Thoughts on Porn Gaming while Trans

This essay is basically a response to another essay I briefly skimmed over that made me sad. I'm not going to focus on what that was, because it was the usual obsessive nonsense designed to discredit the experiences of trans women and frame us as predators, but it got me thinking about some of my own experiences while playing "adult" games online as a trans person. Society as it is, I don't get a lot of chances to discuss these experiences, so I am using this platform to do so. Please don't take my experience as universal, but maybe there are a few things to relate to.

Regrettably, despite my womanly purity and grace, there are times when I must crank my big ol' girl hog to depictions of hot babes getting railed, preferably by other hot babes. This can be a bit of a minefield in and of itself - women are viewed as purely objects of sexual conquest enough in the real world, and society's issues with racism, ableism, transphobia and all manner of discrimination are on full display with abandon in the id-like world of pornography. Porn both drags into light the dark subconscious of the collective (usually white, male) creators and feeds it, pushes thoughts out into the minds of others - into their sexual fantasies, their communing with the cores of their beings.

It's a form of colonialism, a staking of the claim of what is normal, what is acceptable, what is "hot". So you're already running into trouble there. So, too, are you up against the clock - if someone's coming to your work of pornography, they're probably in the market to crank one out, and in today's fast-paced multimedia landscape this is the equivalent of downing a cup of espresso before heading off to work in the cybermines. Enter gaming, a luxury activity where hours are expected to be sunk into a purchase or download. Once more, a woman may gently caress her throbbing, well-lubricated member to a slow building orgasm, with time to ruminate on the fantasy therein.

Here, then, we get to the meat of the problem: most online porn games are so bad at depicting trans women. Don't get me wrong: I get the idea that society hates trans women and that if it isn't your "fault" that you're trans, if some magic curse or "evil" trans woman "forces" you to become a woman, there's absolutely value in that being a way to cope, but it's TIRING when it feels like that's the only thing there is. I want to see a world where trans women are thriving, not where it's a punishment to be one. Because it's not a punishment to be a trans woman.

I absolutely don't want to say that people who have this fantasy or enjoy this shouldn't do so, but for people who are still in the closet or coming to terms with their identity, from experience I know that a lot of this stuff can be damaging and that you don't have to have a magic curse put on you or anything to be who you are. I don't know if it's as much of a slogan these days but there used to be this saying in some trans circles, "if you want to be a girl, you can just be a girl" - I would go further than that, and say "if you want to be a girl, you can already have been a girl". It can be a lens. I'm becoming dangerously heartfelt here and moving away from talking about jacking off to pixels.

Anyway, that's just the most visible and obvious type of online porn game involving trans women. Let's say instead that you move on to futanari, or "futa" porn games and media. Hypersexualised women with huge tits and bigger cocks. So far, hot. And they're generally going to be pounding cis women in a way that mimics a lot of discriminatory stereotypes especially about the hypersexual nature of trans women, there's typically some predatory angle that you just kind of have to brush off, but having power and authority and being wanted is kind of nice sometimes, so despite being problematic, you can see how this might be hot sometimes.

Well, sometimes! It's hot to see a woman with a big dick getting random women pregnant or whatever. But sooner or later, you run into the idea that trans women just don't exist in these worlds. The works typically suggest that a woman having a penis is not just unusual, but impossible. As you can imagine, this is hurtful to engage with as a trans person! Plus, also for me there's always the back of the mind idea that they shouldn't also have cunts and definitely not on the balls. Testicles are already kind of adapted labia... The biology just ends up making me feel dysphoric if I think about it too much.

So, obviously there's also the option to play games with a "cis male" lead, and name them a woman's name, and play them as being trans. This is a kind of punishment, because I'm going to get misgendered all the time, but at least the body might look closer to mine. I never really play these games for very long, though. There's too much disconnect, and it's just not a lot of fun. I can get more enjoyment out of them by thinking of myself as a passive observer - I'm not the main character, but isn't it hot that these situations are happening, what would I do in a world like this.

The next obvious type is games where you can play as a cis woman, which are frankly way too rare. There ends up being the same disconnect - for me personally, the types of men you end up having sex with in these games aren't the kinds of men I'm into - this is without getting into the racist stereotypes, present in almost all porn, but seemingly especially in these games. Even when there's lesbian sex - which is rare, but appreciated, it doesn't often speak to my experience. If the game is made by a woman, however? There's generally more attention paid to what I find hot about the experience, and things outside of sex, which can be really good. And even without that, sometimes you just want to be put in the stocks and bred, or so I hear. This category has a -lot- of "women in peril" games, for good and ill.

The second to last category is games where you can actually choose the pronouns used to refer to you, and things like whether or not you have a cock. These are generally my favourite, even if they can sometimes have terrible terms for how they refer to these options, just because it's closest to my experience and desires most of the time. As a sidenote, even with how extremely limited they are, that's more than there are porn games with options for trans men.

Finally, trans porn games made by trans women: these are so hot and so good. When you find one of these, it's like an oasis in the desert. Experiences that actually speak to my life and without gross depictions of trans women! The problem is they're generally so low budget and short, because we don't get anywhere near as much funding as the other types of games. I haven't given any examples for any of the above, but if anyone has any positive examples feel free to write some in the comments below.

I don't really know if this ended up being anything, but I felt I had to get some thoughts down.