When players first start, they are instructed to make an avatar through which they interact with the game world. She had been a gamer since she was three, and began playing on the Roblox platform at eight. While Hannah hid this from family and friends, there was one place where she could live openly as a female. One of Hannah’s Roblox avatars: ‘You can escape real life and have a completely new identity.’ Photograph: courtesy of Hannah As if on cue, her mother returned from work unexpectedly and caught Hannah in the act. She took out a silky nightgown and shrugged it on, feeling the instant, giddy rush of something she would later learn to call “gender euphoria”, though it was tempered by fear that someone would walk in. Hannah crept into their bedroom and tentatively opened a drawer. Her mother was at work, her father asleep downstairs in his chair. She vividly remembers the first time she explored that wardrobe, at the age of nine. It wasn’t until a decade later that Hannah would come out as transgender, identify as female, and adopt her current name.
Hannah had been assigned male at birth and raised as a boy she feared her mother would not approve of her son trying on dresses. The second was her mother’s wardrobe in their Devon home, full of clothes she longed to try on, even though this was forbidden.
The first was her Nintendo 64, which could transport her to the dark dungeons of Zelda and the chaotic battlefields of Super Smash Bros. When she was a child, Hannah discovered two portals to other worlds.
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