Body Type A & B is dehumanizing
Runescape pushed an update this week which removed male and female from the character creation screen, instead replacing them with “Body Type A” and “Body Type B”. This has conservative leaning gamers in an uproar, as they believe it to be more woke mind virus infecting the industry. Which it most certainly is. However, when taken in the broader context, it’s not just woke, it’s actually quite dehumanizing.
George Carlin did a bit years ago about the tyranny of soft language, which he characterized as language that takes the life out of life. It’s brilliant, so I won’t even try to steal his thunder here. But it perfectly encapsulates what’s been going on. Unfortunately, things have gotten far worse since his death, sorry, unaliving, in 2008.
When I first played Where in Time is Carmen San Diego in the early 90s, when you registered at the detective agency, you went to the personnel department. Now every company calls it human resources. Also, when a game asked you to select whether you wanted Body Type A or Body Type B, you were usually picking out what trim package you wanted for your vehicle in Saints Row or Need for Speed.
Applying this type of language to people, or at least people analogues in games, usually comes with the caveat of making the games softer for the trans community. Much like how the enforced use of pronouns in corporate America, or legally here in Canada, is mainly due to many trans people not physically presenting as what they describe themselves to be. The West not having technology quite as advanced as Thailand in that department. Thing is, the Body Type A and B I don’t think is a trans issue. Rather the trans movement has been hijacked by radical Marxist activists, who want to erase the concept of gender entirely.
To them, humans are born as blank slates. The concept of gender therefore is entirely a social construct, and social constructs are bad because they are created by the “oppressors”. So to achieve utopia, we must erase them and shift towards neutral language that better reflects “reality”. Something they’ve been pushing really hard to achieve in the past couple of years. The one flaw in this logic though is the world, and the humans inhabiting it, don’t work like that. Even most in the trans community don’t believe that gender is non-existent.
Yet there’s a more sinister aspect to this, which I alluded to earlier with my point about the cars. Body “Type A” and “Type B” is very mechanical language. As if differences between the sexes are no different than optional trim packages on a car. Do you want dual exhaust, or single exhaust with a trailer hitch? I’ve noticed this a lot lately with how these activists and the powers-that-be talk about people. It’s as if human beings are just interchangeable cogs in a machine. Ones that can be mass produced as one blank die, who are readily interchangeable once the old ones break down. Obviously this dips into some pretty big philosophical implications well beyond the scope of a gaming blog. Though I think it shows why we gamers need to push back just as hard on this stuff. Because like Carlin said, it’s taking the life out of life.
