I spawned on a moon base in Arma 3. My role was a rifleman, and I held some extra ammo for the rest of my squad. I put on my armor, which had “PRESS” written in white across the chest piece. Outside the base’s walls was the surface of a moon, which had a thin atmosphere and low gravity. I wasn’t going to be able to hear gunshots or footsteps while outside.
After being slowed down by technical issues, we were briefed on the mission. Stellarynn, my squad leader and the founder of the 1st Selkie Platoon, asked everyone to open their maps, and we took a look at our objectives. We were to advance on a base occupied by pirates and find a server room. Once there, we would find a way to connect servers to a huge railgun to target the orbiting pirates’ ship. We’d then get to the railgun, bait the pirates into attacking us, turn it on, and blow up their ship.
“We will convert haters to craters,” Stella said.
We formed up and got ready to move out.
I’ve always loved military simulation video games. There’s something uniquely special about strategizing, navigating the realistic mechanics, and working as a team, all with your heart pumping because one well-placed enemy bullet could knock you out of the game and ruin your plans.
Arma 3 might be the best game to seek that thrill, but it comes with challenges too. Milsim games can be overwhelmingly masculine. When I play public servers in the modern combat milsim Squad, I have to grit my teeth and bear racial and anti-LGBTQ+ slurs. While I feel discomfort and annoyance in these games as a cis, white bisexual man, other players have to act or speak certain ways, or not speak at all, to avoid harassment or worse.
So upon receiving an invite from Stella to play with the 1st Selkie Platoon, her trans women-only unit, I was excited to not only meet them, but to learn how they navigated a game dominated by cisgender men.
Stella told me that she doesn’t play Squad and that, when she plays public servers in milsims, she stays quiet.
“I avoid using microphones in [other milsim games],” she said. “I’ve got friends who have played Squad and do use the microphone and all that, and some of them have absolutely had various forms of bigotry leveled their way.”
The milsim community – and gaming in general – struggles with something Stella calls “assumed maleness.” It’s the idea that another player is a cis male by default until that player asserts otherwise. The key is “asserts” – other players won’t always click your profile and see your pronouns, she said.
“Even when I’ve got my profile picture that is a picture of my face with long hair, bangs, and makeup on, I will still get ‘he/him’s in a conversation unless pronouns are in my username,” Stella said.
For the 1st Selkie Platoon, that idea is “flipped,” she said; everybody in the Discord server is assumed to be a woman by default. This helps trans women who might not feel comfortable talking because they have a deep voice feel safer doing so.
“There’s a lot of girls who basically have said [that] they’ve never really spoken in any kind of voice channels before because they don’t feel comfortable anywhere else,” Stella said. “But this space was an exception.”
"Everybody in this server is like, 'I deserve respect'"
Before the Selkies, Stella was in another unit where it was hers, she said, “in all but name,” run by someone else who was more of a “figurehead” and was “being rude to some of the people” and driving them away.
So Stella decided to make her own unit, which came together last January. The Selkies use a more casual structure than some other units. Before a mission, players choose roles in different squads. Squad leaders are determined from a de facto list of people who like to lead, but others are encouraged to step outside of their comfort zone.
“Because we aren’t very strict, we tend to encourage people to try new things,” she said. “Some days, somebody’s had a long day at work [and] doesn’t want to [lead], so we’ll kind of swap the team structure a little bit.”
Tuesdays are when the group plays their operations, which bring in the most players. Operations are similar to one-shots in tabletop roleplaying games: usually scripted missions developed by a player, with someone — usually the mission maker — as the “game master” called Zeus. Some units have multiple mission makers, but the Selkies have just Stella, who makes the mission, takes command, and acts as Zeus.
Though Stella makes the missions, other members have contributed through modding. The 1st Selkie Platoon has an overarching story in an alternate timeline diverging at the end of Halo 3, so those additional mods help enhance the experience.
“We’ve got custom lore, and we’re fighting against enemies that are like our own custom version of these groups where it’s all kind of coming together to tell that story,” Stella said. “People are matching the amount of effort that I’m putting in, which is awesome to see.”
There isn’t a vetting process to join the Selkies, but Stella said she and two other moderators conduct a “vibe check” when they speak to someone who’s interested. Usually, Stella finds interested players on sites like Tumblr and talks to them for a little bit before extending an invite. That’s enough to keep any bad actors from getting in so far, she said.
And if they do get in, they’re joining a server “full of very outspoken trans women,” she said.
“Everybody in this server is like, ‘I deserve respect and I will fight for respect, and if I’m not respected, I will end communication with people,’” Stella said. “Everybody in that server deserves to take up as much space as somebody who is not a trans woman. That is just a fact of life. We deserve the same respect as any other person, and if somebody’s going to disagree with that, they’re going to find that they’re disagreed with very often.”
The Selkies provide more than just Arma 3 operations. They have roles in their Discord for other games, and Friday nights are a non-Arma game night. Stella’s vision is for the 1st Selkie Platoon to be a casual space like any other.
That the space is casual is important to her, because queer spaces can sometimes open “a floodgate” of repressed sexuality that can finally be expressed, Stella said. The Discord keeps NSFW jokes and comments to “an absolute minimum within reason” to keep everyone comfortable.
“There are people who are not necessarily comfortable with that, and we don’t want anybody feeling like she can’t speak up because the conversation will get derailed into people being horny again,” she said. “It means that people can feel comfortable just forming friendships and there’s no pressure.”
Those rules have worked “wonderfully,” she said. Conversations are kept civil — even in the Discord’s politics channel.
The unit is growing, too. When I spoke first to Stella in July, she said about 15 people come to their big operations. Now, the number is closer to 20-25, and the Discord just hit 70 members.
Stella feels like with every mission, she is “perpetually underestimating” how many people will show. But seeing the growth, she said, is “fantastic.”
“I keep low-balling myself,” she said. “Then everybody’s standing in front of me, and [I’m] like, ‘Wow.’”
Getting briefed
To accept Stella’s invitation to join the operation, I had to set up a slew of mods to join the server, ranging from one called ACE, which makes the game even more realistic through wound management and absurdly accurate ballistics. To communicate with my squad, I installed TaskForce Radio, a mod that accurately replicates radios and adds higher-quality proximity chat with the help of TeamSpeak (yes, it’s still around!). The Selkies don’t play the default near-future modern military gear; they run milsims in the world of Halo using an overhaul called Operation Trebuchet. Players cannot change their character’s gender to female in the game, so some use a mod called Task Force TimberWolf Female Characters for female heads.
I wasn’t the only one newcomer to this op. Joining me was a player who goes by Myra, a new member of the Selkies who was attending eir first op.
The 24-year-old was first introduced to Halo 2 by eir “nerdy parents” when e was 5, Myra told me. Myra bought Arma 2 after watching the YouTube channel FRANKIEonPC play it nearly 13 years ago. But Myra only played solo and casual multiplayer, and e didn’t start to explore unit-based multiplayer options until Arma 3 in 2019.
“Arma has permanently earned a soft spot in my heart,” Myra said.
Myra played online with cis men before coming out, but throughout this time was testing eir gender by dressing as more female presenting. It was a feeling Myra had felt since middle school, but e didn’t come out until last year.
“It was definitely hard to want to come out,” Myra said. “I was comfortable with the mediocrity of not having things change, though the change would be really good for me.”
In another squad was Aurelia. Aurelia first got interested in military roleplaying through a Mass Effect RP server in Garry’s Mod. She came out in 2018, and made her way to Arma around 7 years ago, where she continued her roleplaying interest in the 81st Arachnids, a Halo unit. That unit started as a bunch of friends, but it began to expand and needed someone to help manage the community. That’s where Aurelia came in – and where she was accepted as a woman by a community for the first time.
“[They gave] me a place to be a part of the community — to be such a ‘pillar,’ as they have said to me,” she said.
The 81st Arachnids was retired not long after Aurelia joined. But Aurelia, along with her friends Red and Blue, created a new unit called the 137th Wolf Pack Battalion. Roleplay became even heavier, with operations weaving in storylines from different characters that players inhabited. While the 81st Arachnids was accepting, 137th Wolf Pack Battalion was made with the intent to be queer-friendly.
The 81st Arachnids helped Aurelia feel safe and comfortable, even though the outside world wasn’t as accepting.
“ I was kind of stuck in college and [had] parents that were not even remotely supportive,” she said. “I had a really hard time in my IRL life coming out [and] socially transitioning.”
Joining the op was a woman who wasn’t a regular member of the Selkies, May. The 20-year-old is in her own group made up of trans women called Purple Team, one of the very few units who not only play as Spartans from Halo, but to roleplay as them — like a specialized acting troupe. Other Halo units ask a Spartan unit like Purple Team to join their ops to provide an authentic Spartan experience to members of a unit.
Though she now is embedded within the Operation Trebuchet community, May joined her first Halo unit in 2020 when she was 16 years old. She began to experiment with her gender identity six months later, and hopped from unit to unit. Arma 3 provided May with the opportunity to use her strengths in organization. She refers to herself as a “paper jockey” — she likes writing documentation like new player handbooks and training manuals.
“It’s one of the few games I feel like I can play endlessly and not get tired,” May said. “[Arma 3] is by far what I put the most amount of time and effort into, and enjoy the most doing.”
"You can kind of tell this isn’t quite a safe space"
Six months after May joined her first unit, she wore eyeliner in her Discord profile picture and changed her pronouns to they/them. The change caught the attention of one of the members. May recalled that member, a regular, saying that she “used too much” eyeliner and was getting “really aggressive.”
“Pretty much any time I spoke, he would tell me to get the fuck out,” she said.
The member’s harassment made May feel some doubt about her gender identity, she said. She felt like she couldn’t leave the unit easily because it was the first one she joined, but a couple months later, she finally left.
After she left, an adult member of the unit reached out to her. May said the member encouraged her transition, but that after she turned 17, he joined her new unit, groomed her into a relationship, and later sexually assaulted her when they met in person. A week after the assault, May said the member sent her a message implying that he wanted to hurt her.
May reported the incident to her unit’s leadership. She said leadership banned the player and promised to work on blacklisting him from the particular game’s community, but that, according to a friend of May’s, the unit did not communicate with other units about the danger the player posed.
“I left [the unit] ‘cause that is just no longer a safe place for me to be in if they’re lying to my face about that,” May said.
Aurelia described how putting her pronouns in her Discord bio made players treat her differently. When joining a unit, she does “a lot of sleuthing” to tell if a unit is a safe space for her or not.
“Joining [a] unit, you get to look through some of the things that have been said in the unit, and you can kind of tell this isn’t quite a safe space,” Aurelia said.
Aurelia had joined another Halo unit where she said she met some “really awesome people,” but ran into some “really bad eggs” as well. One player in particular, she says, was “just given a pass to be a bad person.”
“They made some very inappropriate comments towards me on my first day joining the unit,” Aurelia recalled. “When that happened to me, and I told people about it, they just basically shrugged and said, ‘Oh well, that’s Person, that’s what they do.’”
“I made a big fuss about it for like a month,” Aurelia said. “It was one of the first, like, negative experiences that I really took a stand for instead of just leaving, and I’m so glad that I did because I got to meet a whole lot of really good people. I really got to help improve that community in a way, which is awesome. But, you know, I got to learn a whole lot about what it means to just let somebody do what they want in that way, and [it] certainly made me feel a little uncomfortable.”
But Aurelia also understood some of the dynamics at play of why such “bad eggs” had trouble being removed from a community — they’re people’s friends. It’s hard to call out a friend when they fuck up, Aurelia said.
“I can see across the fence, and it’s hard to want to look at your friend and say, ‘Hey, that was really fucked up,’” Aurelia said. “A lot of people don’t do that. They won’t call their friends out on that kind of shit.”
When harassment is spewed on Discord, May said trans women will sometimes be the only members to speak up. But members of a unit can get “unspoken privileges" if they’ve been around long enough as part of a “loyalty system that [leadership] will consider.”
“In almost all of my experience with Arma, you will not be heard if you are a trans woman,” she said.
Masculinity in gaming
What some members of the 1st Selkie Platoon experienced in Arma 3 is indicative of a wider masculine culture in gaming. Megan Condis, a professor at Texas Tech University who studies intersections of technology and gender, said that she’s seeing a comeback in one of the ways gamers show they are in the “in-group,” through the use of slurs in multiplayer games.
“Two years ago, I would’ve said that it is no longer considered necessarily a marker of gamer identity or a way that you demonstrate that you’re within the ‘in-group’ of online gaming culture to use those kinds of slurs or to just sort of casually throw around misogynist or homophobic rhetoric,” Condis said.
She said the lead-up to the 2024 election and the rise of the “manosphere” through streamers and podcasters has reframed that kind of rhetoric. Commentators would argue that they don’t agree with the slurs, but that the censorship of them is a result of the Left and so they use slurs “to emphasize how much [they] care about freedom of speech.” To them, the Left is the “censorious overseer” keeping you, the real gamer, from saying those words, instead of the wider gaming culture disavowing them.
“‘We need to, on the micro scale, take back gaming culture from these feminist critics or companies that have diversity officers or whatever,’” she described this viewpoint. “‘On the macro scale, we need to take America back from the Woke.’”
These rhetorical ideas spread in certain spaces more than others, she said.
“Multiplayer competitive eSports-style spaces are often more steeped in this masculinist communication style — and by that I don’t even necessarily mean that they’re full of men, but everyone who participates is expected to conform to speaking in this particular way or taking this [position],” Condis said.
Additionally, how players are perceived in video games can be influenced by their avatar. In games where a player’s role is designated by a character — such as Tracer in Overwatch — the player is represented by that character.
“The structure of the game causes you to think less about the person operating the computer and more about the function of the avatar and the abilities the avatar has, whereas a game like Call of Duty, Fortnite or Minecraft even, the players’ avatars are representatives of the player in the game world,” Condis said.
Arma 3 has no default customization options for women. You can select military gear and your character’s head and voice, but they are all masculine. This could make players slip into masculine pronouns because that’s the “story of the game” being presented to them, Condis said. Asking whether a player is male or female might not even occur to another player.
“The assumption is, ‘Of course it’s a guy. Why would I even ask?’ And so then it becomes easy to just slip into that assumption all the time,” she said. “The software doesn’t seem to even consider the possibility that anyone else would be participating.”
That assumption has leaked into how player communities teach newcomers. May has read handbooks written for new players, and she said many of them are gendered towards men.
One unit May joined was particularly egregious. “This was prevalent in most documents for that unit, like ‘The soldier will set his gun on full auto. The soldier will throw his grenade. You’ll protect the man in front of you,’” May recalled. “There is absolutely assumed maleness in Arma 3.”
“I just want to have some femininity in it"
The players I talked to all espoused how Arma 3 has provided them special experiences despite the numerous obstacles thrown at them by other units.
For Aurelia and Myra, they think if Bohemia Interactive provided female player options, their experiences would improve much more.
“I just want to have some femininity in it,” Aurelia said. “I don’t want to have this bulky box chest, you know? I wanna feel a little more comfortable and easily identifiable [as a woman] from a distance — a smaller frame, a smaller figure.”
Myra understands that female player models means additional modeling work for developers in a game that is already trying to make authentic, detailed models. But other modern military shooters – Call of Duty, Battlefield, and the more tactical Insurgency: Sandstorm – are open to representing women in combat roles — why not Arma?
“When you have a multiplayer experience where [you can modify] player expression, whether it be selecting skin tones, equipment, [faces] and gear, then why not just go that extra mile and give representation for those who have not been given representation in the past, especially in these kinds of communities?” Myra said.
Myra also wants Bohemia Interactive to add more safeguards against harassment, though e understood how it’s difficult to police a decentralized community. But as Bohemia works on Arma Reforger — a side-game that’s a sort of testing ground for the team’s new engine — and Arma 4, Myra said multiplayer is becoming more centralized through official servers and the previously PC-exclusive series making its way to consoles.
“[Safety tools are] definitely something that they need to kind of put serious thought into,” Myra said. “There’s no excuse to not do it anymore.”
Bohemia Interactive spokesperson Pavel Křižka said the team is “not sharing any details” about Arma 4, but “However, our new technology—the ‘Enfusion engine’—is introducing many new and improved features to help create even more immersive and diverse worlds.” He did not specify whether female player options were part of that.
Křižka also said Bohemia is “including built-in mechanisms to report inappropriate behavior.” He said “flagging inappropriate behavior” and kicking players through voting and admin intervention were already available in Arma 3, and those tools would “most probably be evolved” in Arma 4.
Currently, Arma 3 provides a vote kick option on public servers, but to address any harassment, you have to speak to the community’s admins or moderators in charge of the server.
Arma communities also institute their own rules to manage their communities. As Aurelia joined multiple units over seven years, she came across a familiar rule — don’t talk politics.
While the rule seems fine on the surface, Aurelia found that when servers have that rule, politics tend to include her own transgender identity. The rule constricts her from feeling like she can be herself, she said.
“We are all inherently political — that’s what politics has done, like the world has done that to us,” she said. “The LGBTQ+ community is now a political thing because [others have] made it that way.”
Bohemia Interactive seems to share some of this “no politics” sentiment, according to an answer they gave to me when I asked why their games have not acknowledged or celebrated Pride month. Křižka said the company does not celebrate it, either.
“As a company, we are strictly apolitical and we do not aim to participate in such global activities,” Křižka told me. “Instead, we focus on creating a pleasant and inspirational working environment in our studio for all people, regardless of gender, sexual orientation, or beliefs.”
Aurelia said she has seen more and more servers dropping the “no politics” rule. Rather than not talking politics, servers will instead ask to keep any political discussion civil and kind.
“I like seeing that,” she said. “They’re not trying to erase. They’re just trying to promote healthy discussion.”
“It’s a community that is made for the trans community"
Back on the moon, the operation to take over the MAC cannon had an explosive climax. My squad was split between guarding the cannon’s northern gate, while Myra and I held our ground at the entrance into the cannon. The cannon blew up the pirates’ ship — however, the alien Covenant races landed on the moon right after.
We were outnumbered. The northern gate fell after Stella and my squadmate with a rocket launcher were downed, with their bodies trapped on the other side of the wall. Myra and I shot at the Covenant from a small barricade, but we quickly ran out of ammo. Eventually, we both went down after I accidentally overdosed on morphine and Myra died trying to carry my body to safety.
I’ve played a lot of milsims, and, on occasion, I have joined units in games like Arma 3. Many of my fellow players were men. There was only one unit that I recalled having trans women. After I left the unit, one of them told me that they were harassed by another player in that unit.
The 1st Selkies made me recall fond memories of playing in units, coordinating, and planning together. There wasn’t any drama. Our debrief touched on mistakes people made, but those mistakes were always framed in how they could do better next time.
Stella told me before I joined that she wants the Selkies to feel like a casual unit, just like any other, but one that’s safe for trans women.
“ We are forming the space to be very much for trans women and for general gaming as well,” she said. “A lot of that is making it a space where we can have a normal relationship with other people and develop friendships.”
When I asked Aurelia, Myra and May about the Selkies, they only had positive things to say.
“It’s a community that is made for the trans community,” Aurelia said. “I’ll never find another place that I feel more safe.”
May plays with the Selkies only occasionally, as she’s focused on developing the Purple Team. Having a team full of trans women was when she felt “completely comfortable” for the first time, she said.
“I still feel completely comfortable [in the Selkies],” she said.
Myra started to transition recently, and the Selkies provided em with an opportunity to find emself.
“I’d say the Selkies are kind of the first group that I’ve been able to just kind of be myself and try more things out,” Myra said, choking up. “The Selkies have provided me with a wonderful opportunity to kind of tread new water and test some stuff out, and [to] just be genuine.”
