it became the default representation we had in media. a prime example: in the despicable and crass 2009 shoot-stab sci-fi movie gamer, amber valletta’s character gets mindwiped and programmed to be what is obviously supposed to be a secondlife avatar, only in bodily form. she is of course made to be the proxy for a couch potato straight man, and he is of course portrayed as a corpulent, grotesque pervert, fast food juices running down his chin. the reference is clear: hot feminine avatars are the mask for hideous losers like this. amber of course needs to be rescued with murderous and excessive force by gerard butler, which should give you a clue as to exactly what sort of film gamer is. the transphobia, fatphobia and ablism of this portrayal should be staggering, but it isn’t, because it’s normative.
what if that stereotype was never even close to what was really happening? secondlife was always designed to immerse us, and we have to interrogate why one might invest in a feminine identity, or in fact a more explicitly trans identity (consider why sian might deliberately construct themself so that their breasts are given signifiers of artificiality, the visible veins and rounded shape of obvious implants; consider why they wear clothing designed to show the presence of a package. a real-world friend opined recently that sian’s queerness was “magnetic and spiky”, and both sian and their meatspace counterpart liked that a lot).
the one answer that perhaps critics of secondlife’s peculiar, problematic trans community will inevitably advance is porn. now. a larger chunk of secondlife’s constituency than linden labs might want to accept log into secondlife because they’re frankly horny (by their works you can know them: ruth lives). but even the fantasy sex requires investment; it requires identification. a straight man watching a video where two women make out and getting his rocks off on it is not quite the same as becoming someone of a different shape, identifying with them. imagining that body.
but it’s complicated by that relationship to porn. many queer and trans venues in secondlife have traditionally used the language and imagery of pornography to define themselves (see: rule 34b). just as in the “real” world, as it is in the virtual space – queer identities have always been linked with sex work. this is at best an ambivalent thing. by situating ourselves this way, we are bestowed with the contempt of more “respectable” communities. which is, if you think about it, inevitable, because we have already been rendered other than “respectable” by these communities, the very people that put us in these social boxes in the first place. remember that it was a pair of black queer sex workers who kicked off the stonewall riot. sex workers deserve a dignity and solidarity that they are hardly ever given by society at large. sian knows more than one queer sex worker who does their work in both secondlife and the real world (in fact one has been the custodian of sian’s old account for some years now). sex work and pornography have problems; they have exploitation. but by nature, if you criminalise a thing, you infect it with the criminal. if you take away the dignity of its practitioners, and you make it sordid, some of that dirt sticks. and perhaps we should be raising it up from that dirt, not grinding it back down.
divorced from the more progressive discourse of social media, and isolated from real-world trans communities, a large part of trans culture in secondlife is predicated on stereotypes and tropes that the advocating trans community online has largely rejected as harmful and objectifying. we won’t repeat the terminology – if you know, you know, and if you don’t, you’ve dodged a bullet. but if you have been pushed so far into the closet your whole life that you are limited to getting your ideas from the pile of sleazy old magazines hidden under the shoes, what else do you know? it may be all you have.
older queers too – and nearly two decades of secondlife means that a lot of the queers here are older queers – freely use terms to refer to themselves that have been discarded or disdained by the younger trans community, who often forget that these people marched, and fought, and suffered for the sake of the right to be seen as human.
which is still a fight, for we are still not seen as human. our right to exist is largely disputed by evangelicals and conservatives, a certain variety of second wave feminists, and that one obsessively hateful cishet male who used to write tv sitcoms. they are all happy to ally with people they might otherwise consider opponents, so intent are they on denying a place in the human race to trans people – it was only this week that one prominent second wave feminist, beloved by the guardian, was seen retweeting transphobic things made by the actual alt-right. and meanwhile, as we have said before, we are generally considered expendable by our supposed allies, especially when we’re not behaving, when we’re doing things that aren’t considered healthy. when we’re not doing “trans” right.
(we can forget that it’s a problem in secondlife too – sian’s friend mona eberhardt touched on problems with transphobic and homophobic harassment in secondlife only recently.)
we have to be allowed to get it wrong sometimes. we have to be allowed to get it wrong because we want to get it wrong safely and in the company of people who don’t judge us. we need gently to learn the difference between affirmation and fetishisation, but frankly that difference is a lot finer than the people who would have us behave would think. whoever we are, however we are, we have to be allowed to try out who we are without harming anyone, with full consent, as messy and transgressive as that might be, because for many of us, in the worlds we live in, in the closets we inhabit, so often padlocked on the outside, a tryout may be the best we ever get.
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