Players will be able to create transgender characters in Hogwarts Legacy

Entertainment

March 29, 2024

The new Harry Potter game Hogwarts Legacy is set to come out by 2022. The game is published by Warner Bros Interactive Entertainment Inc, and is developed by Avalanche Software.

Pixabay

According to Bloomberg, people “familiar with the game’s development” have revealed that players will be able to customise their character’s “voice, body type and gender placement” in a bid “toward inclusivity”.

Game producers are slowly becoming more and more inclusive by allowing their players to customize characters in a way that doesn’t conform to cisgender binary norms. Many say that Hogwarts Legacy developers were motivated by the controversy surrounding J.K Rowling, the author of the Harry Potter books. Indeed since 2017, the author has made some tweets that were harmful to the trans community. Rowling tweeted in response to a post that used the phrase “people who menstruate”. In her response, she suggested that the writer should have used the term “women” instead. This led to many people criticizing Rowling, saying that her remark failed to take into consideration the non-binary people and trans men who menstruate, and the many women, including cisgender women, who do not.

Rowling’s comments “rattled some people working on the game,” the report alleged. “As a result, some members of the Hogwarts Legacy development team have fought to make the game as inclusive as possible, pushing for the character customisation and even for a transgender character to be added.”

Rowling has also published an essay where she defended her position. Since the release of that essay, many of the stars of the popular Harry Potter film franchise have said they do not agree with Rowling’s view point, amongst the stars was none other than Danial Radcliffe. The star tweeted “To all the people who now feel that their experience of the books has been tarnished or diminished, I am deeply sorry for the pain these comments have caused you”