No matter how I think about it, gaming has had a very important place in both allowing me to safely explore my identity beyond the dysphoria and at the same time it helped me hide it from my peers to some extent.
Early on there was suspicion about me always seeming to prefer to play female characters, which prior to my coming out I attributed to my mortality rate by gender statistics. My female characters tended to live long fulfilling lives, but my male characters tended to die in glorious martyrdom (in retrospect this should have been a sign).
When I got into MMO rpgs I ran into the peculiar situation that while my character was female, and I was very up front about being male (denial was very strong with me), nobody believed I was male. Generally the belief by many was I was a lesbian who just hated being flirted with (mostly right
)
When I finally came out, most of my gamer friends immediately thought it made sense, but ultimately my first attempt at transition was not fruitful.
At this point I started my CIV V marathoning and non-stop Minecraft while listening to Pink Floyd on loop phase... It wasn't pretty, but smashing people in CIV V or C&C was usually enough for people to accept the pretense of masculinty I was trying to present.
Now I'm back on HRT, transitioning at a steady pace, and gaming only once a week with a group I genuinely see as extended family. My status is never brought up, but my character is female and ever so slowly I appear more feminine as our sessions progress. I'm a woman, comfortable in being a woman, and my spouse now sees me as a woman... a woman who is a major bitch in Civilization V, but a woman nonetheless.
