Crossing a Line: Gender Identity in Animal Crossing

[Writer and game creator Anna Anthropy (Dys4ia) examines how Animal Crossing: New Leaf is the series’ most queer/transgender-friendly game yet, but also explains why she’s weary to applaud Nintendo for this seemingly progressive stance. Image above is via Derek Rose.]

animal crossing has always been ripe for queering. i founded my last animal crossing town — in city folk for the wii — with my partner and our mutual then-girlfriend (my partner took great satisfaction in demolishing her house after we broke up). there’s really no getting around the fact that animal crossing is a very capital-affirming, binary-enforcing game by a publisher that recently edited gay marriage out of one of its games.

player characters in city folk are born with gendered clothing attached to their bodies: BOYS get t-shirts and pants, GIRLS get dresses with poofy sleeves. the same piece of clothing magically transforms according to the body it comes into contact with: a flowery dress will become a flowery t-shirt, worn over shorts, the second a “boy” tries to put it on.

player characters are also born white: there are over fifty kinds of animals represented in the game, but all humans are pale and pink. for animal crossing, enforced whiteness is nintendo’s path of least resistance to the question of player race. you do get a choice of gender, but it’s between two identity-erasing extremes: do you want to wear a dress for the rest of your life, or never?

there are a lot of compromises for queer players. i remember playing a woman character in my family’s animal crossing game long before i ever came out as trans, because the thought of a world with no options to externalize my femininity was too crushingly familiar.

i remember my partner and i racing to collect all the girls’ hairstyles in city folk: we’d heard that once you’ve gotten all of the hairstyles of your chosen gender, the game allowed you to choose from the hairstyles of the other gender. i’ve spent a long time exploring possibilities for femme expression and externalized queerness in the game. i became a punk, a femmebot, a barbarian queen, a girl scout. i created identities for myself that the game didn’t account for.

now new leaf is out for the 3ds. in this new animal crossing, shirts and dresses aren’t part of your body, you can change them. a “girl” character can wear pants or shorts, or dresses and skirts. a “boy” character can wear dresses, skirts, long socks, or a t-shirt and pants. a character’s body no longer dictates what clothes the player is allowed to put on them. it reminds me of saints row 2, the game whose character creation i think gets gender best: it doesn’t remove gender signifiers, but allows the player to mix and match diferent gender signifiers however she wants to. that’s closer to the ways we externalize our identities.

it’s easy to see the design of the new animal crossing as an endorsement of queerness, of transness and gender play. but it’s important to realize that animal crossing is the product of a corporation — and one that’s under no obligation to care about us. as long as we’re playing animal crossing, we can’t change or contradict the rules nintendo has decreed. no matter how many bells you pay to tom nook and his nephews, you’ll never be allowed to choose your character’s race. our identities are glitches in nintendo’s system. will nintendo “fix” the “bug” that allows boys to wear dresses?

queerness is all about context, and that’s what we do control: not what the game allows us to do, but the meaning that we give it. to animal crossing, one shirt is the same as any other, just another bitmap, but it’s intensely powerful for me as a kinky queermo to be able to put a leather jacket on my avatar. as a fat trans woman who has a hard time finding feminine clothes that fit, the ability to design my own clothes for my digital body is super meaningful. but that meaning comes from me, not from nintendo. we’d do well to remember that.

TO FOLLOW THE CONTINUING ADVENTURES OF MY PARTNER AND I IN ANIMAL CROSSING: NEW LEAF, FOLLOW THE HASHTAG #NEWQUEEF ON TWITTER.