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secretgamergirl · 2 years

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Just what is it with wiki editors and trans characters?

It’s still June, which means it’s still pride month, which means I’m still updating this blog more often than the usual maybe 3 times a year, and today I’d like to talk to you about some fictional characters who are trans and the weird wiki entries bending over backwards to deny it. And I’m not even playing this game on hard mode here, talking about like the cast of FF6 or something. I’m here to talk about a gal from Final Fight, and a guy from One Piece.

Oh and I guess I’m also talking about Poison. You all know Poison right? She’s pretty commonly referred to as the first trans woman in a video game, specifically Final Fight in 1989. And that little fun fact is... not an actual fact.

Prior to Final Fight, we had Ms. Pac-Man in 1982. While I hesitate to deadname even fictional characters, Ms. Pac-Man began life as Crazy Otto, and had a brief stint going by Super Pac-Man and a couple other monikers before going with just Ms. Pac-Man. I don’t see why she shouldn’t count.

Perhaps you think we shouldn’t count Ms. Pac-Man because to your reasoning, the origins of the game and the character re-design process behind don’t qualify as transitioning? OK then, the next example that comes immediately to mind is Luigi, from Super Mario Bros., in 1993. Who has had a remarkably consistent portrayal as being very very into feminine clothes, acting super girly while wearing them, and quite enjoying this. Doesn’t count because it’s all in supplementary material? No, it’s in multiple games too. Want to argue there was no in-game confirmation prior to the release of Final Fight? That’s really splitting hairs now, particularly when tie-in media got onboard this train quite early on. Perhaps you want to make the argument that Luigi is not trans, but is a cis man who likes to crossdress, perhaps as a sexual fetish? That is a weird argument to make about a character from a series of games aimed at young children but you do you.

How about Metroid, 1986? Samus canonically dresses like a man, uses masculine pronouns, and when that armor comes off we reveal a woman in a low cut leotard ready to start living it up. Who’s also canonically two meters tall, has super broad shoulders, had her biochemistry tweaked as a child... I think I wrote a whole separate post on this once. We still gonna play the “oh that’s all a disguise/misunderstanding” card on that one?

Well, Doki Doki Panic came out in 1987. Birdo (Catherine in Japan) is quite explicitly a trans woman. It’s right there in the manual, and ad campaigns, and really tastelessly referenced in many sources since. What possible justification could anyone use to argue she isn’t trans?

Well, let’s ask Wikipedia.

“ Since the character's North American introduction, Birdo's gender identity has been an issue of discussion and speculation. The Japanese manual for Doki Doki Panic, when translated into English, states her name to be Catherine and as a man who thinks of himself as female, adding that she likes to wear a bow and would rather be called "Cathy." However, in the first edition manual for the North American release of Super Mario Bros. 2, Birdo is referred to by a text block that states "he thinks he is a girl" and would "rather be called 'Birdetta.'" In later printings, mention of Birdo being male was omitted. Mention of this fact is further not included in most later games featuring the character and seems to have been retconned to Birdo always being a female to begin with. In the Japanese version of Super Smash Bros. Melee, Birdo, called Catherine, is described similarly to the original manual, though wanting to be called "Cathy." In Super Smash Bros. Brawl, it is said that Birdo is of "indeterminate gender." Birdo appears in the Wii Japan-only video game Captain Rainbow, which delves into Birdo's gender identity. It specifically depicts her being imprisoned for entering the women's bathroom, and the player is asked to locate proof of her femininity (her vibrator) to get her out. Birdo is often lauded as the first transgender video game character. The character was given a female voice actor in Super Mario Advance, a remake of Super Mario Bros. 2. The Spanish language website for Mario Smash Football while describing Birdo suggests that the character's gender is indeterminate. The European website for Mario Strikers Charged Football refers to Birdo as a male character.”

And later in the same article, we have this whole subsection:

“Gender identity

Birdo has been the subject of discussion relating to her gender identity and has been regarded as transgender. She has become a trans icon due to her gender identity. She has been credited as an early transgender character in video games. The manual excerpt from Super Mario Bros. 2 about Birdo's gender did not receive attention until some time after the game's release. Writer Lorenzo Fantoni suggested that this was because few people read the manual or because no one cared about Birdo's gender at the time. Fantoni also compared the Captain Rainbow scene to the later bathroom debates regarding trans people. Fantoni also suggests that Nintendo does not know what to do with Birdo and that changes to Birdo's character are made to match present-day morals. Author Sam Greer was critical of Birdo's portrayal, stating that her gender had become a "running joke" and was the "subject of much derision and stereotyping." Paste Magazine's Jennifer Unkle criticized Birdo as a caricatured trans person and as an example of Nintendo's poor handling of gender identity in general.

It is speculated by Wired's Chris Kohler that the gender issue was retconned to make her a cisgender female, while video game developer Jennifer Diane Reitz suggests that she may have undergone gender reassignment surgery. Writer Andrew Webster of The Escapist used the history of Birdo in the lead-in to his article, commenting on the changes Nintendo has made to hide Birdo's gender status.”

Weird efforts by wiki editors to try and establish some sort of “ambiguity” or “controversy” here highlighted in bold. Really though, ALL of this text can quite easily be boiled down to just “it used to be that every single mention of this character in any source of any kind felt compelled to include a gross transphobia-informed vulgar 'joke’ about her being trans, but more recently, in North American localizations, they don’t do that as often.”

I wasn’t planning to focus so heavily on Birdo, but wow what a fantastic example of the thinking at play here. Nobody’s trans unless you’re explicit about it. And by explicit about it we mean making gross jokes... and even then the character is only assumed to be trans when we hear that joke, if you go too long without making any, they revert to being cis.

Anyway I’m sure there’s plenty of other examples with other weird excuses not to count them that I’m forgetting. Was Faria out before Final Fight? It’s hard to pin old arcade releases down to a particular month.

How about Final Fight though? Poison isn’t even the first trans character in the game she appears in. Roxy pops in at the tail end of the first level, then again just before Poison, her palette swap. Believe it or not though, there are absolutely people out there who will insist that Poison is trans but Roxy isn’t. I have a lot of building up to do here but have a little tease from the dedicated Street Fighter wiki to get us going...

Before getting into why “it has been speculated” that Roxy is trans, let’s head over to regular wikipedia and see what they have to say about Poison’s “gender history” shall we?

“Originally conceived as a female thug in Final Fight and part of the game's antagonist group, Mad Gear, concerns during the game's development about reactions from North American audiences to fighting women led to the character being re-imagined as a "newhalf". However, that was not considered satisfactory and both Poison and her palette swap Roxy were replaced by the male characters "Billy" and "Sid" and have been for every subsequent North American port of the title on Nintendo consoles and handhelds. After the Final Fight series, she later appeared alongside wrestler Hugo, acting as his manager, with her schemes revolving around finding a tag team partner for him or developing their own wrestling organization. Poison first appeared as a playable character in Final Fight Revenge. She was also to appear in both Capcom Fighting All-Stars and Final Fight: Streetwise; however, the former was canceled and she was omitted from the latter as development progressed. Following those aborted attempts, she ended up appearing as a playable character on Street Fighter X Tekken. She was also added as a playable character to Ultra Street Fighter IV.

The character's potential status as a trans woman, consciously left ambiguous by the developers, has remained a topic of frequent debate by both fans and media alike.”

OK we’re going to be here a while, this is just the first section. Before even getting into the point I was going to make it’s super weird not to mention that she’s a playable character in Street Fighter V, how long ago was this last edited? Anyway, right off the bat, we have perhaps the most oft-repeated lie in video games. Which is even called out as such in the next section here... while repeating it again.

“Conception and history

Poison's first appearance in Final Fight featured her and a palette swap character named Roxy as recurring minor enemies for the player to fight. Named after the band by an unnamed female employee at Capcom, she was designed by Akira Yasuda to contrast against the bigger characters in the game and move about randomly and described as a "cool and rebellious woman". According to the book All About Capcom Head to Head Fighting Games and Final Fight director Akira Nishitani, the characters were originally planned to be cisgender women, but were changed to "newhalfs" (a Japanese slang term for trans women) after the game's release, due to the suggestion that "hitting women was considered rude" in America and the concern that feminist groups would sue. However, concept artwork included in the 2005 compilation Capcom Classics Collection of the pair specifically uses the kana for 'newhalf' (ニューハーフ), contradicting the statement the change occurred post-release. In 2007 Nishitani stated that he supposed the character "could be male", but added it was up to the viewer to decide. He later clarified in a discussion on Twitter that in his personal view Poison was a woman. Yasuda himself commented that as far as her gender, he considers her transgender in North American localizations, but cis in Japan.

A later appearance by Poison as a playable character in Final Fight Revenge, an American-produced 3D fighting game spinoff of Final Fight, portrayed the character in a highly feminine manner and had her romantically interested in Final Fight hero Cody. Commentary about her ending in the game in All About Capcom suggested that the character may have received sex reassignment surgery. The Final Fight-related character profiles featured in Capcom Classics Collection instead allude to her being a cross-dresser, while addressing Roxy as a "she" who dislikes Poison's cross-dressing.

Street Fighter IV's producer Yoshinori Ono, when asked in an interview about Poison's gender, stated: "Let's set the record straight: In North America, Poison is officially a post-op transsexual woman. But in Japan, she simply tucks her business away to look female." He later emphasized it again when asked about what female characters could be included in the game Street Fighter IV, stating that it would be too confusing to include her due to the region-specific gender. However, in a 2011 interview with Electronic Gaming Monthly at the Tokyo Game Show, he stated that Capcom "doesn't have a stance technically", and while they wouldn't give an official answer, felt it was up to the viewer to decide. He added that his intent was to please all fans and that the mystery behind her gender was the core of the character. During the same interview, a Capcom representative further added that they worked closely with GLAAD, an organization concerned with the portrayal of LGBT people in media, to ensure "anything that might be offensive has been very tailored to not be" for Poison's portrayal in Street Fighter X Tekken.”

Where do I begin? Besides shouting a string of profanity and mashing my keyboard while I read all that. Well first of all, I’m fairly certain every woman who has ever worked at Capcom has, in fact, had a name. Also can we have a look at that Final Fight Revenge ending that allegedly hints at her getting bottom surgery?

I don’t even want to diagram the thought process by which one would get from some stock tropey “I bet I could make him like me” to “clearly this alludes to her running off to get surgery performed after this.”

Anyway damn, I haven’t even gotten to the sections on “censorship” and “reception” here, but I don’t want to be here all night. So let’s just say there’s a bunch of quotes from various people about how she’s really hot, half of those add some “I hope that doesn’t make me gay” sort of comment, and we have a couple more rephrasings of the big lie. So... yeah let’s get into that properly.

So... game developers tend to be gross creeps who love dehumanizing jokes about women and queer people in general, “games journalism” has traditionally been the realm of clueless teens quoting each other in circles, paraphrasing press releases, and pasting anything that claims to be a translation of an interview with someone speaking Japanese, said interviews tend to involve flummoxed third party interpreters, and none of these people are particularly likely to know a single damn thing about trans people, let alone what various slurs and terms in languages they don’t speak really imply.

So, first off, there’s nothing at all “mysterious” or “left to the player’s imagination” about the Final Fight girls. They are a pair of trans women who when not busy being brawler enemies or getting folded into the Street Fighter franchise and rounded out are sex workers, specifically catering to the the plausible deniability crowd who can go “hey she totally looked like a hot cis girl when I picked her up” in regards to women they very much know are trans and haven’t had bottom surgery. It’s a pretty common fetish. There has never actually been any ambiguity or deviation on that. It’s spelled out plain as day right on their original designs. Which I have a scan of, right here!

There it is, plain as day. If you can read katakana, and you’re up on your Japanese sex work slang, there’s no ambiguity here. Same term all these developers keep tossing out in interviews. It ends up getting translated in all sorts of awkward ways because an interpreter is going to have to try and clean it up and simplify it, especially back when most of these quotes were pulled (the one from Ono is a bit more explicitly worded) and I’m guessing all the bits of “well in America she’d be considered a woman” stem from our language regarding trans women being a bit better generally, and/or a further weird crack because, well, America is kind of the country all the other country’s trans women come to when they want bottom surgery. Very few people in the world perform it, and we have a shocking percentage plus the best reviewed ones. Now you know.

The whole story about “making them trans in the U.S. to avoid being sued by feminists” is... just self-evidently BS? That’s like, a 10 year old on a playground’s understanding of “feminists” and the concept of a lawsuit. The closest thing to a source on it is a vague second or third hand anecdote passed along a decade after the fact from someone who thought one of them was blonde. Plus when you remove the later embellishment about neither of them being trans before being swapped out for random guys in the SNES release, it’s uh... pretty obviously all just a setup for a gross “trans women aren’t really women” joke. So let’s all stop spreading that around and get an adult to fix wikipedia.

All THAT said, back to the full text of the funniest thing I’ve ever read on a wiki:

“Trivia

Roxy is named after the English rock band Roxy Music. It has been speculated that Roxy is transgender like Poison not only due to the latter's gender history but also because of Roxy being referred to as a "newhalf" (Japanese term for a pre-op transgender person) in her original character concept art, but this has never been confirmed or denied.”

Yes, that’s right. According to the Street Fighter wiki, some people have this wacky theory that Roxy might be trans, just because the artist who first designed her wrote a giant note under the illustration stating “hey this is a trans woman!” And apparently this “has never been confirmed or denied” despite the citation note literally linking to her original concept art. Which, again, could not be more clear on this subject.

You can’t even ask, “what do designers have to do? Spell it out for you!?” because they ACTUALLY DID in this case.

But I’ve got one more for you all. The other day see, someone showed me a recent scan from the manga One Piece, with a very satisfied “well that should finally settle this.”

So... full disclosure here, I haven’t been up to date on what’s going on in One Piece for at least like a decade, and my effort to catch up on the context here ironically just involved me hastily trying to look up what that is with the horns between Luffy and Zoro. I’m not even sure what his name is. But I sure as hell know when I’m looking at some wiki editing weirdo trying to deny a character is trans when I see it.

Like all trans characters with wiki pages, we have a big subsection just labelled “Gender” which does some filibustering about “controversy” Japanese not using gendered third person pronouns (and conveniently ignoring the first person ones) and so on before begrudgingly hitting us with something like this:

“However, certain statements by characters in the manga have continued to create confusion and uncertainty regarding Yamato's gender, particularly regarding Yamato being referred to as Kaidou's son. Yamato has stated that she refers to herself as Kaidou's son due to her desire to adopt Oden's identity, saying "Oden was a man, wasn't he? So I chose to be a man too!" Yamato has also been referred to as Kaidou's son by Kaidou himself as well as the Beasts Pirates; though their reasons for doing so still remain unclear, given their relationship with the real Oden and their reactions to Yamato claiming to be the legendary samurai. This has led to a significant portion of the fanbase believing that, in-universe, characters who know Yamato consider her to be male, and the official VIZ and Funimation translations have taken this approach, with Luffy and the Beasts Pirates referring to Yamato with masculine ("he/him") pronouns.”

I know, I know, us trans people are always itching to claim any character we can as a trans guy, but just because someone unambiguously says 'I am a man' and 'I am this guy's son' and that guy says 'yes, this is my son' and the official translation exclusively uses he/him pronouns, and when visiting the bathhouse he heads to the men's side and nobody bats an eye at that, well that doesn't really mean ANYTHING, necessarily!

For real though, wiki editors are out here admitting to going out of their way to misgender this guy and stubbornly shout that the official localization is wrong. There’s also some grasping at straws involving a trading card, but like... even if the guy writing the manga were to say “oh this character is actually a girl” that wouldn’t trump the fact that he... unambiguously says “I’m a guy, refer to me as a guy, everyone refers to me as a guy, I am living my life as a guy.” Like, that wins. The only way to argue this isn’t a trans character is if you want to go and say he was actually assigned male at birth and we should just ignore the gynecomastia that might have lead to thinking otherwise.

I don’t know what it is about people who edit wikis where they find it so damn hard to admit when a character is trans, but according to the standard they seem to have set, I guess I have to infer that no cis person has ever actually existed in any work of fiction, or indeed in real life! If they did we’d clearly be bombarded with crass jokes about them.

Also for real, for as often as people make [citation needed] jokes, nobody who edits wikipedia seems to know a primary source from a hole in the ground. People seem to just be searching for whatever they just typed, pasting the first hit, and praying nobody thinks to look at any of the footnotes. It is a MESS down there.

#trans #final fight #poison #roxy #no not the five nights at freddy's roxy #actually wait no #ALSO the five nights at freddy's roxy #I'm sick of quoting trans-denialist wiki pages though #one piece #yamato #birdo

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