'GTA V' brings transphobia to the next console generation
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Grand Theft Auto V Is Just As Transphobic As You'd Expect
<b>The video game's awful depiction of women is notorious, but that doesn't make the latest installment's transphobic jokes any less unsettling.</b> Trigger warning.
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Grand Theft Auto V is due to hit its third console generation next year, complete with "technical improvements, visual upgrades and performance enhancements to take full advantage of the latest hardware," according to developers at Rockstar Games. GTA V launched in 2013 on the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, and since then it's also come to Xbox One, PS4 and PC. GTA V is the home of Grand Theft Auto Online, a living world that's kept the title at the top of monthly US video game sales charts for seven years running.
On June 11th, Sony opened its first PS5 summer showcase with the news that GTA V was heading to the next generation of video game consoles -- presumably with its scenes starring trans people unedited. Rockstar didn't respond to multiple requests for comment, but the studio released GTA V in 2013, 2014 and 2015 with all of its original scenes intact, and it hasn't indicated plans to change anything in 2021.
Regardless, the conversation around transgender rights, visibility and violence has changed significantly in the past seven years.
"If GTA V were a game coming out in 2020 for the first time, and it contained those kinds of stereotypical or harmful representations, a lot of people would be criticizing it for those representations," said Carolyn Petit, a former GameSpot editor and Feminist Frequency managing editor, who's currently a freelance games writer.
Petit reviewed GTA V for GameSpot in 2013, and she's been on the forefront of social conversations within the video game industry for just as long. Back when GTA V launched, a few critics called out its transphobic scenes, but the conversation didn't gain mainstream traction. Nowadays, after years of political maneuvering around transgender rights, relentless activism campaigns and celebrity input, GTA V's depiction of trans women would likely be a main topic of discussion.
"What I felt when I played the game in 2013 was a lot of internal conflict between my admiration for the game's scope and for its craft and for its systems, and my awareness that there were elements of it that would allow those who come to the game with a hatred of women or other marginalized people to really indulge in that hatred as a violent power fantasy," she said. "That was a scary realization to have."
GTA V transforms a real-world violent epidemic into a joke, at best.
"I think there's a huge responsibility on all games, all types of media, to not rely on lazy stereotypes," said Dr. Ben Colliver, a lecturer in criminology at Birmingham City University. "In the Grand Theft Auto series, a lot of the stereotypes to me seem to be there just for comedic effect. They're just there so that trans people and LGBT people more broadly are a joke."
Dr. Colliver is the author of "Representation of LGBTQ Communities in the Grand Theft Auto Series," which will be a chapter in Video Games, Crime and Next-gen Deviance: Reorienting the Debate, a free ebook that launches for Kindle on July 3rd. He's tracked transphobic instances throughout the Grand Theft Auto series and has found a few recurring themes. Rockstar regularly presents trans women in particular as overtly masculine, with chest hair and deep voices. Their dialogue is focused on sex, surgery or deception.
"It just reinforces this idea that you can always tell who's trans and who's not, and that trans women will always be that slightly bit masculine," Dr. Colliver said. "It has all of these stereotypes. They talk to real-life problems, but they don't do it in a way that tackles problems. They do it in a way that just reinforces that trans people are somehow less than everyone else."
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