AS A TRANS PERSON…
I get the argument, vis a vis fetishization and I’m certainly not unsympathetic to it. I think it’s worth considering in plenty of contexts when it comes to constructing characters/stories/et cetera.
It’s just odd for me to square it in THIS specific case, at least for the reasons stated. Ultimately, it’s not a big deal to me - I have removed the offending penis! - so much as a weird one. It’s a game where the primary thrust is ‘what if we just lean into the usual environment on cape games and acknowledge that people like writing smut’, with lax theme/continuity policies to accommodate such, so while there are definitely arguments to be made about fetishization, it strikes me that they by rights ought to apply pretty broadly here, shouldn’t they?
Or, to put it crassly: If I can do a series of scenes in which Wonder Woman sets up shop at a truck stop men’s room for funsies, and that is not disrespectful, inappropriately fetishistic, et cetera, then drawing the line at one of the sets of dangly bits aboard this hypothetical train being Hawkgirl’s feels weird, to me personally. It would probably feel LESS weird if it were not inherently a game where players are encouraged to fetishize a myriad of other aspects of comic book characters for the sake of titillation-- or even if the line was more along the lines of ‘don’t JUST shuffle parts around, put like five seconds of thought into it’, I would get it.
(For the record, ‘how exactly does this make sense’ was indeed part of my thought process, because I’m the kind of weirdo that likes to be able to tie her smut-writing to, like. SOMETHING tangible.)
Anyway, all that having been said, to reiterate: I as one of the affected parties am not ANGRY or whatever, so much as a little bummed/bemused. Nobody was banned. Trans characters are in theory appable, but given how few such characters there are, it’s a very tenuous theory. Pls don’t send hate at these people who I am charitably assuming made a well-intentioned but clumsy decision against the backdrop of being a small staff on a game that wasn’t expected to take off at the rate it did. Choices get made quickly sometimes under those circumstances, and they aren’t always ideal.