My cerebral palsy affects my life far more than my pronouns do, and I'd like to think my dead limb is a more compelling narrative ingredient for creating a character forced to fight their way through the lawless Sword Coast.
Man.. this is just wow
Give me a mid-game "coming out as queer" quest where those demons we wrestle with can be laid to rest with dice checks.
I mean.... if you are transsexual IRL, wouldn't you want to NOT be trans in the game? To just be straight up a woman or w/e?
If you are crippled in real life, wouldn't you want to NOT be crippled in your fantasy? At least in your dreams to be fully mobile?
I really don't get it. I don't dream of being myself, with all of my health issues and accumulated trauma. I dream of being godlike. Git gud at dreaming, noobs.
There are some explanation. For some people being trans is part of their identity and what they think makes them special. Compare them to religious nuts who want to play Paladin crusaders purging unbelievers in whatever games they're playing. Or Death Metal fans plaing as edgelord characters. Most of such people probably aren't trans and just needed something to make them feel unique. Also the reason why they/thems a.k.a enbies are so popular. You can be a part of LGBTQ without having to suck dick or wear dress. Best of both worlds.
Another explanation are radical leftists who don't really play games but want to make sure that all forms of media reflect their ideology.
Radical leftists aren't pro-Trans. A good number of them are quite Homophobic even. Radical Leftism is "Class-First", as in everything else, including identity politics, is second to the proletarian struggle against the Bourgeois.
If you think LGTQ is radical leftism you've never talked to a Leftist.
Ironically, on the one gaming Leftist board I sometimes lurk everyone there is bitching like you guys about check-box diversity and having no meaningful message.
But Gangrel's idea of the "radical Left" is what won an internal struggle in the Left in the 60s, particularly after the fall of the Wall.
I was a Leftist of the kind you're talking about in the 70s and up to about the mid 80s, and I remember critiques of cultural Marxism from the Left at the time. The other day I was reading a book that had quotes from an article in an East German newspaper
as far back as the 60s where they were ripping Marcuse and the Frankfurt School a new one, precisely on the basis of the superiority of the traditional class-based analysis.
But it doesn't matter, because the "New Left" and Frankfurt School types of analysis (based on Gramsci's extension of concessions Marx made in terms of transmission of influence back from the superstructure to the base), won out.
In actual fact, what really happened, the tail that's wagging the dog in all of this, is that Jewish movers and shakers involved with the Left switched allegiance from the old version of the Left starting in the early 50s, when the USSR stopped supporting Israel. (You can see that particularly with the Trostkyites of the 60s who eventualy became Neocons. Khruschev's secret speech at the end of the 50s, revelatory of Stalin's crimes, provided even further impetus to those Jews who had been more humanistically-minded.) Once that happened, the big money stopped flowing to the old version of the Left, and started supporting the New Left, the Frankfurt School, Civil Rights legislation, etc., and the developments in academia re. intersectionality and all the rest of it.
Which make sense actually, in the long view, because the corrosive effects on Western society of big capitalism (alienation, atomization, etc.) dovetail with the corrosive effects on society of that new kind of Leftism. The main target of both is the "primary ties" (family, community, patriotism, religion, etc.) that used to be the pillars holding up Western culture and society, and the reduction of society to the individual - desired by the Left on the grounds of individual freedom (ultimately what the Left has always been all about, since its origins in liberalism - freeing the individual from all social constraints) and desired by capitalism on the grounds of those primary ties being the main bulwark against capitalist encroachment into every corner of life (because they provide alternative sources of allegiance to the cash/consumer nexus).
Neoliberalism is the apt term, because essentialy liberalism "came home" after a detour into the historical determinism and class-based analysis of Marx, and returned to its roots in the liberal idea of total freedom of the individual, which suits both the new Left and capitalism.
