How Animal Crossing: New Horizons Could Genuinely Support Trans People
One small change could make the game much more inclusive
If you played Animal Crossing: New Leaf back when it was first released on the Nintendo 3DS in 2013, you might remember how it was the first installment in the series where clothing options weren’t restricted by gender.
You might remember screengrabs circulating around the Internet of New Leaf characters saying that it’s no big deal for boys to wear dresses or girls to wear masculine clothes.
Like most people, I was impressed by how progressive the game was for its time. After all, this was during the height of the “anti-SJW” movement of the early- to mid-2010s.
Of course, the game still forced you into a gender binary by making you choose to play as a boy or a girl when you first created your character. But at the time, that was about as supportive of non-normative gender identities as we could reasonably expect.
Seven years later, Animal Crossing: New Horizons took this inclusivity even further. Instead of asking you to select a gender at the start of the game, you choose a “style” of either masculine or feminine, which can be changed at any point. And, as far as I can tell from my 220+ hours logged so far, NPCs never seem to remark on your choice of clothing (at least, as far as gender is concerned). Hairstyles are also no longer locked by gender.
In fact, the islanders in New Horizons rarely if ever use gendered terms at all to refer to the player. When they come up with nicknames for you, their ideas are almost always random yet charming and gender-neutral. For example, I’ve had them call me names like “lollipop,” “glitter,” and (my favorite) “schmoopy.” This is a far cry above New Leaf villagers’ nicknames, most of which are heavily gendered, such as “chica,” “princess,” “dude,” and “big guy.”
Additionally, your New Horizons character is usually referred to with they/them pronouns, no matter your “style” or presentation.
Far and away, New Horizons is much more inclusive of gender diversity than previous entries in the Animal Crossing series. And yet, there’s one thing that keeps this game from being actually, fully supportive of transgender people.
It doesn’t let you change your character’s name.
On one hand, I get it. Changing your name would be complicated, both for the NPCs on your own island and for your friends on other islands. But on the other hand, it doesn’t have to be complicated at all. In real life, trans people have to go through a whole bureaucratic rigmarole to legally change our names, but this is a video game and a highly advanced one at that. It shouldn’t take more than a slight alteration in the game’s code.
Maybe they could place limitations on it, such as the number of times you're allowed to change your name. But if New Horizons only had this one additional feature, it would make the lives of so many trans people, including mine, so much easier.
I started playing New Horizons right when it came out in March 2020, and I gave my character the name I’d been going by for 25 years. What I hadn’t known at the time was that after a few months of quarantine, I’d finally come to terms with the fact that I’m a trans guy, and that I needed to change my name in order to be truly happy.
Being called my old name felt intensely wrong, more so than anything I’d ever experienced before. For that reason, I was filled with excruciating disgust and sadness when the characters on my island called me by that name. Even with their gender-neutral nicknames for my character, that original name was everywhere.
It was too much.
Eventually, it reached a point where it didn’t matter how much work I’d put into my island, how much I loved the other islanders, or that I’d nearly completed the museum.
I deleted my island and started over from scratch.
Almost 200 hours of gameplay down the drain. All because the game wouldn't let me change my character's name.
I’m far from the only person who has experienced something like this within the past couple of years. With most people staying home in the early days of the pandemic, away from the gendered expectations of everyday life, more people started questioning their gender identity and even coming out as trans during quarantine.
Of course, many of these people, myself included, had been struggling with their gender for years or even decades beforehand. But the pandemic gave many of us the opportunity to explore our identities and finally come to terms with who we really are.
Since New Horizons was released on March 20, 2020 — right when lockdown started here in the U.S. and in several other countries — these people were probably not aware of their transness yet. By the time they came to terms with it, they (like me) had likely sunk countless hours into their islands. They were faced with a dilemma: Start the game all over again, or continue with the extreme discomfort of being called a name that is completely wrong for them?
If changing your character’s name was possible, no one would have even had to make that choice.
All in all, Animal Crossing: New Horizons is one of my favorite games of all time. It’s engaging enough for me to play it for hours on end, yet relaxing enough to not stress me out. But if the game was actually inclusive of diverse gender identities like it seems to be at first glance, then it would let you change your character’s name.
Real-life is already hard enough for trans folks. We shouldn't have to deal with the same types of problems in video games.
