Board Thread:Video Games Discussion/@comment-5014364-20150927172906

I remember going to an NYCC panel around 2011 for Dragon Age, and a person in the audience Q&A line was a girl about my age who said she was LGBT and wanted more characters like that represented in the story.

This past year, Dragon Age gained some attention for actually including a Transgender character in Dragon Age: Inquisition: http://observationdeck.kinja.com/dragon-age-inquisitions-trans-character-1663500954

The mercenary Krem is female-to-male transgender; the Qunari civilization actually have a term for being transgender, "Aqun-Athlok" (defined as "born as one gender but living as another).

Anyway I was writing the article on "Gender and Sexuality" and I included a short section on "Transgender people in the A Song of Ice and Fire mythos".

There actually are cultures in the book continuity that have conceptions about gender that socially accept what we would call "transgender" people, specifically the Jogos Nhai who live north of Yi Ti. They're....loosely analogous to Mongolians, horse-raiders attacking Yi Ti which is analogous to China. The Jogos Nhai are different from the Dothraki to the west though: the Dothraki are warriors and conquerors, the Jogos Nhai live in smaller groups (the land is drier and harsher) and focus more on raiding and retreating before enemies can counter-attack. I wrote about this more in the article subsection, but the idea is that the Jogos Nhai think gender roles are strictly defined, but you can choose which gender you want to live as. "Men" are warriors and leaders in external politics (jhats); only "Women" can be Moonsingers - a combination priestess/healer/judge who rules over internal domestic matters (it seems probable that other domestic things like commerce would also be in the "feminine" sphere, so Jogos Nhai merchants would all be "women").

But the interesting thing is that if someone born a girl wants to be a jhat, they dress and live as a man; conversely if someone born a boy wants to be a Moonsinger, etc., they dress and live as a woman.

Zhea the Cruel, the greatest Jogos Nhai war-leader ever who defeated and killed the last of the Scarlet Emperors of Yi Ti, was what we would call a female-to-male transgender person.

There haven't been any named transgender characters in the main novels, of course, but thinking on this info I wondered:

Might a future video game chapter ever introduce a transgender character?

It seems that this would be relatively easy to do: the novels already mentioned that there are cultures that socially accept being transgender, i.e. the Jogos Nhai.

So a video game wouldn't really need to "invent" anything, but just point out "we based this on something already mentioned in the novels".

I don't know: one option is a Jogos Nhai mercenary (mercenaries wander far from their homelands after all) who is actually female-to-male transgender. They don't even need to be from the distant lands of the Jogos Nhai themselves --a fraction of Braavos's founding slave population were Jogos Nhai and the Moonsingers led them to the future location of Braavos; the Moonsinger religion seems relatively popular in Braavos even today (though the city welcomes all faiths) -- so logically, wouldn't some Braavosi today who had Jogos Nhai ancestors and that still follow the Moonsinger religion, culturally accept transgender people? So you could just say "a Braavosi mercenary that follows the Moonsinger religion" etc.

Alternatively, given that "women" rule over domestic non-war matters among the Jogos Nhai, why not make a Braavosi banker character working for the Iron Bank that is actually a male-to-female transgender? (I'd go with that one more, frankly; media somehow seems more comfortable with female-to-male than male-to-female transgender people when it comes to representation).

So in short: I think including a transgender character in a future video game chapter would be a good idea, and relatively easy to do given that it could just be said that they're a Braavosi who ethnically had Jogos Nhai ancestors and still follows their Moonsinger religion and culture. 