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Imagine you're out and about in the city, suddenly you hear a noise, you turn to see a truck heading right for you. Maybe you were too distracted, maybe the driver is drunk, either way you never had a chance.
Next thing you know, you wake up in a hospital, and the year is 2122. Turns out someone close to you signed you up to one of those cryonics experiments, where they unfreeze you when the state of medicine is advanced enough that they can help you. You grieve to loss of everyone you knew and loved, and given no other options, you move on with your life. You've made some friends, and one day as you're all chilling out, you find yourself in the middle of a discussion, reminiscent of the ones that happen on The Motte every once in a while: progressives always win... or do they? You hear your friends exchanging the usual arguments about whether or not eugenics was a progressive idea, when you realize you haven't really seen anything about trans issues, since you got revived. You bring it up, but no one knows what you're talking about. You check the current history books, and there's something about gay marriage, but nothing really about trans issues. You check Wikipedia, there's more details there, and while to coverage is not unsympathetic to the 21st century trans narrative, it's oddly terse. Your friends go "huh, the more you know..." and move on with the conversation, but you feel unsatisfied with being unable to show just how big the issue used to be.
There's a decent archive of the early 21st century. You can access articles in the NYT, the Atlantic, Washington Post, Vox, etc, and you can retrieve any academic paper from our current era. What would you try to use, to show how important the issue was in 2022?
My first suspicion is that in a world with cryonics, this means body modification is sufficiently good that people can transition fully and convincingly without too much trouble. I suspect that in such a world the 2022 discussion is going to sound weird and anachronistic. I'd probably give up on trying to convince anyone that it was an important issue, since this would suggest that it was a publicly salient issue for only long enough to be a footnote before becoming technologically and culturally resolved to whatever the 2122 status quo is.
I've actually got a game idea that, for complicated reasons, plays really well with homosexual/bisexual relationships, plays really badly with 2020s trans sensibilities, but is completely compatible with super scifi medical technology.
So I'm planning to just not have "trans people" as such, and if anyone asks, I'll say "oh yeah, medical science is really good, if you want to change your body you just go to the doctor. Takes like an hour of filling out paperwork, then you show up for a shot every week for a few months. Totally normal, nobody cares."
I know some people are going to get bent out of shape anyway, but, hey, fuck 'em.
If you casually established that some character(s) are trans in that way via some minor background detail, like an item description or document hidden in a drawer, people on the left would be pretty ecstatic. Celeste got a ton of positive press coverage and cheering because the main character is established to be trans by some very minor background details in one room in a DLC. (Of course, by the same token, this will piss off some people on the right...)
In this case it wouldn't really work; the general game loop is that you're trapped in a haunted mansion with a few other people, and you're supposed to figure out who the bad people are. Everything can be a clue, so for example, if you find yourself in a mansion with a lot of wooden stakes and mirrors and one female character and the rest male then this might be the Vampire Queen's Harem event. (Or it might not! Could be werewolves; did you notice the silver swords?)
But this means that anything that I call attention to has to potentially be a clue. And it's hard to come up with grade-B-horror plots that center around trans people.
Ah, interesting premise!
I can think of a few horror plots that "this person's family photos show a child that's the opposite gender instead of them" could be a clue for, off the top of my head. And at least a couple for "this person has a mysterious drug that they inject/take regularly" (which has other mundane explanations, of course).
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