Vice's review of "Tell Me Why' came out today, and in general, it's a fairly by the numbers review that covers much of the core elements of the game. However, there is a chunk of the actual review that is problematic, and it merits some highlighting and explanation.
This entire section of the review, from start to finish, is one long, condescending argument that a person's transgender experience isn't enough if it is safe. It isn't enough that someone can simply be transgender without it being something that is a traumatic thing. It isn't enough to have someone that isn't maliciously deadnamed or misgendered. Much of this review is a list of things that would be happening in a bigoted environment against transgender people in the real world, and then going after the game for not hitting things off the list.
'Tell Me Why' is the first game that arguably gets transgender representation right. "How can we expect cis creators aim for anything but safe perfection?" is an absurd slippery slope argument to be making when the transgender community has been mostly been calling out serious bigotry in games with transgender representation before.
Safe representation of transgender people in games is, sadly, new and bold. The entire premise of games becoming too safe for representation of transgender people is absurd when this quantifiable hasn't happened yet.
It is problematic to say that something is 'safe representation' for transgender people because it doesn't show any transgender-related trauma in the game. While the author attempts to convey a compelling argument, the argument essentially boils down to saying that the transgender community would be held responsible for allowing such "safe" representation in the game to exist. I cannot tell you how much it makes my blood boil for the author to argue that if there isn't mess and trauma with our representation at the forefront, the transgender community is damaging the artistic integrity of things.
Let me say, loudly,
transgender people are not defined by trauma. Once again,
transgender people are not defined by trauma. Such logic attempts to root the transgender experience in the 'trauma' a transgender person experiences as a way to define the reason behind someone being transgender.
There are transgender people, myself included, who have not experienced trauma. Being transgender was not something that was traumatic for all transgender people. Sure, there is some basic dysphoria most experience, but for some that's about it. There are transgender people that don't get dead-named maliciously, mis-gendered maliciously, beaten for being transgender, brutalized for being transgender or called slurs for being transgender. Yes, there are transgender people that do experience these things, but their existence do not invalidate the other.
Games that portray being transgender as a safe experience should be encouraged because that's the reality that some transgender people find themselves lucky enough to have gone through. Not every game needs to have transgender people going through trauma. Do not assume that simply because a game has a trauma-free representation for transgender people that such a representation is 'flawed' or 'safe'.
This review is problematic and misses the mark.
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