Don’t rock the boat says trans girls are worth killing for

Elliot Degrassi's 2023 release, don't rock the boat, is a text-based interactive fiction game that follows the fictional Western U women’s rowing team on the day of a 30-mile race. The race is tense from the beginning, as debates around the inclusion of trans women in their league threaten to tear the team apart.

Then, mid-race, they’re attacked by a massive tentacled monster.

don’t rock the boat builds upon feminist horror tropes to deliver an incisive criticism of the moral panic surrounding trans athletes and the dire consequences of cis women failing to stand in solidarity with their trans sisters.

For once, trans women aren’t the monsters

Feminists across various mediums have long used the language of horror and monstrosity to reckon with surviving patriarchy, but trans women rarely get such sympathetic treatment in horror.

Instead, horror often depicts trans women  characters as violent sexual predators. These portrayals echo the real-life rhetoric that’s used in efforts to roll back civil rights for transgender people and has been wielded against marginalized people for decades before that.  The moral panic surrounding transfem athletes, central to don’t rock the boat’s conceit, is no exception, but don’t rock the boat reverses the stereotypical roles of transfem predatory villain and pure, cis female victim, rebuking the lens of predation trans women are too often viewed through.