Essay On Valorant and Transition
You turn your throat into a closet for all the things that don’t quite fit yet.
In a bad round of a bad game one of my teammates asks, “Are you a girl?” My friend Natalie does her best to play it off and the dude says some creep shit. I hope it’ll be fine but I know Valorant better than that. Its a product of the League of Legends and Counter-Strike communities, which is to say that its a living nightmare. More than its heritage though, there’s something mechanical to the way Valorant makes monsters. Like League of Legends, dying actively harms your team. Without mid-round respawns losing a pair of eyes and guns is a grievous loss. The game also requires constant voice chat for optimal play, so you have people with easy access to each other under incredibly high stress. Introduce these factors to a character aesthetic that I would argue is designed to appeal to several marginalized communities, all of whom are identifiable by voice, and you have a recipe for disaster.
In another early round Natalie is picked off when our team fails to support her, this is strange because both her and I have been communicating plans and positioning. We quickly realize they’re intentionally ignoring our call-outs and are refusing to provide any of their own. They tell Natalie she’s shit. She isn’t. At this point, something in me starts to bend wrong.
Not only are they insufferable they’re outplaying us, three sets of eyes are stronger than two and they at least have the info we’re giving them. I’m pissed for two reasons now. On a particularly bad push my limbs break against a wall of gunfire, they name me faggot and I flinch because it isn’t even accurate. I want them to hate me by my right name. Three reasons. This is selfish. They’ve been talking worse shit to Natalie and I, because something in me is broken, want them to do the same to me. Stupid. Four reasons.
My muscle memory falters, I start flailing when I should be flicking. My hands forget their place and I stop spiraling when I hit bedrock. My voice breaks for a second and no one notices. It doesn’t matter.
I feel a ghost twist the corners of my mouth as he pulls himself from my throat, a lonely boy with too many hands. I am not angry anymore. I am haunted.
The game goes bad.
We learn to speak through mimicry. This is how I made the boy I used to be. I found a video of him recently, he sounded strained and wrong. Voice too low, mouth twisting to sound like a man but not quite, never enough.
I’m not going to dwell on how gender dysphoria feels beyond this. When I explain too much to cis people I usually say something like, “It feels like wearing a corpse.” Sometimes they say “I know that feeling,” and they don’t. A boy died and now I’m stuck with what he left behind.
Valorant is what would happen if the devs of Counter-Strike didn’t think that a Post-9/11 Security State was cool, actually. This means it plays like Counter-Strike with team composition. Which is to say it is a game about communication, clicking on heads, and clever use of map knowledge.
I don’t play Counter-Strike, I don’t play League of Legends, so on face value a twitch based tactical shooter from Riot Games shouldn’t have appealed to me. This wasn’t the case, however. The first time I saw it in action was a thirty second Twitter clip posted in a friend’s discord. In it Jett, one of the game’s most aggressive agents, wins a 1v5 with a silenced pistol through a brilliant use of positioning, aim, and an impressive ability to predict her opponents. It sold me on the game immediately. It didn’t, however, feature it’s most necessary skill, good communication.
Controlling your voice is actually all about controlling space. The more room air has to vibrate, the deeper it resonates. Testosterone elongates the larynx and thickens the vocal folds, this can never be undone. The voice itself is defined by how these things are used.
The first task of vocal feminization is learning how to reduce the length of the larynx. Despite what you may think this doesn’t involve your neck muscles. Instead, it begins with the tongue. You can feel this every time you swallow. The larynx raises, then lowers, this forces food down the throat. Control of the larynx is all about teaching it to hold this familiar place.
Swallow, hold, hum. Understand what muscles bring me into being. Start with a deep whisper, engage old muscles in new ways, rise. I inscribe memory into the walls of my throat and it sounds awful. Most exercises do.
I practice in the Shooting Range for half an hour every day for a few weeks. Flick, click, miss. Flick, click, miss. Flick, click, miss. Its during this time that I realize there are actually two distinct movements involved in aiming: arm movement and wrist movement. Arm movement is used for tracking and controlling for recoil. It is slow, steady, and patient. I’m shit at it. Wrist movement is used exclusively for flicks, muscles tense and violence happens. On hard difficulty targets appear for less than half a second, you react on pure instinct. Over the course of two months my high score goes from 2/30 to 19/30. It isn’t fun but it works.
Sadly, there’s no practice range for talking. Not really. Instead, you learn by dying, and then watching your friends die for the same stupid reason. I push into Hookah, my wrist flicks and I check my left, I flick right and become oblivion. I know where they are but I freeze. I don’t know how to speak. My friend Lindsay pushes in after me, she didn’t see the shot and history repeats itself. She calls out their position and Davin pushes in, securing the kill, then the point, then the round. He reminds me to talk more and I think about my throat.
I record myself for the first time in weeks. In six words I make a girl. She sounds whiny, nasally, and utterly foreign. She hurts and I know I’m doing something wrong.
I keep up the exercises though, I keep listening to the new girl I made. She tells me lots of things. First, space isn’t all about the larynx, raising your tongue is similarly effective which takes pressure off the rest of your voice. Second, my mouth is opening too much. I sound garbled and mumbly, mouth wide and words spilling not being spoken.
When I show her to my sister she laughs at me. I don’t know what to do with that. I think she sounds silly too, but she isn’t laughable. She’s trying. She’s a pleasant teacher, at least.
I play Viper, who I’ve also found to be a good teacher. She has access to a variety of smokes, made unique by their extreme range. She can cut off the main sight lines of a point from the attacking side’s spawn area. Because of this she’s often used to feint while her allies slowly push the other point. Viper deploys her smokes, makes some noise, and waits for her enemies to push. When they do, she kills them. She’s all about providing misinformation to the enemy team, while slowly gathering information for her own.
Without communication and game sense her abilities fall apart. She has the power to enable and disable her smokes at will, giving allies cover one moment before exposing her enemies the next. However, if you don’t alert your allies to whether your smokes are up or down they’re likely to be killed from a position they thought you were defending. She forces you to communicate constantly which is one of the reasons I love her.
The other reason is a bit messier. Viper as a character is a lot of things, mostly edgy and horny if we’re being honest. “I wonder if these one will beg. They all do… After a while.” Certainly has an energy to it. I love her voice though. It’s low, predatory, and, at times, deeply sad. This means it’s achievable.
I mimic her voice lines while I play, I try to make sure my mic doesn’t pick it up. When it inevitably does I try to play it off by pretending I think her lines are funny. I do, occasionally. But not enough to repeat them six times over the course of a match. Instead, I’m trying to build her like a house so I can move in through the door in her throat. I don’t want to be her. I just want to borrow her for long enough that someone sees it happen. Someone looks at her and hears me — — and they don’t flinch.
My coworker Niki and I queue by ourselves, this is my first time with a small group in weeks. I refuse to speak for the first half of the game, just in case. One of our randos speaks up and it surprises me, their voice is soft and warm. My body relaxes. Someone asks a question about Reyna, the game’s newest agent, and I answer because I can now. They tell me they love my voice and I tear up. I do my best to organize our team into a cohesive squad. We work together well, mostly. The game feels good.
One of the randos asks me to say “I am so proud of you.” I’ve seen this on TikTok. I get it, sometimes you need to hear something said with care. I oblige and when I say it I mean it. I don’t know why, maybe it’s because they had the confidence to ask. They say “Thanks for my serotonin for the day,” and I hear the smile in their voice. For a moment I am exorcised. There is no ghost, just me — brittle boned and dreadful, a bird so strong her wings shatter with every flap.
One day my friend Austin calls her by my name. When it happens I unspool and I kaleidoscope. “Their Renata is hiding in ‘Screens.’’ My wrist snaps and the not-me is gone. “Sorry I meant Viper,” he says a minute later, realizing what happened. “Oh you’re fine!” I lie. It is more than fine.
Another day I play Sage and it throws everyone off. “Hey Renata can you push with me?” Austin asks while I’m standing right next to him.
“I am.” We all laugh. I don’t even think about how the muscles do their work.
I wish I could tell you most days were my best days or even good days. They aren’t. Most days are fine or worse. I look in the mirror and I see rot. The difference is that now, the rot is manageable. Dysphoria doesn’t stop, it gets better. You learn to fight it. You find more things to hold onto. For me, it was making my throat into a closet for all the things that don’t quite fit yet.
I don’t think the game’s community will ever be healthy. Maybe Riot will find a way to manage their own rot but probably not. That doesn’t mean I’m leaving. It means I’ll fight like hell to carve a space in it. I’ll queue with my friends and I’ll make new ones. We will imagine a better world together and work to bring it into being. We will fail too, and that’s okay.
And I will never be great at Valorant, but some days I am good enough to feel good enough. I’ve learned to communicate at least. I know how to tell my friends where they’re about to be shot from. I can give them something usable. They say “Where where where?” and I cough up a handful of broken bullets. I offer it to them. This is where I was.
Special Thanks to merritt k and Steven Strom who provided a bunch of super helpful edits on this piece. Biggest love to the Palorants, without whom this piece would not exist, y’all have done more than you know over the last few months.
