I found this article from WoW Insider Today emphasizes on how a tansgender player is being insulted by other players and even from his guild members. I think it is an interesting article because it is completely opposite of the Uru game society, where people create strong bonds among the members and support one another, whereas in WoW, players insult another player for being a transgender.
Excerpt from WoW Insider today, "A transgender World of Warcraft player writes in asking for some advice about raiding while being bullied. The player, nicknamed “Gender Reroller”, experiences constant exposure to transphobic language and isn’t sure how to be themself without suffering through the pain of being insulted. The author of the blog post, Robin Torres, has done a good job weighing in the pros and cons of Gender Reroller’s choices within the game."
And here is a message from a player.
Hello Drama Mamas,
I've been playing WoW for about a year and a half now. While I've always been a member of some minority groups (I have a few disabilities, for example) and have always had a problem with the pro-bullying majority environment on WoW, the problem kind of got a bit worse for me about six months into that time when I joined the most maligned group yet and came out as transgender. I really enjoy the game and I'm in a guild that handles this (and many other) things about me quite expertly, but the backlash I get in pickup raids mostly because of Vent (which is how quite a few people on my very small server know my trans status), has me seriously considering quitting the game or at least quitting raiding, which is my favorite part of the game.
I've been playing WoW for about a year and a half now. While I've always been a member of some minority groups (I have a few disabilities, for example) and have always had a problem with the pro-bullying majority environment on WoW, the problem kind of got a bit worse for me about six months into that time when I joined the most maligned group yet and came out as transgender. I really enjoy the game and I'm in a guild that handles this (and many other) things about me quite expertly, but the backlash I get in pickup raids mostly because of Vent (which is how quite a few people on my very small server know my trans status), has me seriously considering quitting the game or at least quitting raiding, which is my favorite part of the game.
The frustrating thing is that WoW was originally an escape for me, where I could function as preferred-gender much more easily than I did in the real world. But ironically the reverse is now true. I'm pretty much done with the process outside of WoW and yet because of rumor creep, a huge amount of people in the game know about me, and even my guildies have trouble with pronouns because my voice hasn't sounded preferred-gender for incredibly long.
To top it off, I'm kind of interested in getting into some more hardcore raiding, but on my server the three hardcore guilds in existence are full of transphobic comments and all sorts of other crap. If I were personally being harassed it would be almost easier because there'd be a clear path to solving it. But it's like a server-wide bucket of crap that's making me think I just want to change servers and not tell anyone in my new guild, preferably to a place where hardcore mature guilds exist and there's a lot of people. Am I letting people get to me when I could just fix the situation, or is this a good idea?
Gender Reroller
Here are the links to the articles.
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