There are two defining images in the reveal of Catherine: Full Body's newest character, Rin. The first is in the trailer , which ends with protagonist Vincent waking up next to a naked Rin and getting a good look below her waist, eyes going wide with terror as he lets out a horrified wail. The second image is in a poster with Rin lifting her skirt to show us her genitals, which are obscured in shadow while Vincent's traumatized eyes stand right in front of them. Ads with the other Catherine girls also covered their genitals for titillation. Rin's ad is not titillation. The framing, the contrast of colors, Vincent's eyes, all convey a specific visual language of dread, of an unspeakable horror hiding in plain sight, a monstrosity in the guise of a girl.

It's frustrating because they've made earnest attempts to honestly portray queer and trans identity, providing rare crumbs of visibility in a medium that makes us invisible. But visibility only damages when it's mired in harmful ideas, and never is that more apparent than with Persona 4's Naoto Shirogane.

Catherine: Full Body's hard swerve into transphobia should come as no surprise to anyone who's played the original Catherine or the Persona games from the same team. Persona 2: Innocent Sin has a character respond to a trans male's appearance by saying “She looks cute.” Persona 3's infamous beach scene featured a trans female predator who's outed by a bit of facial stubble she missed while shaving. Persona 5, while not outwardly transphobic, still features numerous instances of gay panic. As a queer fan of the series—one who even has Persona 5 as their #2 game of the year—it often feels like Atlus hates its queer audience.

This is perhaps the most commonly used transphobic trope in media : the deceptive trans woman, tricking hapless heterosexual men into having sex with them. It's a lazy, regressive device on its own; but with Catherine's developer Atlus, it comes with a storied history of degrading their trans and queer characters. (Be warned: spoilers for Catherine and Persona 4 follow) .

The most damning insult to his identity comes when you decide to initiate the romance route with him. During an intimate moment between you and Naoto where he expresses his wish to have been born a boy, you are able to initiate romance with him by responding, “I’m glad you’re a girl.” Later, after confessing your love, you’re able to ask him to change his talk in a higher pitch to sound more feminine. If you do so, Naoto comes to school in a girl’s uniform during the Christmas event. However valid his feelings are, Naoto’s identity hinges on your cis character’s gatekeeping to be seen as valid, and that has left queer fans in the position of needing to reclaiming his identity .

Naoto is an assigned-female-at-birth detective who presents as male in their daily life, his struggle to come to terms with his gender identity a rare instance of empathy in a series that's needlessly cruel to LGBT people. But Atlus demolishes that initial good will over the course of the game. Naoto's dungeon, which represents his psyche, has him threatening to perform a “dangerous experiment” on himself that's later revealed to be some form of gender reassignment surgery. Your goal as the player character is to stop him from making that decision, ultimately framing Naoto as a woman fed up with the demeaning treatment from their male peers. This, despite a later hot springs scene where Naoto's visibly uncomfortable with his naked body paired alongside his cis female companions, and other clear signs of gender dysphoria.

Catherine centers around a strain of mysterious nightmares that only affect men and end in death, which plague our hero, Vincent, after he cheats on his girlfriend Katherine with a girl named... Catherine. Over the course of the game you drink with friends, complain about your problems, solve puzzles, and converse with other men who are suffering through the same nightmares. At one point, one of your childhood friends, a waitress named Erica, tells you she's experiencing these nightmares. But don't they only affect men? You see where this is going.

This conflicting tug of empathy and delegitimization can be found in the real world, where the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops published an open letter calling for compassion toward trans people while condemning parents who acknowledge their children's trans identities. Naoto Shirogane is Atlus' trans child, his legitimate desires and struggles written-off and dismissed in a way that his cis-hetero companions aren't, and that contradictory ethos carries over to Catherine.

It is foreshadowed throughout that Erica is transgender, and though she's presented as a content, sexually confident woman, the game continually demeans her simply for being trans. When one of Vincent's friends, Toby, starts dating her, everyone in your friend circle snickers, unable to tell him the “truth.” Toby describes the sex with her as “weird,” the game othering her body relative to cis bodies.

By the end of the game, when Toby's disgusted at the reveal of her trans status, his friends laugh at him like they'd successfully executed the punchline to a long-running joke. Toby's attraction to a trans woman is embarrassing, emasculating, “gay.” On top of all this, Erica sees the same nightmares Vincent's getting because she's really just a “man” like the rest of 'em.

Why aren’t we letting trans creators tell these stories?

The transphobic lens through which Catherine views Erica is hardly new or surprising within the context of Atlus' other games. But it's not like the game’s depiction of cis people offers any nuance by comparison. Catherine purports to be a game explicitly about gender differences, trying to honestly examine the sexual power dynamics between (cis) men and women. But it only plays in Types. All men are cheating scumbags, Katherine is the “nagging shrew,” and Catherine is a femme fatale who's later revealed to be a literal succubus who “tricks” men into cheating on their partners. Erica being a classic “deceptive trans woman” isn't just the continuation of a trend, but a product of Catherine's thesis of gender essentialism.