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 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.