A Gamer Tried to Remove Pronouns from ‘Starfield’ and It Turned Their Character Nonbinary

No matter how many light years you travel, you just can’t outrun pronouns.

Starfield, Bethesda Game Studios’ new science fiction role-playing game, launched almost two weeks ago with its fair share of bugs and glitches — but for the internet’s angriest hobbyists, one thing above all else had ruined the game: a drop-down menu in character creation that allows players to choose their own woke pronouns, by which we mean you can choose whether to be referred to as “he,” “she,” or “they.” (Next you’ll be telling us they let you have blue hair — aw, shit!)

Anti-trans gamer bros went on a comments-section rampage, led by one YouTuber who briefly went viral for a shrieking rant about Bethesda “tak[ing] everything we love” and shoving it full of “fucking pronouns.” One person was so Large Mad about the pronoun selection option that they even modified the game’s PC version to remove the option from character creation entirely. There’s just one problem: the mod accidentally made the player’s character gender-neutral.

In a comment on the subreddit r/gaming over the weekend, Reddit user Kryosquid said they had downloaded the mod to try it out before it was removed from the popular modification hosting site Nexus Mods, and it didn’t operate as the creator probably intended: “it doesn’t [sic] actually remove pronouns, it just removed he/him and she/her,” Kryosquid wrote, “meaning the game would then default to They/them pronouns.”

Yes, some nerd really took time out of their life they’ll never get back trying to mod selectable pronouns out of Starfield, and all they managed to do was make their own character a certified they/them.

As Kryoquid alluded, the mod was online for only a brief time before it was removed from Nexus Mods administrators, who told gaming news site 404 Media that while they are “not the police of what people can and cannot mod,” they don’t feel obligated to host material that’s openly anti-LGBTQ+.

“Hosting this mod was not for us and it is certainly within our rights not to host content on our platform,” a representative for the site said in a statement. “It’s not a ‘political statement’ or an ‘alignment to one side or the other in the culture war.’ We stand for diversity and inclusion in our community and the removal of diversity, while appealing to many, does not promote a positive modding community.” The representative went on to say that receiving “hatred, vitriol and threats of violence” from a small minority of users had reinforced that this was the right decision, and “we are not sad to see them go.”

Nexus Mods has previously refused to host other anti-LGBTQ+ content, such as a mod to Sony’s Spider-Man Remastered last year that removed Pride flags from various locations in New York City. “If we think someone is uploading a mod on our site with the intent to deliberately be against inclusivity and/or diversity then we will take action against it,” admins wrote at the time. The site also froze “U.S. political mods” in November 2020 until after the presidential election had concluded.

While reactionary gamers have created a toxic environment for LGBTQ+ fans and stories for years, this kind of rhetoric has escalated wildly over the past decade as games become more diverse and accepting. Sadly for them, trans characters like Guilty Gear’s Bridget and Apex Legends’ Catalyst are only going to get more common, pronouns and all. Now if you’ll excuse us, we have to get back to the really important modding work: restoring the horniness levels of our Baldur’s Gate 3 party.

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