There's No Violence Towards Women Here

The portrayal of violence towards women in video games has been a point of discussion during the 80s and 90s when it came to localizing games for US audience. For the most part it wasn't allowed due to how society in the US saw the portrayal of violence against women. So what happens to the games in Japan that are already made with female presenting characters when they have to be localized to the US? They usually some sort of workaround. Aside from cutting out the content entirely, which is what some developers do, there was one other way that was a bit lazy and honestly just a quick fix to get around those rule and that was to just say that there were transgender with two large examples being Birdo from Super Mario Bros 2 and Poison from Final Fight.

Captured on Nintendo Switch

Birdo is kind of a weird case when it comes to this topic. She's been stated to be transgender multiple time by multiple different sources but at the same time there are many sources that say otherwise. It all started with a starting manual of the game as there wasn't actually much text in the game relating to anything story related and with the description of Birdo it states that "he thinks he is a woman and shoots eggs from his mouth". Which would make someone think that Birdo isn't trans but that can be summed up to a translation error as there were definitely a lot of those during the early days of gaming. Because of this, no one really knows much about Birdo's gender, not even Nintendo has given a fairly straight answer.

Artwork from Street Fighter X Tekken

During the localization of the Super Nintendo port of Final Fight there was a recurring character named Poison who would show up to challenge you to a fight. Now given as her character was very female presenting, this lit up a bunch of red flags during Nintendo's localization of the game. When asked about this, Capcom's teams in Japan literally said "oh, you mean the transvestite"? Which was a quick and easy fix to that problem of getting the rule against violence on women. It was lazy and somewhat terrible, being trans myself I feel this very much, and it shows that the 90s didn't really view trans women as women due to that being the workaround to that rule. Poison was omitted from the first game but later showed up in later games keeping her transgender status in every game released since then even during her move to Street Fighter.