So I'm a cis-norm male, and I realized that all the D&D characters I've ever played were also cis-norm male. And in roleplaying games, you have this unique opportunity to play a person completely different from you in so many ways, but in this way I've been unable to step outside this one characteristic. I've never personally been interested in playing a female character. Not because I didn't think it would be interesting or fun, but because I didn't think I could really pull it off. And this also got me thinking about other people I've gamed with. In my experience when men play as women, they play up the seductress part (perhaps part of the male fantasy of how women should be?), or have some sexual trauma in their character's history that defines them as man hating violence mongers. In a sense, the aspect of playing female becomes an incredibly central aspect of the character who is more cartoon than a flesh-out character. Perhaps this is my own bias coming out, but this is one of the reasons that I never wanted to run a female character, because I didn't really feel I could avoid this pitfall.
On the other hand, I can totally understand a person (regardless of gender or gender identity) playing a male character, since it allows them to explore issues of power, status, and all sorts of other things that don't inherently connect with being male, but is one of the privileges of being male. Additionally, being a therapist and working with adolescents, I can see people playing cross gender as a way to explore their own gender identity.
These were just some thoughts I was having in response to one of my players proposing the character they were thinking of running. Has anyone here had an experience of playing someone of a different gender identity? What was it like and how did you play that character?
Trans woman player here.
Character I currently play is female. Last character in last campaign was a dude(while I still identified as trans, but not as openly so - mostly I just had an idea for a character I wanted to run with). My next character will be female too, though maybe trans(which will largely be incidental, other than having an excuse for why she can drop her voice as part of disguises, lol) and a little more genderqueer than myself.
What's interesting is the character I currently play is sort of a mix of exaggerated feminine tropes - she's a Courtesan, Diva-ish type but also Disney Princess-ish. Basically she's more of a drag queen than I ever could be, lol. It'd be pretty hard and potentially insulting for a (cis het) guy to play a character like that. Some of the lewd jokes(while I try to keep it to a minimum most of the time, as it's not that sort of game) would be particularly jarring for someone who's not a woman(and has no experience of sex work/sex worker culture - as a brief stint as a camgirl and having experienced some pretty nasty slutshaming as a result, along with engaging in a lot of SW activism, I am in a place where certain words are a bit more mine to reclaim). I suppose you could get into the territory of "Is drag offensive?"(personally I don't regard it as such, depending, a lot of young white trans people don't know their history that well & there isn't always a clear separation) but I think that they're two very different forms of performance, that sort of stage entertainment relies heavily on a over the top persona whereas PCs while often comically exaggerated in some ways tend to be more intimate and complex as they need to function in a variety of different situations with different people.
Ellie was never really a seductress type as such, though since she's supposed to be a Leanan Sídhe(mechanically Eladrin with a lot of charm & enabling magic) a degree of that is inherent to the character. I play the Courtesan thing as an extension of that rather than the other way around though, she's sort of the quirky fairy that whisks you away to another world, has that inherent kind of excitable charisma and works outward from that, as opposed to being traditionally seductive(though I do imagine a lot of her outfits being pretty cleavage-heavy) so just relies on people finding her fascinating or attractive and cute as she is. She has slept with a number of NPCs, but got incredibly nervous around a character she was actually interested in(it worked out in the end, thanks GM!).
I think stuff like that can help diffuse a stereotype. Make a character that isn't straightforward, and even if they embody a trope or some tropes find a way to have them play off each other, or throw in some endearing(or not so endearing) character flaws.
As for the exploring one's identity thing - interestingly enough my current character saw me all the way through transition more or less(from first actually helpful therapist apt. to being 3 years on HRT) so that was an interesting experience, but I was already pretty sure of who I was. What was sucky is that back in my old college there used to be a ban on dudes playing lesbians. Their reasoning was that, basically when dudes do that they just play them like dudes(they probably added something offensively cisnormative like "with
"). I can on one level sort of understand this issue, but it's strange they never considered the pitfalls mentioned by the OP. It also sucked for me as someone who identified as - guess what a - a woman largely attracted to other women.
