A developer for Animal Crossing: New Horizons revealed that original ‘male and female’ gender options were changed to ‘styles’ due to threats from LGBTQ activists.

Developers were harassed and called ‘transphobic’ when it was revealed that Animal Crossing: New Horizons would let you choose between a male or female villager. Decisions were made to change ‘genders’ to ‘style’ to better suit the western market.

The popular Nintendo social simulator featuring some of the most adorable townies originally allowed players to choose if they wanted to play as a boy or a girl, but due to back lash by LGBTQ activists Nintendo had to change ‘gender’ to ‘style’.

Last month we published an article highlighting the outrage over the ‘gender roles’ in Animal Crossing: New Horizons by certain communities on social media which has now been read by 1 million people in Japan. The outrage made Japanese headlines and was described to be ‘ridiculous’ by the press.

A source that claims to work for Nintendo told us that, despite the solution being an easy fix, they just couldn’t fathom why people would get so upset over such a trivial thing.

Animal Crossing: New Horizons director, Aya Kyogoku, lied in an interview with WaPo.

“In some games you don’t even get the option to play as a male or female protagonist, you must play the character that is specifically written for the game’s story. Sometimes you play as other-wordly beings whose biological sex attributes may be completely different to humans… and people in the west are upset because you can play as a boy or a girl?” The insider vented in his email.

“A lot of people here in Japan are very confused with anger about gender in games,” he told us. “When we read your article about the outrage that you can now also play as a girl villager we were very surprised.”

The insider later revealed that the changes to the ‘gender roles’ was only done to the English version of the game and all they had to do was remove the words ‘boy’ and ‘girl’ from the game and change ‘choose sex’ to ‘choose style’. He also claimed that a lot of the developers laughed at the idea.

Animal Crossing dev admits gender was only removed from English version due to LGBTQ threats.

The pressure to change ‘sex’ to ‘style’ came from, both, people working for Nintendo America and LGBTQ activists on Twitter. Threats were allegedly made to the Japanese division if they did not adhere to the demands of the activists. “People were called bigots and ‘transphobic’ and other such nonsense, but the biggest concern was when we received threats of revealing our personal information. We have families and we didn’t want them to be harassed over this,” the insider said.

However, the games director, Aya Kyogoku, went on record with far-left leaning blog, WaPo (who have now changed their tagline to ‘democracy dies in darkness’), and her comments went against the evidence and contradicted the insiders statement.

“New Horizons’s flexible nature extends to character customization too. Clothing items and hairstyles aren’t restricted by gender, giving players more options on how to represent themselves in the game. This level of fine-tuning your character is ‘not just about gender,’ Kyogoku said, but relates to the team’s overall feeling that “society is shifting to valuing a lot of people’s different identities.”

“We basically wanted to create a game where users didn’t really have to think about gender or if they wanted to think about gender, they’re also able to,” she said.”

Animal Crossing dev admits gender was only removed from English version due to LGBTQ threats. Still available in all other versions.

As is now abundantly evident in Animal Crossing: New Horizons any mentions of gender and/or sex was only censored from the English localisation of the game, proving that when Kyogoku spoke of creating a game without gender she was merely virtue signalling to those who protested the games inclusion of ‘genders’.

Regardless, a lot of people are not too fussed about the seemingly forced ideology and are thoroughly enjoying Animal Crossing: New Horizons exclusively on their Nintendo Switch consoles… and maybe that’s because nobody really cares about what kinks, fetishes, or even what the sexual orientation of a character in a children’s video game is… except for the LGBTQ community.

What are your thoughts on the blatant censorship of biological sex and gender in a children’s video game? Should the Animal Crossing dev have changed it?Let us know in the comments below.