How Two Video Games Helped Me Come Out As Transgender

Within the past few months, I shared two video games publicly with my Twitch viewers, Tell Me Why and If Found…, that allowed me to finally articulate my complicated internal relationship with gender. And in October of this year, I came out as trans to my mother, to a small group of friends, and then eventually to the Epilogue community. I deeply appreciate these games for facilitating my courage to have those conversations publicly online, and I want to use those games to help explain how I ended up becoming comfortable coming out as a trans woman. 

For 27 years of my life, I presented myself as a cisgendered male who had never had reason to doubt his gender. Until this past year, as far as anyone else was concerned, this was as boring a fact about me as my hair color. I remember a distinct moment in 2015 when I was staying at a hostel in Chengdu, China, where I first questioned myself in a discussion with some college students who identified as non-binary, verbally admitting to them that I was trans but scared to embody that identity when I returned home to America. 

Though I have wrestled internally with gender identity for over five years, it wasn’t until winter of 2019 when I started accepting myself at all.  It took another year to get to the point of writing this. 

Because of this secret identity that I have known about myself for some time, I was immediately drawn to Tell Me Why and If Found…, two games featuring trans protagonists, for obvious reasons: transgender protagonists don’t traditionally exist within mainstream gaming spaces. In retrospect, I think I was subconsciously using these games to test the waters with my friends and gauge their responses to trans narratives but didn’t even want to give myself that permission at the time. And with less than a handful of exceptions, no one in the Epilogue community knew about my internal feelings at this point. So in eagerly playing these games, I had the easy pretense of being a trans ally without the pressure to discuss my still-hidden gender openly. 

I played Tell Me Why first and, despite my pretense of allyship, I ended up nearly breaking down at the end of the game. The amount of empathy I felt for Tyler, a trans man, was overwhelming and I couldn’t simply end the stream when the credits rolled. I realized in that moment that I needed to talk to somebody – anybody – about how this game made me feel.

With Tell Me Why, I knew I would adore the experience because of the storytelling pedigree of several DontNod games, many of which I have written about in the past. A lot of the coverage leading up to the game highlighted how the writers had gone out of their way to consult with LGBT+ organizations to make sure they wrote a respectful and accurate story representing the trans experience. Too often in the media, the trans experience is presented with slurs, degradation, and characters being tricked for crude humor. Very rarely are their stories treated with dignity. 

I don’t want to say with certainty that DontNod got everything right with Tell Me Why. There are some concerns throughout the game that occasionally wash over the ease of access that Tyler has to transitioning and passing, amongst other things that might end up being too glossy for some players. And there are some valid critiques about pacing and character development, as well as gameplay interactions. But overall, I think this game was made with sincere intent to tell a meaningful story that served as a resource for both trans people and allies to explore a trans character in a big budget title. That’s meaningful enough – and unfortunately, unique enough – for me to forgive these issues. 

Tell Me Why’s characters are meaningful and feel human. The relationship between Tyler Ronan and his twin sister, Alyson, is complicated and rocky, but not for scapegoating reasons of gender. Their relationship is messy but well-intentioned just like many siblings who have differing personalities. The Ronan twins’ relationship to the Alaskan town of Delos Crossing is also quaint with a nostalgic feeling as they reconnect and reforge their relationship to their childhood home and the people who remember them. More importantly, they finally come to terms with who their mother was and how she treated them as children.

At the end of Tell Me Why, I ended up extemporaneously spewing ideas about myself and how meaningful the game was to me. With honest and candid words, I said that I really wished that Tell Me Why existed when I was growing up. It would have been beloved by me and served as a model and resource to help explore myself. Tell Me Why presents gender identity and sexuality almost nonchalantly at times in the way its characters treat its protagonist, which is such a breath of fresh air for games – and media in general. Unlike its many peers in varying media, Tell Me Why doesn’t scapegoat its subject matter.

Growing up, nothing in the media I consumed made me feel like I was normal for feeling this way about gender identity and expression. Tell Me Why‘s representation is remarkable to me especially because I grew up in a place where slurs were the default terms for people of those identities. These fleeting feelings and thoughts were automatically repressed out of fear. It took me well into my adulthood to feel that it was okay, or at least “not weird,” to deviate anything pre-assigned about my identity. Now that it exists, I hope Tell Me Why helps young people come to terms with themselves and accept themselves for who they are. 

While expounding upon the fact that I wish Tell Me Why existed for me as a kid, I suddenly felt like I needed to add context, which led to me bashfully rambling about how gender is complicated and I didn’t really know how I felt. (I did.) Again, I am deeply lucky that the people who make up the Epilogue community are accepting and kind. With that knowledge in mind, I wagered out a tiny little part of myself: I might not know how I felt about expressing my gender, but, at the very least, I identified as genderfluid. 

It was a disarming thing to admit out loud – even if a partial truth – something I had never spoken about apart from one or two people in extremely private and usually uncomfortable contexts. And while confessing it felt vulnerable, fragile, and a little scary, what also came about was relief. Just a physical sigh like when you drop an overly-stuffed backpack after a long hike. Though I have always felt some degree of dissonance with expected cultural expressions of masculinity, I didn’t realize the degree to which my true gender identity and its lack of expression was a discomforting burden. 

The waves of encouragement and adorable Twitch pride emotes when I first let it out was beyond what I could have expected. Several people followed up after my stream to congratulate me, ask about my pronouns, etc. Again, I am very lucky, but I wasn’t fully out yet. But Tell Me Why was my first real step towards coming out. 

A few weeks passed, and in that time, I finally switched my pronouns from he/him to they/them. Publicly casting off my previous identity and adopting something that allowed for a more complicated but closer-to-the-truth relationship with gender felt affirming in a way that no amount of encouraging words could match – though those are always deeply appreciated as well. 

I knew I was trans far before my time with Tell Me Why, but for many unfortunate reasons in my personal life, coming out in many spaces like work and family felt (and feels) like a death sentence. I live in a place in the United States where there are virtually no legal protections for trans people from housing to healthcare. I risk alienating myself from my colleagues and being shunted out on a pretense if I come out at work. And as much as I wish those were the limits to my anxieties about coming out in every circle of my life, the list unfortunately goes on. That fear of real life consequences to my career or my relationships kept me locked tight, even in trusted circles, unwilling to push my identity any further than the therapeutic conversations my trusted few friends could provide. 

Then came If Found… (I will henceforth drop the ellipsis off the game’s title), a captivating game by Dreamfeel, published by Annapurna “bangers only” Interactive. I purchased the game on launch day, but for various reasons never got around to it until one weekend when I was feeling in need of an emotional cleanse. And what a tsunami of emotions If Found provided. I cried twice during the two-hour runtime of the game: once from sadness and despair, again from joy and hope. 

If Found is the story of a young trans woman named Kasio, who returns home from university to her small hometown in Ireland. The story notably takes place in the early 1990s, around when I was born, a time marked by an even more fraught understanding of gender than today. The game’s primary mechanic is erasure, using a literal eraser to wipe clean the pages of a notebook filled with memories and thoughts from Kasio’s life. By erasing, we get to the heart of her identity and her defining relationships as she balances parental rejection with open-minded and accepting-but-flawed queer friends. 

If Found is a profound artistic experience with a vibrant and expressive hand-drawn art style that is sometimes intentionally messy and aggressive but always beautiful. Every single page, every single erasure, left me in awe of the pure love exhibited towards its characters and design. The welcomingly suffocating atmosphere was like a fever dream that transported me through time and space towards an attempt (and simultaneous refusal) to define and therefore understand oneself. I cannot overstate the beauty and entrancement that overwhelmed me during my first experience with If Found. 

One of the biggest affecting moments for me in If Found was a moment when Kasio reads a letter from her mother. For context, I was raised by a single mother. My father abandoned her when she was pregnant and she had to raise me by herself. I have the deepest love and respect for my mother, whose beliefs rarely align with my own, and I was terrified of telling her anything about my real gender. I wanted to keep it locked tight because I knew it would let her down and confuse her and make her spiral into self-doubt and self-blame, something she has clumsily displayed since I came out to her – even as she visibly attempts to conceal those feelings.

The letter from Kasio’s mom reads:

I’ve heard things. I understand you’re not who I thought you were, but I can’t believe it. This seems so sudden. There were no signs. You never told me you were unhappy. I’m sorry if all of this is my fault. I must have raised you wrong. People do say it’s bad for your child to be tied to your apron, but I just cared so much for you pet.

I must have raised you wrong. This sentence hit me like a truck, flattening me across the pavement.

I choose to read in-game text out loud when I stream and, in this instance, I felt my throat constrict as I choked up under the weight of the emotion. I had to stop reading as tears escaped my face. I related to this moment more deeply than I can attempt to describe; it was a deep-seated fear of mine, coming out to my mom and her being self-flagellating and apologetic – emotionally devastated – for me being honest with who I was.

When I read those words, again and again, I don’t hear, “I must have raised you wrong.” I hear, “If you are trans, then you are wrong. I made a mistake or you would otherwise be normal. I wish I hadn’t been the reason that you’re making this mistake.” Maybe that’s an unfair extrapolation, but that’s the emotional impact of the unintended condescension in suggesting that someone’s identity is “wrong.”

After the hundreds or thousands of hours that I have thought about this issue regarding my gender, I repudiate anyone suggesting that this uncomfortable and difficult decision to make it public might be a mistake – the demeaning implication that I might be incorrect about my identity and expression. When I went back to this part of the game to make sure I had the quote right, I got choked up again. No tears fell this time, luckily. 

The letter from Kasio’s mother continues:

It’s okay if you like men or dress funny or whatever it is. The world is changing. I won’t get mad. Not on Christmas. But I’m worried about you, that’s all. You’re making life difficult for yourself! I just don’t know where you’ll end up. And if you could keep it quiet, sure what you do on your own time is your own business. No one else should mind!

There is more to Kasio’s letter, but everything that emotionally bothers me is present in these remains of her letter. Set aside the problematic suggestion that becoming a trans woman automatically means that you are attracted to men, which I am not, or that changing the way your clothing presents your gender is “funny,” which it isn’t. In this letter is a kind-hearted but ultimately frustrating attempt for Kasio’s mother to express love. It is abundantly clear that she doesn’t know how, but the fact that she tries is almost beautiful. Almost. 

The worry that bleeds through Kasio’s mother reminds me of my own. The worry becomes annoying when her mother points out that Kasio is making her life more difficult by changing genders – something patently obvious to anyone like myself who has feared coming out at all. I hear my mom’s voice as she warily asks if I’ll be wearing makeup or a dress outside of the house or not. She worries not for my sake, nor does Kasio’s mother for her daughter, but for the fear of word spreading about the “mistake” of this transgender child to people she socially cares about. My heart aches when I read Kasio’s mother’s words because it just misses the mark. It is meant to be kind and yet it is still hurtful because it is veiledly selfish.

It would be so easy to become resentful of someone who doesn’t understand why I “suddenly” came out as trans, because this is such a personal and intimate issue that I have grappled with in the way that I have grappled between faith and atheism throughout my life. When I played If Found, it hurt to see Kasio dismissed and outcast by the person who should have loved her most. Her mother’s urgency to “keep it quiet,” the constant worry, and the idea that gender is ever just one’s “own business” is infuriating because it means that her view of Kasio’s gender is some sort of private playtime when it’s so much deeper than that. It betrays a person who has never had to hide herself from the world before, someone who is trying to reconcile her own dissonant worldview with her daughter’s own emergent self-perspective.

But the reason If Found is a remarkable piece of art isn’t just because it accurately mirrors my own worries and concerns about how people will react and treat me when they see me embody the gender expression that I have preferred for years. If Found transcends that personal domain once more towards the end of the game, in a joyful moment, one that I did not expect but cosmically blasted me with optimism and encouragement. 

Kasio is in a bad rut. Things are not looking well for her relationships, her living space, and in the depth of winter, her health. Many people are concerned about her but Kasio has effectively self-isolated and cut herself off from all her (now severed) support lines, squatting in an abandoned house.

In a moment of desperation, Kasio’s mother finally reunites with her. And after an abundance of hurtful interactions leading up to this moment, not to mention the aforementioned passages of her mother’s letter described above, there is a moment of beauty. All of the following words are spoken by Kasio’s mother in tiny, uninterrupted, reassuring bursts as she cradles her weak daughter:

Everything’s okay.
Your mammy’s here now love.
You poor thing, you’re burning up.
I’ve got you dear.
It’s okay, everything will be okay.
I’ve got you Kasio.

And then I cried again. This is the first moment in the entire game where her mother has called Kasio by her chosen name. At the moment of this writing, I don’t particularly feel a need to change my birth name, but this wasn’t a moment about my personal journey as a trans person. This was a moment about a mother finally putting aside her stubborn preconceptions, judgments, and worries for the higher purpose of loving her child for who she is, not who she was expected to be. 

This moment made me burst into tears because that acceptance came at a price for Kasio. She had to be half-dead with a fever before her mother was willing to discard those resistant and resentful feelings. Seeing how much it took for this mother – and many parents are far worse – to overcome herself and her ego to literally save her child’s life, whose life was only at risk because of her obstinate orthodoxy towards gender, completely broke me apart emotionally. It’s a moment that I had ached for countless times in my life but could never reach because I was terrified of the pain it would take to get there, if ever at all. 

I didn’t finish If Found by coming out further from genderfluid to trans. That took a few extra weeks. But the way that the conversation had grown from Tell Me Why to If Found cemented the conviction that at least my core group of friends in the Epilogue community would be supportive of me if I was properly honest with them about myself. And in order to be honest with them, I needed my mother, who is aware of my Twitch stream and games writing, not to be taken by surprise if she somehow found out without my consent. I never would have finally moved beyond where Tell Me Why had gotten me if If Found hadn’t twisted the knife in my gut. I needed those final moments of emotional breakdown to see how deeply similar my situation was to Kasio’s. 

Gender is a mess for me, at this point in my life reminding me of Rumsfeld’s wisdom: three concentric circles of (1) the known, (2) the known unknowns, and (3) the unknown unknowns. The nearly unlimited modes of gender expression make me realize how large that third outer ring of unknown unknowns truly is. I am not presenting myself fully feminine all the time for aforementioned reasons, but within a few days of coming out, I decided to stream with a trans flag posted behind me on the wall while I wore one of my favorite dresses and matching lipstick. My emotional ratio during this stream was approximately 20% awkward to 80% lighthearted, and nearly everyone – including new people outside of the community – was cool about it. 

One of the key themes that didn’t emotionally impact me at first while streaming If Found, but that struck me in revisiting the game for this writing, was the idea that Shans, a key character whose presence ultimately rends apart their friend group, suggests the two of them move to Dublin where they can be themselves. The word Shans uses that stuck with me was that they wouldn’t have to “pretend” anymore. That’s the verbiage that I struggled to articulate when I was (and oftentimes still am) trying to ignore and repress the thoughts and feelings throughout my life that led to my inevitable writing of this article. These games helped me realize that pretending is a source of misery, and that living the truth may bring hardship but (hopefully) long-term meaning that would otherwise be absent in a life that denied an honest examination and performance of gender. 

Streaming while presenting a gender that people who have known me didn’t expect was an interesting experiment in and of itself. I didn’t warn anybody or communicate that I would be dressing or looking a different way. I just did it because, though I didn’t have the “Kasio” moment, I was finally out to the person I was worried about the most – like Kasio, my mother – and she didn’t reject or ridicule me for it. By the time this article publishes, well over a month after I initially wrote it, this feeling of dressing up and applying makeup for fun has become comfortable when streaming.

Though my streaming friends have been entirely supportive, things started off as accepting with my mother but some resentments soon came out. One night, I had to console her because she finally realized that the thousand times I told her I never wanted children was rooted in something deeper than selfishness. She was grieving for how long she had clung to that vain wish to be a grandmother – despite my insistence. Balancing the implied blame of my decision to embody my identity with the need to emotionally console her confusion and sadness was deeply dissonant. 

Every time my mother acknowledges that she has seen me wearing something coded as feminine, I feel the briefest shrinking feeling, like I’m being swallowed into a black hole within myself, because I recognize that I am being seen as two things at once: the former male identity that was her personal project for nearly two decades, as well as the currently modified version that I have decided more accurately represents who I truly am. I still find myself shrinking from those default expectations on a weekly basis, hoping that my preferred gender will be accepted as I move forward with my chosen expression. 

I have had to continually explain basic definitions and distinctions between gender identity, gender expression, and sexuality with the hopes that my mother will one day understand. None of these interactions cause me to resent her, but they are always exhausting to endure. Every conversation is tinted with concern, ignorance and timidness from her, but I know she is trying, even if it feels like she is getting nowhere through her efforts. At least she is trying to understand. 

Coming out on stream and presenting my appearance in ways that I prefer, on the other hand, has felt liberating because it hasn’t changed my relationship to anyone involved, or at least I haven’t felt that way when playing games with friends. I ended that first stream in a call with my usual friends playing Fall Guys as if nothing had changed; since then, the only difference is that I feel more in alignment with myself. 

Most people who don’t know me online will never see this part of my identity – a frustrating inconsistency, which is one of the reasons that they/them pronouns are more comfortable than she/her pronouns when presenting myself to most people. It’s a regrettable and (hopefully) temporary compromise, but it gives me a middle ground of stability between the ubiquitous “he/him” onslaught of my relentlessly gendered profession and the kind and considerate people in my personal life who go out of their way to make sure they address me in my preferred ways.

In trusted circles, I plan to continue experimenting with how I express my gender because I finally don’t feel ashamed or embarrassed at myself for doing so. And maybe one day I won’t feel like an impostor when I use she/her pronouns, words that fit like an oversized jacket but are comforting nonetheless. I don’t think I could have gotten to the point of writing these honest words, and certainly never sharing them this openly, without these two video games that I’ve described.

I can’t say with certainty that Tell Me Why or If Found did anything to substantially change how I thought about my own gender. What they did do, however, was make me feel that I was not alone, that I could find a community of supportive people who would care about me regardless of how I presented myself. They gave me opportunities to talk about these issues as I explored these games’ themes and characters. And these games have motivated me to continue pushing the comfort zone that others have established for me, in exchange for a deeper and more fulfilling relationship to myself as I establish a new comfort zone of my own for the first time.

One of the final acts in If Found is a Picrew-esque character creator, where having seen Kasio’s story through, you are given agency over her appearance. Throughout the game, Kasio’s character is often delicately sketched with details just vague enough to leave room for abstract interpretation but precise enough to successfully convey important emotions. I think this ending character creator is a brilliant decision in terms of cementing the player’s imagined Kasio at the story’s end. 

After all this erasure, the game provided me with a pencil to create. All the turbulent emotions If Found created in me were able to be pinned down as I was given control of who my Kasio would become visually, modelling her after a version of how I imagine myself. Selecting the trans pride flag as her background was such a beautiful and intimate moment of affirmation that I have since adopted this image of Kasio as my default profile picture in my gaming spaces. It was the reason I purchased a trans pride flag to hang on my wall, a reminder of this feeling that If Found left me with.

Coming out has not been a lightswitch, though I wish it was. To borrow from Judith Butler, gender is a performance, and I am learning how to practice it more effectively every day now that I have finally given myself permission to stop pretending otherwise. Though my situation is not perfect or ideal, I am finally at peace with this part of myself. My hope is that this article gives someone else permission to finally express themselves however they choose to without judging themselves as harshly and repressively as I have over the majority of my life. 

I am deeply grateful to the creators of Tell Me Why and If Found for producing experiences that helped me feel like I wouldn’t be a burden to other people if I acknowledged my true self to them. This would have been a tougher and longer, more isolated journey without these works of art guiding and encouraging me along. Both games succeed tremendously at creating empathy towards their respective protagonists, Tyler and Kasio. There will be many more steps in my journey into accepting myself as trans. In those moments, I will look back at these two games and still recognize them as significant starting points for me.

While I haven’t written this article expecting that people will better understand me, it was necessary that I wrote and shared these thoughts publicly. Apart from my experience, I hope I have made it abundantly clear that these two games are essential to play if you care at all about generally understanding the experience of transgender people more complexly. 

Tell Me Why and If Found cannot be comprehensive games to all trans experiences but they are some of the most successful gaming narratives I have ever encountered. I hope that they serve to inspire more well-known gaming companies – particularly well-established publishers with substantial budgets – to produce meaningful and dignified portrayals of gender identity from developers who understand and believe in the value of the experiences of trans people. 

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