Azita, Queen of the Bretons (Or, How Skyrim Helped Me Come Out To Myself)

I popped the game in and turned the power on. As soon as I took a couple of seconds to listen to the completely epic intro music, I selected “New Game” and took it all in. From the flicker of my tiny college-era TV, the magical world of Skyrim, a wintry hellscape far removed from the subtropical swamplands of Central Florida, opened up to me. I was riding in a wagon in chains, convicted of an unexplained crime and sentenced to death. As a group of imperial guards dressed in shiny red armor brought me up to the chopping block, a man named Hadvar asked me for my name. And from that moment on, I was no longer an insecure, dysphoric college grad trying to understand her gender identity from the confines of her room. I was Azita, a beautiful and powerful magician of an ancient Celtic race known as the Bretons.

For those who aren’t tremendous nerds like myself, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim is a fantasy role-playing video game and one of the most popular and influential games of its time. After thousands of years, dragons have returned to the land of Tamriel, and it’s up to you, as a legendary warrior known as the Dragonborn, to stop them from destroying the world as we know it. One of the things the game is most famous for is its incredible amount of character customization. You can play as a human, and even customize your avatar to look just like you (only wearing more armor). Or you can play as a Tolkien-esque elf, a race of anthropomorphic reptiles, or a race of cat people known as the Khajit.

For me, though, I didn’t want to do any of that. When I played the game, I didn’t want to save the world as a Wood Elf or an Argonian. I just wanted to be a normal, human woman.

I think that longing desire, that insatiable thirst that led me to pick “Female” on the gender selection menu the first chance I got, was one of the first things I ever did to cement my identity as a trans woman. I had always played female characters in video games before (even at a young age, I didn’t mind playing Princess Peach in Mario Kart), but never with as much purpose and intent as this one. I made a character who looked just like I did, only, well, a girl. I gave her long, black hair, and a lot of eye makeup. I named her Azita, a Persian woman’s name which I believe refers to having a free spirit. After I had done enough quests, I decked her out with all sorts of jewelry and a tiara – adding 40 points to Destruction magic! – and pretty soon I was playing as a gorgeous, confident woman who just happened to be able to kill dragons with lightning bolts and a broadsword.

Video games have been criticized for a long time as a form of mindless escapism. “It’s just a distraction from the real world!” people say. “How can you learn anything from this?” Well, playing Skyrim helped me learn a lot about myself. I came to realize I really enjoyed being a woman, even if just a virtual one. I could commiserate with the lady in Whiterun, who complained about the sexism of her male counterparts. I could scour dungeons with my companion, a female vampire, and be a pretty kickass female tag team. Hell, I could even get married to a woman! (Even though Tamriel is supposed to be based on medieval Europe, apparently people there are fairly progressive.)

And for me, this wasn’t escaping at all. It was, in its own weird way, a reflection of who I really was. Nobody in Skyrim ever questioned my gender identity. Nobody said that I “used to be a guy” or tried to insinuate that I was less of a girl than all the other female characters. All that mattered was that I was there, I was doing quests, and I was killing dragons.

It may say a lot about me that I felt more honest playing a fictional character in a virtual world than being myself in the real world. But I believe that we, as human beings, tell stories because they reflect parts of ourselves that we wouldn’t be able to say otherwise. The ancient Greeks had myths about Tiresias, the blind soothsayer who had lived life as both a man and a woman. Maybe the people who came up with those stories were trying to express some emotions about gender that they couldn’t say outright in an extremely patriarchal society. People around the world and across millennia have used stories to try to understand what it means to be a man, or a woman, and to find truths that they could not find any other way.

When I played Skyrim as Azita, Queen of the Bretons, I told my own story. And despite all the dragons and elves and magic involved, there was a lot of truth to it.