is cyberpunk 2077's trans representation good? does it matter?
figuring out my trans thoughts on a game i really loved
It’s weirdly funny to look back at the controversy around Cypberpunk 2077 before it came out. It’s not that the controversy itself was funny or ridiculous but that, seven years, a pandemic, and a right-wing cultural backlash later, it feels very quaint and like it happened in a different universe.
The game felt billed as this very woke experience where you could be anyone you wanted to at the same time it was being marketed by people who were making “did you assume my gender” jokes with Elon Musk, who at this point did not own Twitter and had not become a full mask-off white supremacist quite yet. What I remember the most, however, was the trans stuff.
Around the time it was coming out, I had just started hormones and was transitioning socially in college. I was myself for the first time in my life, and I loved the cyberpunk genre. Blade Runner is still one of my favorite movies, and I still wish that the whole aesthetic wasn’t hack. I remember being stoked for the game, even though at the time I wasn’t familiar with the source material and didn’t have anything that could run it. I was particularly interested in the fact that you could, at least sort of, play as a trans woman for obvious reasons - I always picked girls in video game, and the idea that I would be able to play as close to my real self as possible was pretty cool, even if it felt superficial.
But a lot of the weirdly transphobic-feeling marketing that in-game ad (we’ll get there) made me decide I wouldn’t play the game. When it came out and flopped for being a buggy mess, I laughed. (I was hating from outside the club a little because again, I was broke, in college, and did not own anything capable of running this game to begin with).
Fast forward to now, and I’m an adult with a fully-developed frontal lobe. I don’t game as much as I used to, but I found myself really missing it. Combined with a need for some sort of distraction from the general state of things, something to stop me from scrolling on my phone constantly, I figured I’d try out Cyberpunk 2077. I heard from so many friends, including some trans people, that it was worth playing now. Fuck it, why not?
I got hooked. I played for 80 hours and did basically everything there is to do, and then immediately started another playthrough. Everything is so satisfying. The world feels so lived-in and detailed, and the graphics are gorgeous. I found myself reading every shard, talking to every person I could, reading all of the wiki pages. The characters and story were really compelling to me, too (Judy, my beloved). The Phantom Liberty DLC makes a solid game even better, and I honestly think Cyberpunk 2077 might have made its way into my top games of all time.
But what about the trans representation? Was my mind changed at all because I liked the game so much? In short, not really. But I think cyberpunk is inherently kind of transgender, and that was enough for me in a lot of ways. But I also wanted to think about the trans representation that is in the game and sort of relitigate it. (At least the stuff I found in my playthrough. If I missed something, let me know).
Everything is sexy and I can’t get horny
First is the “Mix It Up” ad, the thing that became so infamous that even my non-online girlfriend who only plays farming games remembered it. It’s an ad for the in-game Chromanticore drink with a woman in a tight leotard. The outline of her gigantic throbbing dick is visible through her clothes, and the tagline is “Mix it Up.”
You do not need a PhD in queer studies to figure out why people weren’t into this. It’s weird! It fetishizes and exoticizes pre-op trans women, already a demographic that’s highly exploited. The stated rationale for the design that the ad’s creator, Kasia Redesiuk, gave was that it meant to show the in-universe exploitation of queer identities under the regime of megacorporations. From a 2019 Polygon interview:
“This is all to show that [much like in our modern world], hypersexualization in advertisements is just terrible,” Redesiuk continued. “It was a conscious choice on our end to show that in this world — a world where you are a cyberpunk, a person fighting against corporations. That [advertisement] is what you’re fighting against.”
I mean… I guess? If it was one in a series of in-game ads, or if there was side-quest where you could help that model escape exploitation, I’d maybe believe that. I’m sure that was the intent. But it’s one in-game advertisement, and what really surprised me upon actually playing Cyperpunk was that it’s everywhere. Like, plastered all over Night City. You can find it in almost every vendor shop, on every street. It’s so repetitive, almost like it’s mocking you. I understand that game assets are hard to create and that making a bunch of different ads for a game is a big ask. But this specific graphic being everywhere, in light of how stupid it is, just really annoyed me.
Besides, what’s the commentary? Yeah, queer and trans bodies are exploited and advertisements are hypersexualized. You can show that without exploiting stereotypes and making real-life caricatures yourself. As others have pointed out, this kind of trans woman, the kind that’s the butt of some sort of joke, is everywhere. It’s not biting satire, it just perpetuates a vicious cycle.
Redesiuk’s other comment, that she thought the in-game ad might help increase empathy for trans and queer people, rang hollow to me. It’s an advertisement for an in-game soda that uses a gigantic futa cock model and says “Mix It Up.” Be so for real. It’s a sub-GTA level joke. I don’t feel any plight for the model involved, especially since there’s nothing really to be done about it in the game. I mostly got sick of seeing it a few hours into the game.
What’s funny is I think Cyberpunk actually has some compelling narratives about sexualization and exploitation. Evelyn Parker, the sex worker who gives you the quest to steal the relic from Arasaka only to eventually be sold into sexual slavery herself and forced to create unspeakable pornos (called braindances in game). Her storyline sends you to Judy, a braindance editor who runs with a gang of sex workers called the Mox. Eventually, you help Judy and the Mox try to rid their club of gang members in a bid to help the sex workers there run it themselves. It’s an interesting story about labor, as well as what it means to have your body literally commodified. The sex workers, called dolls, have chips installed that take over their bodies, so they can be essentially asleep during sex. They do whatever is asked by the client without really any consent. Several of the dolls you help talk about being beaten or assaulted, and Evelyn’s story in particular is upsetting.
A short quest about helping trans or queer dolls deal with a specific kind of exploitation would’ve been interesting. But there’s nothing there. It fits into one of my big critiques of Cyberpunk. It’s a real “everyone is beautiful and no one is horny” type game. All the ads, including the “Mix It Up” one, are hypersexual. When you go to one bar near the beginning of the game, you’re told they have insane porn braindances you can watch, but you can’t actually watch any of them, and all the BDs you do watch are usually for narrative purposes that don’t involve sex. You’re allowed to make your character a woman with a penis, but it doesn’t show up during the game’s sexual encounters. Cyberpunk is obsessed with sex, and there’s not much that’s actually interesting about it. No matter how bad you want to, you can’t “Mix It Up” even if you wanted to. I understand that there are ratings involved and not everyone cares about this sort of thing, but it felt like a missed opportunity.
If you’re going to let me give my V a dick, I think it should have some sort of bearing in my character’s story, even if it just shows up during the sex scenes. It’s nice that I can create a diverse body, but what’s the point if I can’t really do anything with it? What’s the point of making commentary on queer sexploitation if you’re just doing it yourself?
It’s funny that the "Mix It Up” ad was considered both thoughtful and empathy-driven by the devs because, as Stacey Henley at Polygon pointed out in 2020, the ad is one of the extremely few times you see a trans person in Cyberpunk at all. Which brings us to…
The Claire of it all
The only actual explicitly trans character in Cypberpunk 2077 is Claire Russell, a side character. Claire is the bartender at Afterlife, the legendary merc bar run by Rogue. She’s also an engineer who loves street racing, and her only quest is “The Beast in Me” where you help her finish a series of races. Claire is also trans.
How do you know she’s trans? Well, she doesn’t say it right away, but when you go to her autoshop to start the quest, you see that her truck, Beast, has a gigantic trans flag decal on the back. (Side note: Nobody has come up with a new trans flag in the future?). Her journal entry also notes that she’s a trans woman, but those words aren’t ever spoken (again, unless I missed a dialogue option or something). She might as well have a Blahaj.
Look, I have a trans symbol necklace I wear everywhere, and my jacket has a trans pride flag patch. It’s not like I don’t have the trans flag on stuff. But I don’t plaster it everywhere, and maybe I just live in Texas, but I wouldn’t put it on my car. It feels like a lazy way for writers and artists to say “look! we have a trans character!” I guess it’s better than the new trans character DC Comics introduced.
Consider Kerry Eurodyne, the former member of Samurai that you can romance and do a few quests for. He’s gay, and tells you so if you try to initiate a romance with him as a female V. Is it amazing gay representation? Not really, and it doesn’t really come up outside of the romance stuff. But he’s not decked out in rainbow flag stuff. Same with Judy, the best queer character in the game.
Claire’s not a bad character by any means. As you complete races with her, you learn that she’s racing to avenge her husband, Dean, who was killed in the championship race after a collision with a corporation-backed driver. Claire will tell you that Dean supported her through her transition, and brought her flowers the day she got bottom surgery. Once you finish “The Beast In Me,” that’s about it, and she gives you Beast as a reward. I played my V as a trans woman, so it was kind of cool to get a truck with a trans flag on it even though I drive bikes in the game. But story-wise, it makes no sense. Why would a trans woman give her prized posession, customized with pride flags for her own identity, to a cis person?
And for a game that is obsessed with at the surface level with all sorts of “out there” stuff, it’s interesting that the game’s only trans character is pretty plain. Claire is a heterosexual trans woman who got bottom surgery and doesn’t have any cybernetic implants. Obviously, that kind of trans woman really does exist, and there’s nothing wrong with being trans, straight, and getting bottom surgery. Getting bottom surgery or injecting hormones is incredibly cyberpunk to me.
But couldn’t there be more? My transness is an expression of my bodily autonomy. I’m free to modify my body as I wish, and that includes transitioning and getting the surgeries I do (or don’t) want and expressing myself however I want. In that same vein, part of the the allure of the cyberpunk genre is that it’s about the ways people exercise their autonomy in a world ruled by corporations. Cyberpunk denizens enhance their bodies with cybernetic tech to fight the very companies that make them. In a sense, they are physically taking back some of your power by doing so.
Imagine the trans stories you can tell in that kind of setting, with that kind of tension. Trans women who are reliant on implanted bio-pumps that give them estrogen, and the kinds of gender expression that would spring from being able to modify your body on a whim. In a cyberpunk future transitioning and passing might be easier than ever but only to people with ludicrous amounts of money, while the rest go to back-alley rippers or learn to hack themselves to transition. Not even to mention what being trans might look like in a world where existing in “The Net” can be realer than real life. There are plenty of trans and queer people telling their stories in cyberpunk settings in super compelling ways. Imagine if they had the budget of an AAA game to do it!
With that in mind, Claire was disappointing to me even if I found her a welcome addition to a game with such little meaningful trans inclusion. Again, it’s not that there’s anything wrong with her characterization so much as it felt like she was made with a limited imagination. In a world where tech and medical science are far beyond where we are, where you can be whoever you want to be in a city where forging your own path is the way to survive, the best we could come up with was a heterosexual trans woman who is an engineer and bartender? It just feels like a little bit of a wasted opportunity.
I would love to know more about how Claire came about, if she was a reaction to the “Mix It Up” fiasco or if someone really did geniunely want to create a trans character for Cyberpunk. I’m not sure if any of the devs on the game were trans or had any input on Claire (I would hope so!) but I think myself or any number of trans creatives could’ve really cooked here.
Go your own way
What actually playing Cyberpunk years after release reminded me is that we can’t rely on the biggest publishers and corporations to create the stories we need and want. It’s nice if they can, but I shouldn’t expect CD Projekt Red or some other giant AAA game studio or publisher to create the perfect trans stories I want to see. That kind of creative process is inherently exclusionary a lot of the time, even if it’s not intended to be. When only cis people are in the room for most of the creative process, it means they’ll create and tell mostly cis forward stories. I loved romancing Judy, and felt that it was a really good sapphic relationship depicted in a video game. But that kind of thing still feels like a rarity, and when trans people are concerned, we end up less like Judy and more like Claire: filtered and filtered down in order to not bother anyone, until there’s just a vague, trans flag shaped outline left.
I played my V as an expliticly trans person, and I got a lot out of the game. Cyberpunk made me want to read more cyberpunk genre fiction and maybe even create my own. In true genre fashion, I’ve learned that I have that I have the power to tell the stories I need, that people want, even if it requires me to use software and systems created by corporations I loathe. There’s freedom in realizing that, even if I wish games like Cyberpunk could do it for me sometimes. Sometimes, you have to just take what you can get, and make what you really want yourself.
Thanks for reading!