Not a day goes by, it seems, without another skirmish in the culture wars. While gaming is not today the theater of war it was just several years ago, the world of gaming remains a significant battlefield. Perhaps the most recent controversy in this space has to do with Cyberpunk 2077, a video game set for release in April 2020.

The controversy surrounds an in-game poster’s sexualized depiction of a transgender model. At first glance, there is nothing particularly degrading about the depiction—unless any sexualized depiction is judged as degrading. That’s an altogether different critique, questioning why bodily depictions in general seem to take on a hypersexualized form in videogame culture. But that’s not the issue in this case: rather, the Cyberpunk 2077 developers are accused of being “transphobic.”

Cyberpunk

The cyberpunk genre has great potential for transgender acceptance. It portrays a future both technologically advanced and dystopian, with society run by a tyrannical, and often corporate, government. (Notable examples include William Gibson’s sci-fi novel Neuromancer and the film Blade Runner, based on the Philip K. Dick classic, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?) The characters tend to be radical individualists with an openness to technological customization, from countless guns and swords to thousands of biomechanical body parts. In modern cyberpunk games, players can customize their characters however the hell they want, and however they think will best take the power back from the tyrants who rule over them.

The genre is epitomized in Mike Pondsmith’s tabletop game series, fittingly called Cyberpunk. Video game developer CD Projekt Red, best known for making The Witcher series, is currently developing Cyberpunk 2077 as a game based on Pondsmith’s vision, with his help. It promises players a massively open world and more customization options than ever before, both practical and cosmetic. It features characters whose bodies can morph in a variety of ways. This is a context theoretically far more hospitable, far more welcoming, to transgender people.

Yet the art police, who breathlessly scan literature and film and video games for ways to manufacture outrage in the dubious service of advancing justice, have seized on Cyberpunk 2077’s poster as problematic.

The Poster

Recently, the studio released a promotional shot with some in-game advertising posters for a fictional drink. One of them features a female model with what is clearly the outline of a penis visible through her leotard.

Inclusive? No, according to PC Gamer, who wrote that “the image was widely — but not universally — criticized as being transphobic.” Some said it reeked of “fetishism” and was being used for shock value. PC Gamer quotes Ana Valens, a sex columnist for The Daily Dot, a publication whose achievements range from calling the critique of an intersex South African Olympic runner a “study in racism, sexism, and transphobia” to monitoring the NFL for tweeting-while-MAGA. Valens writes:

If Cyberpunk 2077 treated girls’ dicks as just another facet of life, it would be fine. This ad shows that CDPR thinks trans people are weird, shocking, and fundamentally sexual.

The poster’s artist, Kasia Redesiuk, revealed that the depictions are “meant to reflect corporate exploitation.” She says the trans model in the ad “is displayed there just as a thing,” and that “this is the terrible part of it.” In other words, if there is fetishistic exploitation here, it is being satirized and criticized — much in the same way that The Dead Kennedys’ anthem “Kill the Poor” addressed the problems of poverty through the lens of satirical exploitation. Ironically, satire used this way is very much in the spirit of social justice.

Redesiuk also says this about the poster:

I honestly think we need it because we need more acceptance in the world, and we need to also show how the goodness of people is sometimes used against them.

But you can never be woke enough for the woke. You can denounce corporate exploitation and promote inclusion, you can create a world that is far more welcoming to bodily customization and modification, a world less beholden to the socially conservative norms that still loom large in our own, a world more accepting of trans people than our own — yet you’re a hopeless bigot if you don’t abide by the inscrutable intersectional requirements that govern how you can depict, talk about, and conceptualize “girldick.”

The point isn’t that transphobia isn’t real, it’s that if this counts as transphobia, what doesn’t?

The unfortunate reality, for many artists and consumers of art, is that few things today are able to escape the hypervigilant gaze of the woke police. Whether it’s calling a comic book character racist or claiming that a television character is homophobic, culture war smut peddlers will always find a way to spin entertainment into outrage for the masses.

Prior Offenses

Part of the problem in this case apparently lies less with the poster but with the prior reputation of the development studio responsible for the game.

From a Polygon write-up:

Almost immediately, some began to wonder if the advertisement was created in good faith. CD Projekt Red has previously made jokes at the expense of the trans community. Just last year, the company was forced to apologize for what many considered to be a transphobic tweet. GOG.com, a digital storefront that is, like the studio, a wholly owned subsidiary of CD Projekt, has also been accused of making transphobic attempts at humor. That’s likely why on social media, many people saw the in-fiction ad as just another example of CD Projekt Red going out of its way to use the queer community as a punchline and to fetishize trans people.

When you click on the links, it turns out that the developer’s offenses are preposterously trivial: a tweet from the Cyberpunk 2077 Twitter account (@CyberpunkGame) making an (admittedly done-to-death) “did you just assume their gender?” joke, and a tweet on the GOG.com feed that riffed on the pro-transgender rights hashtag #WontBeErased to say, “Classic PC Games #WontBeErased on our watch. Yeah, how’s that for some use of hashtags.” If flippancy equals bigotry, that’s taking speech policing to a new level. (Both tweets were later deleted.)

But let’s assume, just for argument’s sake, that the employees running those social media accounts were actually ridiculing transgender people or transgender rights. Does that really prove “bad faith” by the company and add up to a case for seeing the poster as transphobic? Talk about guilt by association.

When you consider the poster on its own merits, the far likelier interpretation is the artist’s own: the in-game ad is intended to critique corporate exploitation. It depicts a sexualized advertisement, put out by an exploitative firm, using a model who is very likely accepted just like any other type of person in the future cyberpunk setting of the game. Indeed, the ad wouldn’t work in that setting, in that culture, unless trans people were more or less accepted the same as everyone else.

The Dystopian Future of Art

Think about it for a moment: a transhumanist cyberpunk game, a game in which the possibilities of gender are limitless, is under attack for being insufficiently sensitive to gender depictions.

We—fans of cyberpunk—thought this genre was safe from these idiotic culture wars. Cyberpunk was our last refuge against Marie Kondo and Harry Potter. We thought we could read Neuromancer and Snow Crash alone at goth clubs as we reflected on the decline of modernity. Yet now, for the first time, we must ask ourselves if our transgender and transhumanist video game avatars are woke enough.

They are. And if you try to take them from us, remember: Cyberpunk is all about standing up to authoritarian dystopias.

Rachel Haywire is a writer whose work has appeared in Arc Digital, Splice Today, and other places. Follow her on Twitter @BeyondTheCenter.