The obvious solution is introducing a gender verification system next to the age verification system (obviously also has to be implemented by a private for-profit company with minimal oversight because anything else would be socialist and evil).

Then, kids could either upload their government id or a picture of themselves naked. Those pictures have to be kept around indefinitely because security and analytics and feeding them into an ai model.

Then (because genitals always 100% identity someone's real sex and everybody has a real binary sex) the kid can only select the appropriate character! Simple as that!

(This is probably the worst thing I have ever written. But it doesn't feel implausible that someone would actually suggest this, which I think is testament to how bad the situation is.)

playing a pokémon game in the world where this parent got what they want:

"are you a boy? or are you a girl? please upload a picture of your birth certificate"

I love how the paragraph opened with how anyone can upload their own skins, and use simple photo editing and have unlimited creative freedom. But then in the back half of the second paragraph they reveal that their kid has been using the default female character the whole time. So none of that customization stuff anyway, the game said "boy or girl" on boot, they picked "girl", and that's that.

I hope this doesn't come across as too semantic, but I dunno, I bet you can understand them. They're just stupid! They will do anything to avoid blaming themselves, accepting they were wrong, or simply accepting their daughter. It's gotta be that got dang vidya game's fault! Everyone knows that games have been indoctrinating children into devil worship since at least as far back as the invention of D&D!

Understanding them is easy. It's empathizing with them that is damn near impossible

I am mostly here dying over “more fitting masculine character” when talking about a fucking series of 5 rectangular prisms.

No, no, you don’t understand. Girls play girls games, boys play boys games. /s

I've been playing Tomb Raider since I was 7. First TR2, then TR3, and TR4. Lara Croft led me by the hand through middle school. It took years of watching her wiggle her butt in cramped spaces for the spell to take effect. By the time I entered high school, the vicious kuffars at Core Design had a hold of me : I was certain I was a murderous bourgeois british girl loosely based on Indiana Jones. I even asked my mom to make me a costume, complete with foam guns.

Then I started playing Crash Bandicoot ....

Because if playing a female character confuses young boys' genderes, surely playing a mal characte will certainly not confuse young girls in their gender identities.

You see, that's the neat part: this would never even occur to them. The thought that there could potentially be such a thing as trans men doesn't even occur to these people. And when it does, they think of them as poor misguided victims, because of course women would jealously desire to become men, the superior sex. Everybody wants to be a man, obviously.

One of the reasons that they're so obsessed with trans women is that the very concept that someone would actually prefer to be a woman shakes the foundations of their patriarchal view of the world and its rigid gender binary.

these people will confess their child's immeasurable stupidity before accepting maybe you can't just kinda turn trans from looking at and playing as girls. well, maybe if he stopped looking at vaugely feminine coded video game skins and started looking at men like a real cis straight man he would have turned out just fine!

"oh no! my child saw two men kiss for one (1) second! will he have his entire sense of human society and social interaction annihilated irrecoverably for the rest of his life and turn gay caused by his inherited inability to process incoming information, leading to an immediate internalization of anything?"

It's PacMAN, not PacWOMAN!

It's been a long time since I played it but isn't minecraft first person? It's only other players who would see you skin.

It's true. The gender-neutral Jeb skin has cracked many an egg

In 2016, my daughter started started to ask for the popular mobile phone game known as “Pokemon Go.” Later that year, my third husband and I decided to get said game for him, and he loved it. He constantly showed us his latest pocket monster and his team.

Little did we know, this seemingly innocent game was a gateway drug to ballots, MAGA hats, Awoos, and a pedophile con artist.

I'm convinced that a fully automated item sorting system that handles every item in vanilla Minecraft is basically impossible. Even the best ones require a ton of prep work, and you're still fucked if you get a block variant that you didn't already have in the system. Until we can properly filter by general categories rather than matching, I don't see how most of them aren't as much trouble as they're worth.

admits they do not supervise the child playing the video game

And as so often with your proposed helicopter parenting, the child is better off for it.

The daughter and her wife sound awesome and I hope they're doing okay

warning: transphobia

Surprisingly no homophobia though

damn these chuds really want to control gender options in video games. absolutely deranged

I, of course, was not invited. Wonder why?

Heaven forbid I try to save my son from his horrible confusion. Ah.

No, it was the Minecraft that turned my child gay, I can't be wrong!

In a way I can sympathize with the parent here. He doesnt believe in "gender ideology", his shit ass media has been hammering at his poor conservative brain that it's wrong. So now he's looking for any excuse, any reason that would conform ro his worldview. Such as blaming a videogame. So much that he's lost his daughter entirely. The icing on the cake is the resentful bit at the end where he's not even invited to the wedding. Like its the kids fault.

Dumb bastard is so close to getting it, I almost think this is satire.

I've used a real life skin for many years that did not align with my gender. Thankfully that was fixable, though why they had to paywall it i still dont get.

What a fucking cess pool that post comes from.

also luanti > minecraft

for those who don't know it: luanti is a complete FOSS (open source) re-implementation of minecraft. i actually think it's better, not just because it's free but also because of it's built-in modding system. mods are a feature, not a work-around around the closed nature of the project. fuck microsoft.

https://www.luanti.org/en/

https://content.luanti.org/

https://content.luanti.org/packages/Wuzzy/mineclone2/