#gender in thedas

[hezenkossapologist]

Dragon Age Transgender sidebar, since I’m thinking about Gender and its suffocating presence in Orzammar: I am SO frustrated that we won’t deal with Orzammar from a 2024 lens, as far as I can tell because it’s problematic and they would rather ignore and do away with it.

But it is, to me, more important than ever that we get stories that depict power and violence and how people are organised by power and violence. ESPECIALLY stories about Gender and Bodies. We deserve 2024 sociological storytelling! We should not let it be abandoned to the 90s and the derivatives of the 90s! A transgender woman in Orzammar doesn’t just defy gendered expectations of a person with her body, she defies caste expectations. When caste is afforded according to your same-sex parent, what happens when you are not the sex everyone said you were? Do you become Casteless? You likely can’t then become a Noble hunter, for if you did, which caste would the child be a part of? You or your Deshyr woman? What do you do with a male child when there is no male parent? What happens when you are a woman, a gender that is organised for consumption in a specific and particular reproductive role, and you can’t and don’t fill that role? (Are women who cannot give birth disproportionately joining the Legion of the Dead? What about the Silent Sisters?)

Give me transfemininity in Orzammar. Give me a story that demonstrates what happens when you assume that because there is sex-articulated violence (that is, violence that is enacted against a person using their reproductive and bodily reality) that this is sex-based violence (the idea that violence happens to people because they are born into a sex, namely female). Trouble that TERF-ass stupid dumb dumb narrative about how power and violence and gender and bodies actually work*. Show how transgender woman are actually organised by gender hierarchy, even (or especially) when that hierarchy is fixated on a reproductive capability they do not have.

And this just flat-out does not have to involve lurid depictions of transphobia or violence against trans women- because Orzammar society is built to squeeze out transgender people, even if we say as a writing rule that Orzammar citizens are never personally transphobic people. Just like how in the real world, systems change how transgender people navigate the world, even if you are able to completely avoid interpersonal violence.

For that matter, tell me about a non-binary person from Orzammar! The most aggressively binary gender-enforcing location I can think of in Thedas!

Trans Dwarves should be all over the place on the Surface. What under Stone is there to lose for you when Orzammar has truly nothing for you?

As much as Taash’s story touched me and made me cry and I love them as a character, I am so frustrated by how frictionless their story is against the society and world they live in. Why don’t they know the term non-binary when non-binary people are not only accepted in Rivain, but have even had a place in the Lords of Fortune- their group, that isn't depicted as being particularly large? For that matter what is the Rivani understanding of nonbinary? Has Taash somehow just never met a non-binary person, a person friends with a non-binary person, nor ever heard about their fellow non-binary Lord? If not, how can I believe that Rivaini society is at a base level truly accepting of non-binary identity?

I don't. I think Taash's conflict and struggle is one that is heavily inspired by Trick Weeks' actual experience as a non-binary person in this society. This society within which the dominant cultural logic is "men are people with penises, women are people with vaginas, and we violate and ignore anyone who troubles this in any way". (Something which is not universal and is inextricable from colonial histories). If Rivain is not a society that hides, violates, controls, erases, or dominates transgender and nonbinary people Taash simply should have come across mentions of transgender and nonbinary histories and lives and realities in Rivain.

Non-binary as a term is culturally situated to anglophone, colonised or colonising, societies in the 21st century. That is where it came from. It came out of a reaction to that specific gender binary. I like it being used explicitly in VG- I like transgender people being undeniable and using words that are meaningful to us, this is a game by and largely for people from this social and cultural context- but I want it to be specifically culturally situated to Thedas, too. Who came up with the term non-binary in Thedas? Has there been a LGBTQ rights struggle that mirrors the origins of the term in our world? Did Maevaris coin the word transgender in Tevine and now it’s been adopted for the Trade Tongue?

Fantasy as a genre, to put it very very broadly, asks questions about how things came to be. It pisses me off as a transgender person that there is more detail on how Orzammar came to be a caste-driven patriarchal nightmare than there is on how transgender people in Thedas have conceptualised and dealt with their realities in their different contexts through time. I think we deserve better.

(* To put this bluntly: cis women are not r*ped because they are cis women with Cis Women Bodies, sexual violence is not some biological reality of The Womb that r*pists are responding to, they are r*ped bc r*pists in a r*pe culture have power, and they use it over other people. Notably they use it disproportionately against all women, cis and trans, because women- all women- are disempowered and made vulnerable by patriarchy.)

[asharaks]

& like of course it isn't Inherently Emasculating for men to wear "skirts" (read: robes) this is a very specific western hangup, and a pretty modern one at that. there are plenty of cultures where men wear things other than trousers without being considered Gender Nonconforming - but Thedas was written by white westerners with white western gamers in mind, and the parts of it that much of the series is set in are based of white western countries. you can't discount the doylist explanations for a lot of this: when the writers put in off-colour jokes about who's the Girl in an m/m relationship, or about men wearing skirts, or about women being wannabe men because they wear armour and wield swords - yes, you're supposed to take it as an offcolour joke and read into it about the characters saying it, but as gamers we have the unique and beautiful perspective of knowing that some guy, somewhere, wrote that line into the character's mouth for a reason . and that reason is that you're supposed to get that it's a nasty joke on gamlen's part because same-sex relationships are expected to emulate heterosexual gender roles in western culture, and men who sleep with men are considered to be feminised (in a humiliating way) in western culture. and as a gamer you understand that and that's why the joke lands .

[infinitelystrangemachinex]

Veilguard vaguing:

It's not automatically a good thing, actually, that the game de-emphasizes or even outright removes racism against elves, and bigotry against other groups, from the story

[kirkwallguy]

im very glad taash is nb since a trans companion is something i've been wanting in a game like this for a LONG time. please don't put in the papers that i'm not happy about taash being nb. but it does feel kind of funny that they're straight up saying the word nonbinary in a universe that has never previously had words for sexuality or gender. which i know may be a product of it being from the early 2010s but imo it feels appropriate for the kind of society thedas is and it's sooo much more fun to have everyone identify themselves seperately or imagine there are region-specific communities that use their own language.

[laurelsofhighever]

So who else noticed that rug in the Shadow Dragon headquarters?

TO BE CLEAR because this is the piss on the poor website: transphobia is bad. This is a critique of Veilguard's bizarre approach to in-world politics

[zoya-nazyalenskys]

this might sound insensitive but taash is currently my biggest disappointment of the companions because there is literally nothing to their story other than the gender identity

[mist-the-wannabe-linguist]

Girl help why is a fantasy setting using modern American gender terminology

They could've already bounced off of the existing term aqun-athlok and show the gender culture of the North largely adopting Qunari concepts as part of cultural exchange resulting from the literal hundreds of years of war with the Qun. The only openly transgender characters we know of are from Tevinter anyway! They already wanted to show the Qun in a more positive light in Veilguard, having Thedosian queer culture be primarily influenced by the Qun would be a great way to do exactly that

[creaking-skull]

if da had loved me we’d see college’s factions between different groups of mages (redcliffe group, vivienne’s group, other groups) but ill discuss it with myself forever as always

[kuraiummei]

Play Veilguard.

Give it a chance. I swear to fuck and back there's some incredibly innovative RPG design elements in it that will impress you, and ALSO the way they handled gender issues was so great. I cannot understate how good they did with these issues, which everyone else is afraid to even address. You can be joyfully trans, skittishly nb, various combinations, or you can even express discomfort with the subject and avoid it. The overall interpersonal writing with companions really has its moments.

There are parts of the story that are seriously good! Mostly, they dropped the ball on the faction quests. Bland or heavy handed writing that stands out next to the moments of spice. They shyed away from some of the most awful parts of Thedas, and that was a mistake too. They toned the racism down too far, and hid from the Templar-Mage issues entirely. These things should have been there, to stand as fictional examples of real world issues gone to their extremes. However, all in all, it's a visually beautiful game, with a massive skill tree and combat flexibility, excellent gear system and items. Good puzzles, good voice acting, and fun exploration content.

It's worth your time.

[dragon-age-here]

The MGiT would actually be great for Veilguard because you can just explain Rook’s incredibly sensitivity and awareness of mental health and identity stuff as someone who did go to therapy for years and has the skill set but like, isn’t using it for themself.

Like yes, I have seen 13 papers/wiki articles/youtube discussions on gender identity, do not ask me what that means I cannot tell you, btw have you heard of the wide spectrum of sexuality and gender-

[asharaks]

hope you guys are excited for the next seven weeks of posting😁

[himbopunk]

do you think surgery recovery times are like, faster in fantasy worlds with healers and stuff. cuz you can kinda get it halfway there w magic probably at least if not fully heal it on the spot???

[axiomsend]

Fic writers, tell me about your Modern Girl in Thedas!

[kirkwallguy]

I was surprised they didnt touch on anything transition/hrt related with veilguard either tbh even in like a throwaway codex entry. Considering we got ones about like Taash talking to the shadow dragons/other canonically trans characters about stuff youd think maybe this would be the perfect game to consider addressing it but they never do. Very sad about that

honestly this is one of the reasons i really hate how transness is done in the game and why it feels so hollow. there's no attempt to actually engage with what being queer in thedas would actually look like beyond "i came out, some people were nice and some people weren't but that's life i guess" which is an oversimplified narrative for OUR world let alone a semi-medieval fantasy setting. even a little "i'm lucky i learned creation magic / was good at alchemy / live somewhere where blood magic is legal so i could control my transition" from mae or "i saved up every coin i earned until i could see some backalley healer for surgery" from tarquin would make it feel more like transness actually exists in thedas. i'm very interested in the current trend in mainstream media that sanitises queer experiences to the point that it strips them of anything meaningful, i guess it's a semi-appropriate reaction to the years of exploiting trauma narratives but i selfishly preferred those because it at least felt like there was some form of emotional connection going on there.

[antiivarook]

kiran making small grabby hands at other trans and non binary muses.

[dearansur]

finally got that taash gender dialogue and then the note and yeah.