I've got a bit of a weird situation going on here, and I want to hear what the fellow transes and the fellow RPG players have to say about it. So I'm crossposting it to both communities.
So I started a new Beam Saber campaign, and one of My players came up with the idea of playing as "Egg James Bond". A womanising super spy who still thinks she's a cis guy, and is externalising all her gender dysphoria into being a terrible person to those around her. It sounded like a fun story to tell, especially the moment where she comes to accept herself and transes her gender. So we've played three sessions so far, and Egg James Bond has been exactly the kind of misogynistic A-hole we were promised.
Except, a complication: The person playing as Egg James Bond is the host of a plural system, and Egg James Bond accidentally becomes her headmate. Her brain adapts to playing as this fictional character, and suddenly he's another person inside her head. Believe it or not, this is a pretty common experience for plural roleplayers.
One of the other players is really bothered by Egg James Bond out of game, because Egg James Bond is a complete A-hole. She's mean, petty, doesn't respect women, etc. Personally, I'm not bothered by this behaviour, because we all discussed the character at session 0 and agreed to make it part of our game. And for Me, the behaviour is staying inside the game. But this other player is deliberately antagonising Egg James Bond out-of-character, receiving exactly the kind of replies I'd expect, and seems bothered by them.
So this other player goes to Egg James Bond and their player/host between sessions, and forcibly cracks her egg. Confronts her and makes her realise that she's a woman inside. Guides her through choosing a name for herself. And this other player seems really proud of Themself, and says they've "fixed" ~~Egg~~ Trans James Bond. And that we can still play through the egg cracking moment in the game, Egg James Bond is still an egg in the game.
But I'm unhappy. I feel like our story has been spoiled. What's the point of playing the story if we already know the ending? So I want Trans James Bond's host to make a new character to play in the game. I don't want to put up with the eggy bigoted version of the character to get to a story moment that's already happened out of game. I feel like the character's story in the game I'm running has been ruined. I wanted to play to find out. But now we've found out, and most of us didn't get to play. And I'm bitter that we put up with the misogyny and pouting without getting the payoff. I was fine with it when it was in service to a story we all wanted to tell, but I don't want to tell that story now that it's already been told.
Well, most of the players at the table have had that moment happen before, where a roleplaying character becomes a headmate. I'll tell you My story.
I was playing a space adventure RPG, and My character was Heidi Shipwright, badass space marine with a shapeshifting gun. It was actually an RPG I invented, and Heidi was the first character ever created in the new system, so I put in an effort to create a more familiar character archetype than I normally do. Heidi is tough as nails and spits in the face of danger.
So after a few missions we're hanging out in the cantina, and I should mention, this is a TTMMORPG, so there's a lot of players. The Cantina is a place anyone can drop in for a scene of roleplay and maybe agree to party up. So this purple haired lady in a hoverchair floats in, played by a friend of Mine.
And up until this point, Heidi has been a stone cold badass sergeant type. Imagine combining Sergeant Johnson, TF2 Heavy, and that lady from Wreck it Ralph. But Heidi sees this pretty lady, and in My head, her facade of bravado just melts. Turns out she gay! I didn't plan that, but she's gay, and she wants to ask the pretty lady out on a date, which she's very nervous about.
And that's how I realised that I'm plural. Because I was playing a roleplaying game, and Heidi wanted to do something in the game that was absolutely not what I expected to roleplay her doing.
Autojects like Heidi Shipwright and Trans James Bond are natives of the imagination. Their foundational memories happen inside of fiction. They're from other worlds, worlds that only exist in the minds of these few people. Those fictional worlds tend to be important to them, because they're home. Their default state is being roleplayed by their hosts.