Transgender Character in Dragon Age Has Millions of Players Boycotting Game

Transgender inclusion in Dragon Age: Veilguard has been causing lots of pushback in various communities, GamersOnly observed via BlueSky.

A main character identifies as #transgender, and is causing millions of players to boycott the game. What are your thoughts on this? Is the Transgender pushback fair?

Transgender inclusion in Dragon Age: Veilguard has been causing lots of pushback in various communities. A main character identifies as #transgender, and is causing millions of players to boycott the game. What are your thoughts on this? Is the Transgender pushback fair? #dragonage #gaming

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— Gamers Only! (@gamersonly.bsky.social) November 21, 2024 at 11:28 AM

Dragon Age is a media franchise centered on a series of fantasy role-playing video games created and developed by BioWare.

Since 1995, BioWare has created some of the world's most critically acclaimed video games, including Baldur's Gate™, Neverwinter Nights™, Star Wars™: Knights of the Old Republic™, Jade Empire™, Mass Effect™, and Dragon Age™.

One person wrote on X:

“I’m not trans, but why are people hating on it? Could add a lot of replayability. The people who are mad always played female characters, gnomes, goblins, etc and didn’t have to completely identify with those choices. Why is this is a bridge too far? Anyways, grats guys.”

“The joy I’m feeling in my heart right now can’t be put into words. The 31st can’t get here soon enough so I can experience that joy on an even deeper level,” another X user commented. You know what? I don’t know what sensible corner I stumbled into. Although, I’m not mad about it! In fact, I want to pretend that these reactions are the only ones! …And not the inevitably awful takes."

Objectors of the game include Avi Green of Bleeding Fool, who writes "the transgender character creation elements in 'Veilguard' reveal the left’s pathetic obsession with self-victimization and identity politics."

Video games are a portal to a world of fantasy and escapism. They give players the potential to be whomever they want, from a swaggering swordsman to an arcane sorcerer. Thus, when activists insist on playing transgender characters, complete with body modification scars, rather than male or female characters, it calls into question just how sincere the radical gender ideology movement is.

“Dragon Age: The Veilguard” cranks the identity politics obsession in gaming up to 11 with a series of utterly bizarre character customization decisions. In addition to the pronoun and gender options that seem to come standard with all woke games these days, players can add chest surgery scars to their characters to indicate they’ve had their breasts removed.

Last year, Hogwarts Legacy, a Harry Potter video game, came under fire for series creator J.K. Rowling's public stance on gender identity.

From Owen S. Good of Polygon:

After a couple of years of coy social media gestures and replies on the subject, on June 10, 2020, Rowling published a confrontational 3,600-word essay on her personal website spelling out her views on gender identity, her skepticism of transgender-inclusive laws and policies, and “the new trans activism.” Rowling invoked her own survival of domestic abuse and sexual assault, while also raising a discredited hypothetical about male sexual predators being allowed into restrooms for girls and women as long as they identify as one.

I absolutely love how well #DragonAgeVeilguard allows you to express various gender and sexual identities with your character.

As an asexual non-binary person, I really can't emphasise enough how seen this interaction made me feel.

Reminds me of the ace rep in The Outer Worlds! pic.twitter.com/7VKYyuFVmv

— Ewan Austin (@EDAboii) November 19, 2024

Ghost on BlueSky offered his take to the controversy. 

"It’s performative at best. Too many politicians and 'anti-woke' people see characters in film, TV, and gaming that are LGBTQIA+ and think that the one character that they are seeing is a representation of the industries trying to erase a perceived 'normal' character (i.e., straight, white, cis)

"The reason it’s performative imo is because the folks that don’t want to play because the character exists, don’t eventually find out that most of the time, a characters gender identity or sexuality doesn’t impact gameplay and, often times, the story itself."

ItsWildFox explained what they encountered during a certain point in the game:

"So we just encountered the scene where Taash cries about being he or she, this felt so forced and SO SO unnecessary...it feels REAL heavy in this game that they needed to make a point that it's okay to be "they and them" and the whole #LGBTQIA aspect has been really heavily imposed."

Erik Kain of Forbes writes:

The best way to convince someone of your own point-of-view is generally not to bash them over the head with a cudgel, though that seems to be the preferred approach in modern political discourse and, alas, in entertainment. The culture, being what it is, has lost all sense of subtlety. In far too many films, TV shows and video games, we see a heavy-handed, top-down approach to the issues of the day. It’s a real shame that the developers at BioWare decided to go this route in Dragon Age: The Veilguard.

I’ve already posted my impressions piece about the game, which I’ve been pleasantly surprised with so far. I was worried going in, but Veilguard has been a lot more fun and a lot more engaging than I expected, even if I’m still annoyed with its overly-saturated, overly-cartoonish art-style (among other things).

Kain hadn't encountered anything he describes as "overtly preachy" until....

I had not yet arrived at a certain section of the game that has now been making the rounds on social media, being roundly—and rightfully—mocked. Unfortunately, the scene in question will play directly into the narrative that this game is “woke”, feeding a cycle of online discourse that goes nowhere but earns lots of clicks. It will undoubtedly turn many gamers off entirely, not necessarily because they’re unsympathetic to trans rights, but because they’re tired of being preached at.

In the scene in question (below), one character misgenders another. To atone for this sin, she does a set of push-ups and then lectures the other characters on how to properly apologize. The term “nonbinary” is thrown around, despite this being a word that very few people had even heard of when Dragon Age: Inquisition came out a decade ago—let alone in a fantasy setting divorced entirely from the real world.

One Redditor suggested: "Bioware doing this knowing it would get tons of outreach is a genius move."

Another Redditor writes: "Im not part of the community myself but honestly BioWare in the past have done some really amazing characters like Dorian and Zevran, Zev is a manwhore (affectionately) he swings both ways and if you tell him no he understands. Dorian is a tragic tale of a father who in his own twisted way loves his son and “wants the best to him” but uses the wrong means and ends up regretting it, coming to terms with the fact there never was anything wrong with Dorian in the first place and that his homosexuality is a part of him and not a flaw or imperfection to be corrected. However I don’t think that EA mandated its addition, a few of the heads on the game came out during the development as NB and transgender and such, but they came out to a sterile and accepting office where any rejection was incomprehensible and I know that isn’t how reality is for a lot of people which is where the separation from reality is."