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Hogwarts Legacy continues to generate controversy. Turns out there's a... transwitch in the game, and a mod that gave that person a more femme voice has already been purged from Nexus Mods. Is not passing a virtue or a source of trans pride now? Just a few years ago, I've been reading Tumblr discussions that went "if there was a magic pill that turned you into an afab woman, would you take it?" - "yes duh".
I was watching a streamer play the Japanese dub and the voice is normal there, so the only "tell" that the character is intended to be trans is that they're just kind of masculine and ugly.
Trans characters in general seem rather difficult to just toss in for extra inclusivity points. As you mentioned, the aspiration of most trans women is to be indistinguishable from an actual biological woman, not clearly identifiable as some weird third neither-man-nor-woman thing that disgusts normies. But if you include a trans character that obviously passes, then you need to be really hamfisted with the dialogue to make sure whoever's playing understands that yes, this character is trans and it's still likely they'll miss it. So if you want to inject your political views and make sure they actually get across you need to make it obvious through e.g., voice or appearance.
There is a dark humor here, where apparently even in Harry Potter's world of magic and wonders, trans women still look and sound like men in dresses. I don't know that I'd be happy with this depiction if I was a trans activist.
Would be funny if games just started saying we have x number of trans characters, without any need to identify them, or even think about it ever in the development process. Free controversy/advertising without effort.
The concept of "passing" makes this a really amusing and interesting scenario to me. When I think of "passing," I think of "indistinguishable" - for someone to "pass" would mean that if you pointed a gun at my head and presented me a "passing transwoman/transman" and a "cis woman/man" and told me that if I guessed wrong that they would pull the trigger, then my best option for my survival would be to flip a coin. If there were any edge I could eke out by noticing anything at all about these people to increase my chances of survival by even a fraction of a percent, then that would mean that the person didn't "pass."
Given that, it seems trivial that any game dev could credibly claim that their game has some arbitrary X number of trans people who pass - you just don't notice them as trans, by definition. But then that would easily be countered with the argument that these characters aren't trans in any meaningful way, when there's no actual mention of them being trans in the story. Which could then be countered by the argument that they're actually trying to pass, which includes not giving out any information to others that could give them an edge in determining their trans status.
I'm not going anywhere with this, but this also makes me wonder if the only way we'll get to a world where we get "passing" trans people is by creating time travel and gene editing technologies that allows us to edit the genes of the person pre-birth (pre-conception possibly?) while not changing anything else Butterfly-effect style, in a way to assign their birth sex to match their preferred gender (this happens to be a minor plot point in the anime and visual novel Steins;Gate). After all, even with atom-level rearrangement technology that could make you physically indistinguishable from a cis person of the other sex, if you were known as belonging to one sex as a child, it's possible that someone might be able to tie your current identity to your old one and give them an edge in recognizing you as trans rather than cis, which means you don't "pass."
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