The Game That First Allowed Me to Explore Gender: ‘Pokemon Crystal’

It’s Transgender Awareness Week, a time of much reflection, celebration, indignation, and sorrow. As I’ve scrolled online, my emotions have stirred, but I have been struck by a surprising pattern: the Pokemon community seems to be overwhelmingly trans positive. 

I am not steeped in the fandom, as the last mainline Pokemon title I played was the third generation with Ruby and Sapphire. But scrolling through the #TransAwarenessWeek hashtag, Pokemon fans seem to be celebrating the trans community, offering resources and support, and producing some incredible (usually Sylveon) fan art. This refreshing treatment of trans people caused me to reflect on one of my earliest and most beloved gaming memories: playing Pokemon Crystal.

Growing up under a single parent household where my mother worked three jobs to keep bills at bay, I never expected much in the way of video games. Christmas and birthday money were the two rare outlets where I was able to obtain new games, so I absolutely cherished and exhausted each one. It was a miracle when my aunt and uncle surprised me with their GameBoy Color, and I brought the handheld everywhere. The first game I picked out for myself was Pokemon Crystal, and my life was never the same.

The nature of Pokemon games is to afford some player choice and enable replayability, at least in terms of the party of Pokemon you use in battle. With a thick Prima strategy guide in hand, I tore through this game from start to finish at least 40 times, with no exaggeration. To this day, I still can remember where invisible items are placed, if that illustrates my complete rinsing of Crystal. 

Are You A Boy? Or Are You A Girl?

In replaying Pokemon Crystal so often, I frequently had to answer the question, “Are you a boy? Or are you a girl?” Perhaps the gender conscious among us will roll our eyes at the question, but as a child, it was the first time that being a girl was presented as a legitimate option, where it wasn’t a sexualized or belittled portrayal. It was the first chance I had to transgress gender without reprimand. I could be a girl and even the game wouldn’t ridicule me for it. There was initial hesitation, sure, but I chose “girl,” despite being raised as a boy. I made this choice dozens of times.

At the time, I couldn’t speak to why I chose to play Pokemon Crystal as a girl, nor could I explain why I dressed up in my mother’s clothes and raided her childhood Barbie toys in her closet. And, like all such inexplicable childhood memories, perhaps this only feels like an obvious “sign” in hindsight. But when presented with the option, I secretly thought it was really cool that I could play as a girl when all of my friends, who happened to own the Silver and Gold editions of the game, could not.

So many of these gender exploring memories had a cover story that I frantically told anyone who’d ask. If questioned, I was playing as a girl because I liked her sprite more, or I thought she was cute, or I had a better version of the game so I was taking advantage of all the things that are different, and so on. There always had to be some kind of rationalized motive in my back pocket, lest the queerphobic remarks creep in. 

It didn’t honestly occur to me that I was trans or even explicitly exploring my gender when I was playing Pokemon Crystal. But from Crystal on, I have always chosen to play as women when presented with the option. At various points in my early adulthood, I framed this decision to others as a feminist act of recognizing and celebrating diverse representation in media. But in my heart of hearts, playing as a woman is a heated blanket of comfort in a world of relentlessly masculine characters. The good news is that, as many of you know, two games in 2020 cracked my egg and I couldn’t meaningfully live in the closet any longer. 

Thus, I credit Pokemon Crystal with giving me one of the first safe spaces in my life to exist outside of the gender to which I was assigned at birth. It’s a safe space where I could return for meaningful challenge like the infamous Nuzlocke runs. I wouldn’t call it revolutionary, but I will always feel a certain endearment to Crystal because of the quiet freedom to explore gender, however consciously. 

My thanks to the Pokemon community for being the loudest fandom in my online spaces to echo a sentiment that direly needs to be heard in these times: trans people are human beings deserving of empathy, solidarity, and autonomy. The rights of trans people must be protected. And we should believe children when they tell us who they are. The most vulnerable people in our societies warrant our acknowledgement, respect, and support.

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