When she was a child, Hannah discovered two portals to other worlds. The first was her Nintendo 64, which could transport her to the dark dungeons of Zelda and the chaotic battlefields of Super Smash Bros. The second was her mother’s wardrobe in their Devon home, full of clothes she longed to try on, even though this was forbidden. Hannah had been assigned male at birth and raised as a boy; she feared her mother would not approve of her son trying on dresses. It wasn’t until a decade later that Hannah would come out as transgender, identify as female, and adopt her current name.
She vividly remembers the first time she explored that wardrobe, at the age of nine. Her mother was at work, her father asleep downstairs in his chair. Hannah crept into their bedroom and tentatively opened a drawer. She took out a silky nightgown and shrugged it on, feeling the instant, giddy rush of something she would later learn to call “gender euphoria”, though it was tempered by fear that someone would walk in. As if on cue, her mother returned from work unexpectedly and caught Hannah in the act.
Now a computer science student, Hannah, 20, tells me this story from her childhood bedroom, decorated with Pokémon posters and shared with two hyperactive gerbils, Jeremy and Jellybean. Playing with her long, dark hair, she explains how from that first moment she took every covert opportunity to try on her mother’s clothing, favouring nightdresses and floral skirts. At secondary school, she would wear tights under her school trousers, enjoying how they felt against her skin. In PE, she wore baggy trousers to hide the fact that she had shaved her legs. She experimented with her mother’s makeup, and when she got her first debit card, secretly ordered women’s clothes online. “I was in bed every night praying to myself that I could just wake up as a girl,” she recalls. “Eventually reality hit. I never could.”
While Hannah hid this from family and friends, there was one place where she could live openly as a female. She had been a gamer since she was three, and began playing on the Roblox platform at eight. When players first start, they are instructed to make an avatar through which they interact with the game world. Hannah’s first avatar, which she made to play with her school friends, looked like a boy. But she created a second, secret account her friends didn’t know about. There, she played as a girl, under the name PrincessBananna. “It’s such a 10-year-old name,” she says, laughing, but it was an important turning point. “In a game you can choose your gender. Go in as female and no one knows you’re biologically male. You can escape real life and have a completely new identity. As soon as I got on the computer, I just knew myself as Hannah.”
Before she had ever heard the word “trans” or understood the concept of gender, Hannah was using the anonymity of the internet to create a version of herself that felt more authentic than her real-world body. Through her teenage years, the online community around Roblox would help her learn about transitioning, support her as she came out to her family and even help fund her gender-affirming surgery. I spoke to almost 30 trans gamers, aged 13 to 30, for this article and, while every story was different, each emphasised the important role that games played in helping them to come to terms with their real-world selves.
As Hannah began to favour her female avatar, she confided in Roblox friends about her confusion over her gender identity. They offered advice and, more importantly, acceptance. “Online, you can get rid of all the baggage of real life,” she says. “You have no idea about someone’s background, what school they go to, what their face looks like. All you need to know is that they play games, they’re nice and they’re accepting of you.”
While Hannah spent a lot of time gaming, her mother, Terri, 47, an NHS recovery support worker, never saw this as a problem. “I don’t feel games were detrimental to any of my three children,” she says. “It probably developed some skills, like helping them problem-solve. Looking back, I’m glad it allowed Hannah to talk to people who knew more than me about what she’s going through.”
Hannah’s gaming platform of choice, Roblox, has become a cultural phenomenon. Since its 2006 launch, it has grown to host 37 million daily active users, with two-thirds of players under the age of 17 in 2020. The company claims that three-quarters of all American children aged nine to 12 are on Roblox. Its recent high-profile debut on the American stock market resulted in a 60% increase in share prices, valuing the company at $47bn (£34bn). It is the highest-grossing game on the US iOS store, according to mobile game market research company GameRefinery, which also noted a huge jump in popularity over the pandemic when children have been stuck at home. The platform has evolved into one of the world’s biggest junior social networks.
Roblox has had less media attention than games such as Fortnite or Minecraft, perhaps because of its younger demographic, but it has an edge over competitors because of the range of players it caters to. Unlike Fortnite, Roblox is not a single game, but a platform for game creation and sharing. Any user can download the Roblox Studio software free and use its simplified design toolkit to make and share their own games. Results range from treasure-hunting in the jungle to shooting baddies in military compounds, or role-playing baristas and customers in a virtual coffee shop. The most popular title, Adopt Me!, is based on buying and trading virtual pets.
Communities on Roblox interact in different ways. There is the in-game chat box, where players talk about the game they are playing or just shoot the breeze. Outside the games, but still on the platform, are text-based message boards catering to various interest groups, from Christian reading groups to a tiger appreciation society (“For tiger lovers and donesnt want them to be extinked”). The third layer is a messaging app, Discord, popular among gamers who use it to talk while playing, which enables them to escape Roblox’s strict chat filters. (The platform’s rules prohibit conversation which is deemed discriminatory or “overly violent”, even when discussing real-world events, and discussion of illegal activities including drugs, gambling and hacking.)
Among the platform’s many groups are four LGBTQ+ communities with between 50,000 and 250,000-plus members each, alongside countless smaller groups. Here, players can learn about queer issues, play games and meet others. Several of those I spoke to told me that Roblox’s community is more accepting of queer people than other online games. It lacks the aggression and vicious, often casually racist, sexist and hom*ophobic comments common in online shooting and sports games. Roblox’s relative safety is perhaps because of its non-competitive atmosphere and the youth of users, who might not yet have learned to be hom*ophobic. “It’s a free game, you download it in 30 seconds and you’re playing against six-year-olds,” one 15-year-old trans player said. “You can’t get mad at that.”
Roblox’s LGBTQ+ community is only the latest online space to offer queer people a safe home. The internet’s twin promises of anonymity and reinvention were the foundation for queer communities across pre-world wide web bulletin boards, Tumblr, and large parts of Twitter and Reddit today. Several people I spoke to said they first realised they were trans after seeing memes about gender dysphoria on a Reddit subforum called “egg_irl”, named for the trans community internet slang “egg”, which indicates a person who shows signs of being trans but has not realised; their egg has not yet cracked.
It is not a coincidence that the age most people get seriously into gaming is adolescence, a stage of life when our sense of self is in flux and we actively seek to define ourselves. Players questioning their gender identity can experiment without social judgment, consequences or commitment. For a young person assigned male at birth to walk down the street in a dress could be a terrifying, even dangerous experience. To design a female avatar and step out into a virtual city could hardly be easier or safer.
Freya (not her real name), a 14-year-old trans girl from the south of England, told me how experimenting with her Roblox avatar helped her understand her gender identity. Her first character, made when she was 10, was a boyish figure in a baggy red hoodie, with a majestic pair of golden wings. Over the next four years, her avatar underwent a gradual transformation: she grew out the hair and swapped the hoodie and trousers for a sunhat and white short-shorts. It was affirming to experience not just being in a girl’s body, albeit virtually, but also the way other players unthinkingly treated her as female. “Roblox shaped who I am and gave me the courage to come out in real life,” she says. Freya has now changed her name legally, transitioned fully at school and partially with her family (she is not out to all her relatives).
Studies on how gamers express themselves through avatars have typically focused on cisgender players (people whose gender identity corresponds with the sex they were assigned at birth). It is generally found that they create avatars that look like idealised versions of themselves: taller, thinner, more muscular, or with a different skin tone. Few academics have studied the intersection of avatars and gender identity, though a 2017 study suggested that games might be prescribed therapeutically to ease the path to transitioning in the real world. All gamers enjoy playing with the looks of their avatars – almost half of Roblox players update their avatar each month, adding body parts and accessories to their Lego-like characters, ranging from new clothes and hairstyles to antlers, wings and weaponry.
Hannah can pinpoint the moment when, at 15, she changed the gender of her main Roblox character to female. With a single click, her avatar made a transition that was still a distant, complicated dream for its creator. By 17, she was ordering supplements online to boost her oestrogen levels, but was still afraid to come out. “It’s a really horrible, unknown thing, a kind of void,” she says. “How are people going to react when you come out as trans? Are you going to get bullied at school?” hom*ophobic comments made by her secondary school friends deterred her from broaching the topic.
No online space is free from trolling. The same anonymity that allows users like Hannah to experiment with their identity also allows trolls to harass with relative impunity. Roblox’s army of about 2,300 moderators worldwide, and an array of chat filters that replace banned terms with a string of symbols, cannot stop all instances of abuse. A 2017 report by Stonewall found that two in five LGBTQ+ young people are bullied online, and around half the trans Roblox players I talked to said they had experienced some form of transphobic abuse on the platform. Several found the in-game tools to report harassment – which include blocking other players or reporting them to moderators – ineffective at curbing abuse. One felt compelled to remove the colours of the blue, pink and white trans flag from her avatar’s clothes because she was tired of being insulted. Yet all agreed that these occurrences were relatively rare. “There are always trolls, but some of them don’t mean it,” says Hannah. “That was me, 10 years ago. I used to trash-talk people and get angry when I lost a competitive game.”
Laura Higgins, director of community safety and digital civility at Roblox, says: “We work relentlessly to create a safe, civil, and diverse community and have no tolerance for cyberbullying, which is in violation of our community guidelines. We actively encourage and empower users to report and block anyone that may be harassing or bullying them or other members of the community.” She understands why children may act out, and that cyberbullying has serious consequences: “This is real life for kids, they don’t differentiate between on- and offline.” Yet she emphasises that online communities cannot be divided simply into civilians and trolls. “Young people need to try out different personalities, and sometimes you test whether you’re the bad guy. It’s part of growing up.”
As part of her job, Higgins shares safety tips and encourages parents to learn about Roblox alongside their child. “We’re a platform built for kids so safety always comes first,” she says. “But since we have this community of young players just starting out their journey online, we also want to go beyond safety and actually give them some life skills as they are growing up, through promotional campaigns and by highlighting different voices in the Roblox community. People never report as much as you’d like, but we try to remind them of the important message: we’re here to protect you, we’re here to support you, and we believe you.”
With the encouragement of her Roblox community, Hannah finally came out as trans to her family at the age of 18, and found them surprisingly supportive. “I just punched myself because I could have just come out at 10 years old and started puberty blockers,” she says. “Now I have to get surgery to reverse puberty.” She has spent almost three years on the NHS gender clinic’s waiting list, in the meantime opting for a private consultation, after which she was prescribed hormones. She now wants vocal cord surgery to feminise her voice and the gender-affirming procedure commonly known as “bottom surgery”, which she estimates will cost £30,000 in total.
At first Hannah had no idea how she could make that much money. Roblox provided a potential answer. Though free to download, Roblox makes money from a premium subscription service and the sale of Robux, an in-game currency used to buy accessories and items for avatars. It is not just the company that can profit; Roblox has more than 8 million community developers, often teenagers working alone or in small teams, who create games for others to play. When a developer has earned 100,000 Robux from their games, they can cash out at an exchange rate of 100,000 Robux to $350. There is serious money to be made: the developer community made $328m in 2020, up from $110m in 2019.
Hannah had been making games on Roblox for fun since 2014. She joined a small team of game-makers who go by the name “Pops Developing”, and began creating games for a fan group that now has more than 13,000 members. In their most successful game so far, Marble Simulator, players roll around a blindingly colourful landscape collecting coins and blasting enemies. It recorded 1,500 simultaneous players during the first coronavirus lockdown. This is still small‑scale – the most successful game racked up more than 1.5 million players – but it allowed Hannah to pay other players to help with 3D modelling for their next game. She has now earned £1,200 from Roblox, and estimates she has more than £1,000 in her account to cash out. She plans to put the money towards voice surgery, booked for early 2022, for which she will need £15,000. “Even if I earn just 5% of what those top games earn, I’ll be happy,” she says.
Her mother has some concerns about Hannah’s plans, but respects her daughter’s choice to transition. “Children are not your property,” she says. “Your responsibility is to support them to be the best person they can be, not what you want them to be. I do worry about the risks and cost of surgery, and the fact that it’s quite permanent – what happens if it doesn’t work out, or it doesn’t make her as happy as she thought it would? But Hannah is a clear, thoughtful person. She wouldn’t jump into a decision impulsively.”
It is not uncommon for trans gamers to mobilise their communities to help pay for surgery. American gamer Veronica Ripley, 30, livestreams herself on video platform Twitch to more than 30,000 followers who know her as Nikatine. In 2019, she raised $3,000 from her community for gender-affirming surgery, enough for breast augmentation. She is also co-founder of Transmission Gaming, a community for trans gamers; in this group, players don’t have to worry about being misgendered over voice chat, and trolls are swiftly banned by a team of volunteer moderators. But as tight-knit as the trans gamer community is, Ripley says that people rarely stick around for long. “It’s like they leave the nest,” she says. “That’s the nature of trans communities online – people get older, they outgrow the need for that tight community, and gracefully exit.”
Freya is only 14, but feeling this already. “I love the support in LGBT groups,” she says, “but I don’t want to be under the ‘trans’ label all my life. I prefer to be known as female, not trans female. I’ve found out who I am and I’m ready to move forward now, out of this life.”
Ripley tells me she often receives private messages from young people experiencing debilitating gender dysphoria, who learn to accept themselves by interacting online. “I created my online persona to make an example of a trans role model,” she says. “Because when I began my transition, there weren’t any around.” Her online persona is wry and warm, equally comfortable issuing words of encouragement and withering put-downs, earning her a devoted following and a position as a Twitch ambassador.
Not everybody who swaps gender online is on the path to transitioning, Ripley is keen to point out. “I don’t want cisgendered, heterosexual people to feel they shouldn’t do it, or that it’s taboo,” she says. “I want everybody to be able to experiment and see what fits. Anything that can subvert gender norms in some way is a huge, beneficial thing for any questioning person.”
Meanwhile, Hannah has taken on a mentoring role in her Discord groups, describing herself as a “mother” to her community. “So many of them struggle coming out, and I know what that’s like – how it feels to be scared,” she says. She advises them to explore their options early, opening up to parents if they will be accepting, in order to save years of potential suffering. She hopes younger players might learn from her own mistakes.
Ripley and Hannah both say they have observed that the current cohort of people questioning their gender online are younger. Today’s generation, who grew up playing Roblox, are fully tuned in to social issues, ranging from the nuances of gender to racial injustice and the threat of environmental collapse. Last summer the Roblox online store was stocked with user-created clothing emblazoned with pride flags and Black Lives Matter logos. The wider gaming industry is also beginning to level up when it comes to trans representation. Last year saw the release of Tell Me Why, the first major game with a trans protagonist, while gender non-binary options have been introduced to the character creation options in games such as Animal Crossing, The Sims and Cyberpunk 2077. Last October, Roblox made the “select gender” box on its account creation page optional.
Hannah is still waiting for the operations that will make her feel as authentic as she does in her Roblox avatar. For now, though, PrincessBananna isn’t such a bad person to be. In the game she created, Marble Simulator, a huge image of her avatar’s face is painted on to the floor of the town square: it’s the first thing players see when they start the game. When she drops into the game, players treat her like a hero. “I’m not gonna lie,” she says, “that does make me feel pretty good.”
