I'm playing a girl in a Fate fantasy game at the moment. It's just me and another player (the GM - a guy).

When I recently ran a TSOY campaign, both players, my wife and a female friend of ours, played male characters. One of the PCs (not my wifes) became quite involved with a female NPC played by me, and though we never took it to a sexual level, a lot of romantic conflicts got played out.

There was no discomfort whatsoever.

In tabletop, I almost always gender bend (about 75%? Something like that.). Why? Probably because most characters I come up with quickly end up being female, and for obvious reasons I want to play the characters as I've concieved them.

In LARPs, I tend not to, because costuming and such tends to be a bit tough (exception: Kat Millers LARP at Dexcon. But that game didn't have costuming so, well, no problem).

I never play male characters if I can help it. I more often than not have played in groups where the majority of players and the majority of characters have been male, and in the interest of seeing my gender represented in the game, I've played female characters. I also like the idea that in a game I can have the women I play do things they wouldn't necessarily get the chance to do in real life.

I've played female characters.
Sex hasn't happened yet, not onscreen. I'm not gonna put it there.

I hesitate to ask Vax, but which ST MUSH? (I can't whisper, or I would... =P)

Okay, some general questions:

Joshua BishopTutakamenRoby -- Why don't you play female characters in table top? You talked about the "dissonance" thing, but is that all there is? Is it your dissonance, theirs, both? How much of this lines up with Nancy's statement that the folks at the table wouldn't buy her as a guy?

How would you feel if you were playing with your wife, Mo, and I (me as GM) and we decided we wanted an all female PC group. In that context how comfortable would you be playing a girl? How comfortable if it was me, you, Lem, and your brother?

Jess, I like that answer, very strongly and elegantly said. What, just to be difficult, would make you unable to help it? Have you ever felt preasured to play a male character?

Shreyas, does sex happen onscreen when you play male characters? What about romance? Any differences there?

Anders, rock on. Do you think it would have changed if sex had been involved? Do you ever have sex in your games, or is it more or less limited to romance?

Fred, GM? Tell me more of this GM! What was his problem? How did he deal with it? How did you deal with that?

Rafial (sorry, can't remember your real name ATM), that is an awesome Cyberpunk story. While you were pushing your boundaries, how did the others at the table deal with it? How much OOC talk was there about it? Between you and other players? You and the GM? If your GM had actually been gay, or a girl, or a space alien without gender, would it have changed anything?

Also, why were the GMs so hot to have female characters in the group? Most of my early D&D days no one even thought about having girls in the group until we got female players. Being as this was the early 80s and Texas, at that point we just assumed they'd play girls. So what was going on in your group that lead to the desire? What kind of plots did they give you? How did the others in the game respond to it?

Joshua K, excellent descriptions. Do you know of other guys who are willing to play girls in LARP? Cross dress to do it? You said that costuming can be a pain -- how far in to that are you willing to talk about?

Len. Excellent responses. Have you always played in mixed orientation games, or has that changed over your time gaming? I know that I used to play with a lot of straight white Mormon boys, and now days play with every kind of queer orientation you can think of -- and I have noticed a big difference between the two groups in their willingness to use sex, crossed genders, and general gender bending in game. Have you had any similar, or opposite, experience?

You know, all obvious patriarchal oppression aside, I think the world I live in is more accepting of a woman who's both badass and emotionally expressive than of a man in the same role. In that sense I have an easier time playing a well-rounded character who's a woman. Maybe Brokeback Mountain will do some good there, but rarely will you find a male character who's like Wolverine or something and then has a good cry. Guys are always 'angry.' Whatever.

I think it's a huge problem with men. HUGE. Obviously it's my problem too. Maybe this weekend at FM I'll play a man who's both badass and teary eyed and see how it goes.

Paul, I'd agree with that. Do you think your GMness and NPC girlness would change the way you played a PC girl or no?

Matt, What about men in other cultures? Or are you being all nasty and talking about the fact that all of us are gendered people in our culture IRL and so get stuck with the detrius of assumption even when playing men in a fictional society that says warriors can wear flowers, makeup, and have a good cry?

(The latter is, btw, one of the few problems I've had with Suryamaya playtests -- the idea that you can wear a dress, makeup, and flowers and still be the most feared warrior on earth just doesn't go over well with some guys. Can't imagine why.)

Shreyas, So for you gender just isn't important in RPing?

Why don't you play female characters in table top? You talked about the "dissonance" thing, but is that all there is? Is it your dissonance, theirs, both? How much of this lines up with Nancy's statement that the folks at the table wouldn't buy her as a guy? How would you feel if you were playing with your wife, Mo, and I (me as GM) and we decided we wanted an all female PC group. In that context how comfortable would you be playing a girl? How comfortable if it was me, you, Lem, and your brother?

Online, all the players trade is information -- ones and zeroes, mostly text, maybe an occasional image (drawn or photoshopped pics). In tabletop, there is also a performance aspect that cannot be separated from the performer and the performer's physicality. Online, if my character does something effete, she appears feminine; in tabletop, if I play my character effete, I look effete, and I suspect the character doesn't appear anything, since me and my goatee acting effete are more interesting than my character at that point. Certainly this has just as much to do with how the rest of the table sees me and understands my character as it does with how I believe the rest of the table sees me and understands my character. Or, to put it in a lot fewer words, online play gives me more masking techniques.

You, me, Mo, Laura, playing Powerpuff Girls... well, then it's a gag, mostly. If we were for some reason trying to do it in all seriousness -- playing Emily's not-quite-Geisha game or something, I suppose -- then it's part and parcel of the experience, and there's less expectation of me and my goatee being a believable girl. Really, it's not much difference than the gag scenario. Me playing a girl is sort of the point, then. I don't think it's much different when I'm playing among all-guys or mixed, either.

I think it's at least partially a flagging issue. When I'm in a game that constrains me to play a woman, I'm not flagging anything by playing a woman any more than I'm flagging something when I play a Starfleet officer in a Star Trek game. When I'm in a game that does not constrain me to play a woman and I choose to do so, there's a reason that I choose to do so. Here's me not blathering on for pages about bisexuality and transexuality. Suffice to say, I find gender to be a fascinating divide, one that is both significant and superficial (and at the same time!). I can't explore that divide in a fictional context when the act of roleplaying highlights my own, real-life context. Unless I want to experience the RPG equivalent of a Rodin sculpture.

Am I making any sense whatsoever?

I find gender to be a fascinating divide, one that is both significant and superficial (and at the same time!).

You can say that again. This is part of the difficulty I have with portraying female characters. When is the fact that she's a woman important? When is it not? How do make my portrayals realistic without being patronizing or stereotyped?

--Paul

Josh,

Yes, you are.

So what about when you are GM and run female NPCs? There seems to be a divide among many, many people between doing that and playing a female PC -- so I'd like to dig into that a bit.

Joshua,

Excellent responses. So since you are so smart I will continue to bother you.

What about RPing a tree-person animated by the power of imagination? I mean you seem to be assuming that the standard PC is a human(ish) and gendered construct... do your answers change when dealing with people playing bodiless Doyen in the 31st century who are post-singularity creatures dealing with the flux cycle of time travel? How tightly is situation exploration tied to gender, flagging, and the "I'm playing a human" issue? Do you flag your TOSY goblin differently based on gender, or once you aren't human anymore does gender matter less?

Um, the other questions are about methods of GMing and NPC interaction, but don't have to do with gender so I'll save them for another time.

Brand, this is a fascinating discussion.

For me, I deemphasize gender deliberately. I feel like it is too caught up in agendas and exaggerated reactions in the real world, and I don't want those agendas to turn into bad blood when someone makes a stink while I am trying to have fun and play a game.

Brand, I'm going to steal one of those questions. It doesn't bother me that people expect female characters to be boys with breasts. It bothers me when they expect that and then say "of course she's not as good as we men" when you botch a roll or lose a contest. I don't mind the lack of sterotypes; you're on a quest or something tromping through the woods -- of course you're not going to be wearing a dress and complaining about bugs (unless you've specifically envisioned your character that way). But then again, I'm rather practical when it comes to these sorts of things.

For the group that was perpetually confused when i played a male character, I don't think they'd have any problems with my playing a lesbian or other-gendered character. In another group (playing Burning Wheel) I played a lesbian and it was a non-issue. Mind, these were both pretty liberal groups as a whole so that probably contributed.

--Nancy

Brand,

Yeah, I use those things. And I do tend to unconsciously ignore gender associations. They fly right under my radar and I don't engage in them. If someone tried to get in my face about them, I'd probably disengage with the game and just stop right there. It's not something I want to deal with and I don't care who I offend by not doing so. That's how I roll. I'm not interested in it being a "thing that matters" and people in my games that make it such are raining on my parade.

Shreyas,

Cool. I'll have to ponder more, I have more questions for you -- but at this point they aren't all about gender.

Nancy,

Right... um... let me find what I was talking about. Josh BishopTutakenkamun said: In tabletop, there is also a performance aspect that cannot be separated from the performer and the performer's physicality. Online, if my character does something effete, she appears feminine; in tabletop, if I play my character effete, I look effete, and I suspect the character doesn't appear anything, since me and my goatee acting effete are more interesting than my character at that point. Certainly this has just as much to do with how the rest of the table sees me and understands my character as it does with how I believe the rest of the table sees me and understands my character. Or, to put it in a lot fewer words, online play gives me more masking techniques.
And I was thinking that your comment about them getting "confused" might fit in there somewhere. When you, obviously female are sitting there at the table being obviously female but playing a guy, there is a lot of cognitive dissonance going on in the heads of the folks playing with you. They are seeing a woman, and getting the social codes of a woman, but being told information about a boy. So it creates a sense of disconnection between the character and the player, and results in some general confusion.

Sound about right?

Now, a question for folks who don't have that problem – why don't you? Did you ever have it and overcame it? Do some players have it and others not? Does it depend on who is playing? In other words, do you think it has to do with acting talent, ability to suppress gender codes, ability to separate character and player, all of that? More than that? Less than that?

Brand: While I (more often than not) play women in tabletop, I generally -don't- play them in LARPs. Why? Partially because most LARPs I play are pre-cast, so while in tabletop I'm answering "what do you want to play", in LARPs I'm answering questions like "what gender are you" and letting the GMs handling casting. But even aside from that, I'm not amazingly eager to play women in LARPs, because unlike a tabletop, people -do- take their cue from what you're wearing and what you look like in a LARP -- so to portray a female chracter reasonably requires cross-dressing, something I'm not amazingly comfortable with. (for similar reasons, I tend to play same-gender in the large, rotating game group I'm loosely involved in, since that group is more liikely to forget what gender you're actually playing than not). That said, playing a female character in Kat's Everway LARP was fine -- it was a small group of players (8), the character pictures were on the badges (a -big- help!), and since nobody was costumed, I didn't feel out of place.

I have seen players playing cross-gender in LARPs before, though -- Lisa played my father in Appalachian Wedding (who was, in turn, cross-dressing as a woman), and another player, Q, played the same character when we helped run the game at Columbia. And I can think of several other examples.. With one exception (the tribal shamaneess in the run of Miscatonic Archeological Expedition I played in), these were all women crossing (and cross-dressing) as men -- which is much less conditioned against.

I think a lot of the problem some male players playing female characters is the need to play them as "effite". I don't, and I don't have problems -- whether I'm playing a wolf-girl, a shapechangng (but more female than male) shadow, a drug-abuse recovering mother and witch (and, eventually, crow shamaness), a socialite turned costumed vigilante turned mayoral hopeful, or a frustrated 30 year old child, my characters aren't "effite". They may be feminine, but that comes across in how they act, how they dress, and how I describe them, not in coming across trying to "act like a womean" -- which in my experience, tends to work less well.

Joshuas,

Thanks. Good stuff there. Especially about the oddness of cross-dressing and LARP.

Joshua Tutekamen,

I'd disagree about only one point: I don't think Trek is genderless. Riker never made out with Picard, but he did hit it up with half the female cast. Ditto John Kim's comments about why sex in fan fic vis a vis Spock and Kirk, not to mention Kirks aggressive maleness in bagging every space woman that set foot on the ship. (And then proving that he just screws them but doesn't love them when he chooses his ship over the alien princess with the love-producing tears.)

I think Trek just has a particularly watered down and sometimes noxious version of a standard white-bread gender-bias that allows it to pass as being genderless.

Joshua K,

In your table top games how much of characteriziation is made up by acting? I know that at my table I do much of my work by verbal description and syntactic tricks -- I'm not much of an actor. OTOH, some of my players are formally trained actors and bring physicality and "real acting" into the picture. As a result any game I'm in can be anywhere across the spectrum from virtual LARP to joint storytelling with no one directly representing the characters. Do you think this "level of representation" issue ties in with your methods?

I don't think Trek is genderless.

Dude, Trek isn't genderless; Trek gaming is genderless, at least in my experience. Sure, Kirk and Riker were sexy beasts and Picard and Beverly had their impossible love and all that stuff, but I have never seen anything even remotely similar in an actual Trek game.

Joshua RamaGupta,

Okay, I'll have to bow to your superior knowledge of that.

Joshua K,

Thanks!

More questions tomorrow, when brain is not dead from tired.

Brand: Terrific thread!

Josh B-R: Could it be that your comfort level as a GM playing NPC's is less about expectations of verisimilitude and more an issue of authority, pressure and necessity? (I.e. you have to play girls as s GM, so you are less self-conscious about them, feel like they have more of a right to be a girl product from you because you're the GM?)

Shreyas: So if I were in a game with you and wanted to play with gender as a theme, you would check out of the game?

Matt W: Asutue, honest and sensitive observation. Bravo.

Nancy: I am boggled by your experience (no intent at all to invalidate it, it's just so *different* than mine!)

And Brand already knows all of this, but I thought I'd throw it in for variance and discussion:

I've played all over the genderbending world. I've played girls, I've played boys, I've played gay, straight, bi and poly. I've played characters that lived in drag, and have a character in creation now that is posthumanist and omnigendered. I've romanced and sexed in both genders characters of both genders and characters of players of both genders. I've played both genders online, in TT, and in LARP. I've had a character in love with a hermaphrodite. I even once played a lesbian that was for a short time, magically transformed into a man, and fell in love with her best friend who was a gay male transvestite (and who's player was a decidedly gay man) who had at the same time also been magically transformed into a woman (the attraction continued, fitfully, painfully, after both had been returned to their natural state - it sounds convoluted, and it was, but it was also serious, and moving, and hard).

Writing all that down at once, it becomes quite the litany

I guess you could say: I'm versed in the genderfuck. It's fascinating, and it's a deeply emotional playground.

Kuma,

So if there is no dissonance, how did it help with your desire to cause dissonance? Or is it that you hoped it would, and it just never did?

Mo,

I fear you may be a perv. I have no questions for you. ;)

Mo,

Shreyas: So if I were in a game with you and wanted to play with gender as a theme, you would check out of the game?

Possibly! It really depends on whether you're aggressively forcing me to make my input into the game into a gender issue to interact with your input or not.

I'll check out if I'm feeling backed into a corner, but it's fairly likely that if you leave me an opportunity and don't force it then I'll take it. (In thinking about your question I'm starting to guess that what I'm reacting to here is aggressive issue-pushing and not to any issue in particular.)

Responding to the questions that are now way way up there ^^^

>>While you were pushing your boundaries, how did the others at the table deal with it? How much OOC talk was there about it? Between you and other players? You and the GM?

Very little as I recall. I seem to remember there being a moment when the GM *got it* when he sort of stopped and said "uh, okay, are you sure you want to go there" and I said yes, and then we moved on.

>>If your GM had actually been gay, or a girl, or a space alien without gender, would it have changed anything?

I don't actually think so. I'm very fond of slipping into actor stance, and I typically have a very strong mental image of the scene that I'm acting out, and project myself into the scene. So simply holding a mental image of myself being physically affectionate with another male was moderately uncomfortable for me.

>>Also, why were the GMs so hot to have female characters in the group? Most of my early D&D days no one even thought about having girls in the group until we got female players. So what was going on in your group that lead to the desire?

We had an interesting arc. Originally, I only had a few friends who gamed, and all the modules were for "6-8 characters of n to n+3 levels", so we all ran stables of characters. And some were male and some were female. It was all very pawn stance... "Elena Half-Elven strikes the orc with her sword, while Mezzo Forte casts magic missile at the one behind it". And as our characters leveled up and aged, we started marrying them off. All very dispassionately, "My cleric marries your ranger, let's roll up their kids". We even got a second generation into play.

Then at some point we had enough people to do it "the right way" and have one character one player, and character identification set in, and that was it for female characters. Only I think the GM's had gotten used to the presence of female PCs, and so felt there "ought" to be some.

>>What kind of plots did they give you?

Oddly enough, it was never anything different. I mean, all our plots at this point were "go to point B and get the dingus". In fact the main guy who I remember lobbying me to play a female character typically ran these game where the mine cart was firmly bolted to the rails, and we rode from one ueber NPC to another, faced an opponent who could crush us without blinking, and then at the last moment huzzah, we are saved by one of the ueber NPCs. So PCs didn't get plots, PCs were window dressing and amusing color :/

>>How did the others in the game respond to it?

"Huh huh. You're playin' a GIRL..."

What about games that have plots that have political gender issues, or if a character in the game wants to play the gender fuck? Will you shy away from it if they're not pushing issues, but opening up avenues and paths of exploration?

Hm. At this point we're kinda wafting out into theory-land, into which place I don't go. Can you couch these in the language of specific examples?

My guess is that I have some threshold at which issue-discussion and pretend-game and story-game and game separate, and I only like three of those in my roleplayin'. If I can't sustain the bits I do like, then I'm not gonna stick around.

Someone asked me about the GM who prohibited cross-gender play.

His justification wasn't that he had a hangup about gender (perish the thought) but that he believed that people were better at RPing their own gender than the opposite.

I responded by playing a gay working-class gearhead punk-rock anarchist.

The only thing I had in common with the PC was that he's male. The GM didn't have any problem with any of that.

Funny that.

To belatedly answer Ben's first post:

Do you play members of the opposite gender?

Of course. Later even more than usual. I think that if I were to sum up every character I ever played the female/male ratio would be around 50-50, with the scales probably tipping to the opposite side. Contrary to this, I have never played any character who was openly homosexual. A priest adept with high sensibilities and impeccable taste in clothing, yes. A Verbana virgin(!) witch whose company was sought by many women, yes. But it never had the chance to come out in-game.

How does your group react to it?

I have no group these days. However the 2 longer-lived groups I was in didn't think of it as such a big deal. The first group I ever was in used to joke about how another player was always playing half-elven female cleric/mages. Didn't faze him, as it was all in good humor. Gender roles didn't play more than a mechanical part, even when PCs got in sexual/relationship stuff. Said stuff was quite variable, actually: infatuation, wooing, rape (by a doppelganger), pregnancy, marriage, childbirth, even a mid-sex "black widow" scenario... also, most of these things weren't very much acted out, they just "happened" in game through some author-director stance combo. Maybe our 19-year-old selves weren't feeling comfortable acting it out? Maybe it was just a "that's how stuff happens, but it's not what we came to play for, so we give it lip service" mentality? I don't quite know why we engaged these things on this level, or at all. I now realize I went way off-topic, but I'll leave it here as an anecdote.

What about if it lead to you having an IC sexual involvement with a PC played by a person whose OOC gender is not your normal preference? How would you deal with it? How do you think your normal groups would?

I normally need to feel very comfortable with the person I'm playing with for this to happen. And have an understanding that it's ok to create such a situation. Only then, it might happen. I believe that RPGs are, among other things, a way to express yourself and experiment imaginatively in a "safe" environment. But the game environment is not "safe" enough, in itself. Not for me. Everything my character does is in essence some kind of fantasy (using the tamer meaning of the word here) born of me, and if I'm passionate enough about it, then it might seem like it is really "me", or at least some inner self "leaking out". I feel that this (as well as other things which aren't the issue here) would make some people uncomfortable. Kindof removing The Veil or pushing The Line.

Which is weird, because if I had any homosexual fantasies, I so wouldn't act them out in a game. For me sexual fantasies are private affairs, either to be openly shared with a like-minded person, and/or acted out, and/or be kept to myself and confined to daydreaming. I believe acting those out under the guise of a game, without any prior understanding between the parties involved, breaks trust between people.

But here I am, thinking the worse of people. The last two paragraphs assume that others will see my roleplaying as an attempt to play out my sexual fantasies. Well, I kindof believe people are mostly playing out some of their fantasies in roleplaying games anyway. Why some fantasies are a cause for concern more than others? Maybe maturity issues. Maybe the importance of those issues to us and our society. Maybe something else which I cannot put into words yet.

MarK.

Rafial,

Thanks! That's fascinating stuff, and not just for the gender issue. The change from pawn stance to character identification, and the reaction of the players changing due to a gendered character being the focus of identification are all some rich material.

John,

Oh yea, Buffy… but you're getting ahead of me again! I will have more questions for you later.

Anders,

Excellent information, thanks! It sounds like your group, after an initial weirdness, was pretty happy with TSOY for letting you tackle romance and sexual themes without actually having to have sex onscreen or having romance dominate the game. Is that a fair assessment?

Also, as you're sounding very interesting Mr Gone and Back Again, how does the "switch" in your gaming before and after your long break feel to you? Are you happier with the romance and (veiled, off-screen) sex in the game? Does it give you anything in game you didn't have before? Is there anything with gender relations in game you've wanted to do, but haven't been able to yet?

Fred,

Yea, that's funny. But not funny ha-ha. Thanks for the response!

Jason,

That is indeed a good anecdote. You also made me realize that in all my many years as a GM I have never RPed a woman in labor. The only labor I've ever run on screen was for a female PC run by a female player, and she ended up narrating about 85% of what happened. Of course, I don't have kids of my own or that might have changed.

But yea, that's a telling point about me isn't it? For all the sex and children and family in my games, the process of labor – which is most certainly big fodder for just about every agenda – is something I do off screen. Huh.

MarK,

Brand, not Ben. ;)

As for the sexual fantasies issue, I'd posit that there are different kids of sexual fantasies. There are those that we normally hear when we think of the term, about the kinds of sex we'd like to have to get us off, and then there are the kind that are more complicated. In a very real way movies like Desperado or Dangerous Liaisons are "sexual fantasies" writ large, in which the point isn't the sexual excitement but the engagement through sexual focus.

The second kind is what I normally run: games with lots of sex and blood and family and all the rest of that stuff. When you put it in that context the sex in the game isn't erotica (though it can come close), it is an intensifier. It may well be connected to people's real sexual issues (probably should be, come to think of it) but it isn't just erotic.

Though it's probably worth noting that I have run games in which erotic interest was a definite element. Mostly online or in one-on-one games, but I've had one group in which we did it in a group context without problems. I agree with you though that such takes a HUGE level of safety – and much of the time just a game with your friends isn't safe enough for that.

So, tell me, is there any situation in which you can see yourself being safe and comfortable enough with the person/people you're playing with to actually use sex and gender in an erotic way? Or is that just right out?

Jess,

I was just thinking the same: I've seen lots of games that used historical situation to force all male games, but damn few all female games. I've some friends playing City of the Moon who are, by constraint of the game, all female – but that's the only such game I can ever remember anyone actually playing. Interesting, no?

As for the "real woman vs. fake space elf" issue – I very much think your answer is part of it. Thus the questions about playing other cultures, and playing other cultures if there isn't a member of that culture around to correct you. I got this one myself, with my India fixation I've occasionally had chances to play in games set in India with Indian players – and I can tell you that my level of self-consciousness did shoot WAY up. OTOH, when there weren't Indian players in the game I didn't give it a second thought. (I also later found out that they were intimidated by me, because I knew so much about Indian history that they didn't know themselves. Silly, isn't it? So silly it made me feel like a running imperialist dog.)

However, I think that sword has another edge. I know people who hesitate to play ancient Egyptians, not because there aren't any around anymore to tell you that you're doing it wrong, but precisely because there aren't enough around to let you know you're doing it right. For S based thinkers having data is important, and its hard to think of something most of us have more data about than sex, sexuality, and gender. You'd think it would be something we're all experts on, given how much time we spend interacting with it. But yet, it doesn't work that way at all, does it?

I mean if some of us are playing to deal with situation, and theme, and issues of emotionality, humanity, and all that crazy Nar stuff that folks like Josh and Ben and Vincent talk about (or that John brings up about his Buffy game above)… then isn't playing the thing that you really can judge and be judged by a thing to consider? Isn't there some degree to which we could use it as a learning opportunity? Lean across the table to the girl and say, "Do you think I'm being honest about that? Did that seem like something women you know would do?" I know I've seen people do things like that to Indian players in my India games… so why can't we do it with members of other genders and different sexes?

Edit PS: That whole last section may sound preachy. It honestly isn't meant to be -- its a big giant question in my head that I was trying to poke with a stick to see what would come out. I mean the quetions I ask honestly.

So, a question: if we can play psionic elves made of energy from the 31st and 1/2 century without a blink, why does playing a member of the opposite sex cause us such trauma? And I don't even mean in terms of the difficulty of portayal -- Josh and Nancy already did an admirable job dealing with that. I mean why does it lead us to questions like this? Why the tension? Why the concern?

Well, I generally don't run games with psionic energy elves from the 31st and 1/2 century because I have no idea what they'd be like. But more importantly, they don't exist. Women do. I don't care if I'm patronizing towards psionic energy elves; I'll likely never meet one.

Paul, would you have the same issues playing a gay man? Or a straight man of a different race? Is it just the tension of playing an other that actually exists against whom you might be compared?

It's not so much about being compared with a group. It's more about understanding a real group I'm not a part of.


Would it change if you were playing in a group of all girls? A group with no girls? Playing a Thai man with a group that had never met anyone of Thai descent?

I don't think so.

I agree honesty is important, but the problem is that I'm often not sure how to be honest. Like I said, I have difficulty determined when group membership is important and when it's irrelevant.

To add another layer of mindbending to this, I have no idea when, in my portrayals of male characters, it's important that they're men and when it's not.

--Paul

Brand,

Stripping away the ducky baggage, I can engage with that as a political and religious situation, but I don't see it as significantly different from, "Mo wants to play a potato, but the salad she wants to join only lets in eggs. But potatoes and eggs are equal in the goddess's eyes!"

That "isn't really a potato anyway" bit's probably gonna slide right off me, though.

Adam,

I've known men who pass as women, and women who pass as men online fairly often. I've also known women who do fetishize their characters bodies (though there is often a difference in the -way- they fetishize it) for various reasons. I also think your comments about age and socalization are pretty much spot on. Which leads me to a question -- if you were playing with a female character you thought was female for some period of time, and then found out the player was male would you be upset? Because they had lied to you? For any other reason?

Paul,

Very good points! To be honest, except when I'm playing games specifically themed towards "what is a man" or "what makes masculenity" I don't pay attention to what is and is not male in my characters either. I just assume, because I am male. That's some good insightful shit right there, my friend.

So, if you were playing with a group of women, and they told you they wanted you to play a woman in the group, how comfortable would you be? If they did so because they told you they thought you would do a good job (and they meant it)?

Shreyas,

Oh, I see now. We just aren't speaking the same language. In a world where exclusion, boys clubs, job discrimination and issues of having children vs. chosing to "work like a man" are all things that many women face on a daily basis, things that inform the very nature of who they are and how they interact with reality, I don't see a woman playing with those issues in another setting to be like a potatoe at all.

Of course, minus that I'm not entirely sure what you think gender issues in play are. Could you give me some specific examples? Things that have happened in game that made you diconnect?

Brand,

I had an important realization just after I posted the last thing that think applies. The games I've been playing recently have had very strong social frameworks, and characters tend to be products of their environments. What I realized is that this makes the issue of gender roles important to fully realized characters, because characters of different genders have necessarily different backgrounds. For example, in my fifth-century Britain game, gender roles are strongly segregated. Because of this, female NPCs have a very different experiences than male NPCs. Once I can figure out what those experiences are like intellectually, I can construct a concept of identity that I can use to realize the character. It becomes less of an issue of "she's going to react this way because she's a woman" and more of a matter of "she's going to react this way because she's had these experiences because she's a woman." Does that make sense?

--Paul

Brand asked:

Which leads me to a question -- if you were playing with a female character you thought was female for some period of time, and then found out the player was male would you be upset? Because they had lied to you? For any other reason?

I would not be upset to find someone I'd played with a while wasn't the same sex as the character he or she played. If they're a sufficient role-player to play the character convincingly, it's all good. It's just a character.

However: My relationships with players online tends to transcend character stuff. I get to know the players in OOC discussion, If they'd lied to me about their RL gender in conversations in which it was relevant, I'd be upset because they lied. It wouldn't necessarily be friendship-breaking though. I'd want to understand the reason for the deception. In fact, I'm pretty sure one of my online friends (whom I have never met in person) is lying about their sex, even after many years. It's become one of those "whatever" things to me and people who suspect.

But this RL stuff has nothing to do with cross-playing, in my opinion. Just RL trust. Cross-playing doesn't breach trust, though it may require a certain amount of trust for it to feel safe for its participants.

I think the greatest value of cross-playing is not exploration but critique. A female player might play a machista character to make a statement about sexism. A male player might play a lesbian to make a statement about sexual preference.

The other players at the table might be offended by those statements. That's the risk we take when we role-play.

Adam,

"Cross-playing doesn't breach trust, though it may require a certain amount of trust for it to feel safe for its participants."

Yes. Well said.

As for critique rather than exploration... I think it can do both. I think critique is where it would probably start out. However, with a good GM and a good group, especially a group made up of the members of the gender/sex you're trying to explore, I think it could be done. Not easily, mind you, but with some trust and guidance and a painful lot of honesty from all.

Make any sense?

Paul,

Fucked if I know. My guess would be that it has to do with the "real women are real, elves aren't" issue and the flagging of physicality in gender identity. We all have these flags that we aren't even aware of, and they do a hell of a lot to tell people what gender (or at least what sex) we are.

Some of us (yes me) have had that horrible experience at one point in our lives where someone has mistaken us for a member of the opposite sex. For me it was in middle school, before I'd hit full puberty and had a chubby face. I had several people ask me, point blank, if I was a boy or a girl. It was pretty uncomfortable for me then (now days I'd probably have less of a problem with it), but the thing that I found out later is that it was equally discomforting for them. Mistaking someone's sex is a sign that you don't know the rules, and causes many people vast unease. As years went on I got my masculine traits and learned to "walk like a man" and the mistakes stopped.

Now days I'm pretty hard to confuse with a girl, due to physicality. However, you'd be amazed how little it takes for men and women with a moderately androgynous body type to pass. Without the obvious external physical characteristics, once they learn the rules they can just slide in like a member of the opposite sex and most people will never even look twice. The thing is that not all of us can learn those rules, even when they're explained to us, because gender and sexual identity have been so deeply wired into us. Its part of who we are, and something that we very much have been trained to project in order to avoid that whole uncomfortable middle-school moment.

So I'd guess that for a lot of us, trying to overcome the sex-gap only makes us subconsciously more flaggy. Something in us screams, "Sure I'm talking like a girl, but I'm a man! A man! A man!" And something in those looking at us starts going, "Mustache, deep voice, adam's apple... he's a man! A man! A man!"

To get past that, I think you have to have some acting ability yourself – but more than that you have to have some suspension of disbelief ability among the others in your group. I think you could get that a lot of ways – playing with people who are already gender fuckers, playing pawn stance, playing by description rather than acting, and so on.

So, um… questions. Is any of this making sense? Fit strongly with anyone else's experiences? Go strongly against anyone else's experiences?

Brand,

It's not something I'm uncomfortable saying in public, I just want to be sure to say it right, and without feeling like I'm inappropriately airing my personal issues.

So I'd guess that for a lot of us, trying to overcome the sex-gap only makes us subconsciously more flaggy. Something in us screams, "Sure I'm talking like a girl, but I'm a man! A man! A man!" And something in those looking at us starts going, "Mustache, deep voice, adam's apple... he's a man! A man! A man!"

To get past that, I think you have to have some acting ability yourself – but more than that you have to have some suspension of disbelief ability among the others in your group.

This is really dang interesting. I'm gonna split off a thread about the acting ability aspect of this, I think...

Larps don't generally do cross-gender casting. Usually. Except when they do.
I loved playing the guy dressing as a woman because a) this was a broad, scenery chewing round-the-bend character, which was what I had asked for and b) I got to reveal my true identity! Josh, playing my son, had a great line:

Josh: No, Dad, you're a great dad. Really. I just have one request. When we're in public, and I'm giving a press conference -- lose the dress?

We did some cross casting for Roman Baths. As I recall, we had a woman or two who specifically asked to be cross cast, and I think our questionnaire asked how the players felt about that.

Josh once told me about a larp where every character had gender neutral names, and no one had wives or husbands. They had Life Partners. (This made sense in context.) So, for Jamais Vue, our amnesia larp, I did likewise. It's easy coming up with 20 gender neutral names. It's hard writing detailed character sheets (to be handed back in sadistically portioned chunks) without using the third person singular.

Todd Furler uses Faces to create pictures of characters for the badges. He said that this had two interesting effects in larps where he cast guys as women.

1. The guys had a picture of their PC, so they did not try to talk in a silly falsetto that just drew attention to how not a woman they were.

2. The picture went into a badge holder that fell to chest hight. This meant that someone talking to a guy who was playing a woman, and looking at the badge to "see" who he was interacting with wound up staring at the person's chest, an oddly realistic touch, I am told.

Hm. The Angel game he ran at GenCon had pictures of the PCs in plastic stands, so cross gender play didn't cause confusion. Of course, the only one playing cross gender was me. (I chose last, as I was the one genericking my way in, and I had a choice of Connor or Lorne. Both cool, both male.) And, the fact that it was Angel, where we all knew the characters, would have helped even if we'd never role played before.

For Dark of the Moon, the larp we've been working on for over a decade, we want badges not just for gender stuff. If you're a 40-something playing an 8 year old, or a 20-something playing a 70 year old, it's nice to know. Plus, we've got a lot of animal roles. It's really helpful if I know I'm looking at a bat or a leopard.

And yes, Josh's comment about the D&D group just not tracking who's playing cross-gender is apt. I'm not sure how many are aware that I'm, as usual, playing a guy. Maybe now that we've sent out a list of who's who, they've figured it out. But there, the dynamic is skewed by the fact that it's a huge group, and we focus on tactics, so gender's not hugely important. Race? Sure! That determines what you've got pluses in and what language you speak and stuff like that.

The running joke is that Josh plays the woman and I play the man. It's not universally true, but it happens a lot.

Josh and I are domestic partners, and we've been living together for over 7 years. When we do in-game romance, our default is NOT to do it with each other. That's what we do when we're not gaming, and we want to come as we aren't when we're gaming. It's not a hard rule, especially if one of us is gming. Odds favor PC-NPC romance over PC-PC, I think.

The thing about most larps is that the players don't generally get to make up their PCs. They're usually cast in advance by the gms, although "in advance" may mean "Is everyone here? Okay, I'll hand out roles at random." For table top, players create their own PCs most of the time. Except at conventions, most of the time.

Some convention runs mandate playing the opposite gender. Both Kult games I played in had only male PCs. No biggie.

I've seen a lot of points discussed here raised elsewhere. I've never been in the kind of gaming group where I felt uncomfortable because of my gender, and I never want to be.

A couple of years ago at Arisia, an sf convention, I went to a panel on women in gaming. One of my players, Avram, asked if that wasn't old hat already. I said that when I stopped hearing about how some idiot male gm thought it'd be a great idea to have one of his NPCs molest a female player's female PC, then, maybe, it'd be old hat. I look forward to that day.

-Lisa

Brand,

Another late reply. I wrote this before going to bed, but when I tried to post it the forum went down.

Anyway.

Excellent information, thanks! It sounds like your group, after an initial weirdness, was pretty happy with TSOY for letting you tackle romance and sexual themes without actually having to have sex onscreen or having romance dominate the game. Is that a fair assessment?

Excellent thread. Glad I could contribute.

That would be a fair assessment, yes. I asked both players this question too, and they agree.

Also, as you're sounding very interesting Mr Gone and Back Again, how does the "switch" in your gaming before and after your long break feel to you?

Actually, my gaming the last couple of months has so little in common with the way I gamed when I was younger that I consider them almost completely seperable.

If it weren't for the baggage I brought with me when I started again about a year and a half ago, I wouldn't connect the two at all.

Are you happier with the romance and (veiled, off-screen) sex in the game?

In the games it has come up, yeah. I like it. I'd like to explore it some more.

Does it give you anything in game you didn't have before?

A sense of purpose as well as something that speaks to me as the person I am today.

Is there anything with gender relations in game you've wanted to do, but haven't been able to yet?

I know I'd like something that says something about what it means (for me) to be a man.

I am a father. I'm on my second year (14 months) of parental leave. I think it would be cool to explore the thing about being a parent without having the need to be either mother or father, woman or man. And how it would affect the children to grow up in such an environment.

Shock: migth be the game for that. I'm looking forward to that one a lot.

My writing skills clearly deteriorate at 4:30 am, as I may have to shoot myself for using the word 'interesting' about a million times in that post. Perhaps it is time for sleep.