I've been pretty active in the Mass Effect fandom back in the day and a lot of my trans mutuals got shat on by cishet women for playing maleShep (they were more comfortable playing as him) and got called misogynist for it even though they didn't say anything misogynist. and I remember a lot of the same women had a meltdown when people referred to Shepard as they/them when speaking in general, and what I'm trying to say is - yeah, the terf and radfem rhetoric is very much a thing in fandoms as I saw it first-hand.

It was very upsetting to see my trans mutuals being scared of sharing their male (or nb) OCs, because you were automatically labelled a misogynist. I used to identify as a cis woman at the time too and even then, it was baffling to me that they'd come to this conclusion. I know how actual misogynists act like and they were far from that. A lot of my mutuals, including me after I started questioning my gender, left the fandom because we felt we didn't belong.

gonna talk about this undercut because ngl i feel a tad unsafe in this topic

i'm seeing this happen in the bg3 fandom with posts in the main tags where tav is being she/her'd exclusively and happy endings for characters being nuclear family/pregnancy and nothing else is a true happy/good ending, and the second trans folks and gay men tried to talk about this becoming the only accepted view for many people they were stomped into silence again for ruining peoples fun... by people not even realising this stuff is rooted in terf/radfem rhetoric. they just comment 'pregnancy is ok actually, let people have fun' without even checking the original OPs blogs and seeing how transphobic and homophobic they are.

we don't get upset because we're not being included. we're upset because we know what the fuck is going on and we can see it happening in real time and are trying to stop it before it becomes so widespread we don't feel safe enough to talk at all.

this also happened in the dragon age fandom and it's just. maybe rpg fandoms are just not safe spaces! that sucks!

i'm really sorry your friends and you had a rough time. i'm also sorry this is a repeating behaviour, no matter how many years pass. there's never a lesson learnt here, i suppose