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‘Harry Potter: Hogwarts Legacy’ Will Have Transgender Character Creation Options: Report

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In an effort to push back against the creator of its universe, according to Bloomberg’s sources working on Harry Potter: Hogwarts Legacy, the game will include options to create a transgender character as your hero.

The move comes after years of Harry Potter author JK Rowling expressing anti-trans sentiments, which have upset those working on the game, who have instead tried to make it as inclusive as possible (even if ultimately, Rowling will still get paid for the project).

This kind of inclusion is present in the character creator, where players can pair a masculine or feminine voice with any type of body, and then later simply have to pick whether they are a “witch or a wizard” which will determine their dormitory placement.

We have seen this more often in video games as of late, the ability to pair male or female voices with any body type, or the ability to designate any gender in the creator (or none). This can sometimes come with complications (Cyberpunk 2077’s various romance options seem to have some issues with this system), but generally speaking, it’s the direction most games with character creators are moving, separating out gender from appearance. Though obviously it’s particularly noteworthy that this is happening in the Harry Potter game, given JK Rowling’s past comments.

What I also find important about this story is that this is not an official announcement by Warner Bros. but a leak apparently passed directly to Jason Schreier. While it’s seems like this customization option is now in the game, since it has now become public knowledge, they can’t very well backtrack and remove it, as that would look terrible. Schreier says that “anything can change” before the game is released, but the idea is that after this leak, this really can’t. WB has no comment on all this at the moment for the Bloomberg story, I’ve reached out to them an additional time and will update if I hear back.

The Harry Potter game is reportedly at least a year away, so we won’t see how all this manifests for a while yet, though perhaps some of it will be shown off in earnest this year. The Harry Potter brand is not in the greatest of shape at the moment in the wake of Rowling’s frequent comments, but it’s still a multi-billion dollar IP, and games, movies and more continue to be developed for it.

We’ll see if this recent development is made official any time soon, but given how little we’ve seen from the game so far, that seems unlikely, though it could be rolled into a larger slate of reveals once the game starts being shown off in full.

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