TTRPGs Didn't Help Me Figure Out My Gender, Actually (2025)

This article was excerpted as blackout poetry by Thomas Manuel for Rascal News as part of their History Week article on personal TTRPG histories. You can read the blackout versions of mine and others’ stories for a dollar on their site.

The first TTRPG I ever played¶

It’s probably 2002 and we all think I’m a 12 year old All-American boy. I’m at my friend’s block party. We’ve been growing apart since middle school started but I want to make an effort to be there. There’s a bouncy castle, a water slide, and a camping tent, and our parents are drinking and yelling over the Cubs and the White Sox; all the classics of suburban Chicagoland block parties.

I ask around if anyone would like to try a game I made, based on the criminally underappreciated game Threads of Fate (2000). His sister and my sister are the only ones interested in playing, so we go into the camping tent with some dice and some pen and paper. I figure these pen and paper games are probably just like video games but on paper, so they should be really easy to make.

I set the scene and plop the first monster in front of them, one of those large flying yellow tadpole-like things. My friend’s sister is playing as Mint, the spunky girl with twin pigtails who wields dual metal hula hoops. It’s the very first action she takes to hit this thing, but she wants to hit it in the eye. This is the worst possible thing that could’ve happened: I don’t have rules for hitting things in the eyes. I freeze.

“Roll damage,” I finally suggest. She rolls her die.

“Only 2 damage?” She says, incredulously. “But I hit this thing in the eye!”

“I guess you’re right. Hitting it in the eye should probably kill it. Okay, it’s dead.”

She cheers, but I stop knowing what to do after that, so we wrap up rather quickly and get back to the rest of the party.

Okay, the first TTRPG I ever played, for real this time¶

It’s probably 2006 and we all think I’m a 16 year old capital C Christ-Following All-American boy with a capital S Straight Christian highschool sweetheart. I need to hang out with atheist friends more so I can learn how they think and convert them to Christianity. Also Dan is pretty cool, so I want to hang out with him more anyway, and I don’t want him to go to Hell, so I better seem cool so he can see that Jesus is cool too.

I try to listen and fit in at the table. They’re playing one of the 3rd edition D&Ds, and it’s all new to me and I barely know what to do or how to roleplay my character, but I’m trying. There’s a lot of buildup to a big battle that’s about to happen, and I’m extremely excited for it, but I have to leave to go to youth group as it’s being set up. I ask if they can wait for next week, they say they can’t.

Next week, the battle is still ongoing, so I ask if I can join it.

“Your character wouldn’t suddenly show up,” the GM says.

“Oh.”

I play Soulcalibur 3 in the adjacent room until the table rejoices. They’re leveling up and pull out the books to look at character options and update their sheets.

I come back to the table and ask if I earn any XP too.

“No, your character literally wasn’t even in the fight.”

“Oh.”

By the time they’re done leveling up, I leave for youth group.

Dan wishes I would stop going so I could actually play with them. I choose years of spiraling religious trauma instead.

Okay okay, the first TTRPG that I ever actually played instead of just sat in the presence of¶

It’s probably 2013 and I’m a 23 year old software engineer with “one must imagine Sisyphus happy” taped to my monitor and everyone thinks I’m a closeted gay man. I am seeing my third serious girlfriend (second bisexual girlfriend), but she is long distance, so it is my first time living without a partner or family, just roommates my age. I am suddenly wearing eyeliner and mascara, shaving my legs, buying candles, drinking wine in the bathtub, and writing small bits of smut on Facebook.

I start playing Shadowrun at Big Data’s, a raging antifeminist whose cleanliness habits are in the 4chan tradition and eating habits are massive meal replacement drinks blended with entire bottles of chocolate syrup and corn syrup. I talk him down from more extreme antifeminist positions when I can. He is otherwise a bizarrely sweet and gentle man in ways that are constantly startling given the way his misogyny and passive nihilism feed each other. Our other players are two decent dudes.

Most of us have barely any TTRPG experience. The GM, Big Data, doesn’t give us direct advice on how to play because it would be metagaming. The only experienced player chooses to play a dumb-as-rocks himbo troll street samurai. He, of course, doesn’t give advice on what we should pursue because he wants to stay in character.

I keep getting stuck on the adventure being prewritten. My questions are both in-universe “why would my player think to go to the docks?” and out-of-universe “but how do I know if investigating the docks is a good idea?” I am given shrugs instead of any general guidance on how to play a tabletop game. I am not understanding that the fact that the GM has mentioned the docks is likely a hook. I am both our leader and too anxious to make any decisions because there will be no saves to reload if we die or if we screw things up.

When we finally do our Shadowrun heist to retrieve data from secure databases, we are disguised as hired maintenance workers. I charm the receptionist and call the elevator. As soon as the elevator is about to open, we give the signal. Our rigger rides a rented motorcycle through the lobby, shoots the elevator guard dead, and skids inside as the doors are closing. When the elevator reaches the database floor, the rigger sets some explosives on the motorcycle and jams the accelerator. It drives forward into a hail of gunfire before it crashes. The ensuing explosion reduces the guards stationed there to “chunky salsa” and echoes enough off the walls to injure our rigger.

The troll and I come downstairs and negotiate with other runners who happen to be hacking into the very same database we are. Negotiations are failing, so I try to make an intimidating shot with my pistol. I reiterate to Big Data that my intention here is not to kill the decker, but to disarm him and intimidate him.

I then roll an absolutely ludicrous amount of 6s.

“Headshot”, Big Data says. “A spray of blood out the back of his head and his body falls limp.”

We laugh, but I quickly panic. We discover that the now dead man was the only person capable enough to hack the security in the database storage room. We break into the room physically, but the databases are all sealed into the walls and floors and require technical skills none of us have to get them to come out of the walls to become accessible.

We give up on the run, in worse debt than ever, with half our connections furious. I feel like I failed the game. We all agree that the heist was kinda cool and funny, but we stop playing.

Okay okay okay, the first TTRPG that I ever actually got to play more than like two sessions of¶

It’s probably 2017 and I’m a 27 year old depressed and unemployed failed writer with memories of acid trips providing a semblance of something resembling spirituality. I am coming out of a verge-of-suicide funk caused by a serious breakup two years prior. I start to date my sixth serious partner, who is also my sixth serious bisexual-umbrella partner. (Astute readers will realize that my first girlfriend came out as bisexual.) It is clear to me that the chain of bisexual partners probably means something about my gender, but I am not sure what yet. My girlfriend asks me about my gender and I, in her words, “giggle, twirl around, and walk away”.

She invites me to join a Pathfinder game that she’s playing with her husband. I have always heard from the straight men in my life that it’s important not to let “girlfriends” join long running TTRPG campaigns, as relationships often don’t last and the campaign ends up exploding.

I hesitate to join, but I choose a bard. I figure a support character will not be missed if our relationship doesn’t last. He will be horny, as is the style of the time, though he will never actually try to bone anyone. I’ll name him Fizz, a good, throwaway character name.

Her husband drops when he realizes it takes work and commitment (this is foreshadowing).

We, however, play on. I get increasingly invested. I research my character build for maximum support effectiveness because I do not want us to “lose” like we did in Shadowrun. I prestige into a battle herald. I flesh out his backstory. His birth name is Lawrence Dovecrow, but he estranged himself from his noble family. His father, empowered by a lawful rage against all chaos and his station in the crusades, killed his mother for witchcraft and summoning outsiders for educational purposes deemed heretical. I cry when I have him speak with his mother’s spirit in Elysium.

Our relationship stumbles. There comes a point where I think we should probably break up, but I’m not sure I actually want to. I am embarrassingly unsure to what extent the reason I stuck out this early fight is because I wanted to keep playing in this campaign with her and these friends.

The GM roleplays out a trans, demon-slaying crusader, Anevia, describing to us her love of her demon-slaying wife, Irabeth. I think nothing of it other than it’s really neat.

4 and a half years later, our druid smashes Deskari, the Demon Lord of Locusts, between two giant boulders. Our shiny paladin tanks massive swings of his scythe. My battle herald harasses and provides some ridiculously optimized +30-ish aid to my girlfriend’s Crimson Templar for 1 round, but Deskari throws her blade deep into a rift in the abyss. Our trickster rogue teleports to the blade and teleports it back to her hands. With a mighty flurry of mythic swings, she cleaves Deskari in twain.

Epilogue: it is, however, helping me figure out my feelings on bottom surgery¶

It’s 2025 and I’m a happy woman in tech living with my life-girlfriend from our Pathfinder group and our pets. My favorite game is Deathmatch Island; my favorite setting is Heart: The City Beneath. I hate powergaming; I crave success with consequences. I’m in four recurring TTRPG groups and have run several campaigns; I decide I need to cut my TTRPG budget down to only $1000 this year.

I am lying naked on my bed and drawing dashed lines with red marker on my wrists, ankles, and hairline to represent where my character has had surgery. I flip over another card with anxious excitement, read the prompt with dreadful delight, and get to journaling until the pen bruises my fingers.

I am playing Horse Girl, the solo horror RPG that romanticizes abusive relationships as much as it admonishes ourselves for choosing them. It asks you to imagine being too in love to say no, a very easy thing to do, and stretches that out as far as it can. It’s explicitly about consenting to a loved one surgically transforming you into a horse over the course of many months of a rollercoaster relationship.

Horse Girl is not a gender transition allegory, but love, desirability, sexuality, are all entangled in being embodied. Will I be more lovable if I change? Will I love myself more? There are risks to leaps of faith. To crossing points of no return, into a body made more vulnerable to the outside world while it becomes more beloved to the interior world.

Still, it’s a significant relief that it will be a choice I make for my own sake, for my own joy, and not for a wealthy surgeon with a horse girl fetish.