How to do a transgender character in AD&D world properly:
MakeAthkatlaGrtAgain
Member Posts: 132
I realize I'm late to this but please hear me out. I will tell you exactly how to do it in a game and make it fit. I give dialog and even a quest for the http://baldursgate.wikia.com/wiki/Girdle_of_Masculinity/Femininity to give to the transgender character who is seeking to fully change.
In our world, we don't have the ability to change someone's sex but we have pills to block hormones and add hormones. The hormone pills are the result of research and that our population is in the billions. The AD&D population of a world probably would be like medieval times, in the millions, but then again since their healing ability is far beyond ours (can even ressurrect the dead), maybe it would be billions with overpopulation. (I made a thread here https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/62827/what-would-the-world-population-be-in-a-baldurs-gate-forgotten-realms-world/ ) So computers and all kinds of chemicals is our technology and magic is there's.
In the AD&D world there have been lots of gender switches. One of the Mystra deities turned Elminster into a woman for a long time and I believe he bore a child during that. I also like the Edwin gender switch when I took Edwin to the prostitutes above the Copper Coronet, well I wondered if he would get male or female prostitute, and Edwin got the male prostitute to pleasure him.
Anyway, here's how to do it properly:
1) The transgender character is saving up money for a powerful mage to switch their gender. Although the Roman Empire had a welfare state (free bread) and it contributed to its collapse, I don't believe AD&D has. If you take your character to a priest and pay to cure something, the priest charges--no charity! So the character wants to switch their gender but has to save up the money to pay for it. Or they paid some mage and he did a bad job so they must find a way to fix the botched spell and do it properly.
2) A spell turned someone into a hermaphrodite. In Japanese manga, futanari is a common thing. Futanari is hermaphrodite.
Like have the transgender character go up to the player:
Trans NPC: Are you a mage?
Player character: Yes/No
Trans NPC: I am looking for a spell to change me from male to female. I paid a mage before and he fouled it up.
Player character: Unfortunately the spells I know are all based around combat. I don't even know a spell to clean my clothes. After traveling outdoors all the time, they stink something awful! It would be nice if I had a spell to churn out hot water for a hot shower, but I instead have to bathe in a frozen lake. Oh and a spell to conjure some way to clean my teeth. My breathe and all my companions is horrible.
Trans NPC: Ummm??
Player character: Oh your problem. Sorry, I don't have a spell for that. There was a girdle I saw that if you put it on you change gender and it takes a remove curse spell to take off so it's pretty sturdy. Of course if you get pregnant while it's on and then get it off, I wonder what happens to the unborn baby. Kinda scary...
Trans NPC: Will you find this belt for me.
Options:
Player character: Oh certaintly, I will do it for free.
Player character: I will do it for a price.
Player character: No, I am too busy.
The player then has a quest to find this http://baldursgate.wikia.com/wiki/Girdle_of_Masculinity/Femininity for the character.
See? Now it works in the game.
The way it looks like now in Dragonspear is like Beamdog was hard up for money and George Soros offered to pay them 100 million to include a transgender character and they were so excited for the money they didn't bother to write a good story around the character. Even the very brief transgender character, flea, in Crono Trigger was done without losing immersion in the fantasy. So please do these things properly like a transgender would be in that world so it doesn't look like modern times.
After that, you need to do the setting with the cultural views of the place and not with western cultural views.
Western cultural views about transgenderism and other alternative sexuality are based in either (1) Abrahamic religions (Christianity, Judaism, Islam) which oppose it, (2) neo-marxist views (aka. cultural marxism, SJW) which promote it only to break down society to replace it with a communist state; then it becomes like communist Cuba where Fidel Castro sent all the people with alternative sexuality to Orwellian re-education camps and Castro after campaigning to women a lot ended up putting mainly women in torture-prisons and killing them.
The AD&D world would be like India and Japan. There have been transgendered in those societies and there's neither a hatred for them nor a neo-marxist push to shove it down people's throats. It's simply some rare quirk. India has had transgendered people for thousands of years and they were just some unusual part of society.
Beamdog needs to research how transgender was viewed in ancient India and Japan. Also ancient Roman historian Tacitus visited Germania (before Christianity exists) and found the people there were ashamed of homosexuality and executed them. So Beamdog needs to research how these things were viewed in ancient times and base it on that. It's more interesting to view stuff through a different culture and not simply copy modern culture on things.
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Comments
You mean the way that they did treat it already?
-sigh-
Here's an idea: See how the anime Naruto handles transgender stuff.
Also:
In modern times I have my temperature-controlled home and I go from there to my temperature-controlled car to other temperature-controlled buildings. I have various stuff in my car like hand sanitizer, tissues, etc. I have my large smartphone.
In the A&D times, I think most people wouldn't be able to stand it. The first thing you notice is there is no hot running water, or any running water at all. Let's say you want to wash your hands? You have a bowl of water which you re-use, splash on your face, etc and it's filthy but you get the visible dirt off your hands. Without running water, most ability to clean just didn't exist. There was no manufacturing ability to make basic things like toilet paper either. The ancient Romans made aqueducts but I never see that in AD&D and it was just in the cities. Ancient Rome had baths and not showers and the water was re-used.
There's no air conditioning and to keep cool, you have to sit in a tub of cold water (something I did when my air conditioning broke an and my landlord was all "no you can't buy one yourself, you must wait for maintenance to do it.) And to keep warm, you need to burn things which makes everything stink outside. I hate it when I go by cities in the winter and it stinks like smoke. In AD&D like medieval times there's no electricity, propane, or natural gas for clean heating, just stinky fireplaces.
Then in the game, you are traveling out where it's basically like camping expect campers today use modern technology. They filter all the bacteria from the rivers where otherwise you get diarrhea from the bacteria in them. They have all sorts of other modern gear to make camping easier.
Oh and don't forget everyone's breathe will smell like a dead animal all the time. Every time they speak, it'll just reek a long way. Do you remember the snobby nobles are all "Don't touch me" and "Don't stand so close" because the poor people really smelt bad and their breathe did too.
It's important to view things in this context.
2. If you look at Mizhena's in-game creature file, she is coded as female. She doesn't just have the female character sprite; that's what she literally is according to the game's code. If her sex needed any magical correction, she apparently already received it. She doesn't need any new help; she already addressed the situation.
3. There are a lot more views in Western civilization about the transgender "thing" than the Old Testament or Neo-Marxism.
--a. For one thing, a lot of Christians don't adhere to every aspect of the Old Testament (the New Testament is supposed to override parts of it, according to standard Christian doctrine), and the Bible doesn't discuss transgender stuff at all. It only addresses homosexual sex.
--b. For another thing, Neo-Marxism has nothing to do with transgender issues. Marxism has always been an economic philosophy; it started that way with Marx and even 21st-century Neo-Marxists focus on economics and politics, and basically nothing else. The fact that Cuba executed gays is a perfect example of how Marxism does NOT mean tolerance of homosexuality.
--c. Personally, I don't get my views of transgender people from the Bible or the Communist Manifesto. I met one transgender person in real life, another one online, and I've heard of a few others like Caitlin Jenner. Plus I've read about the phenomenon here and there, in scattered places online, and none of them had any relation to the gospel or communism.
4. The entirety of SoD content about transgender people is inside this one screenshot.
There is literally nothing in the entire game about transgender identity besides those four sentences. But nobody ever seems to quote this dialogue.
This article is a start https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intersex_in_history
Ancient Sumeria, Greece, and Rome give good accounts.
If you got to "from the Middle Ages to the sixteenth century ... hermaphrodites were considered to be monsters and were executed, burnt at the stake and their ashes thrown to the winds." that's too far along. Althought in Baldur's Gate II they tried to burn Viconia at the stake like a witch, but the group doing it followed a god classified as "evil" and not Helm or someone.
Good thing the game is set in Faerun and not Europe. Does this confuse you?
God couldn't help but post.
1) The problem of transgender in SoD as it currently is
2) How the "proper way" fixes that problem
The tone of the content pretty much implies that "Beamdog didn't do it the way I prefer". But "my preference" shouldn't be called "the proper way". They're different. Don't try to mislead.
I give you 6/10. You made me laugh but the account name gives you away and you called Jan a cuck. No one insults my gnome.
Incidentally, I've seen a lot of posting about it, but does everyone believe that Mizhena is in fact transgender? That's a serious question, because the dialogue in the game is certainly not convincing on that point. What Mizhena says is that when she was young her parents raised her as a boy. There are a number of reasons why that might have happened, e.g.
1) Her parents wanted a boy so much they treated a girl as a boy - this type of behaviour has been documented on a number of occasions in recent history in China (when the one-child policy was being enforced).
2) Her parents were concerned about the possibility of a girl being attacked and raised her as a boy as a protective mechanism (in a rural, mediaeval context such behaviour would be understandable).
3) Her sexuality was in fact ambiguous to some degree. This is not uncommon - think about the number of athletes receiving hormone treatment in recent years.
The dialogue goes on to say that everyone came to understand her as a woman. While I agree it's possible that she is indeed transgender and has undergone a magical change to become a woman it would seem more likely to me based on the dialogue that she in fact always was female and is now simply living as such.
Also: Trent Oster does refer to her as a transgender character, which should confirm it beyond any shadow of a doubt.
They could even give you a huge variety of conversation options that make absolutely no difference and changes the opinion of no one in the game just for the sake of realism.
Well as far as AD&D is concerned, I see two options depending on the persons preference of keeping their.... package
a). Magic to sex change, such as the cursed belt. This will change everything, the perfect "post-op" I guess you could say since really has no flaws other than it being expensive
b) For those who want to... keep the thing... it is more complicated:
- Mundane surgery (profession surgery? Use heal/profession checks?) in DnD to alter bodily features to become more female-like.
- Color spray is the General Anesthesia lol.
- Body grafting feats could just be modified to include implants
- Permanency enlarge/reduce set on the specific graft could alter it accordingly. An A cup could become a double-D cup?
- Have a cleric nearby to heal up any "mistakes" to save you from dying. Cure disease spells means no risk of infection at least
So... who wants option B?
LOL were-troll
That's what I don't like about it too.
To me the dialog is like if there's a Star Wars movie and there's a line of dialog like "You know those stormtroopers always look like nazis." That would just break the whole fantasy of it.
They use wording in the style of 2015 when "I am a woman trapped in a man's body" simply became "actually I'm a woman". I watched the video where Lauren Southern goes to the DMV and she is dressed as a woman with long hair and says "I identify as a man now" and the DMV rep immediately calls her "Sir". That's the modern world, not some fantasy world based around ancient times.
And then right after that instead of developing the character on that, it goes into this part about I made my name from lots of different languages to be all multicultural. That's also very 2015.
The writing is simply bad. The dialog sounds very modern.
I can rewrite the dialog a lot better.
"When I was born, my parents thought me male but actually I was female on the inside in a man's body. In time, my mother came to understand but my father never did so I left to join The Flaming Fist."
I've read lots of manga with transgender characters and it's handled way better. There's some stories where a male and female will swap bodies.
You could also add depth to the story, like if you're familiar with a certain internet celebrity who makes fanfiction comics based on Sonic The Hedgehog. Well he initially constantly spoke about how he hated homosexuals and was against transsexuality. Then gradually he became transgender first with small things into a big thing. And now today he supports LGBT and says he is a "lesbian-identified man".
The essence of the matter is the dialog was written badly and sounds very modern.
That's all the dialogue there is. Please tell me exactly what is objectionable and an example of what could be done in the same amount of space that wouldn't be. Because it has been made exceedingly clear that this is the space limit for minor NPCs, which she is. And surely you agree that a minor NPC can be transgender, right?
Every dialog in IE games sounds very modern to me. Just occasionally putting "ye" and "yer" doesn't make it any older English.
I think the problem is not in the dialog. It's in comparing 13th century D.R. Common to medieval and modern English.
Faerûn is not Europe.
I am not a fan of answer 1. and 2. being almost identical. Answer 2. should be something like "I don't care"
Now lets tweak that boring "minor" dialogue a little. Maybe add an option to "unminor" her (oh god I am going to regret posting this pic of mine)...
There is another way to make a kickass transgender character: Create one in something we actually have stake in.
Gaming used to be almost exclusively a boys club. Then ladies got in on the act and started making games. Over time more LGBT people will start making games. It won't happen all at once, but if we want it to happen faster, stop critiquing, start creating.
*runs from the angry mob*
With that said, could someone please show me what about the dialogue itself is problematic? As in, an exact quote and how you would have changed it?
Let's even assume this, to anyone who doesn't like it. YOU are the writer. It is pre-launch. She is a minor NPC. There isn't time or budget to expand her into anything else. There isn't even inclination because the shit storm hasn't happened yet. Given the space restraints, what exactly would you have written?