But visibility only damages when it's mired in harmful ideas, and never is that more apparent than with Persona 4's Naoto Shirogane. It's frustrating because they've made earnest attempts to honestly portray queer and trans identity, providing rare crumbs of visibility in a medium that makes us invisible.
As a queer fan of the series-one who even has Persona 5 as their #2 game of the year-it often feels like Atlus hates its queer audience. Persona 5, while not outwardly transphobic, still features numerous instances of gay panic. Persona 2: Innocent Sin has a character respond to a trans male's appearance by saying “She looks cute.” Persona 3's infamous beach scene featured a trans female predator who's outed by a bit of facial stubble she missed while shaving.
(Be warned: spoilers for Catherine and Persona 4 follow).Ĭatherine: Full Body's hard swerve into transphobia should come as no surprise to anyone who's played the original Catherine or the Persona games from the same team. It's a lazy, regressive device on its own but with Catherine's developer Atlus, it comes with a storied history of degrading their trans and queer characters. This is perhaps the most commonly used transphobic trope in media: the deceptive trans woman, tricking hapless heterosexual men into having sex with them.
