Saints Row Taught Me To Love The Bulge

thegamer.com:

Way back in the summer of 2020, cisgender people were very excited at the idea of being a trans person in a video game. This, bizarrely, had become a major selling point for Cyberpunk 2077, with its character creator having the option of giving your femme avatar a penis seeing huge praise from critics as a positive step for representation. Trans people, as is often the case, knew better. Red flags included the highly fetishised Mix It Up poster featuring a female supermodel with a huge veiny bulge, the mocking tone of its marketing, and the occasional desperation of these cisgender observers to use transgender characters as a way to score points rather than something inclusive. Cyberpunk 2077 launched, left a string of broken promises behind it, and the trans character creator was a bit naff. As I and many other trans people pointed out at the time, Saints Row was already doing it, and better. Now that a new Saints Row is here, it has continued to reign supreme.

The overriding emotion when I think of Cyberpunk 2077's character creator is annoyance. Sure, you could add a penis to a femme character, and could even change the size of it. But once that happened, it did not exist. V had the smoothest tuck in existence, and even when naked in the game, she retained a strange Barbie-like flat purple crotch panel. Sex scenes in the game heavily implied you had a vagina, while any vagina-sporting trans men romancing Panam had scenes that suggested the presence of a penis. It just wasn't good, but marketing is everything in video games, and any critique of it at launch was drowned out by the primal screams of the bugs, so many people seem to think it is gaming's trans peak. It is not. It never was. It never could be. It is, and