Doing gender in game spaces: Transgender and non-binary players’ gender signaling strategies in online games

Abstract

Transgender and non-binary people manage public perceptions of their genders not only in the material world, but also within the virtual worlds of online digital games. Game spaces offer a site of trans and non-binary embodiment that can be decoupled from the physical world, yet these spaces remain embedded in structures of cisnormative hegemony. In this exploratory study, I interviewed 10 players whose gender identities do not conform to the static male-female binary that is encoded, both literally and ideologically, in games. This work centers the experiences of non-cisgender people with particular attention to the differences in how virtual environments are approached by those who wish to present within binary gender/sex categories and those who do not. I consider both the features and the constraints of the digital game environment, and their implications for non-cisgender players’ processes of gender expression and identification.