Issued on: 24/09/2021 -
Gaming firms in China have pledged to tackle addiction and "politically harmful" content, as the government cracks down on the industry
GREG BAKER AFP
Beijing (AFP)
Hundreds of Chinese video game makers have vowed to police their products for "politically harmful" content and enforce curbs on underage players, as the government cracks down on the entertainment industry.
The 213 gaming firms, including top industry players Tencent and NetEase, promised in a joint statement dated Thursday to ban content that was "politically harmful, historically nihilistic, dirty and pornographic, bloody and terrifying", and to resist "money worship" or "effeminacy" in their games.
They also pledged to "put all efforts into anti-addiction work" and strictly enforce limits on children's screen time through facial recognition and other identification technology.
Chinese authorities have in recent weeks imposed strict curbs on the country's multibillion-dollar gaming industry, restricting players under 18 to only three hours of gaming time a week and ordering businesses to remove "sissy" depictions of men from their apps.
Top firms were also ordered by regulators this month to stop focusing on profit and gaining fans, with enterprises that are seen as flouting rules threatened with punishment.
This has come amid a broader rollout of regulation aimed at reining in the country's influential tech sector, including tough new data security and online privacy laws and rules limiting the power of app algorithms to shape users' online activity.
At the same time, the country's Communist government has gone after celebrities and music idols, blaming them for promoting "abnormal aesthetics" and unhealthy values among Chinese youth.
The firms said in their statement on Thursday that they would not place ads featuring celebrities who had "broken the law or were unethical".
The companies have already stepped up restrictions on minors, with Tencent rolling out a facial recognition "midnight patrol" function in July to root out children masquerading as adults to get around the curfew.
But determined young gamers continued to find ways around the rules, using gaming accounts registered in adults' names -- a practice the companies said on Thursday they would put an end to.
© 2021 AFP
Beijing (AFP)
Hundreds of Chinese video game makers have vowed to police their products for "politically harmful" content and enforce curbs on underage players, as the government cracks down on the entertainment industry.
The 213 gaming firms, including top industry players Tencent and NetEase, promised in a joint statement dated Thursday to ban content that was "politically harmful, historically nihilistic, dirty and pornographic, bloody and terrifying", and to resist "money worship" or "effeminacy" in their games.
They also pledged to "put all efforts into anti-addiction work" and strictly enforce limits on children's screen time through facial recognition and other identification technology.
Chinese authorities have in recent weeks imposed strict curbs on the country's multibillion-dollar gaming industry, restricting players under 18 to only three hours of gaming time a week and ordering businesses to remove "sissy" depictions of men from their apps.
Top firms were also ordered by regulators this month to stop focusing on profit and gaining fans, with enterprises that are seen as flouting rules threatened with punishment.
This has come amid a broader rollout of regulation aimed at reining in the country's influential tech sector, including tough new data security and online privacy laws and rules limiting the power of app algorithms to shape users' online activity.
At the same time, the country's Communist government has gone after celebrities and music idols, blaming them for promoting "abnormal aesthetics" and unhealthy values among Chinese youth.
The firms said in their statement on Thursday that they would not place ads featuring celebrities who had "broken the law or were unethical".
The companies have already stepped up restrictions on minors, with Tencent rolling out a facial recognition "midnight patrol" function in July to root out children masquerading as adults to get around the curfew.
But determined young gamers continued to find ways around the rules, using gaming accounts registered in adults' names -- a practice the companies said on Thursday they would put an end to.
© 2021 AFP
Why cosplay can be so liberating for trans and non-binary folks
For many, dressing up as their favourite characters is the first safe opportunity to play with gender
By V.S. Wells • July 8, 2020 9:00 am EDT
Credit: alblec/iStock/Getty Images Plus; Coprid/iStock/Getty Images Plus; Batareykin/iStock/Getty Images Plus; Hemera Technologies/PhotoObjects.net/Getty Images Plus; Francesca Roh/Xtra
My first cosplay wasn’t one I would have chosen for myself. Like many things I tried in my teens, I got into it because my friend was doing it.
It was 2010 and Susie was attending her first fan convention in London, U.K. She wanted to dress up as characters from the short-lived webcomic Hanna is Not a Boy’s Name. That’s the heart of cosplaying: the act of dressing up as beloved characters—often from television shows, comic books or games—typically for fan conventions. Susie was cosplaying Conrad Achenleck, a prissy vampire mocked for his snaggletooth and love of argyle. My hair was short and blond like Doc Worth’s, so she roped me into dressing as him—a back-alley medical professional with an Australian accent and a cigarette perpetually hanging from his mouth.
To become Worth, I sewed faux fur onto a lab coat I stole from my brother and painted stubble onto my face with shimmery brown eyeshadow. I’d been to conventions before, but I had never cosplayed. Our costumes were incredibly specific, and yet we met some strangers who were cosplaying characters from the same webcomic. Suddenly, I had a new group of friends.
For the next year of my life, my cycle of school and depression and gigs was punctuated by semi-regular cosplay meet-ups at conventions across the U.K. And though Worth was skeezy and a total jerk—like if Benedict Cumberbatch’s Sherlock or Robert Downey Jr.’s Tony Stark had none of the genius to back up their bad attitudes—I kept dressing up as him. He wasn’t a character I would have chosen to step into, but I loved him nonetheless.
I loved making strangers happy when they recognized my niche cosplay choice. I loved my ragtag cosplay group that incestuously dated each other before drifting apart (it was, after all, where I met my first two girlfriends). But most of all, I loved that my cosplay replaced my body as the primary signifier of my gender; that, at a convention, my physical form mattered less than the physicality of my character.
The author, left, and their friend, Susie, in cosplay from the webcomic 'Hanna is Not a Boy's Name.' Credit: Courtesy V.S Wells; photo by Ruben Willis-Powell
Cosplaying as a character whose gender is different from your own is often known as “crossplaying”—a term I’m not fond of, due to its associations with cross-dressing and the assumed cis-ness of all involved. But discussions of identity and gender in this context matter. The 2018 erotic comic book Crossplay by Niki Smith complicates this simple idea: Characters engage in gender-bending cosplay to explore their own identities.
In the book, Alexis and Sierra are girls who cosplay as boys because it makes them happy. J is in awe of them, until a non-binary character helps him understand his own identity as a trans man. And there’s an unnamed assigned-male character wearing a princess dress, which their partner has lovingly sewn. By including trans and non-binary characters, Smith represents a surprisingly common experience: that of gender-questioning people using cosplay to feel out their identity.
That’s the beauty of cosplay; unlike drag, which implies having stage and performance chops, it’s low-stakes. Performing for judgment is optional. Instead, you exist in a sea of other folks. People don’t question your gender if you’re dressed as a character of another gender. Fellow convention-goers don’t make snap judgments about your sexuality or identity the same way the general public might. The collective agreement—that people dressed up as characters are indulging in something playful and make-believe—means that it can be easier for gender nonconforming and trans people to try on things that they’ve always wanted to wear. You can defend it as being “just for fun,” even if it sparks something much more serious in your heart. And for many, it’s a safe way to play with gender for the first time.
The term “cosplay”—a portmanteau of “costume” and “play”—was coined by Nobuyuki Takahashi in a 1983 magazine article, after he witnessed droves of fans at conventions masquerading as their favourite fictional characters. The practice has long had roots in pop culture dress-up, all the way back to the 1930s. But nowadays, it has evolved into a subculture rooted in queerness and gender-bending. A 2013 paper by Jason Bainbridge and Craig Norris has gone as far as to call cosplay “post-human drag.” By cosplaying, they argue, you create “sutures” between this real world and the fictional one of your character.
What the academics don’t realize is that cosplay can create sutures within a person, too—between the fiction of other people’s perceptions of you and the reality of who you truly are.
“The idea that crossplayers might actually be trans people exploring or affirming their gender isn’t really talked about—for the most part, trans and non-binary folks aren’t part of the conversation”
Kayla Hammond, a cosplayer from Washington, used to dress up as their favourite characters to help them figure out they were agender. “I went through a period where I only wanted to do female characters, to the point where even if I had a male character, I would sort of gender-bend them into a girl,” they tell me. “I thought I just didn’t look as good as a boy.”
As they thought more about their gender, they started moving toward cosplaying as more masculine characters. “I thought, okay, I’m going to crossplay and do boy characters because I like it.” This lasted “maybe two or three years before I actually started to question my actual gender identity,” they say. But as Hammond came to identify as agender—without, they say, “any strong emotional connection to any gender at all”—their cosplay shifted, too. These days, they cosplay as both masculine and feminine characters. “I’m just as comfortable trying on different aspects of femininity as I am of masculinity, and I tend to just fall somewhere in the middle,” they say.
Hammond spending years “crossplaying” before considering their gender identity shows how pervasive cisgender narratives are in cosplay spaces. The idea that crossplayers might actually be trans people exploring or affirming their gender isn’t really talked about—for the most part, trans and non-binary folks aren’t part of the conversation.
“Many discussions of cosplay and gender seem to elide discussions of queer, trans or non-binary cosplayers,” writes researcher and cosplayer Emerald L King in a 2015 article. “That’s born out both in academic studies of cosplay, and in cis-dominated cosplay spaces online.” A Grinnell College resource on queer theory echoes that sentiment: “Though people outside of anime fandoms and the cosplay community often stereotype crossplayers as closeted queer folks, the reality is that the majority of crossplayers are cisgender heterosexual individuals,” it reads. The insistence that most crossplayers are cisgender ends up straightwashing queer narratives out of sight. Another paper, “Gender, Sexuality and Cosplay: A Case Study of Male-to-Female Crossplay,” focuses entirely on straight men cosplaying as female characters. The only mention of transness is a throwaway comment explaining how these straight male crossplayers resent assumptions of transness.
And out of the dozens of papers I read on cosplay and gender, only one even considered the possibilities of trans people participating. It was a dissertation on gender-creative Harry Potter cosplay—written by Charles Ledbetter, a trans man. Through his research, Ledbetter found that “cosplay decentered gender as a primary category of identification.” As he explains over email, “Some people did use it [cosplay] as a playground for gender exploration, but in talking to cosplayers I realized that gender was secondary to inhabiting character.”
In some ways, the gender of my first cosplay was a non-factor. I was dressed in costume because it was something my friends liked doing. I thought it didn’t matter to me who I was, so long as it was fun. Cosplaying as characters I admired initially felt separate from exploring my gender identity.
I also spent much of my teens obsessing over fictional male characters, like Tamaki from the anime series Ouran High School Host Club and Howl from the Studio Ghibli film Howl’s Moving Castle—two peacocking blond boys whose maleness was never called into question, despite their vanity. They lived in a world of feminine masculinity that I wanted to stick a straw into and drink up. My cousin offered to help me with both their outfits, but we never had time to make it work. Those were my first twinges of genderqueerness, but it was easy to stamp them out: Tumblr was full of girls who cosplayed as boys, often those who they were attracted to. I assumed my love of Tamaki and Howl was heterosexual fangirling and nothing more, despite the fact I’d been identifying as bisexual since age 12.
The first time I cosplayed as Worth, I realized how much I liked embodying his uncomplicated masculinity. When I looked around at Susie and my new female friends who cosplayed as men, I wondered if they all felt like I did—like living in this imaginative place made them feel more real. Cosplay was the first space where I felt like being somewhere in between male and female was where I was most comfortable.
The author in cosplay. Credit: Courtesy V.S. Wells; photo by Ruben Willis-Powell
For my girlfriend Marcy, the world of cisgender crossplayers was especially confusing. She stumbled upon cosplay as a teenager on the online message board 4chan, several years before she started admitting her gender dysphoria. “I had a huge amount of respect and maybe even deification of people who did crossplay,” she tells me. “There were no male characters for whom I was like, ‘Wow, that’s so cool, I want to be them.’ But there were lots of female characters.”
Crossplay created a space where she felt like she could fit in: Her admiration for men who crossplayed as female characters made it feel like she could do that, too. Crossplaying as female characters was fine, the internet said, so long as you didn’t think you really are a woman. The first time she wore a skirt in public, she cosplayed as Ryko Matoi from the anime Kill la Kill. At the time, she identified as a cross-dresser—because that was the terminology her internet spaces used.
“Just because cosplaying is a comparatively safe space doesn’t mean it’s perfect—transphobia is still prevalent”
For Marcy, crossplaying in public also provided positive feedback from other people. “You’re actively celebrated for who you’re being and how you’re presenting yourself. I think it’s an incredibly affirming sort of space,” she tells me. “It definitely helped me reinforce those presentation ideas, like, ‘Yes, I’m not strange to want to present myself in a more feminine way.’”
But just because cosplaying is a comparatively safe space doesn’t mean it’s perfect. Transphobia is still prevalent—as affirming as it is to dress however you want, having strangers see through your cosplay can be hurtful. And due to the prevalence of cisgender people who cosplay, it’s not uncommon to refer to cosplayers as the perceived gender of the cosplayer instead of that of the character. Marcy remembers the first time she wore her Ryko cosplay at a fan convention in London. “Someone in one of the merch stands was giving cosplayers free little badges based on their costumes, and they gave me a ‘cross-dressing boy’ pin,” she recalls. “It made me feel kind of shitty. At the time, that’s what I thought I was, but it still made me feel shitty.”
Kyler Williams, a trans person from California, struggles to correct people at conventions who assume he’s female. “Me and the character I’m cosplaying as are two different entities,” he says. “But I normally don’t have the heart to correct people on my pronouns, because that involves having to come out and I hate doing that.”
And while he identifies as non-binary and sometimes cosplays as female characters, he’s not entirely comfortable with how onlookers assume gender based on his costume. “Part of me doesn’t mind [if] people think of me as a woman because my character is. But if they think me as a person is a woman, then it just makes me feel shitty.”
For many, the potential drawbacks of cosplaying are outweighed by the positive experiences they have in costume. Maxel Riverin, a trans man from Quebec, first started cosplaying in 2014 while he identified as genderfluid. His first cosplay was Kuroko, the eponymous basketball prodigy from the manga series Kuroko no Basuke.
“It was liberating! It felt like I was able to look like what I imagined in my head,” he says. “I guess I fell in love with the idea of becoming the characters I relate to for a while.”
Riverin has long been a fan of sports anime, a genre that revolves around (typically) male characters excited to play various high-school sports. Often, athletics takes a backseat to the relationships that happen between characters on the team. “All the fandoms I’ve been in are welcoming,” Maxel says. “There’s no toxicity.”
Kayla Hammond, the cosplayer from Washington, felt that cosplaying at conventions was a safe space to try out different gender presentations. “It’s comfortable to be able to express myself as male, especially in the context of cosplay,” they say. “If you’re not totally out to other people or out to yourself yet, it’s safer to be like, ‘I’m going to dress as a boy because it’s cosplay, it’s just for fun.’ I’m not going to have to have anybody necessarily question what my gender actually is.”
“Being in the cosplay made me feel really masculine, and any doubts I had about myself was thrown out the window”
While assigned-female people have a certain amount of social leeway for dressing more masculine, the same isn’t true for assigned-male people. My girlfriend found that cosplaying was like a baptism of fire. “I know, for a lot of people, there’s a lot of initial fears about going out presenting as your gender for your first time,” she says. “I feel like cosplay softened a lot of that for me because I’d already gone so extreme.” Her outfit for anime character Ryko involved “a tiny skirt and crop top showing your entire tummy.” By contrast, going out during the day in feminine clothing was less scary.
Williams found that cosplay was what helped him tap into his masculine side. Cosplaying as Noctis from the game Final Fantasy XV made him feel more confident. “Being in the cosplay made me feel really masculine, and any doubts I had about myself was thrown out the window, because I really enjoyed dressing up as him,” he says. “Noctis […] makes me ooze masculinity.”
Ididn’t come out as non-binary until I was 20, long after my teenage cosplaying days were behind me. I never wore a binder, because the physical discomfort of binding H-cup breasts outweighed my social discomfort of looking too female.
The last time I cosplayed was in 2017, shortly before moving to Canada. Marcy dusted off her Ryko cosplay, and I roped one of our housemates into helping me make an outfit for Ryko’s ditzy love interest, Mako Mankanshoku. I’d cosplayed girls before, when I still identified as female. Cosplaying as Mako once I identified as non-binary was freeing. She was just another costume to slip into.
Now that conventions are cancelled for the foreseeable future, I’ve started wondering about cosplaying again. If there are no social gatherings for the next year, that might be enough time to learn how to sew—or find a blue jacket I can repurpose into Tamaki’s blazer.
More From This Contributor
V. S. Wells is a British writer living in Vancouver, B.C., with bylines in Slate, VICE and Autostraddle. Please stop asking them about Brexit.
For many, dressing up as their favourite characters is the first safe opportunity to play with gender
By V.S. Wells • July 8, 2020 9:00 am EDT
Credit: alblec/iStock/Getty Images Plus; Coprid/iStock/Getty Images Plus; Batareykin/iStock/Getty Images Plus; Hemera Technologies/PhotoObjects.net/Getty Images Plus; Francesca Roh/Xtra
My first cosplay wasn’t one I would have chosen for myself. Like many things I tried in my teens, I got into it because my friend was doing it.
It was 2010 and Susie was attending her first fan convention in London, U.K. She wanted to dress up as characters from the short-lived webcomic Hanna is Not a Boy’s Name. That’s the heart of cosplaying: the act of dressing up as beloved characters—often from television shows, comic books or games—typically for fan conventions. Susie was cosplaying Conrad Achenleck, a prissy vampire mocked for his snaggletooth and love of argyle. My hair was short and blond like Doc Worth’s, so she roped me into dressing as him—a back-alley medical professional with an Australian accent and a cigarette perpetually hanging from his mouth.
To become Worth, I sewed faux fur onto a lab coat I stole from my brother and painted stubble onto my face with shimmery brown eyeshadow. I’d been to conventions before, but I had never cosplayed. Our costumes were incredibly specific, and yet we met some strangers who were cosplaying characters from the same webcomic. Suddenly, I had a new group of friends.
For the next year of my life, my cycle of school and depression and gigs was punctuated by semi-regular cosplay meet-ups at conventions across the U.K. And though Worth was skeezy and a total jerk—like if Benedict Cumberbatch’s Sherlock or Robert Downey Jr.’s Tony Stark had none of the genius to back up their bad attitudes—I kept dressing up as him. He wasn’t a character I would have chosen to step into, but I loved him nonetheless.
I loved making strangers happy when they recognized my niche cosplay choice. I loved my ragtag cosplay group that incestuously dated each other before drifting apart (it was, after all, where I met my first two girlfriends). But most of all, I loved that my cosplay replaced my body as the primary signifier of my gender; that, at a convention, my physical form mattered less than the physicality of my character.
The author, left, and their friend, Susie, in cosplay from the webcomic 'Hanna is Not a Boy's Name.' Credit: Courtesy V.S Wells; photo by Ruben Willis-Powell
Cosplaying as a character whose gender is different from your own is often known as “crossplaying”—a term I’m not fond of, due to its associations with cross-dressing and the assumed cis-ness of all involved. But discussions of identity and gender in this context matter. The 2018 erotic comic book Crossplay by Niki Smith complicates this simple idea: Characters engage in gender-bending cosplay to explore their own identities.
In the book, Alexis and Sierra are girls who cosplay as boys because it makes them happy. J is in awe of them, until a non-binary character helps him understand his own identity as a trans man. And there’s an unnamed assigned-male character wearing a princess dress, which their partner has lovingly sewn. By including trans and non-binary characters, Smith represents a surprisingly common experience: that of gender-questioning people using cosplay to feel out their identity.
That’s the beauty of cosplay; unlike drag, which implies having stage and performance chops, it’s low-stakes. Performing for judgment is optional. Instead, you exist in a sea of other folks. People don’t question your gender if you’re dressed as a character of another gender. Fellow convention-goers don’t make snap judgments about your sexuality or identity the same way the general public might. The collective agreement—that people dressed up as characters are indulging in something playful and make-believe—means that it can be easier for gender nonconforming and trans people to try on things that they’ve always wanted to wear. You can defend it as being “just for fun,” even if it sparks something much more serious in your heart. And for many, it’s a safe way to play with gender for the first time.
The term “cosplay”—a portmanteau of “costume” and “play”—was coined by Nobuyuki Takahashi in a 1983 magazine article, after he witnessed droves of fans at conventions masquerading as their favourite fictional characters. The practice has long had roots in pop culture dress-up, all the way back to the 1930s. But nowadays, it has evolved into a subculture rooted in queerness and gender-bending. A 2013 paper by Jason Bainbridge and Craig Norris has gone as far as to call cosplay “post-human drag.” By cosplaying, they argue, you create “sutures” between this real world and the fictional one of your character.
What the academics don’t realize is that cosplay can create sutures within a person, too—between the fiction of other people’s perceptions of you and the reality of who you truly are.
“The idea that crossplayers might actually be trans people exploring or affirming their gender isn’t really talked about—for the most part, trans and non-binary folks aren’t part of the conversation”
Kayla Hammond, a cosplayer from Washington, used to dress up as their favourite characters to help them figure out they were agender. “I went through a period where I only wanted to do female characters, to the point where even if I had a male character, I would sort of gender-bend them into a girl,” they tell me. “I thought I just didn’t look as good as a boy.”
As they thought more about their gender, they started moving toward cosplaying as more masculine characters. “I thought, okay, I’m going to crossplay and do boy characters because I like it.” This lasted “maybe two or three years before I actually started to question my actual gender identity,” they say. But as Hammond came to identify as agender—without, they say, “any strong emotional connection to any gender at all”—their cosplay shifted, too. These days, they cosplay as both masculine and feminine characters. “I’m just as comfortable trying on different aspects of femininity as I am of masculinity, and I tend to just fall somewhere in the middle,” they say.
Hammond spending years “crossplaying” before considering their gender identity shows how pervasive cisgender narratives are in cosplay spaces. The idea that crossplayers might actually be trans people exploring or affirming their gender isn’t really talked about—for the most part, trans and non-binary folks aren’t part of the conversation.
“Many discussions of cosplay and gender seem to elide discussions of queer, trans or non-binary cosplayers,” writes researcher and cosplayer Emerald L King in a 2015 article. “That’s born out both in academic studies of cosplay, and in cis-dominated cosplay spaces online.” A Grinnell College resource on queer theory echoes that sentiment: “Though people outside of anime fandoms and the cosplay community often stereotype crossplayers as closeted queer folks, the reality is that the majority of crossplayers are cisgender heterosexual individuals,” it reads. The insistence that most crossplayers are cisgender ends up straightwashing queer narratives out of sight. Another paper, “Gender, Sexuality and Cosplay: A Case Study of Male-to-Female Crossplay,” focuses entirely on straight men cosplaying as female characters. The only mention of transness is a throwaway comment explaining how these straight male crossplayers resent assumptions of transness.
And out of the dozens of papers I read on cosplay and gender, only one even considered the possibilities of trans people participating. It was a dissertation on gender-creative Harry Potter cosplay—written by Charles Ledbetter, a trans man. Through his research, Ledbetter found that “cosplay decentered gender as a primary category of identification.” As he explains over email, “Some people did use it [cosplay] as a playground for gender exploration, but in talking to cosplayers I realized that gender was secondary to inhabiting character.”
In some ways, the gender of my first cosplay was a non-factor. I was dressed in costume because it was something my friends liked doing. I thought it didn’t matter to me who I was, so long as it was fun. Cosplaying as characters I admired initially felt separate from exploring my gender identity.
I also spent much of my teens obsessing over fictional male characters, like Tamaki from the anime series Ouran High School Host Club and Howl from the Studio Ghibli film Howl’s Moving Castle—two peacocking blond boys whose maleness was never called into question, despite their vanity. They lived in a world of feminine masculinity that I wanted to stick a straw into and drink up. My cousin offered to help me with both their outfits, but we never had time to make it work. Those were my first twinges of genderqueerness, but it was easy to stamp them out: Tumblr was full of girls who cosplayed as boys, often those who they were attracted to. I assumed my love of Tamaki and Howl was heterosexual fangirling and nothing more, despite the fact I’d been identifying as bisexual since age 12.
The first time I cosplayed as Worth, I realized how much I liked embodying his uncomplicated masculinity. When I looked around at Susie and my new female friends who cosplayed as men, I wondered if they all felt like I did—like living in this imaginative place made them feel more real. Cosplay was the first space where I felt like being somewhere in between male and female was where I was most comfortable.
The author in cosplay. Credit: Courtesy V.S. Wells; photo by Ruben Willis-Powell
For my girlfriend Marcy, the world of cisgender crossplayers was especially confusing. She stumbled upon cosplay as a teenager on the online message board 4chan, several years before she started admitting her gender dysphoria. “I had a huge amount of respect and maybe even deification of people who did crossplay,” she tells me. “There were no male characters for whom I was like, ‘Wow, that’s so cool, I want to be them.’ But there were lots of female characters.”
Crossplay created a space where she felt like she could fit in: Her admiration for men who crossplayed as female characters made it feel like she could do that, too. Crossplaying as female characters was fine, the internet said, so long as you didn’t think you really are a woman. The first time she wore a skirt in public, she cosplayed as Ryko Matoi from the anime Kill la Kill. At the time, she identified as a cross-dresser—because that was the terminology her internet spaces used.
“Just because cosplaying is a comparatively safe space doesn’t mean it’s perfect—transphobia is still prevalent”
For Marcy, crossplaying in public also provided positive feedback from other people. “You’re actively celebrated for who you’re being and how you’re presenting yourself. I think it’s an incredibly affirming sort of space,” she tells me. “It definitely helped me reinforce those presentation ideas, like, ‘Yes, I’m not strange to want to present myself in a more feminine way.’”
But just because cosplaying is a comparatively safe space doesn’t mean it’s perfect. Transphobia is still prevalent—as affirming as it is to dress however you want, having strangers see through your cosplay can be hurtful. And due to the prevalence of cisgender people who cosplay, it’s not uncommon to refer to cosplayers as the perceived gender of the cosplayer instead of that of the character. Marcy remembers the first time she wore her Ryko cosplay at a fan convention in London. “Someone in one of the merch stands was giving cosplayers free little badges based on their costumes, and they gave me a ‘cross-dressing boy’ pin,” she recalls. “It made me feel kind of shitty. At the time, that’s what I thought I was, but it still made me feel shitty.”
Kyler Williams, a trans person from California, struggles to correct people at conventions who assume he’s female. “Me and the character I’m cosplaying as are two different entities,” he says. “But I normally don’t have the heart to correct people on my pronouns, because that involves having to come out and I hate doing that.”
And while he identifies as non-binary and sometimes cosplays as female characters, he’s not entirely comfortable with how onlookers assume gender based on his costume. “Part of me doesn’t mind [if] people think of me as a woman because my character is. But if they think me as a person is a woman, then it just makes me feel shitty.”
For many, the potential drawbacks of cosplaying are outweighed by the positive experiences they have in costume. Maxel Riverin, a trans man from Quebec, first started cosplaying in 2014 while he identified as genderfluid. His first cosplay was Kuroko, the eponymous basketball prodigy from the manga series Kuroko no Basuke.
“It was liberating! It felt like I was able to look like what I imagined in my head,” he says. “I guess I fell in love with the idea of becoming the characters I relate to for a while.”
Riverin has long been a fan of sports anime, a genre that revolves around (typically) male characters excited to play various high-school sports. Often, athletics takes a backseat to the relationships that happen between characters on the team. “All the fandoms I’ve been in are welcoming,” Maxel says. “There’s no toxicity.”
Kayla Hammond, the cosplayer from Washington, felt that cosplaying at conventions was a safe space to try out different gender presentations. “It’s comfortable to be able to express myself as male, especially in the context of cosplay,” they say. “If you’re not totally out to other people or out to yourself yet, it’s safer to be like, ‘I’m going to dress as a boy because it’s cosplay, it’s just for fun.’ I’m not going to have to have anybody necessarily question what my gender actually is.”
“Being in the cosplay made me feel really masculine, and any doubts I had about myself was thrown out the window”
While assigned-female people have a certain amount of social leeway for dressing more masculine, the same isn’t true for assigned-male people. My girlfriend found that cosplaying was like a baptism of fire. “I know, for a lot of people, there’s a lot of initial fears about going out presenting as your gender for your first time,” she says. “I feel like cosplay softened a lot of that for me because I’d already gone so extreme.” Her outfit for anime character Ryko involved “a tiny skirt and crop top showing your entire tummy.” By contrast, going out during the day in feminine clothing was less scary.
Williams found that cosplay was what helped him tap into his masculine side. Cosplaying as Noctis from the game Final Fantasy XV made him feel more confident. “Being in the cosplay made me feel really masculine, and any doubts I had about myself was thrown out the window, because I really enjoyed dressing up as him,” he says. “Noctis […] makes me ooze masculinity.”
Ididn’t come out as non-binary until I was 20, long after my teenage cosplaying days were behind me. I never wore a binder, because the physical discomfort of binding H-cup breasts outweighed my social discomfort of looking too female.
The last time I cosplayed was in 2017, shortly before moving to Canada. Marcy dusted off her Ryko cosplay, and I roped one of our housemates into helping me make an outfit for Ryko’s ditzy love interest, Mako Mankanshoku. I’d cosplayed girls before, when I still identified as female. Cosplaying as Mako once I identified as non-binary was freeing. She was just another costume to slip into.
Now that conventions are cancelled for the foreseeable future, I’ve started wondering about cosplaying again. If there are no social gatherings for the next year, that might be enough time to learn how to sew—or find a blue jacket I can repurpose into Tamaki’s blazer.
More From This Contributor
V. S. Wells is a British writer living in Vancouver, B.C., with bylines in Slate, VICE and Autostraddle. Please stop asking them about Brexit.
Queer and Trans Cosplayers: “We’re Here, We Exist”
The Importance of Representation and Allyship in the Cosplay Community
July 6, 2020
by Joey Phoenix
Image: Brandon the Shapeshifter (Left), Lee Clever (Right)
Content Warning: Sexual Harassment, Transphobia, Homophobia
Click here for a list of North Shore LGBTQIA+ Resources
The world of Cosplay is one that allows you to temporarily become someone else. Individuals can don costumes, put on fanciful makeup, and embody characters from all branches of culture, be it popular or not. But for Queer and Transgender Cosplayers, Cosplay can often become a way for people to feel fully themselves.
Unfortunately, even with the freedom the hobby (read: lifestyle) can provide, Transphobia and Homophobia runs rampant in many communities, and the Cosplay community isn’t excluded from that. While many people find their social homes at Cosplay Conventions or “Cons,” and herald the inclusivity of that space, things are easier for some than for others. And it’s not just issues attached to Gender Identity, Non able-bodied cosplayers have had their share of difficulties, and older and plus-sized cosplayers have faced similar gatekeeping challenges.
While cons have been working to make their spaces more inclusive and accessible to all genders, there is still a long way to go, especially when globally recognized icons aren’t speaking inclusively themselves.
Becoming Mr. Clever
“One of us needs to control this head. We’re too well-balanced.” – Mr. Clever, Doctor Who
Lee Clever (he/they) had never fully considered being a Cosplayer until he started watching the reboot of Doctor Who, and even then, it wasn’t until the 11th doctor Matt Smith portrayed the Cyber Doctor Mr. Clever in Nightmare in Silver that everything finally clicked in his head.
“I tried cosplaying as ‘Town Called Mercy‘ 11. I tried the ‘Let’s Kill Hitler‘ green coat. I tried the standard purple coat sans Cybernetics. Eh. Wasn’t for me. I didn’t like it. Like all the other costumes before, I just didn’t get the appeal. I couldn’t understand why ‘those people dressed up’. Try as I might, I couldn’t be a Malfoy,” Lee said in a blog post on his website.”
But when Mr. Clever appeared onscreen in “Nightmare in Silver,” he just knew that’s what he wanted to Cosplay.
“I just thought, oh my god, this is my character. This is like the greatest character I’ve ever seen,” Lee said.
“I want to change that,” he said. “It’s something that needs to change in mainstream media like yesterday, like last year, and I’m going to be part of what changes that. I’m working on a book right now, it’s called Memoirs of an Immortal Witch” It’s the fifth installment in his Dark Mysteries of the Paranormal series, which you can read in ebook form.
Other ways for this to change is for not just Cosplay communities, but also Pride organizations, and Social Justice organizations to become more inclusive of their BIPOC Queer community.
“It’s important because the country is on fire right now with the whole Black Lives Matter movement. And I feel like Black people won’t like me saying this, but I’m Black, so I’m talking about members of my community,” he said. “They love to shout and scream Black Lives Matter, except for when it comes to black people of the LGBTQ community.
“They do this all the time. They seek to end racism and then turn around and say [that they] hate gay people or that we have mental illnesses or that we choose to be gay. It wasn’t a choice for me, and they are being willfully ignorant,” he added.
For him, it starts with representation. If people don’t see Black Queer Werewolves in their stories, or Black Queer Trans Womxn in their Pride parades, their world can remain heteronormative and white-centric.
“I can’t stress this enough,” he said. “It’s important for us to have Pride, to be visible in our communities. We’re saying ‘Like, Hello! We’re here, We exist. You can’t ignore us.’”
The Importance of Allyship in Cosplay Communities
“For my ally is the Force. And a powerful ally it is. Life creates it, makes it grow. Its energy surrounds us and binds us. Luminous beings are we… not this crude matter. You must feel the Force around you.” – Yoda, Star Wars
While Cosplay communities on the whole tend to be more inclusive of people in general, problematic behaviors can arise when transphobic, homophobic, racist, fatphobic, ageist, and ableist voices find a platform for their views.
After Lee Clever’s Mr. Clever cosplay went viral after Arisia in 2014, another photographer put a photo of Lee’s Mr. Clever on Reddit, which wasn’t received well at all. Not only did people harshly criticize Lee’s choice of cosplay with Mr. Clever, a character not particularly well-loved in the Whovian fandom, but the comment section was also rife with transphobic threats and sexual harassment.
“One person told me if they ever saw me at a con they would key my car. Another person threatened to ‘spit on me.’ Another said they would take me in an alleyway,” He said.
Since then he has been kicked out of a couple of public cosplay groups, which he believes was not only because he was Trans, but also because of his speaking out against gender binaries in general. “It wasn’t just about me, it was about non-binary people and my other Trans friends too.”
He also has noticed a general trend in regards to non-inclusivity in cosplay communities towards Trans individuals.
“If I use the hashtag #transcosplayers, I will get half the interactions [on social media]. It’s really frustrating to know that someone can just look at you and have no problems with you, but when [they realize] that you’re trans, they want no part of you,” he said.
A Misti-Con-troversy
Cat Benjamin (she/her), a cisgender female cosplayer and cast member of Intramersive Media, LLC who identifies as Queer/Bisexual, has witnessed some of the effects Transphobia can have on cosplay communities she’s been a part of.
For example, J.K Rowling has been all over the news recently for the Transphobic comments she’s made in personal blog posts, public interviews, and on Twitter. While the reactions to these comments are currently trending, they’re not new to her or to some of her fans.
Misti-Con, the region’s largest Harry Potter convention held in New Hampshire every other odd year, dealt with controversy in 2015 when a notable Cosplayer in the community started making their own Transphobic comments.
Cat, a self-identified Griffindor who frequently cosplays Luna Lovegood, specifically Christmas Party Luna, remembers how the events played out.
She was recently named the Diversity and Inclusion Officer both for Alderaan Base, part of the New England contingent of The Rebel Legion, and 501st New England, the “bad guy” counterpart to the Rebel Legion, an elite charitable Star-Wars costuming organization. She’s also part of Pride Squadron, an LGBTQIA+ component of that community.
At first, she wasn’t sure she would be the best fit as Diversity and Inclusion Officer. “I felt a little weird about it because as someone who is [bisexual] and has experienced a lot of bi-erasure throughout the years,” Arielle said.
The Importance of Representation and Allyship in the Cosplay Community
July 6, 2020
by Joey Phoenix
Image: Brandon the Shapeshifter (Left), Lee Clever (Right)
Content Warning: Sexual Harassment, Transphobia, Homophobia
Click here for a list of North Shore LGBTQIA+ Resources
The world of Cosplay is one that allows you to temporarily become someone else. Individuals can don costumes, put on fanciful makeup, and embody characters from all branches of culture, be it popular or not. But for Queer and Transgender Cosplayers, Cosplay can often become a way for people to feel fully themselves.
Unfortunately, even with the freedom the hobby (read: lifestyle) can provide, Transphobia and Homophobia runs rampant in many communities, and the Cosplay community isn’t excluded from that. While many people find their social homes at Cosplay Conventions or “Cons,” and herald the inclusivity of that space, things are easier for some than for others. And it’s not just issues attached to Gender Identity, Non able-bodied cosplayers have had their share of difficulties, and older and plus-sized cosplayers have faced similar gatekeeping challenges.
While cons have been working to make their spaces more inclusive and accessible to all genders, there is still a long way to go, especially when globally recognized icons aren’t speaking inclusively themselves.
Becoming Mr. Clever
“One of us needs to control this head. We’re too well-balanced.” – Mr. Clever, Doctor Who
Lee Clever (he/they) had never fully considered being a Cosplayer until he started watching the reboot of Doctor Who, and even then, it wasn’t until the 11th doctor Matt Smith portrayed the Cyber Doctor Mr. Clever in Nightmare in Silver that everything finally clicked in his head.
“I tried cosplaying as ‘Town Called Mercy‘ 11. I tried the ‘Let’s Kill Hitler‘ green coat. I tried the standard purple coat sans Cybernetics. Eh. Wasn’t for me. I didn’t like it. Like all the other costumes before, I just didn’t get the appeal. I couldn’t understand why ‘those people dressed up’. Try as I might, I couldn’t be a Malfoy,” Lee said in a blog post on his website.”
But when Mr. Clever appeared onscreen in “Nightmare in Silver,” he just knew that’s what he wanted to Cosplay.
“I just thought, oh my god, this is my character. This is like the greatest character I’ve ever seen,” Lee said.
Photo by Vignette Lammot Portraits
But when Lee had this realization, he hadn’t yet come out publicly as Transgender. For him, it wasn’t really the point, at least not yet. At the time, the focus was more on how to create the costume well – something he had never done before.
One of the biggest challenges of putting it together was deciding how to incorporate the cybertech face piece using materials that Lee wasn’t allergic to, as most prosthetics have latex or silicone.
“I realized that I had to make something that was mostly edible,” he said. “I sat in my kitchen and felt like I was a kid making playdough, and it worked. Although at the time I thought it was something I was going to do once.”
Lee Clever debuted Mr. Clever at Arisia in 2014, which, being the fiftieth anniversary of the popular series, was a Dr. Who-Centric year at the con.
“People kept saying they had never seen anyone cosplay Mr. Clever before, and [that weekend] I was bombarded with people. I’ve never experienced anything like that,” he recalled. “And then, my friend took a photo of me, and that picture ended up going viral.”
Cosplay and Gender Identity
“But the only measure that [Sauron] knows is desire, desire for power; and so he judges all hearts,” – Gandalf
Jude (He/Him), a North Shore-based Trans cosplayer, was attending an all women’s liberal arts college in Raleigh, North Carolina five years ago when he realized he didn’t identify with the gender he was assigned at birth. With the support of friends “and a lot of help from Tumblr,” he was able to come out as Nonbinary and begin exploring different gender identities.
But when Lee had this realization, he hadn’t yet come out publicly as Transgender. For him, it wasn’t really the point, at least not yet. At the time, the focus was more on how to create the costume well – something he had never done before.
One of the biggest challenges of putting it together was deciding how to incorporate the cybertech face piece using materials that Lee wasn’t allergic to, as most prosthetics have latex or silicone.
“I realized that I had to make something that was mostly edible,” he said. “I sat in my kitchen and felt like I was a kid making playdough, and it worked. Although at the time I thought it was something I was going to do once.”
Lee Clever debuted Mr. Clever at Arisia in 2014, which, being the fiftieth anniversary of the popular series, was a Dr. Who-Centric year at the con.
“People kept saying they had never seen anyone cosplay Mr. Clever before, and [that weekend] I was bombarded with people. I’ve never experienced anything like that,” he recalled. “And then, my friend took a photo of me, and that picture ended up going viral.”
Cosplay and Gender Identity
“But the only measure that [Sauron] knows is desire, desire for power; and so he judges all hearts,” – Gandalf
Jude (He/Him), a North Shore-based Trans cosplayer, was attending an all women’s liberal arts college in Raleigh, North Carolina five years ago when he realized he didn’t identify with the gender he was assigned at birth. With the support of friends “and a lot of help from Tumblr,” he was able to come out as Nonbinary and begin exploring different gender identities.
Jude as First Age Sauron
His whole life, from growing up in Kansas where transgender identities just “weren’t really a thing,” to going to college, he had never been traditionally femme. “I was always a tomboy as a kid running around playing in the mud getting dirty,” Jude remembered. “I played with Hot Wheels, I had action figures, a lot of my toys were things that girls traditionally weren’t supposed to like or play with.”
For Halloween when he was 7 or 8, he asked his mom if he could dress up as Harry Potter. She said no, and Jude, seeing no other option, dressed like Hermione instead.
“When I started going through puberty, I was cursed by a very large chest size,” he said. “So I’ve always been very unhappy with that part of me specifically, and I was always really unhappy when my ‘time in the month’ came around, because it just made me feel disgusting, which is something a lot of Trans people I know have experienced.”
Originally, cosplay was a way for him to start exploring the boundaries of gender. Some favorite cosplays have included First Age Sauron from Lord of the Rings, Michael Langdon from American Horror Story, and the Crow. He doesn’t consider himself to be a “con cosplayer,” mainly because cost and timing has always prevented him from attending larger events.
His whole life, from growing up in Kansas where transgender identities just “weren’t really a thing,” to going to college, he had never been traditionally femme. “I was always a tomboy as a kid running around playing in the mud getting dirty,” Jude remembered. “I played with Hot Wheels, I had action figures, a lot of my toys were things that girls traditionally weren’t supposed to like or play with.”
For Halloween when he was 7 or 8, he asked his mom if he could dress up as Harry Potter. She said no, and Jude, seeing no other option, dressed like Hermione instead.
“When I started going through puberty, I was cursed by a very large chest size,” he said. “So I’ve always been very unhappy with that part of me specifically, and I was always really unhappy when my ‘time in the month’ came around, because it just made me feel disgusting, which is something a lot of Trans people I know have experienced.”
Originally, cosplay was a way for him to start exploring the boundaries of gender. Some favorite cosplays have included First Age Sauron from Lord of the Rings, Michael Langdon from American Horror Story, and the Crow. He doesn’t consider himself to be a “con cosplayer,” mainly because cost and timing has always prevented him from attending larger events.
Jude as Michael Langdon from American Horror Story
When he moved to Boston for grad school in 2017, the first time fully away from his parents, he started experimenting more with gender and realized that he was male.
“I’ve been living socially as a guy for three years now. I’ve been out in Salem [for that time], but I didn’t really come out to my parents until February,” he said. “I still haven’t told them that I’m on hormones.”
Jude made the decision to transition this year thanks to the help of a friend who, after seeing some negative posts Jude made on social media, decided to intervene.
“They said ‘You don’t live in the south anymore. Let me take you to Boston, to Fenway Health.’” Jude said. “And they did. They showed up and brought me to Fenway. It took me another month after that initial appointment to actually get the prescription. But without them, I don’t know if I would have been able to ‘man up,’” he said, pun intended.
An American LGBTQIA+ Horror Story
“Once again…welcome to my house. Come freely. Go safely; and leave something of the happiness you bring.” – Bram Stoker, Dracula
Brandon the Shapeshifter (He/Him) is a Black, queer, cisgender male cosplayer who has become a well-known face not just on the North Shore but in Cosplay across the Eastern seaboard. His wildly creative costumes have ranged from traditional horror like Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Stephen King’s It to supernatural creatures from his own novels.
When he moved to Boston for grad school in 2017, the first time fully away from his parents, he started experimenting more with gender and realized that he was male.
“I’ve been living socially as a guy for three years now. I’ve been out in Salem [for that time], but I didn’t really come out to my parents until February,” he said. “I still haven’t told them that I’m on hormones.”
Jude made the decision to transition this year thanks to the help of a friend who, after seeing some negative posts Jude made on social media, decided to intervene.
“They said ‘You don’t live in the south anymore. Let me take you to Boston, to Fenway Health.’” Jude said. “And they did. They showed up and brought me to Fenway. It took me another month after that initial appointment to actually get the prescription. But without them, I don’t know if I would have been able to ‘man up,’” he said, pun intended.
An American LGBTQIA+ Horror Story
“Once again…welcome to my house. Come freely. Go safely; and leave something of the happiness you bring.” – Bram Stoker, Dracula
Brandon the Shapeshifter (He/Him) is a Black, queer, cisgender male cosplayer who has become a well-known face not just on the North Shore but in Cosplay across the Eastern seaboard. His wildly creative costumes have ranged from traditional horror like Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Stephen King’s It to supernatural creatures from his own novels.
The Master of Time and Space
Many of his costumes can be classified as high-femme, with intensely detailed pieces he made himself.
“Cosplay allowed me to find an oasis of creativity,” he said when asked about queer inclusivity in the cosplay community, “[Creative people] try to find safe havens so that we’re not having constant hate being directed towards us.”
He said that while the broader world may not be so accepting of Queer identities, he’s been lucky to have found the connections he has through Cosplay, because his experience so far has been mainly positive.
“A lot of people have their toxic moments and their really not so great moments,” he said. “But I’ve just had positive reinforcement up until now.”
Brandon came out to his parents as gay when he was 18, which they were ultimately indifferent to. To this day, part of him wishes he hadn’t done it.
“I hate the fact that you can go up to a person and say ‘This is who I am, I hope you can accept me. And then they have the power to say ‘No I don’t,’” he explained. “In sharing something so personal you’re giving them the power to just shut you down. It’s not fair.”
One of the biggest issues Brandon has come up against in Cosplay is that he’s been forced to create a lot of original characters (OC) because there just isn’t a lot of LGBTQIA+ representation, especially Black representation, in pop-culture. And in the horror genre, there is hardly any.
Many of his costumes can be classified as high-femme, with intensely detailed pieces he made himself.
“Cosplay allowed me to find an oasis of creativity,” he said when asked about queer inclusivity in the cosplay community, “[Creative people] try to find safe havens so that we’re not having constant hate being directed towards us.”
He said that while the broader world may not be so accepting of Queer identities, he’s been lucky to have found the connections he has through Cosplay, because his experience so far has been mainly positive.
“A lot of people have their toxic moments and their really not so great moments,” he said. “But I’ve just had positive reinforcement up until now.”
Brandon came out to his parents as gay when he was 18, which they were ultimately indifferent to. To this day, part of him wishes he hadn’t done it.
“I hate the fact that you can go up to a person and say ‘This is who I am, I hope you can accept me. And then they have the power to say ‘No I don’t,’” he explained. “In sharing something so personal you’re giving them the power to just shut you down. It’s not fair.”
One of the biggest issues Brandon has come up against in Cosplay is that he’s been forced to create a lot of original characters (OC) because there just isn’t a lot of LGBTQIA+ representation, especially Black representation, in pop-culture. And in the horror genre, there is hardly any.
“I want to change that,” he said. “It’s something that needs to change in mainstream media like yesterday, like last year, and I’m going to be part of what changes that. I’m working on a book right now, it’s called Memoirs of an Immortal Witch” It’s the fifth installment in his Dark Mysteries of the Paranormal series, which you can read in ebook form.
Other ways for this to change is for not just Cosplay communities, but also Pride organizations, and Social Justice organizations to become more inclusive of their BIPOC Queer community.
“It’s important because the country is on fire right now with the whole Black Lives Matter movement. And I feel like Black people won’t like me saying this, but I’m Black, so I’m talking about members of my community,” he said. “They love to shout and scream Black Lives Matter, except for when it comes to black people of the LGBTQ community.
“They do this all the time. They seek to end racism and then turn around and say [that they] hate gay people or that we have mental illnesses or that we choose to be gay. It wasn’t a choice for me, and they are being willfully ignorant,” he added.
For him, it starts with representation. If people don’t see Black Queer Werewolves in their stories, or Black Queer Trans Womxn in their Pride parades, their world can remain heteronormative and white-centric.
“I can’t stress this enough,” he said. “It’s important for us to have Pride, to be visible in our communities. We’re saying ‘Like, Hello! We’re here, We exist. You can’t ignore us.’”
The Importance of Allyship in Cosplay Communities
“For my ally is the Force. And a powerful ally it is. Life creates it, makes it grow. Its energy surrounds us and binds us. Luminous beings are we… not this crude matter. You must feel the Force around you.” – Yoda, Star Wars
While Cosplay communities on the whole tend to be more inclusive of people in general, problematic behaviors can arise when transphobic, homophobic, racist, fatphobic, ageist, and ableist voices find a platform for their views.
After Lee Clever’s Mr. Clever cosplay went viral after Arisia in 2014, another photographer put a photo of Lee’s Mr. Clever on Reddit, which wasn’t received well at all. Not only did people harshly criticize Lee’s choice of cosplay with Mr. Clever, a character not particularly well-loved in the Whovian fandom, but the comment section was also rife with transphobic threats and sexual harassment.
“One person told me if they ever saw me at a con they would key my car. Another person threatened to ‘spit on me.’ Another said they would take me in an alleyway,” He said.
Since then he has been kicked out of a couple of public cosplay groups, which he believes was not only because he was Trans, but also because of his speaking out against gender binaries in general. “It wasn’t just about me, it was about non-binary people and my other Trans friends too.”
He also has noticed a general trend in regards to non-inclusivity in cosplay communities towards Trans individuals.
“If I use the hashtag #transcosplayers, I will get half the interactions [on social media]. It’s really frustrating to know that someone can just look at you and have no problems with you, but when [they realize] that you’re trans, they want no part of you,” he said.
A Misti-Con-troversy
Cat Benjamin (she/her), a cisgender female cosplayer and cast member of Intramersive Media, LLC who identifies as Queer/Bisexual, has witnessed some of the effects Transphobia can have on cosplay communities she’s been a part of.
For example, J.K Rowling has been all over the news recently for the Transphobic comments she’s made in personal blog posts, public interviews, and on Twitter. While the reactions to these comments are currently trending, they’re not new to her or to some of her fans.
Misti-Con, the region’s largest Harry Potter convention held in New Hampshire every other odd year, dealt with controversy in 2015 when a notable Cosplayer in the community started making their own Transphobic comments.
Cat, a self-identified Griffindor who frequently cosplays Luna Lovegood, specifically Christmas Party Luna, remembers how the events played out.
Photo by Cassandra Murkison
“They quickly became very aggressively Transphobic online and in conversations with certain people,” Cat recalled. “And there was a big kind of divide in the community of Misti-Con because there was a huge backlash, and a movement to try to ban this person from attending the con, which was successful.”
The person in question hasn’t been able to attend Misti-Con since 2015, and while this is a triumph for the LGBTQIA+ community and a testament to the staff’s ability to make inclusive choices that promote the safety of guests at the convention, the event continues to be divisive for a number or reasons.
“There was a contingent of people from the con who sided with this transphobic person,” Cat went on to say. “And that created a weird divide within the con because those people have been staples of Misti-Con for a while as well. It was weird to see this kind of fissure within the community that I’d felt really safe and comfortable in before.”
For Cat, Cosplay has always been a mostly inclusive community where LGBTQIA+ community members can find their footing and experiment with gender expression in a fun way. It’s also part of the reason she’s been drawn to the Sailor Moon franchise, which famously boasted one of Anime’s first queer-positive couples, and to Miyazaki films, which feature a lineup of strong female protagonists.
“They quickly became very aggressively Transphobic online and in conversations with certain people,” Cat recalled. “And there was a big kind of divide in the community of Misti-Con because there was a huge backlash, and a movement to try to ban this person from attending the con, which was successful.”
The person in question hasn’t been able to attend Misti-Con since 2015, and while this is a triumph for the LGBTQIA+ community and a testament to the staff’s ability to make inclusive choices that promote the safety of guests at the convention, the event continues to be divisive for a number or reasons.
“There was a contingent of people from the con who sided with this transphobic person,” Cat went on to say. “And that created a weird divide within the con because those people have been staples of Misti-Con for a while as well. It was weird to see this kind of fissure within the community that I’d felt really safe and comfortable in before.”
For Cat, Cosplay has always been a mostly inclusive community where LGBTQIA+ community members can find their footing and experiment with gender expression in a fun way. It’s also part of the reason she’s been drawn to the Sailor Moon franchise, which famously boasted one of Anime’s first queer-positive couples, and to Miyazaki films, which feature a lineup of strong female protagonists.
Photo by Nate Buchman
Photo by Nate Buchman
“There’s something about the con environment that does feel really welcoming,” she said. “It’s a weird combination of people being themselves but also we’re all dressed up like somebody else, but we feel really comfortable. It’s a way for us to be authentically ourselves.”
Editor’s Note – you can catch Cat reading the Hobbit on Tuesday afternoons on Creative North Shore.
Speaking up for Inclusivity
“There are things that you cannot solve by jumping in an X-wing and blowing something up.” – General Leia Organa
Arielle Kaplan (she/her), known as Inevitable Betrayal Cosplay, is a Jewish cisgender woman professional cosplayer who identifies as Bisexual, and like Cat, is also a cast member with Intramersive Media, LLC.
“There’s something about the con environment that does feel really welcoming,” she said. “It’s a weird combination of people being themselves but also we’re all dressed up like somebody else, but we feel really comfortable. It’s a way for us to be authentically ourselves.”
Editor’s Note – you can catch Cat reading the Hobbit on Tuesday afternoons on Creative North Shore.
Speaking up for Inclusivity
“There are things that you cannot solve by jumping in an X-wing and blowing something up.” – General Leia Organa
Arielle Kaplan (she/her), known as Inevitable Betrayal Cosplay, is a Jewish cisgender woman professional cosplayer who identifies as Bisexual, and like Cat, is also a cast member with Intramersive Media, LLC.
She was recently named the Diversity and Inclusion Officer both for Alderaan Base, part of the New England contingent of The Rebel Legion, and 501st New England, the “bad guy” counterpart to the Rebel Legion, an elite charitable Star-Wars costuming organization. She’s also part of Pride Squadron, an LGBTQIA+ component of that community.
At first, she wasn’t sure she would be the best fit as Diversity and Inclusion Officer. “I felt a little weird about it because as someone who is [bisexual] and has experienced a lot of bi-erasure throughout the years,” Arielle said.
Vex’ahlia from Critical Role
Image by Nerd Caliber
“I had the fleeting feeling that I wasn’t gay enough presenting to be taking on this role. And he said, ‘Well, if you don’t do it, no one else is going to accept,’ so I did.”
For her, despite rampant bi-erasure in pop-culture and in many LGBTQIA+ circles, cosplay has always been accepting and welcoming. Some of her favorite cosplays have been either historical in nature or gender bends of famous characters like Mal from Firefly and King George III from Hamilton
Image by Nerd Caliber
“I had the fleeting feeling that I wasn’t gay enough presenting to be taking on this role. And he said, ‘Well, if you don’t do it, no one else is going to accept,’ so I did.”
For her, despite rampant bi-erasure in pop-culture and in many LGBTQIA+ circles, cosplay has always been accepting and welcoming. Some of her favorite cosplays have been either historical in nature or gender bends of famous characters like Mal from Firefly and King George III from Hamilton
Arielle as King George III from Hamilton
“More and more characters and actors have been coming out [as queer] and not adhering to a binary, which I think is really positive for everybody that falls under the LGBT umbrella,” she said. “I find that the cosplay world also opens up so much creativity as far as what type of character you want to present and what version of that character you want to present.”
For her, because she’s white, straight-passing, and very visible in the cosplay community, it’s very important that she uses her privilege to speak up for community members who don’t necessarily have the ability to do that safely for themselves.
“More and more characters and actors have been coming out [as queer] and not adhering to a binary, which I think is really positive for everybody that falls under the LGBT umbrella,” she said. “I find that the cosplay world also opens up so much creativity as far as what type of character you want to present and what version of that character you want to present.”
For her, because she’s white, straight-passing, and very visible in the cosplay community, it’s very important that she uses her privilege to speak up for community members who don’t necessarily have the ability to do that safely for themselves.
Arielle as Femme Mal from Firefly
“Over the past few weeks I’ve lost some followers on Instagram, which is where I do most of my cosplay stuff, because I’ve been moving the conversation off of myself and into the people who need their voices amplified within the Black Lives Matter movement, the Trans Cosplayers movement, and the Trans Pride movements.
“And I know I wouldn’t be able to [use my platform] without the work of everyone who came before. People forget that cosplay, especially in the queer community, is such a communal act.”
The Cosplay community has a long way to go before it can truly call itself inclusive and diverse, but it’s making strides in that direction. Conventions like Anime Boston, Misti-Con, and Arisia have incorporated elements like better accessibility, gender-neutral bathrooms, and security and staff that pay attention to the concerns of attendees.
But many Cosplayers argue that things like normalization of pronoun uses on badges, panels dedicated to issues of inclusivity, and specified LGBTQIA+ safe spaces would be also helpful additions to cons all over the country.
“We need to have safe spaces, we need to be able to use the bathroom safely, and we need to have security take us seriously when we’re being harassed,” Lee said.
Author’s Note: For me, Cosplay became my door to exploring my gender identity. When working with a Princess Party company in 2018, I got a chance to work at a children’s birthday party as Peter Pan, a character I had idolized since I was a child. Getting into character, embodying the mischievous pixie teenage boy, felt like the most natural thing. For one of the first times in my adult life, I felt fully, completely myself. And it shocked me.
Not long after that I came out publicly, and here we are. I’m a very out non-binary faerie (Peter Pandrogynous) willing to offer my allyship to those in the Cosplay community who aren’t yet given the inclusivity they rightfully deserve.
I also recognize that in this article I’m gonna get it wrong, I’m still learning. So if you notice anything problematic, feel free to reach out and let me know at joeyphoenix@creativecollectivema.com
Joey Phoenix is a nonbinary, queer performer and cosplayer who wants to talk to you about your experiences. Send them a message at joeyphoenix@creativecollectivema.com
#BlackLivesMatter
“Over the past few weeks I’ve lost some followers on Instagram, which is where I do most of my cosplay stuff, because I’ve been moving the conversation off of myself and into the people who need their voices amplified within the Black Lives Matter movement, the Trans Cosplayers movement, and the Trans Pride movements.
“And I know I wouldn’t be able to [use my platform] without the work of everyone who came before. People forget that cosplay, especially in the queer community, is such a communal act.”
The Cosplay community has a long way to go before it can truly call itself inclusive and diverse, but it’s making strides in that direction. Conventions like Anime Boston, Misti-Con, and Arisia have incorporated elements like better accessibility, gender-neutral bathrooms, and security and staff that pay attention to the concerns of attendees.
But many Cosplayers argue that things like normalization of pronoun uses on badges, panels dedicated to issues of inclusivity, and specified LGBTQIA+ safe spaces would be also helpful additions to cons all over the country.
“We need to have safe spaces, we need to be able to use the bathroom safely, and we need to have security take us seriously when we’re being harassed,” Lee said.
Author’s Note: For me, Cosplay became my door to exploring my gender identity. When working with a Princess Party company in 2018, I got a chance to work at a children’s birthday party as Peter Pan, a character I had idolized since I was a child. Getting into character, embodying the mischievous pixie teenage boy, felt like the most natural thing. For one of the first times in my adult life, I felt fully, completely myself. And it shocked me.
Not long after that I came out publicly, and here we are. I’m a very out non-binary faerie (Peter Pandrogynous) willing to offer my allyship to those in the Cosplay community who aren’t yet given the inclusivity they rightfully deserve.
I also recognize that in this article I’m gonna get it wrong, I’m still learning. So if you notice anything problematic, feel free to reach out and let me know at joeyphoenix@creativecollectivema.com
Joey Phoenix is a nonbinary, queer performer and cosplayer who wants to talk to you about your experiences. Send them a message at joeyphoenix@creativecollectivema.com
#BlackLivesMatter
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