In a Washington Post article titled “Meet the queer, nonbinary, pansexual characters of ‘Borderlands 3’” (basically an ad) before the release of the game, Lor (who is deadnamed in the article as well as in the game, only getting to use his chosen name in the New Tales From the Borderlands game, which no-one has played voluntarily – which actually means that it doesn’t fulfill the definition of a game) is one of the few NPCs mentioned. He is not the first trans character in the franchise, but he is the most prominent one.

Borderlands, in general, has a very good history of inclusivity. There are plenty of queer characters throughout the history of the game, both playable and not, there’s people of different ethnicity, there’s disabled people (there’s a very long side mission chain in BL3, where the last mission is about showing someone in a wheelchair that you don’t have to stop living your life just because you lose the use of your legs), and so forth.

Lor is played by Ciarán Strange, himself a trans man. He also plays Paladin Mike in Wonderlands, which is important, because Tina, who is the Bunkermaster in that game, uses people she knows as NPCs, so she clearly sees Lor as male (although I don’t know how they would have met).

But here’s my problem with the character: I don’t know how much thought they actually put into his transition. The WaPo article says this:

Lorelei [sic] wanted to explore all that goes into the transition to become male but had to put that off because of violence that surrounded her [sic]. Slowly, she [sic] reveals her [sic] story. In a world, Winkler said, where you can “walk into a booth and change your head and things about you and have access to (such) tech on a daily basis, she [sic] realizes transitioning is more than changing your physical body. It’s an emotional journey during which you need your friends around you.”

I’m not trans, but I feel that they have captured something here. Yes, transitioning is a journey. Same as most things in your life. Just a journey most of us don’t experience.

However, I keep wondering about the idea that you can’t start your transition because of the war. Isn’t that the best opportunity? He is a resistance leader, so he has a role commonly seen as male. Wouldn’t this enable him to transition socially, even if he leaves the physical transition for the future?

And maybe he has. Here’s a line by one of his men:

“It’s definitely her, guys! Welcome back, sir!”

Okay… That’s weird. In the span of two sentences, he is referred to as female, but also implied to be male. So, has he started social transitioning or not? Is it just common practice to call your superiors ‘sir’ independent of their gender?

Also, it should be noted that there are plenty of women in this world who occupy military roles. So, perhaps it isn’t an opportunity for a social transition in the same way it would be in our world (assuming the people around you are inclusive, which probably isn’t a given in the largely conservative military culture), since those roles aren’t necessarily seen as masculine. Considering that there seems to be exactly one character in the franchise, who wears feminine clothes, maybe crossing the lines doesn’t even matter that much. Since most people are pansexual anyhow, who even cares about gender or sex at that point?

Lor doesn’t really seem to suffer from gender dysphoria pre-transition. He would have an opportunity to use a power armor to hide his body pre-transition, but instead he uses tight clothes and is not afraid to show cleavage. Some kind of a discussion regarding this would be interesting, but since the franchise has moved to new locations (at least for the time being), it is likely that we want be seeing Lor again.

In the end, this is just my musing on the topic. It’s good to have representation. They could have been a little more brave about it. Now it feels like they kept this aspect of Lor on the downlow to avoid allegations of wokeness. Did anyone worth anything really care? Would it have actually affected their sales? Wouldn’t the added visibility among trans folk and their allies offset any negatives?