Trans characters in video games: who is canon, who is fan-read

The clearest trans characters in video games include Tyler Ronan in Tell Me Why, Lev in The Last of Us Part II, Krem and Taash in the Dragon Age series, and Madeline in Celeste. Many other names on popular lists are fan readings, or come with an official record that contradicts itself. This guide sorts characters by what the evidence actually is, with dates, and flags spoilers and the portrayals that can hurt.

Canon, confirmed or fan-read: how we sort them

Lists of trans video game characters mix very different kinds of evidence. We sort them the same way as our guide to trans anime characters:

• Stated in the game. Dialogue, a scene or an in-game text makes it clear.
• Confirmed by the developer. The game leaves room for doubt, and the studio or the writer closes it in a blog post, an interview or a trailer.
• Changed along the way. One version says it and another removes it, or the people who made the game give different answers.
• Read by players. The hints are there, sometimes strong ones, but neither the game nor its makers say so.

Words like trans or non-binary often never appear on screen, especially in older games and fantasy worlds, so a character can be canon without the word. That is worth knowing before you buy a game on the strength of a list.

Spoilers ahead. Several of these characters are revealed as trans partway through a story, and the entries below say where.

Trans characters the game itself makes clear

Tyler Ronan (Tell Me Why, 2020)

Dontnod's three-chapter mystery follows Tyler, a young trans man, and his twin sister Alyson as they return to their childhood home in small-town Alaska. You play as both of them. GLAAD described it as the first game from a major studio with a playable transgender lead, and its Director of Transgender Representation, Nick Adams, advised the team on the story, dialogue, character design and casting. Tyler is voiced by August Black, an out trans actor.

The studio also answered, in advance, two questions trans players often ask. Tyler's birth name is never used, and his transition is not presented as a result of the childhood trauma the plot is about. The chapters came out a week apart from 27 August 2020.

Lev (The Last of Us Part II, 2020)

Spoiler: how Lev is revealed as trans.

Lev is a teenage boy who has fled the Seraphites, a religious sect, with his older sister Yara. He shaved his head, something only the sect's men do, after being assigned to marry one of its elders, and the group turned on him. The player learns he is trans in the middle of a fight, when his attackers call him by his birth name. Afterwards he asks Abby whether she heard, and says he does not want her to ask about it.

That scene split trans players. Many objected to hearing his deadname used at all; Kotaku's Riley MacLeod, writing as a trans person, liked that the game did not stop for a dramatic reveal. Lev is played by Ian Alexander, who told Polygon he brought his own experience as a trans person to the role. The whole game is very violent, and Lev is not spared.

Krem (Dragon Age: Inquisition, 2014)

Krem, the first trans character in a BioWare game, is second in command of Iron Bull's mercenary company, and his story comes out naturally when you talk to him or to Bull. The writer, Trick Weekes, showed early drafts to two friends in the genderqueer community. In the first version, Krem had deserted after fighting off someone who discovered his secret and tried to assault him; those friends pointed out that this was the old cliché of the attacked trans person, and the backstory changed. Kotaku noted that some fans criticised the casting of Jennifer Hale, a cis woman, rather than a trans man. The game describes Krem with an invented word from its own world, not with the word trans.

Taash (Dragon Age: The Veilguard, 2024)

Spoiler: Taash's personal quest line.

Ten years later, the same series said the word out loud. Taash, one of the companions, works out during their personal quests that they are non-binary, and then has to tell their mother. In their diary they write that they identify as non-binary, then cross it out for something more direct. Their mother suggests a word from their own culture instead, and TheGamer's Stacey Henley read that scene as a deliberate break with how Krem was handled.

Not everyone liked it. Some players found a modern word out of place in a fantasy setting, and Inverse's reviewer called a coming-out plot low-hanging fruit. Polygon's reviewer, who is non-binary, found the conversations with Taash written with real empathy. The Qun, the belief system Taash grew up in, accepts binary trans people but has no place for non-binary ones, which is what makes their position so hard. At the 36th GLAAD Media Awards, the game won Outstanding Video Game.

Confirmed by the developers after release

Madeline (Celeste, 2018)

Celeste is a hard platformer about a young woman climbing a mountain while her anxiety, in the shape of a darker double, tries to stop her. Nothing in the original story says Madeline is trans. The free final chapter, Farewell, released in September 2019, ended on a screen with small pride flags on her desk, a trans one among them, which fans took as a hint and nothing more.

In November 2020, the game's creator, Maddy Thorson, confirmed in a blog post that Madeline is a trans woman. As PC Gamer reported it, Thorson explained that during development she had not known that either Madeline or she herself was trans, began to suspect it while making Farewell, and knew afterwards that both were. She apologised to fans who had been hurt by the silence after Farewell, and said she would probably write Madeline differently if she started again.

In community slang, that is an egg story told twice: a character and her author who both worked it out after the fact. It is also why Madeline spent more than a year as a fan reading before she was canon.

Bridget (Guilty Gear Strive, 2022)

Bridget, from the Guilty Gear fighting games, comes to terms with being a trans woman in her story in Guilty Gear Strive. When some players claimed the English translation had invented it, the directors, Daisuke Ishiwatari and Akira Katano, confirmed on the game's official website in September 2022 that she identifies as a woman and uses she/her. Her longer history, and the anime that followed, are in our guide to trans anime characters.

Changed in translation, or never settled

Vivian (Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door, 2004 and 2024)

Vivian is the youngest of three villainous sisters who hunt Mario, until her sister Beldam's constant bullying drives her to join him. In the original Japanese version of this 2004 GameCube game she is a trans woman, although Beldam, an in-game description and a companion's commentary all misgender her. The first English version removed it: Beldam calls her ugly instead.

Nintendo's 2024 remake for the Switch wrote her as a trans woman in English for the first time. In chapter 4, Vivian tells Mario it took her a while to realise she was her sisters' sister, not their brother, and every other character and text now refers to her as a woman. The remake was nominated for a GLAAD Media Award.

Birdo (Super Mario Bros. 2, 1988)

Birdo is often named as one of the first trans characters in games, and the evidence is a single line. The first North American instruction manual referred to Birdo as a boy who wants to be a girl, and said she would rather be called Birdetta. Later printings dropped it, and Nintendo has since referred to her only as female, without any mention of her history.

The one later game that returned to the subject, Captain Rainbow, released only in Japan in 2008, has Birdo locked up for using the women's bathroom. She has been embraced as a trans icon regardless, and a trans writer at TheGamer argues that Nintendo seems ashamed of her past, not of the mockery but of the transness itself.

Poison (Final Fight, 1989)

Poison shows how little an official answer can be worth. According to the game's director and a Capcom guidebook, the team had been warned that hitting women would be seen as rude in America, and answered by saying that Poison and another enemy, Roxy, were trans women. Nintendo of America replaced both with male enemies on its consoles anyway. Since then, Capcom staff have described her differently for North America and for Japan, and have said the company has no official stance. The director's personal view is that she is a woman.

Her transness began as a loophole, not a portrait. When Capcom showed Street Fighter X Tekken in 2011, early victory lines had other fighters suggest she was not a real woman; the company said those lines were from an earlier stage of development and that it was working with GLAAD. Any list that gives Poison one simple answer is tidying up an untidy record.

Read as trans or non-binary by players, never confirmed

Some of the names that come up most often are readings. The game hints, sometimes hard, but nobody who made it has said so, and the honest label is read as trans, not trans.

Flea (Chrono Trigger, 1995)

Flea is one of the villain Magus's lieutenants: a magician who dresses and presents as feminine, is called he in the English script, and at one point says: "Male... Female... what does it matter? Power is beautiful, and I've got the power!" In the Japanese original, Flea also speaks in a markedly feminine way, which the English localisation largely dropped under Nintendo of America's content rules of the time.

The LGBTQ Video Game Archive, a research project run by Adrienne Shaw at Temple University, files Flea under gender non-conforming and under non-binary or genderqueer, and Flea has been recognised as a notable LGBTQ character, particularly for non-binary and genderqueer people. Accounts of the character's creation describe a man who presents as feminine, and some critics were unhappy that a blurred gender was used to mark a villain. That makes Flea a strong reading, for good reasons, and not a confirmation.

Readings are not worthless because they are unconfirmed. Madeline was one for more than a year, and trans players have long found themselves in characters whose makers never had them in mind. What matters is saying which is which.

Canon, but handle with care

A character can be confirmed as trans and still be written badly. Two cases show what that looks like, and what a repair can look like.

Hainly Abrams (Mass Effect: Andromeda, 2017)

Hainly Abrams is a minor character who tells the player she is trans without being asked, before they have any real relationship, and gives her birth name to someone who is effectively a stranger. The scene was widely criticised, including by the journalist Laura Kate Dale, who explained why, for many trans people, hearing that name hurts. In April 2017, BioWare apologised, saying she had not been included in a caring or thoughtful way. After talking to trans people inside and outside the studio, it said it would change the conversation so that she only shares that information once trust has been built, and only if the player chooses to support her.

Erica Anderson (Catherine, 2011, and Catherine: Full Body, 2019)

Spoiler: one of the endings of Catherine.

Erica is a waitress at the bar where the hero and his friends drink. In one ending, a younger man who has slept with her regrets it on learning that she is a trans woman, and critics read the scene as using her to embarrass him. Her birth name also appeared in the credits of the original game. The 2019 remake, Catherine: Full Body, corrected the credits. Before its English release, unofficial translations of a new Japanese ending, in which everyone is happier in another timeline, suggested that Erica had never transitioned, and set off a fresh controversy in queer and trans spaces. Atlus's representative argued that the scene lost its context when lifted out of the game.

Where to go next

Trans characters in games used to be a line in a manual or a loophole found during localisation. The strongest recent ones were written with trans consultants and voiced by trans actors, though even they can arrive with a scene that hurts.

A fan reading can matter to you without being canon, and a canon trans character can still be written badly. Knowing which is which helps you pick what to play now, and what to leave for a better day. If you want more stories with trans and non-binary people at the centre, our lists of trans and non-binary films and series and books by trans and non-binary authors are good places to start.