebrities of different calibers presenting for their events and comedians are one of the most common, but they are not presenting in the same capacity as they would be delivering their stand-up routine at comedy club. I do not believe that Microsoft hired this comedian expecting them to heckle the journalists in attendance of this event.
Another popular opinion is that this woman should not have brought attention to this issue because as humans we have to deal with bullshit from other people on a regular basis. Comedians tell jokes about “insert minority group here” all the time. Just because she is transgendered does not mean that she deserves special attention. Okay, before I start to hit the rage quit button because people COME ON, I actually have a small story that I think might shed some light on this thought process in a less rage inducing way.
Recently, Sam posted an article about how she found Saints Row IV to be above her threshold for offensiveness. A couple of hours later I received a text from a friend that held a simple, yet poignant thought that forced me to think on it for a while. The text read “It’s like… who gets mad at ‘Friday’ movies?” Their point being that some things are meant to be terrible and bad (whether in content or quality) and to place these things in the same realm as items that are meant to be taken seriously is not a fair assessment. At first I agreed, these games are meant to exploit every stereotype possible and in the most ridiculous way possible and in that exploitation/ridiculousness is where people find these games entertaining. Because they are meant to be just that: entertainment. The unfortunate thing is that there isn’t a good way to draw that line; which games get to claim that they are being racially insensitive just because they want to entertain people and which ones don’t? It all comes down to the execution and truly how the game makes players feel. Sam felt offended and gave ample reasons as to why, does this mean that she should just shut up about it because there wasn’t any harm meant? Hopefully the obvious answer to that question is no, she should be able to voice why the representations were offensive and maybe the video game industry can learn from her opinion to make a better game in the future.
Okay now to tie this story in: just because this form of comedy is meant to entertain and not harm anyone does not mean that this woman should not bring attention to how it made her feel. Just because everybody deals with terrible things on a daily basis does not mean that this woman’s wanting the issue to be addressed is unwarranted. This woman has probably been the subject of this kind of humiliation for a long time and to have it shoved in her face at an event where it was completely unexpected is a matter that needs to be addressed. Microsoft is not making the Xbox One their excuse to have comedians heckle/ostracize members of the community (or so I hope!) and therefore they need to properly address the handling of this situation. I’m not saying that we need to track down the comedian and banish him from the realm of video game convention presenting, but there should be a letter of recognition that shows humility and regret for causing this one woman pain, when I am 100% positive that was not his intention at all.
Talk about a step back for the industry, I think this is a prime example of the issues that need to be addressed but commonly get swept under the rug because of the hate that gets rained down upon the people bringing the matter up into the public eye.
I’d like to know what you guys think, should this kind of entertainment be allowed in this setting?
Author’s note: since this woman has explicitly asked for this to not be covered I am not going to link the stories/articles that have covered it thus far. If you choose to search it out that is up to you.
