Video game offers more blurring of gender distinctions

Ryan looks very different from the characters he creates on the popular life-simulation video game The Sims. The 22-year-old college student sports a gray button-down collar shirt, a newsboy-style cap, and a well-trimmed beard, but his Sims characters are women with vibrantly colored blouses and long hair—and for years he has used female characters to represent him on The Sims. (The game allows players to design and direct their characters as they engage in day-to-day activities like interacting with family members, dressing for work, and commuting to the office.)

I told Ryan I’d let my editor know his real name and address, yet would not reveal who he is in this article, because we wanted WORLD readers to understand his experience but did not want to out him to his parents and the rest of the world.

Ryan is a Christian who has wrestled with gender dysphoria since childhood. He is not acting out his attractions by wearing women’s clothes or pushing toward a sex-change operation, but he said using female characters in the video game has been “therapeutic for me. … I always questioned what it would be like to be a girl.”

Now, more players of The Sims will find it easier to satisfy some gender dysphoria urges. An update for the latest version of the game, The Sims 4, released on Thursday, dismisses gender boundaries altogether. The update enables players to select any of the 700 apparel or appearance options for both male and female characters. Previously, characters had gender-specific wardrobes, hairdos, and body types to choose from. Players are also able to change their character’s gender throughout the game, and gender symbols will no longer pop up beside characters’ names.

Electronic Arts, publisher of The Sims, and the game’s developer, Maxis, collaborated with the LGBT advocacy group GLAAD to update the game “so that all players can create a Sims world that more accurately reflects the world in which we live today,” said Nick Adams, GLAAD’s media director. Rachel Franklin, executive producer of The Sims 4, pointed out that with the changes “female Sims can wear sharp men’s suits like Ellen [DeGeneres], and male Sims can wear heels like Prince.”

While independently developed “cross-dressing” packages could be found for The Sims before Thursday’s update, the adaptations still tailored clothes to fit only male or female bodies. For example, when a male character tried on female clothing, he would morph into a male head on a female body, or vice versa. “They’d end up looking like weird monster people,” Ryan said.

Ryan has some monstrous childhood memories. He watched his parents separate, and in playing The Sims he has reenacted childhood scenes—but his Sims parents stayed married and raised a girl. Like many fiction writers who live vicariously through their novels and short stories, Ryan satisfied some of his real-life desire to be a woman through the game. But is acting out desires in video games helpful in dealing with gender dysphoria, or does it lead a troubled person deeper into harmful thinking?

Sam A. Andreades, senior pastor of Faith Reformed Presbyterian Church in Quarryville, Pa., and the author of enGendered: God’s Gift of Gender Difference in Relationship, recently wrote in a column for WORLD that it’s important to ask questions of men who have gender dysphoria: “What is a man? … How do you know you aren’t one? Or, alternatively, what is a woman supposed to feel like? If you cannot answer that question, how can you know you have ‘felt like one all your life’?”

Andreades added, “According to Scripture, the current eagerness to pursue sex-change procedures as an answer to inner alienation is misguided. As many parents can testify, gender dysphoria is common in children and usually can be addressed not by changing the body but by dispelling misunderstandings of what they think a boy or girl should be, by clarifying for them the truth of their gender.”

Those are important questions for Ryan to consider—and already he says he is not excited about the new update since he knows it is politically and not artistically motivated: “As a Christian, I feel like this move is not that helpful.”

He sees the game he’s played as one that relieves some of his anxiety, but sees The Sims and its latest update as no panacea for people like himself who suffer from gender dysphoria: “It is easy for it to become an idol, to match what they see in their head.”

The Associated Press contributed to this report.