This all means that my options for medically transitioning into a body I feel more comfortable in are very limited for the foreseeable future.
My effective invisibility makes me feel recognised in the way I want to be.Īs an immigrant my access to healthcare is nebulous at time, compounded to that, Finland is a country known for its human rights violations when it comes to the treatment of transgender people. Other players, even in their silence, are collaborating with my fantasy and joy. My existence in that space, as that body, is implicitly accepted by my in-game friends, random party members and passersby in the busy areas of the game. Most of the time I don’t get anything worse than a few bad looks, but there is always a degree of recognition of my otherness, and my worst experiences still bring me a degree of trauma. The fact that I am in a “public” space, where other people can see me and interact with me, makes my experience more validated than when I play a single player game only I can see.ĭressing up in a gender nonconforming way in the meatspace is a mixed experience for me, there is joy in expressing myself as I want, but there is also fear. While I have played as different genders and gender nonconforming characters in other games, the multiplayer nature of an online game turns it into a uniquely different experience.
Like the writer, my character is also a bit of a scholar in her free time. The most recent character option added is the masculine variant of the Viera race, a humanoid race which until then was composed mostly of tall women with tall bunny ears. While there are only two genders available for the player characters, most outfits can be worn by the different body types. Effectively a magical cat girl.įinal Fantasy XIV offered many character customization options, different races and hair colors. For my character in Final Fantasy XIV, I decided to go with a white mage woman Miqo’te, a race of humanoids with some cat-like physical features. Even before I understood my gender identity the way I do today, I always preferred to play characters from a different gender than the one I was assigned at birth. You see, I am a non-binary transgender person, and for me character creation in videogames has always been an important part of the experience in every game that allows it. Little did I know that the multiplayer aspect would be part of why I felt even more immersed into the Final Fantasy 14’s world of Eorzea.Īs soon as I started, I got caught up in the intricate character creation system.
Part of why I enjoyed the other games in the series is how they offer complex fantasy worlds for me to get lost in, on my own time, without having to share it and worry about other people. I have been a long time fan of the series, and had been considering the game for some time, but was put off by the MMO aspect of the game. I started playing Final Fantasy XIV during the pandemic.
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