Where’s the Messy, Sexy, and Trans-inclusive Lesbian Sex in Games?

Lesbian desire looks like a lot of things. It can be holding hands, saving the world together, vigorously making out at a cyberpunk bar, or sharing a tender kiss on a Greek shore. Games like Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey, Fire Emblem: Three Houses, GreedFall, Life is Strange, The Outer Worlds, and the upcoming Cyberpunk 2077 all let players do just that. This is great to see. Visible lesbianism challenges the stigma around women-loving-women stories. And let’s not mince words: gay women doing gay things is hot.

But the games industry’s AAA developers are still incredibly squeamish about lesbian eroticism. Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey and GreedFall both feature flirty love interests dropping hints and making out with other women, but developers Ubisoft and Spiders shy away from showing anything more than a make out session before pulling a fade-to-black. Nor do these games have much to say about what it’s like to be a woman who dates another woman, complete with all the internalized homophobia, misogyny, and trauma that can creep into our love lives.

This is a common problem among the gaming industry’s biggest names, in part because RPGs traditionally offer lesbian sexual encounters and romantic partners as supplementary storylines that can be outright avoided. Even among RPGs praised for their queer romance routes, like Mass Effect 2 and Dragon Age: Inquisition, lesbian love and eroticism is always optional, let alone devoid of its real-world context.

But the AAA gaming world has a bigger problem on its hands than watered-down lesbian make out sessions: few blockbuster titles with wlw relationships have explicit trans lesbian representation. Most treat cisness as the default character option until proven otherwise, doubly so in games that show lesbian sex scenes with nary a girldick in sight. Where are the trans women who desire other women, and where are the cis and trans girls that adore trans girls? When society assumes cisness is the default, this shines through in our media. And when trans women are nowhere to be found in sapphic love and sex, we end up feeling left out.

Caitlin Galiz-Rowe (who uses they/she pronouns) is the Editor-in-Chief behind games criticism site Uppercut. As a nonbinary lesbian, she isn’t expecting any blockbuster game studios to write nuanced sapphic storylines anytime soon, let alone trans-inclusive ones. But she does believe the indie gaming world is much more receptive to realistic queer sex and romance than the AAA industry. She points to indie games like Heaven Will Be Mine and Extreme Meatpunks Forever, two popular titles that offer realistic depictions of what it’s like engage in queer relationships as both cis and trans women.

“[Visual novel] Butterfly Soup came out in 2017 and it was pretty soon after I got back into games and was writing about them and this quirky little visual novel was one of if not the most relatable depictions of being a queer teen, even if I couldn’t relate to other aspects of it since I’m white,” Galiz-Rowe told me. “And then Heaven Will Be Mine went in a different but also rad direction of depicting queer and trans folks as like complicated, flawed people who can be messy and stupid just like anyone else, and we need to be able to see that in my opinion.”

    Indie games are embracing trans lesbianism in realistic ways too. Heart of the Woods avoids giving its transgender lesbian character an explicit sex scene, but it does depict her as a queer woman who connects with other queer women both platonically and sexually. Ghosthug Games’ adult cyberpunk visual novel Hardcoded takes a more direct turn, showing cis-trans lesbian sex that is as lifelike as it is hot. Both of these games have left a huge impact on cis and trans lesbians alike for their realistic takes on queerness. And both are showing developers that it’s time to double down on lesbian representation in all of its forms.

    “I definitely think that AAA devs are still very much in a ‘if we show a kiss we’re pushing the envelope’ mindset, regardless of what else they end up doing with the characters,” Galiz-Rowe said.