I saw the thread about homosexual sims in game a while back and it made me wonder how simmers play trans (or even nonbinary (I haven't had any nb sims yet, myself, despite being in what may be considered the nb pool irl)) sims in their games. How and when do you decide on a gender identity for your sims? Do you use an external program like SimPE and fiddle with their file and whatnot when the time's right for the game to treat them as male/female? Do you use batbox to rename them or just use your imagination? How often do you play trans/nb sims in your game? Do you use gender clothing conversions, downloading from places like simmergirl and the like? Do you have an idea how the sims around them act (i.e., are they supportive? are there fights? do they have mixed feelings?) and does it depend on the neighborhood?

I play quite a few trans sims in my game, actually. The first time I've played a trans sim was actually Dustin and Angela's firstborn son, Reuben, who is FtM; the idea just came out of nowhere and it was like he was just calling out to me, almost like it was him telling me this rather than just me deciding on it. It might sound weird, but my sims like to dictate how I play them more than I do it seems. Out of pure anxiety over messing anything up, I haven't fiddled with any character files or names, so I rely on imagination and lots of clothing/hair conversions; CAS trans sims are much easier in this than in-born game sims since I can put in their preferred name in the box if they're at an age (any stage older than toddler in my game, pretty much) where they can decide on one. Autonomy and Nice points pretty much decide the actions and attitudes of the sims around them towards them, but also depends on the neighborhood. My Downtowns often have a very large LGBT community which would mean most sims living in that subhood would treat them with some more respect than, say, sims in the upper-middle class area of Pleasantview. There are some Apartment townies in my Downtown that have surprised me while adding to the story. There's a guy who lived in the apartment downstairs from one of my families consisting of a transwoman, her husband, and two adopted children; the guy would always be getting into fights with the husband, and I figured it was because the neighbor was making some nasty comments and the husband wanted to defend his wife from them. Luckily, the single mother upstairs is very kind and welcoming towards the family and they switch back and forth babysitting for each other (mostly for the single mother since she's a call-girl and does most of her work at night while her son is home from school.)

Anyways, how about you guys?

I don't really think about adding trans sims as there isn't an official option for it and if there was I probably wouldn't use it.

Although I'm the one who made the transwoman pizza girl for the Sims Community Project, I have yet to have anyone who seemed to me to be oddly gendered in my game.

Partly this is down to the strong gender binary in the mechanics - you have to fight like the dickens to keep a sim even bisexual - and partly because of my (apparently abnormal) sense of my gender and sex being completely congruent. I'm a woman, so anything I do is gendered feminine, and if that happened to include activities which society genders as masculine, society can go jump in a lake. I can't feel that way about myself and not extend the same premise to other people - if a man is wearing lipstick, or a dress, then he's making them masculine. I don't really see the point of separating gender from sex at all.

I am the only person I know who feels this way, though, so all I can do is accept that the divide is somehow real and meaningful, and if a person with a clearly defined female sex wants to be referred to as "he" then it's only polite for me to do so. It's no business of mine how he dresses or sorts out his life. And it naturally makes me less inclined to go to the trouble of figuring out how to model a trans* in sims, though I understand it's possible to do.

What I do, however, do fairly readily is set up transvestites. All you need for that is unisex clothing and hairstyles. I have gussied a few townies into cross-gendered clothing; when she was adult, my premier heartbreaker Leslie Gay dressed butch (this is much, much harder to do as an elder); and I have a rising teen fashionista who I have always intended to grow up to wear dresses. At the moment, he's wearing slightly feminine-looking teen clothes, but the minute he gets a sewing badge that allows making outfits, he gets to start wearing the dresses, kilts, skirts, and unisex blouses I downloaded for him.

Unfortunately, it's hard to find a practical, realistic, and attractive assortment of clothes that don't change the bodyshape significantly. Dior's Vati won't be down with his getting hormone shots or silicon injections as a teen, and I don't think he really wants them. He just wants to wear skirts because skirts are pretty and he thinks he could look great in them! He doesn't feel feminine - he feels like himself. So I don't think of Dior as a transgirl; I think of him as a boy who likes clothes. Some days he'll wear "masculine" clothing and some days he'll wear "feminine" clothing, and he will be a lot more concerned about finding the right palette to complement his skintone (he's an alien hybrid) than he will about whether the outfit is "appropriate" to the body underneath.

I'm mostly interested in crossdressing. You should see Gunnar Roque in my game. Perhaps I will post pictures.

I don't really make any transgender sims. Though I do have one sim, I can't remember their name (Valerie? I think) who is now a teenager. She was brought up by her Uncle with her twin brother Roman. At first she just liked to cut her hair short as a toddler to match Roman, but then eventually she realized she was more comfortable being a boy, so I downloaded a few conversion outfits. I still usually refer to her as a "she" and call her by her birth name, but when she's an adult I planned on making her a "him" (I have a mod that gives male sims 'parts', and I know there's one that gives females those parts too) and naming him Vaughan, but I've stopped playing that neighbourhood because it was well on its way to becoming a firey ball of death.

I don't really have any other transgender sims. I guess that's mainly because I play a 1950s neighbourhood so it's not really a common thing, and also because my other laptop is already insanely slow, I don't want to have to download lots of transgender outfits.

I mostly just crossdress,
and sometimes I will make sims in CAS who are males/women but clearly make them look the opposite gender and opp gender names thats how I make trans in my game.

^ I do the same, except for the names. I'm not good at being creative in my game and putting up obstacles, so I honestly only make tomboy girls and femme guys if I think it fits the sim I'm playing. I've never even considered making a transgendered sim. Moreso tomboy females than femme males though. There's something about a girl who wears boy'ish clothes and is into tinkering. I tend to find them more fun to play than the all-pink type of female sims.

I have two sims that fit the bill, both FtM and both at the end of their child stage at the moment. However, SimPE doesn´t run on my pc and I´m loath to fiddle with external programs anyway, so I will rule that something (health issues?) prevents a surgery in both cases. For this reason I do not include transgender sims on purpose - don´t want to give the sims cravings that I cannot fulfill.

Hermione lives in Desiderata Valley where gender equalitiy exists not only on paper but in the heads of the people. That actually makes it harder for him, because people don´t really understand what his problem is. He´s accepted, he can express female and male characteristics at his leisure, so what the Jumbok is wrong?! Well, a whole lot of things. Breasts, menstruation, nursing - this isn´t him, it is as unnatural and often scary to Hermione as it would be to any other male. At the moment everybody inlucding himself believes Hermione is just creeped out by the onset of puberty, but in time they will learn the truth. (His father always suspected it, but he´s dead and cannot guide Hermione). Fun detail: Because of the the equal rights Hermione will keep his birthname. He´s the only one with this name in the country, so it might even change into a male name.

The other girl/boy lives in Loneley Valley, a long neglected orphanage/BACC. I don´t remember his name, but the moment I spawned him in I thought "what a nice looking boy". I was dumbfounded when I learned that he was biologically female.
The orphans of Lonely Valley are close-knit bunch, but also too down to earth to give their brother´s problem much thought. "Drive to Sim City and be done with it, but not during the harvest!" might sum it up best. Perhaps this is why he won´t got through with it after all, because of lack of time and opportunity.

I haven't had any transgendered sims, but I love this thread and I will be more open to spotting sims who suggest themselves as possibly being trans.

On the side, though, I've been slowly collecting wardrobe pieces and hair (and enabling male use for a lot of makeup that was restricted to female only) for an eventual drag club.

Occasionally I'll have tomboys, but other than that I don't think about it all that much. But if there was an option for a Sim to be trans, I might use it.

I currently have one strait male sim who likes to wear women's clothes because he likes them. I've downloaded special underwear, everyday, and formal outfits for him, but they are all on the male bodyshape, so they don't have breasts. (I can't see him wanting to pa his bra.) When he wears jeans and a shirt, it's a slightly blouse-y shirt, and I pretend he bought the jeans in the women's section. Nobody in town thinks anything of it, including his wife and kids. (Although she sometimes grumbles about how much room his petticoats take up in the closet.)

I will have a sim coming up soon for reasons of Plot who will be post-op MtF. She will have had full surgery because that's what right for her, and because she will have had full surgery before she ever appears on the scene, I plan to make her in CAS as female, although perhaps with a slightly squarer jaw than most of the female templates have. The MtF part will be completely backstory, but an important part.

I agree with Peni -- it's kind of pointless for some activities to be labeled "male" and others to be labeled "female." I love wearing vintage-style dresses, dancing, and knitting. I study martial arts, I have a well-equipped toolbox which I know how to use, and I like using most common power tools. I like romantic comedies and action movies with lots of explosions. I like those things because I like them, not because of my genetic/physical configuration.

I have only had a single transgender sim in my game. M to F. There were some fantastic clothes available and I loved playing him. It was very unique. I'd definitely be into making some drag queens in my game. I've had a few sims, male and female, who just seem to fit the role of a drag queen/king so well. There just seems to be a lack of CC supporting it. (I can't find where I got the stuff for the only trans character I had and I've moved computers since then)

I will say that the game is pretty binary. Like others have said, it's hard to even keep a sim bisexual. I'm afraid that may just be because of the mechanics though. We've done so much more with Sims 2 than I think the creators thought possible.

You are both right in that these labels are silly. But being a transgender person is not about the activities you perform or the things you like. It´s about feeling trapped in the wrong body shape, growing body parts that feel unnatural and falling victim to hormon induced emotions that aren´t yours. It´s like a chronic illness. Some like me can live with it, others require treatment in the form of a full surgery.

Yeah; I don't have to get it to respect it. You know best about yourself.

I did not mean to offend you or anyone else nor to make light of people who are transgender, and I sincerely apologize for not expressing myself properly, thereby causing offense! Feeling trapped for any reason is horrible, chronic illnesses of any type are difficult, and everyone should be able to get the respect, support, and treatment they need, whether that's full surgery, hormone treatments, therapy, medication (for chronic illnesses where that can help), and/or any other appropriate treatment or combination of treatments.

My comment was more directed at the thought process that goes "This man/woman doesn't like [arbitrarily stereotyped as masculine/feminine behaviors] but he/she does like [arbitrarily stereotyped as feminine/masculine behaviors], therefore he/she must be transgender." It seems to be an increasingly common thought process that doesn't really help anybody.

This is why I don't play transgendered sims. My sims can't tell me, I feel trapped in the wrong body. If they could I would fix them properly, with SimPE because I've stood on the outside and watched how hellish that is, why would I make my sims suffer? The idea of making judgements of gender based on what people enjoy doing always makes me think of the FtM boy I knew growing up who loved cooking, sewing, make up and pretty dresses but that didn't mean he was a girl.

I have sims whose behaviour and appearance doesn't fit the masculine/feminine binary but that doesn't make them trans anymore than me liking robots and heavy machinery makes me a man.

Gender dysphoria and transsexualism are two different things. What you're saying is true regarding gender dysphoria, yes. But not transsexualism. Often, transgendered people can't get help, for the very reason that psychologists claim that they're not transgendered, but have gender dysphoria caused by an identity disorder or trauma. At least that's what it's like here.

And basically, personality, interests etc has nothing to do with gender identity or sexual orientation. A guy can love cars and mechanics while having the full gender identity of being a female, be attracted to males and not in any way considering that homosexual, as he is unable to see himself as being a male to begin with. Another guy can love playing with dolls as a kid and grow up to become, what we call 'femme', but still be 100% heterosexual and a complete male gender identity.

I really didn't want to post in this thread, but yeah.

Except that gender dysphoria can be many things, transgendered...ness only being one of them. The transsexual/transgendered thing is due to a language barrier on my part, as they were called transsexual here in the past, but recently transgendered instead, although it's been used to describe the exact same thing.

Gender dysphoria generally covers all issues identifying with ones own gender. Someone who were molested may grow up to experience gender dysphoria later in life, thereby showing the same symptoms as a transgendered person but without actually being transgendered (not saying that someone who suffered sexual abuse can't be transgendered, since time doesn't go backwards that way, but this is just an example of someone who is not). In a case like that, the person would be 100% convinced that they were trapped in the wrong body, but wouldn't have felt that way before being molested. If they recieved intensive therapy, worked out their traumatic experiences and identity crisis, the symptoms of gender dysphoria would gradually subside. That wouldn't happen with a person who was transgendered, seeing as that's just something you... are. Not something you can 'get'. All the therapy in the world wouldn't change anything for someone who was transgendered. Not unless it was brainwashing, that could just as well convince a female with a female gender identity, that she was a male.

So basically, all kinds of gender dysphorias except for transgenderedness are psychological and temporary (unless untreated), whereas transgenderism is more biological. No hard evidence that it's biological from what I've been able to find, but it's definitely not psychological, which is why I get pissed off when sexological clinic in my country, does nothing but try to convince transgendered people that they're not actually transgendered, but just sick and sexually deviant.

These vast differences are the reasons I can't judge gender dysphoria as a whole in one specific way.

Edit: Fixed a milion typos. -_-

I agree with all of that. Is the only thing we disagree on here, whether or not transgenderism and gender dysphoria are two different words for the same thing? Cause the way I see it, transgenderism is gender dysphoria, but gender dysphoria is not transgenderism. The same way that math is logic, but not all logic is math.

Honestly, the only definition of "transgendered" I care about is the one given me by a person who identifies that way.

If two different people who identify that way disagree on what that definition is, well - welcome to language!

In my Sims world, there is no transgender gender. I play under the impression that my Sims are born with the gender that they (and/or the player) would have wanted so there is no need to fiddle around with SimPE or with meshes to change or ever feel that they were born wrong.

Sims may be more feminine or masculine than others (or even androgynous!) and their sexuality varies from sim to sim (with the help of SimBlender sometimes) but ultimately are satisfied with their little binary world.