Deadly Premonition 2 Developer Apologizes For Transphobic Content, Promises To Patch It Out

Hidetaka “SWERY” Suehiro, director of the recently released Deadly Premonition 2, took to twitter yesterday to apologize over the game’s handling of a transgender character.

Good morning everyone.
I need to tell you about my apologies about DP2.
So I wrote message by myself with Google-sensei.
Please forgive my poor english skills.

SWERY pic.twitter.com/x5fR114HnF

— Hidetaka SWERY Skywalker (@Swery65) July 13, 2020

Written via Google Translate, SWERY goes on to say that he will be rewriting the scenes, in which the player character repeatedly misgenders a trans character, “ASAP”.

Laura Kate Dale (@LauraKBuzz on twitter), a prominent video game critic, author and trans woman, adds that while the apology is nice, the game director has a habit of poorly representing trans characters in videogames.

He's a cis male game dev who has put trans women in three of his games.

In two of those the trans woman is a sister infatuated ritual killer of women, and the penultimate villain.

He's had chances to learn what not to do.

— Laura Kate Dale (@LaurakBuzz) July 14, 2020

The transgender community receives a lot of abuse in the gaming community, with the common trope of the mere existence of a trans character being deemed “political virtue-signalling”.

Actively misgendering someone may be reduced to a meme in some circles, but it is a macrocosm of the aggression trans people face- to be told they don’t exist- and absolutely deserves to be called out.