Content note: This game contains discussion of sexual assault, transphobia, suicidal ideation, and some other grim stuff.

He Fucked The Girl Out of Me is a 2023 semi-autobiographical narrative game by Taylor McCue, focusing on her experiences in sex work as a trans woman. It has a sort of GameBoy aesthetic (which is good for you to know, because you’re not getting any screenshots today) and it’s won a few awards, including an IndieCade award for Innovation in Experience Design. Reviews tend to focus on the role of trauma, and the autobiographical aspects. It’s almost treated less as a game and more as a communication from the creator – like a letter. The responses are often personal, intimate, as if responding not to a piece of art but directly to the person who made it. Jade King at thegamer.com discusses the game in relation to her own experience of rape, and Willa Rowe at Inverse discusses it in relation to her experiences of transition. Zoey Handley at Destructoid even talks about how the game unlocked repressed memories. There’s a lot of personal stuff out there. And that makes sense, right. It’s a memoir-game about trauma, and people are responding by discussing their experiences of the same. We talked back in April about video games for difficult times – it’s good and important to talk about games in terms of what they mean to you. It makes sense that people respond to this game by reflecting on their own related experiences. That’s important. For me personally, I’m more immediately drawn to the structure of the game itself. This is a dense, interconnected piece of writing. It has a lot to say about gender and sexuality, identity, money – it’s probably one of the more sophisticated pieces I’ve seen in a while.

He Fucked The Girl Out of Me is pitched as semi-autobiographical – so for instance the main character is called Ann, even though the creator’s name is Taylor. The boundaries between Ann and Taylor aren’t entirely clear, but there’s definitely a meaningful overlap between the two. At one point, Ann speaks to her mother on the phone. Her mother is not accepting, and uses Ann’s deadname, Tyler. The proximity between Tyler and Taylor indicates something about the overlap between the creator and her creation. In not respecting Ann’s transition, the mother uses a deadname that slights Taylor as well, landing just slightly to the left of what she would prefer to be called. Ann and Taylor clearly aren’t identical, but there’s some meaningful overlap between them. It would be reasonable to assume that most of these experiences are legitimately McCue’s own.

In broad strokes, then, the game recounts McCue’s experiences as a trans woman in college, early in her transition, where she entered into sex work to help pay for hormones. The money thing is probably a good place to start. HFTGOOM highlights a complicated relationship between money and love. The foil, the point of contrast for the rest of the story, is Ann’s parents, and specifically her mother. Ann’s parents are poor, and, as noted, not affirming of her transition. In the same phone call with the deadnaming, Ann’s mother apologises for taking money out of Ann’s college tuition: “I needed to pay the power bill. I’ll have it back in two days when I get paid.” Being poor and being non-affirming are clustered thematic concepts. It’s not that every poor person in this story is non-affirming, but the two concepts are thematically linked in the person of Ann’s mother. There’s no support, there’s no love or understanding, and also there’s no money.

That pairing is set in contrast to sex work, which offers both love and money in a confusing way that Ann is clearly not equipped to deal with. Ann’s first experience of sex work is escorting with her friend Sally, another trans woman. On meeting her first client, Ann tells herself (or the player?) “Your goal is to get him to love you.” The man hugs her, assuming a physical intimacy that’s bought and paid for (“Wow, you’re cute! Give me a hug!”), but also triggering an emotional response to the affection missing elsewhere in her life. “His hug felt warm… It made me miss my family. I didn’t realise how much… I wanted to be loved.” If Ann’s mother is characterised by a lack of love and money, Ann’s client offers both. His money, which will be used for hormones, is indirectly gender-affirming. It is the financial support that her parents will not offer. The love is obviously not parental love – it is sexual, transactional, selfish – but it still triggers that sense of loss. It is love enough to make her grieve.

At this point it’s clear that Ann is in a vulnerable position. Sex work is not a positive environment for her, given her particular baggage. It’s further complicated by how it intersects with her developing sense of gender. After she leaves the club with Sally and her first client, the trio move to a motel. Ann sits on the kerb outside while Sally and the man have sex, and Ann reflects on her reasons for starting sex work. The money is one aspect, but it’s also about her sense of gender identity. “I think on some level, I want to prove to myself that I’m a girl. If a guy could want me, even pay money for me, it means I pass, right?” Ann desires heterosexual approval as a source of gender affirmation. When straight men want her, it makes her feel like a girl. Makes sense. What she finds is that many of her customers fetishize her being trans as part of their own various kinks. She meets a lot of men who get off pretending to be women – specifically women degraded, disrespected, humiliated. They want to be dominated, and they express submission by adopting markers of femininity. Her first client dresses up in women’s clothes to act out a servant fantasy: “For her, becoming a woman was a disgusting, degrading act.” Instead of the more familiar terms of bottom and top, Ann refers to this encounter as being between bottom and “attacker”, with all of its violent, domineering subtext. These people see Ann as embodying their sexual fantasy – a man becoming a woman, becoming degraded, and therefore super hot. It’s – again, not a healthy environment for a poor college student early in their transition. It’s not a healthy view of what it means to be a woman.

We’re skipping over some of the more explicit details here, but you can imagine how this experience messed Ann up. Ann is desired, but only because she’s seen as degraded. She doesn’t have emotional or financial support from her parents, so she gets the money she needs by playing into fantasies that make her feel gross and violated. She begins to hate herself, hate her womanhood – in a sense her parents’ rejection coming full circle. Their ‘no’ to her identity as a woman becomes her ‘no’. The solution, ultimately, is the game itself. It is the experience talked about, shared, discussed. “The primary impulse of shame is to hide and isolate. I’ve spent most of my life believing that no one would understand me. Accept me. I don’t want to hide anymore.” We’re running up against the fact that Ann’s story is really Taylor’s story. We can’t talk about this game without acknowledging that there’s a real person behind it. As much as possible, I’ve tried to focus on the story as its own thing, on structure and themes – partly just out of respect. McCue has said in interview that the response to the game has been overwhelming, even where it’s good. “An overwhelmingly huge amount of good or bad things still is overwhelming.” I don’t want to sit here and speculate about the inner life of this person I don’t know. I think the most respectful way to approach this text, for me, is to recognise the artistry with which it’s made.