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Personal Essay

Pokopia is my post-gender utopia

The most recent Pokémon game takes a lax attitude toward gender and pronouns

Ellie Black
A human-shaped Ditto holds lipstick and has messy lipstick on their face; Tangrowth says, "There must have been humans who liked this sort of thing."
Image: Ellie Black
2 min read
Long before I knew that I was (or could be) nonbinary, I knew I was a Pokémon fan.
Illustration: Ellie sits on a school bus bench, playing a blue Nintendo Game Boy Advance SP. Beside them on the bench sits a backpack with the initials "EB" and an Eevee keychain on the zipper.
In elementary school, it seemed that every activity was divided by gender. This filled me with a queasy discomfort I didn’t understand. My love of Pokémon became the primary way I made friends, because for whatever reason the girls-versus-boys rules didn’t feel as pervasive in the fandom.
Illustration: A wider view of the bus shows Ellie sitting on the bus, showing their Game Boy to the kids in the row behind her. In the row behind Ellie, one kid with long hair holds up a Chikorita figurine; the other kid plays a purple Game Boy Advance while leaning over the back of Ellie's seat.
There were some gendered mechanics in the Pokémon games, and I hated them all. Gen 4 introduced sexually dimorphic traits in some species, which drove me nuts.
Illustration: Left, the male and female Hisuian Sneasel are shown. The male has a much larger pink ear than the female. Right, the male and female Luxray are shown. The male has larger tufts of hair around its face compared to the female.
You get the picture — female Pokémon were usually smaller and ‘“off-model.” Their differing features tended to have a weird cosmetology bend.
Illustration: Left, the male and female forms of Tangrowth are shown. The female has a longer pink accent on the tips of their fingers than the male. Right, Tangrowth paints their nails with a caption that reads, "I think the implication is that she's painting her nails?"
My instinct is to make a self-deprecating joke about the pedantry of the young nonbinary feminist. But was my outrage really more pedantic than putting lipstick on a punching bag and calling it a girl?

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