I most often play Pathfinder, with a mostly-canon Golarion setting. I almost always play a woman - sometimes I make her trans, and sometimes I don’t. Her trans status is usually based on the rest of their characteristics, and whether I feel it “makes sense” for my character to realize she’s trans.
When I played a brash, independent sorceror, or a young noblewoman with resources and connections and a supportive family, it made sense to make my characters trans because they were in a position to figure that out and had the ability to do something about it. In my current Pathfinder game, my character was raised in a militaristic cult that isn’t a good environment for deep introspection, so I made her cis.
When I made my character for Baldur’s Gate 3, she was a self-insert alongside my BF’s self-insert, so she was transfemme and it was an easy decision. I’ll generally prefer to make trans characters, but only if I can make up a good justification to do so.
I recently spoke to a friend who primarily makes cis woman characters as part of the whole “power fantasy” that comes with roleplaying, and her experience was a little different than mine, so I thought I’d ask here. Trans Hexbears, are your RPG characters trans?
I generally prefer playing trans characters if the setting makes transition accessible enough for them, and i particularly like it when the details of transitioning work slightly different and lead to a different lived experience i can explore while still playing a transfem character. When that isn’t an option and i would realistically have to play a character that just gets stuck in a shitty pre transition dysphoria death loop forever, i prefer to go with cis women who work as trans allegories instead. Most of these cis characters are from early on in my transition, in a few cases before i was out to anybody, and the oldest ones are very eggy, but i still love them dearly. It’s fun to take a character i originally made to try out feminine gender roles in my questioning phase and play her now that i actually know what kind of woman i am, it’s a nice contrast to see how she has developed and how different i act when roleplaying her now.
With my next character, i’m going with “normal contemporary trans goth GF” except that she has her own transbian kinkster blood cult because she happens to be a Tremere witch in a game of V:tM. I just wanna lean fully into the queervillain and Anarch thing (we’re playing V5, so eating the city’s Prince and taking everything over is a fairly realistic option when we play hard). Really looking forward to that, witches are always fun for me, it’s such a nice archetype when you’re going for “unapologetically queer power fantasy”.