And there’s a version of this where I apologise for that upfront. Where I frame it as a confession — I know, I know, I should have been looking for myself in female characters, but the options were limited and I did what I could — and then spend the rest of the post reassuring you that I’ve since found better representation and everything is a-okay👍now.
But I’m not going to write that essay. Because I don’t think it’s true, and I think the discomfort hiding inside that apology is actually the most interesting thing here.
This isn’t a complaint or a badge of honour. It’s just a fact about the particular shape I came in. My body was stocky and strong from early on — built for work, for contact, for physical effort. I competed in martial arts. I trained horses. I worked in logistics for years, a world that genuinely did not know what to do with women and handled this mostly by pretending we weren’t there or weren’t serious.
When I was in dance school, they made me play the man in the pas de deuxs. We were all girls. I was the strong one. So I was assigned the masculine role — the one who lifts, who supports, who holds the structure together while someone else gets to be held.
I didn’t object. It felt accurate, somehow, even though I couldn’t have told you why.
What I can tell you now is that I spent a significant portion of my early life being recruited into masculine roles by the world around me based on what my body could actually do — while the culture simultaneously insisted that what I was supposed to want was to be decorative. To be the one lifted, not the one doing the lifting. To be looked at rather than load-bearing.
And I was very bad at that. Not morally bad. Just — constitutionally unsuited to it. Hyper-femininity felt like a costume made for someone else’s measurements.
Into that gap came video games.
I was a girl gamer before that phrase existed as a marketing category, back when it mostly just meant you were strange. The games I loved were male-centric in the way that most things were male-centric then — the protagonist was a man, the world was built around his perspective, the story moved through his body.
And I inhabited those characters completely. Without friction. Without the low-level dissonance I felt trying to perform the femininity the real world kept requesting.
I’ve thought about this a lot since, and I want to be precise about what I mean. It wasn’t so much that I wanted to be a man as much as it was about relief. The gendered performance pressure was off. I could just be the character. Competent, physical, agentic, moving through the world with the assumption that my body was for doing things rather than for being looked at (because yes, I did play Tomb Raider too, but you can’t play that game without being visually subjected to boobs and ass, meaning that the gender performance was always present).
There’s an uncomfortable admission buried in here and I’m going to say it directly rather than dance around it: inhabiting those male protagonists helped shape me. The way I move through the world, the way I think about competence and physicality and what a body is for — some of that came from spending formative years inside characters whose bodies were assumed to be functional rather than decorative.
And I’m genuinely not sure that was a bad thing. Especially not, for a gender non-conforming kid who found herself falling somewhere in between the gender binary.
But that’s not what I’m supposed to say.
I’m supposed to pivot to: but representation matters, and I wish I’d had better options. And I do wish that. That part is true.
But I want to sit with the other part a little longer, because I think flattening it into a simple representation argument loses something real.
I’m non-binary and pansexual. I didn’t have that language when I was a kid playing those games. I had a body that kept getting assigned to masculine roles, a constitutional inability to make hyper-femininity feel like anything other than a performance, and a strong instinct that the story being told about what women were for didn’t quite apply to me — but no framework for why.
What I had instead was the capacity to inhabit characters not designed for me.
And I think — I’m still working this out, genuinely — that this wasn’t just making do with limited options. I think it was something my gender was doing before I had language for what my gender was. The permeability wasn’t a failure to assert a female identity. It was evidence that what the binary the culture was offering me — perform femininity correctly, or you’re doing something wrong — was simply not the map of the territory I was actually living in.
The male protagonist wasn’t the right fit either. But he was closer to the shape of how I actually moved through the world than most of the female characters I was being offered — precisely because the male characters were afforded agency where female characters were assigned performativity even if it came with agency.
And that told me something. Even if it took years to understand what.
What it told me, eventually, is that fiction wasn’t giving me the character I needed. Not the female characters performing decorative strength, and not the male characters whose functionality came with a whole set of other assumptions I didn’t share.
The character I needed was Sasha Barrett.
I didn’t write her as a political act. I wrote her because I’d spent years inhabiting characters that were almost right and never quite right, and I finally had enough craft and enough self-knowledge to write the one that actually fit. A female soldier whose competence is structural rather than decorative. Whose body is for doing things. Whose strength isn’t pointed at a man’s recognition of her.
She isn’t exceptional in the way the genre means exceptional — singular, above other women, validated by the most powerful man in the room. She’s exceptional the way Robin Hobb’s women are exceptional — she’s doing what she can with what she has, inside a system that doesn’t always accommodate her, and her competence has actual weight and consequence.
I needed to find that character for forty years before I could write her.
If you grew up inhabiting male protagonists because the female characters on offer weren’t built for what you actually were — I’m not here to tell you that was internalised patriarchy. I’m here to tell you it might have been your gender talking before you had the language to hear it.
That’s not the same as saying it was fine, or that better representation wouldn’t have mattered, or that the absence of characters built for you cost you nothing.
It cost something.
The years of trying on the wrong costume cost something. The dance school making me the man in the pas de deux because I was strong — that was accurate to something true about me, and also a way of the world not quite having a category for what I was. Both things are true and the cost was real.
And what you learned in those spaces that weren’t built for you — that was real too.
You were never doing it wrong. You were just reading the only maps that existed, and noticing where they didn’t match the territory.
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One snake bite. One moment of clarity she really didn’t ask for. Sasha Barrett has survived two years at the Praetorian Academy — turns out her captain was always going to be the most dangerous thing in the field.
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