Over the past several months I’ve become grimly obsessed with a YouGov poll from 2022.

What you’re looking at here is a survey that asks Americans to estimate how large different demographic groups are. I.e. - “what percentage of people are _____ ?” What makes me grimly obsessed is how incredibly wrong people were — particularly when it came to trans people.

I find myself gripped by the insanity that Americans think that trans people are twelve (if not twenty) times more common than they actually are. When I dwell on that insanity, I feel this strange question start to swallow me whole: 

Are trans people too visible? 

To be clear, I am a trans woman myself. I’m not blaming trans people for anything — and honestly, what I’m really asking is: Are trans people being made too visible? Are we being discussed, highlighted, televised, covered to a point where it builds obsession? To a point where people across the world, but in the US especially, are hallucinating trans people?

And if we are being made too visible: What is there to do about it? It might seem strange to ask the question on teamliquid.com but the sports world has long been one of the most targeted and spoken-about topics in the trans world. Why wouldn’t this conversation come to esports? And as a trans woman working in esports, I already see it encroaching when any esports tweet I make that breaches 500 likes gets swarmed with inane hate comments from sub 200 follower accounts that I’ve never seen before. 

In truth, I came into this topic overwhelmed. So I decided to speak with someone who lives a life not only as a hyper-visible, hyper-online trans woman but also as a professional engineer, a Pokemon VGC competitor, a Super Smash Bros. Melee competitor and formerly one of the more influential esports organizers in Canada — Victoria “Vicwingly” Ly. 

If you know Victoria from Twitter, you likely know her for one variety of shitpost or another, but before Victoria was any kind of shitposter or cosplayer, she was a tournament organizer (TO). She started organizing tournaments as early as fourteen years old and built up much of Canada’s Smash scene, going all the way back to 2006 — giving a home to legends like Soonsay, Superboomfan and Falcomaster3000. After that, she created the Alberta Esports Association and after that she created a scholarship for queer engineers at her alma mater. 

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Victoria also kicked off one of the most famous Midwest Emo clips in gaming.

We ended up having a two-hour-long conversation (edited and truncated for readability) that felt important to present as a conversation. So you’ll see our conversation in blocks, nestled in between the conversation that I want to have with you.

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Illusions, mirages, and esports

First, to understand how some people are trying to make you see me and people like me, we need to talk about hallucinations; about how trans people are literally imagined.

You can take “hallucination” literally: There have been a few cases this year where cisgender women have been forced to leave women’s bathrooms because someone saw in them a transgender mirage. This “transvestigating” — AKA interrogating someone’s presence for proof of being trans — has spiked to the point where it’s reached conservative political matriarch Barbara Bush. 

You can also take “hallucination” figuratively: There are several issues that are not that “real” but that people hallucinate into great travesties. Many people get tied in knots over trans women going into the ladies room but the flat truth is that assaults between any two kinds of individuals, in any bathroom, are vanishingly rare and studies show trans-inclusive policies have no link to restroom safety whatsoever. Most assaults and sex crimes occur, incredibly depressingly, from someone the victim knows. 

Outside of bathrooms, these figurative hallucinations might loom the largest in the world of sports. And this is why, increasingly, you see these hallucinations in esports — because any playbook, political or commercial, that gets run in sports will get run in esports too.

Many commentators peddle stories about trans women beating cis women in a women’s sports event. Most of the stories they sell are cherry picked not even from collegiate or farm leagues, but from amateur or semi-semi-pro events. But the reality is that, if trans women are some great threat to the big women’s leagues, it’s not bearing out at all in the numbers. 

In ranked collegiate sports, the president of the NCAA estimated there are fewer than 10 trans athletes in the pool of roughly 500,000 total NCAA athletes (before bans and exclusionary policies began rolling in). That’s .002 percent, closer to zero than to one percent.” What’s more, there is even some research emerging saying that trans women well underperform cis men and about line up with cis women in a number of performance tests and physical benchmarks. Perhaps having estrogen as your dominant sex hormone for years does, in fact, change your body!

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This study’s sample size is small, but the trans population is small, and the trans athlete pool is even smaller. The issue is so small that a proper sample size may not exist. 

All that said, you do see a bigger proportion of trans women at the highest echelons of esports. A lot of the terminally online try to play off this as they do sports, wringing hands about how trans women shouldn’t compete in Valorant’s Game Changers league or with CS’s women’s teams or even Smash Sisters, which isn’t even a competitive league! It’s more a social club that runs for-fun crew battles. You also see hordes of hate commenters, even though the trans and cis women athletes themselves have no issue with each other and often bond over their shared issues with men in the scene.

However, despite more trans athletes being in esports, these transphobic pushes largely fail where they have succeeded in sports. Some of that is because esports is a younger field than sports, but I think it’s also because of the ever-mounting politics of visibility. 

In sports, it’s easier to play off of visibility even though there are less trans women in them. A lot of trans women do have larger frames than cis women and even in sports where it does not terribly benefit you to be larger, the contrast alone carries a lot of water. It’s easy to sell these transphobic illusions in sports. 

When you run the illusion in esports, it’s more awkward. You’re telling me that a trans player is  destined to be better than a cis woman in Valorant? Because they both look like roughly the same undersized nerd to me. At the end of the day, most people that get hooked on any kind of social phobia do it because they’re stuck in a desert of meaning and want a mirage to chase — so the strength of the superficial, context-deprived image matters a lot.

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When people do try to push the line in esports that a trans woman is better than a cis woman, I find it’s usually arguing from an assumption that men are better than women at anything that is at all physical or competitive — because the science itself is shaky at best. There’s hardly much research about how men and women compare in esports, or about trans athletes more generally, so there’s almost nothing on trans women in esports. 

Read more: Findings from our own research team on women vs. men in esports.

Most times, though, I find that the idea of cis women being worse at esports comes from cis men not wanting to accept that the main reason there are not more cis women pro gamers is that cis women have been pushed out of gaming since they were children, and the best esports players in the world grabbed a controller as soon as they were cogent. (m0NESY, one of CS’s top prospects, played 20,000 hours — over 2 years worth of time — on CS by the time he was 18.) Trans women face this issue less because most of us did grow up as boys and no one batted an eye when we started obsessing over pixels at five-years-old. 

Should that advantage keep trans women out of women’s leagues? Gender minority leagues in esports are more for women to have real chances to play competitive matches than to mitigate physical disparities. So, yes, trans women should be in women’s leagues, given that they report being ostracised, rejected from rosters, and abused in ways similar to cis women.

If the world were chill and nice, the best trans players would naturally be picked up by tier 2 mixed teams or even by tier 1 squads (the ultimate goal of any woman pro player you talk to). In 1v1 scenes, especially those that are kinder to trans women, this is no hypothetical.

In Melee there are 5-6 trans players in the top 50 and you can find plenty of trans women in the wider scene. But the absolute best trans players — Magi, MOF, Salt, Zamu —  don’t usually attend Smash Sisters or register for Gaylee tournaments. That’s because, like most top players, they need to spend most of the tournament practicing against other top echelon players, and because Melee is largely an accepting scene, they get that practice with little issue. 

As trans players rise to the top, it encourages other trans players and even cis women to compete and make it there too. Salt told Team Liquid in another interview that she was inspired by Magi to push for the top 100 and now Salt is the highest-ranked woman in Smash history. French Melee player i4 became the first cis woman to win a notable tournament in 2024 and she and her cis sister Fecfec are one of the stronger doubles pairing in the world. We can see the biggest successes in Melee history for trans women happening alongside the biggest successes for cis women. There’s an incessant desire to wall off trans women from cis women, to act as though trans women would not lift up cis women and vice versa, but when you are a trans woman you know that this wall is yet another mirage. [Editor's Note: There was a factual error in the first running of this article that Fecfec was trans. This has since been updated.]

How to fight a mirage

Clearly, these transphobia-based hallucinations occur all the time in sport and esport. Establishing that is the easy part. The hard part is figuring out how to fight these mirages. 

It’s also something esports should figure out soon because the hysteria around trans esports athletes is likely going to grow. There are political organizations pumping billions of dollars into propping these mirages up so that people get lost chasing them rather than organizing around any sort of real issue. These political organizations have largely beaten the sports world into an embarrassing submission, so they’re already trying to shop these strategies in esports. 

This is where visibility becomes a strategic question. Following the US election, a lot of liberal talking heads argued that trans people were too visible — especially in the sporting world. The argument goes that it doesn’t matter if .002 percent of NCAA athletes are trans, it matters that this tiny sliver is striking enough to let these organizations run a successful optics play. The response from the trans community, then, should be to button up and quiet down.

The issue is that trans women can’t really go invisible — and also that ceding ground on any issue doesn’t really work anymore.

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No queer person wants to go invisible but when I was nonbinary, when I dated men as a man, it was possible for me to pass as straight. And doing so was convenient if not reassuring sometimes. Trans women often don’t get that option.

The experience also varies wildly based on the pace of your transition. I came out earlier than I planned to because I had A-cup breasts after six months on estrogen (and was also lucky enough to be able to safely come out.) My eyes and face changed rapidly too, to a point where after a year, some friends would tell me I no longer looked like the same person. 

For many trans people, that’s the ideal. But it did make me feel, very suddenly, like old parts of me were so incongruent that they no longer belonged to me at all — like my voice. I really wanted to reshape my voice but it was incredibly difficult to do so without practicing in public. Truthfully, I resent how public I had to be just to learn how to pass as a cis woman, and I even further resent how it often takes me feminizing myself more than I’d like for cis people to respect my pronouns, or simply be nice to me.  

But the nature of transition is public. A part of gender, I truly believe, is innate. (How could I not believe this, when I feel the estrogen pull my soul into my body after every pill, every shot?) Another part of gender is social, is learned behaviors. I need both parts, many trans people do, and to have them both I need to be visible, to be able to study in a real-world environment. 

I think there are a lot of cisgender people (straight and gay) who believe that if trans people simply act normal, look normal whenever they are visible, then the rights issues will advance themselves. Ignoring all the moral issues with enforcing “normal” — this is also a woefully naive reading of modern times. For most people nowadays, politics is a facet of identity and being transphobic for some becomes an identity — ideally for them, a “counter-cringe” one. (That’s why you see transphobes largely target trans people who are in those early, awkward stages — ala Dylan Mulvaney and Bud Light.)

This is a mind-numbingly stupid position for the world to be in, but it’s where we’re at right now. If you’re a cis liberal, fighting effectively from this position does not mean toning down or finding points for concession. Instead, it’s better to attack the mirage directly, and to assert how cringe it is to obsess over a fraction of a fraction of a population; to obsess over trans athletes when this population is so small that you need to be seeking them out to find them; to obsess over random trans woman you don’t even know.

Victoria recommends mostly ignoring the trans-obsessed weirdos — unless there’s a good moment to laugh at them — and putting that energy towards yelling at people in power. 

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Visibility as possibility, joy as power

Despite all this effort to prey on trans people’s visibility, to give us a higher profile than at all warranted — Victoria still sees visibility is still the solution, not the issue. Victoria argues that if transphobic, homophobic forces want to weaponize trans visibility, then the response should be to weaponize trans joy. 

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“Trans joy” might sound woo woo, but there is a real strategy here because so many of the arguments against transition fall apart when faced with joy. For trans people to warrant all this attention, all this phobia, we need to be seen as a great societal detriment — a harm to ourselves and others. Trans women living joyfully runs counter to that narrative — and if the nightmare panopticon of social media has any upside it’s that we can show a joy that the many scapegoated minorities of the past could not.

Make no mistake: Joy is not a stronger emotion than any other; nor is it a magical shield that can upturn laws or prevent harm. There will always be a need to call out the negative, to decry the inane cruelties, or to simply call your local official. Optics is only ever one side of the arena.

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But now, when I ask myself that question: “Are trans people too visible?” I come increasingly to agree with Victoria. No, we’re not — we just have to recenter the image. For too long, it’s been on suicide percentages, on bathroom crimes that don’t even happen, on trans athlete thought experiments — on hallucinated visions and illusory fears. We should recenter on the light that comes into your life the moment you become embodied, on the massive upswing in mental health that happens when trans people get on HRT, on the full lives we finally get to share with our communities, friends, and loved ones. 

More than anything, I’d like to show you that, in all my thirty-some years of life, I’ve never been so alive as the last two I’ve spent transitioning.

Postscript to the trans reader: I want you to see what I couldn’t

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To anyone in transition: As bleak as this world may feel to you, it's one that Victoria and I both wished that we'd had earlier. We both transitioned at 30, and while there is a power in that, I wonder if I wouldn't have transitioned earlier if I lived in this world. I wonder at all of the ways things would be easier for me, but even more important than that — I wonder what it would be like to have lived more of my life with my soul fully in my body; to have been fully alive across all my raucous twenties.   

I wonder so much what it would feel like to have more time. Victoria wonders too. We talk about it. In the end, I think this is what visibility means to us both. To build that world where you get the time we didn't.

To anyone in transition that reads this, I stay visible because I want you to have what I didn’t. I want you to see what I couldn’t.