Demolition Pants (Take Two)

More ruminations about gender from your local genderqueer person brought about by Helldivers2 (of all things).

I've been playing for a year and have already written once about the strange liminal space of playing a first person shooter game as a queer person. Namely where there's not a lot of room for explaining things to people, etc, and we're all so voice coded that of course the binary tends to settle in by default.

As I said, I wrote about this back in March, about my reluctance to speak up and how it kind of sucked; but lately there's been a fascinating shift in my own brain.

I have met a number of people, some of whom I play with quite a bit, and all of whom I enjoy spending time with. A few months ago I landed in a group of guys who all sound like they're from West Texas (and at least one is from our conversations). They are, I'm guessing, all around my age, unfailingly polite, and extremely welcoming. Even more so since I hit the "150 club" it seems. They also misgender me and I haven't corrected them. There's a decent chance that our politics don't align, but honestly an equally good chance they do - given that I have other friends from Texas who are not Republicans.

You might wonder why I haven't corrected them, hell I've wondered why plenty of times. 😅 Some of it is safety, some of it is the nuance of trying to have those conversations with relative strangers while in a firefight. Some of it is just that I want to be able to play the fucking game and not deal with it. (see, our "agenda" is just to live our damn lives) I've talked to my therapist about this a lot in the last few months because I was trying to figure out if I was avoiding an important ethical stand in favor of comfort. However, largely the conclusion I've come to is that I no longer mind it, that while I still skew very heavily toward neutral or even masculine pronouns and descriptors, I am very much genderqueer and contain multitudes. I am at least 3% "girl" when you run the numbers. laughs

So last night when I dropped into a mission with one of the guys and he said, "Is that you Lady Gray?" with obvious happiness, I had a dopamine spark of delight versus an immediate sadness of misgendering. And that was extremely fascinating. More importantly, it doesn't hurt me which is really what this all comes down to.

Honestly I never thought a satirical fascist-coded game about shooting bots and bugs and aliens would have settled into my life like this, bringing me not only hours of hilarity, no small amount of improvement on my gaming skills, and some camaraderie that might actually bear out into long-term friendships. I don't know, I suppose I'll continue to be the stealth queer with some of them (others we've actually had conversations as we get to know each other more); but maybe at some point down the line I won't have to.

As always, if you happen to be playing Helldivers2 and we are not friends on there, please hit me up, I'm always happy to play with folks! And if you're thinking of getting it but are a little unsure about playing alone, also hit me up, I am more than cool with showing you the ropes.

Love,
K