The release of a highly anticipated book has attracted backlash for a passage that arguably stigmatizes sex with trans and nonbinary people.
Ready Player Two, a sequel to science-fiction author Ernest Cline’s 2011 debut novel Ready Player One, hit bookstores on Tuesday. The original story follows the main character’s search for an Easter egg hidden in a virtual reality game, which is part of a greater quest to reap rewards from the game’s creator. But in the hours following the sequel’s release, astute readers called out a storyline that reeks of ignorance about trans identities.
In one passage from the novel, the protagonist, Wade Watts, spies on another player, L0hengrin, who is also part of the virtual reality world. But while rummaging through private information about L0hengrin, Watts finds out that she’s a transgender person named Skylar Castillo Adkins. The discovery, Watts says, comes as a “surprise.”
“Her school records included a scan of her birth certificate, which revealed another surprise,” Cline writes from the first-person perspective of his hero. “She’d been DMAB — designated male at birth. Discovering this minor detail didn’t send me spiraling into a sexual-identity crisis, the way it probably would have back when I was younger.”
As creepy as the moment already is, given that the character has violated someone else’s privacy, Watts’ reflection continues with musings about the nature of sex with people who aren’t cisgender. He notes his sexual encounters in virtual reality, having been able to take on different types of characters in various scenarios.
“I’d experienced sex with women while being another woman and sex with men as both a woman and a man,” Watts thinks to himself. “I’d done playback of different flavors of straight and gay and nonbinary sex, just out of pure curiosity, and I’d come away with the same realization that most ONI users come away with. Passion was passion and love was love, regardless of who the participants involved were, or what sort of body they were assigned at birth.”
The portion about “nonbinary sex” raised eyebrows on social media among those who noted that the passage betrays an ignorance about trans identities and sexuality.
YouTube and Twitch streamer Jacob Mercy tweeted images of select passages to call attention to how tone deaf they are, and the screenshots were widely shared before Twitter removed some of the images due to a copyright violation. “JESUS CHRIST ERNEST,” Mercy tweeted, to which another Twitter user replied, “Ah, the three kinds of sex: gay, straight and non-binary.”
Others were similarly unimpressed with the depiction.
In an interview with internet culture site The Daily Dot, queer game creator Kate Barrett said the writing falls flat in accurately representing trans people because there’s too much of a singular focus on the inner dialogue of the cishet protagonist, in ways that fetishize trans and non binary people. In addition, Barrett noted, the use of the phrase “designated male at birth” is out of line with the language trans and gender nonconforming people to describe their identity — such as “assigned male at birth” or AMAB.
