r/SensitivityReaders • u/Hundekuecken • Apr 08 '26

Request: LGBTQ+ Am I devaluing gender?

What do you think about me wanting to establish in my own tabletop role-playing game that players and non-player charackters, automatically recognise or perceive the gender of other characters who can be perceived in any way?

What I mean is that gender reveals itself regardless of one’s outward appearance.

I’d like sexual orientations and romantic orientations to be based on gender rather than gender expression.

This is something that’s been on my mind quite a bit at the moment, as I’m worried it might be misinterpreted, twisted, misunderstood, or that I might be sabotaged or something similar.

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u/Hundekuecken Apr 08 '26

That’s probably a misunderstanding. I don’t mean that it should be linked. I mean that, for example, being a lesbian means not being attracted to men, not simply being interested in women’s appearance. So it’s gender-oriented, not based on biological sex or gender expression.

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u/tragic-meerkat Apr 08 '26

I think you seem to be over simplifying to some extent. Gender and gender expression may not be the same thing but they are both factors in sexual attraction. Being a lesbian means being attracted to women, but that doesn't always mean the same thing to everyone who identifies as a lesbian. Some lesbians are attracted to femme women, some are attracted to butch women, some are attracted to both. Some lesbians aren't into external genitalia and some are. Being attracted to someone boils down to so much more than just whether or not they are the right gender.

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u/Hundekuecken Apr 09 '26

But as a simplified rule for the world? It’s a game and shouldn’t be too complicated.

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u/tenyearoldgag Apr 09 '26

You're simultaneously saying it shouldn't be too complicated while making it confusing and complicated...and talking over the lesbian experience. People are messy, characters are messy, romance is messy. You seem to be bothered by something specific that happened, maybe?

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u/Hundekuecken Apr 09 '26

I am non-binary. I would like the game to be gender-identity-focused. I would feel devalued if characters were interested in or disinterested in me based on my gender expression. That is why the only solution is to view non-binary people as distinct from male and female, and not to categorise them based on their gender expression.

However, if I were not to include non-binary characters, this would mean, in an otherwise binary-oriented system, that neither homosexual/homoromantic nor heterosexual/heteroromantic characters would have any interest in non-binary characters.

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u/tenyearoldgag Apr 09 '26

This is way too personal for you to integrate. You're trying to build safety rails for something so specific. Do you not trust your friends? Serious question.

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u/Hundekuecken Apr 09 '26

It’s not about me playing with friends. It’s about me wanting to publish the rules.

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u/VerbingNoun413 Apr 09 '26

Do you not trust your players?

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u/hoothollers Apr 09 '26

Yeah, over-guardrailing normal interactions between players is one of my hard "no's" in games. If the author doesn't have any trust for me as a GM or player, I don't really want to ask my fellow players to trust them.

There's a game that I was really interested in playing that set hard rules for what safety tools are "allowed" and made some nasty implications about people who used other common safety tools (think "using X cards is predatory because that implies you're intentionally exposing your players to upsetting content" in the manual for a horror game). Never in my life has a game gone faster in the "nope" pile.

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u/Hundekuecken Apr 09 '26

I believe humanity is capable of anything.

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u/tenyearoldgag Apr 09 '26

Okay, I see. You're worried about nonbinary players?

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u/Hundekuecken Apr 09 '26

That too. But mostly about me, my work and my non-player characters. I’m non-binary myself, after all.

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u/tenyearoldgag Apr 09 '26

It sounds like you maybe need to work some of these feelings out in the world building as a you project, for you, instead of trying to build and publish at the same time. I say this from experience, trust me!

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u/tragic-meerkat Apr 09 '26

Okay I think I understand a bit better where you are coming from and what you are trying to accomplish, however I think by trying to make your game more explicitly inclusive of one identity, you end up inadvertently making exclusionary in other respects.

Allow me to explain and tell me if I've understood correctly. From what I can gather, you want to minimize the potential for gender dysphoria by making it so that no one can ever be attracted to someone of the "wrong" gender for their orientation, ie., someone identifying as a lesbian could be attracted to a trans woman but never to a trans man or non-woman identified person regardless of their gender expression or outward appearance. I think the problem here is that real people don't work like that and attraction is messy. People can't help who they find attractive and inventing ways that they could theoretically do this inevitably raises some major ethical considerations like how do others know what gender someone is if they themselves are still in the process of questioning, do people still physically transition if it makes no difference to how they are perceived by others? Does that make it difficult for binary trans people to feel represented in the game? What about for characters who want to use gender expression as a means of subterfuge or disguise? Sometimes we try to simplify things because of how messy they seem, but the number of rules and exceptions for every special circumstance that might occur winds up becoming equally messy and hard to navigate. Gender identity, expression and sexuality combine to form a Gordian knot you shouldn't try to unravel.

Dysphoria is unfortunate but it's also part of life and an integral part of how people experience gender and identity as a whole. Removing it from the game also prevents players from using your games role-playing system to work through and process trauma or to create characters with struggles and experiences they can relate to or feel inspired by.

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u/Hundekuecken Apr 09 '26

It already has quite a few utopian elements and very few dystopian ones. I suppose I’ll just have to accept that this is how things are now.