Saints Row and Digital Gender Euphoria

I think one of the biggest problems with trans representation in so many games is that there’s always a spotlight on it. What I mean is this: liberal types – particularly the corporately-aligned liberals who are desperate to show off their “tolerance,” – insist that the only way to adequately represent a minority is to openly label them as a minority and make their experiences as part of an in-group essential to the character’s development. For example, queer or non-binary characters in the Dragon Age games often have their companion quests be explicitly about facing bigotry and sometimes overcoming it. For a game series that is otherwise pretty progressive, it can come across as frustratingly saccharine. Intentional or not, it others these characters.

Right now it is pretty overtly dangerous to be trans or gender non-conforming in the wider world, and the last thing that I want as a gender non-conforming person is to have my identity outlined to others. A rather humiliating example personally has been a trusted liberal family member outing me to conservative relatives as a sort of political gotcha, as though my identity would somehow convince them of the evil in their genocidal worldview rather than label me yet another degenerate to be locked away. Representation is important! However, when it becomes a character’s sole-defining characteristic – or the only thing one can talk about with them – it takes away from the shared humanity of our experiences overcoming injustice and the burdens of self-discovery.

A lot of games have character customization options. One sign of progressing Videogame Generations has been the detail and specificity of the Character Creators, moving from hair colors to wholesale facial sculpting and pore-generation, from “male or female?” to more overt genital sculpting tools. As someone who has struggled with body dysmorphia and dysphoria alike, I’ve found escapism since childhood in making my characters pretty, potty-mouthed femmes and goth creatures that more adequately represented my self-conception when I was still struggling to be honest with myself. A lot of people – trans or gender non-conforming as well as cis people in a questioning phase – have used character stand-ins to explore self-perception.

Sometimes, the player is even allowed to change their appearance after the game has begun. Perhaps for a price, or a rare item: I find that stat reallocation is more common that physical reallocation/shapeshifting, and more often than not while I can change my character’s haircut or skin color and sometimes even weight/build, I can’t flip-flop on gender. Dark Souls II has my favorite Gender Transition Coffin and it’s really the only example I can think of off of the top of my head where a character can just hop in and come out with the opposite “body type.”

Even then, though, in Souls games the player isn’t really a concrete character beyond the Unkindled/Chosen Undead/Special Prophecy Guy, so gender or identity doesn’t come into play at all. Maybe the death cry or damage grunt is different, and that’s cool, but my scrungly undead is hidden behind armor and thus it really is merely cosmetic.

The game series with the best character customization is Saints Row, and I’m not kidding.

Once you have a little bit of money in Saints Row 3 or 4 (around $500, which comes super quickly – most missions offer between 2,000 and 20,000 bucks upon completion) – The Boss can stop into an Image as Designed store and come out a whole new person. And no one bats an eye.

Beyond a broad and surreal amount of options to change – your typical white guy protag can come out a purple-skinned BBW with dreadlocks – the game also doesn’t gate any of the auxiliary changes to a specific gender. I can play Saints Row 3 or 4 as a thick woman with Nolan North’s voice, or a man with a higher-pitched voice. I can exist in between gender identities and alter my form whenever I like – there’s no limitation or gating to the times I can customize. As a young person in deeply red territory, I’d spend hours going to the different Image As Designed stores and just remaking my character over and over again, shapeshifting for the hell of it.

Alternatively, if I don’t feel like changing my Boss’ physical characteristics, I can dress them in whatever I want. A buff masculine Boss can wear cute kawaii dresses or a skirt and heels, or a femme boss can wear a suit or go topless. Some stores might offer conventionally gendered outfits – but the game never sets that hard barrier between cosmetics. There’s no “this outfit doesn’t match your body type, please try again later!’ to interrupt the breadth of customization. There’s no quasi-moral judgment for making my Boss as weird as possible, a topless Na’vi wearing a giant mask of George W. Bush and lugging around a shotgun. If that’s what I want to do, Saints Row says, that’s what the Boss would do. Go wild. Go crazy. Have fun, and feel free to fuck around until you’re happy.

One of the hard things about manifesting your idealized body in the real world is the amount of time, money, and effort it requires. Perhaps the difficulty makes it more special, but I have no doubt the majority of people with body dysphoria would love nothing more than a button that instantly changes them.

If that were the case, though, I think even liberals would try to tell those lucky people that “they’re wonderful representation… but it’s obvious.” And they’d think that this was a progressive statement.

Do I think that Saints Row is trying to be progressive with this? No, not really. I think that this blooms from its origin as a tongue-in-cheek Grand Theft Auto parody and its (far-more limited) customization options.

I also don’t think that Saints Row 3 or 4 are trying to be progressive by having the Boss always identified as the Boss, even if they fully transition between missions. I’m capable of acknowledging that it’s a bit extraneous to try and have the zaniest characters in the series identify a character as trans, gender-nonconforming, or so generally manic as to be beyond the concept of gender. It’s far more accurate, though, to my own lived experiences in gender-non-conforming spaces.

There are no interrogation of identity or the causality behind self-fulfillment.

Here’s how it really tends to work in my circles:

“Hey [deadname]!”
“Hey guys, I’m going by [preferred name] now.”
“Oh, shit, my bad. What’s up, [preferred name]!”

It’s super refreshing, then, when the Boss’ character doesn’t fundamentally change no matter what they look like. No one rolls their eyes or slips up with pronouns or draws a spotlight on what should be a pretty auxiliary character trait. The Boss is the Boss so long as they’re a strangely-moral psychopath with a lust for violence and debauchery. Even gangsters don’t have a problem with self-idealization in this world, and I think that’s beautiful, in its own fucked up way.

When queer people are written by cis writers with very little experience interacting with us, or that writing is corralled by obsessively-centrist-but-nominally-progressive corpos, it becomes the whole dynamic of a character. Their differences define them but only marginally include them.

Speaking personally, I’d be ecstatic if everyone in the world shut the fuck up about my gender and just let me be my weird, erratic, horror-writer self.

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J.M. Henson has been playing video games since Doom II at the age of four, and hasn’t shut up about them since. You can find them on Bluesky posting very occasionally.