This was written in response to experiencing the installation ‘He Fucked The Girl Out Of Me’ at IDFA DOCLABS made by Tayler McCue.
You can find more about it here -> https://taylormccue.itch.io/trauma
PREASES
How many more people are going to suffer?
He fucked the girl out of me is a new videogame released by famous video game director Taylor McCue entering your homes today. Harbouring back to nostalgic feelings by emulating the Nintendo GameBoy you play as Ann young trans girl learning to accept herself in a scary and dangerous world. It is a lovely coming of age game about a time not every had is as well as we have right now.
We will not speak of the present; everything is okay right now.
FORM,
TRAUMA
He fucked the girl out of me is real. This traumatic experience happened and is happening right now. Every day trans people must sell their bodies to pay their dept of merely existing.
In form it might look like a nostalgic throwback to the 90s/00s but He Fucked the Girl Out of Me is more a documentary than anything else. A documentary appropriating the form of a Video Game to tell the scattered story of the trauma of the protagonist Ann.
DOCUMENTARY
All the formalistic traits of HFtGOoM centre around how to convey a past trauma to an audience. The dialogue the documentary has with the documentary as a medium is because of this very interesting. The documentary distances itself from the documentary as a medium with the hyper-subjective mode of experience you gain in the interactive medium of the game (which seems contradictory to the space it is exhibited in, a documentary festival.)
GAME
To approach the game as a medium you quickly have to deal with a lot of baggage. Even after act of distancing yourself form the medium itself you still have certain presumptions just by entering the interactive space. The medium of the game presupposes a level of control that the player should have yet in the story the only control you have is pressing a button to advance the dialogue. The most control you ever get is looking at the different items in the vending machine of a rundown motel.
This synthesis of objectivity and subjectivity or linearity and interactivity also sees into the sub-medium or console of the game. The GameBoy color and the Arcade-esque with big buttons and a joystick quickly make the player reminiscent of a nostalgic past of playing games in the backseat of the car or even the arcade. The feeling is even further accentuated by the comfortable doodles, bright pink colours and pixel art style of the game.
This feeling of nostalgia creates an ever further distance yet closeness to the viewer. The time is long gone, in the past, yet it could have been you who experienced it.
The game/documentary places itself in a liminal zone between the game and documentary. Threading a fine line to avoid becoming bigger than it wants to be, not turning into a symbol rather than the personal story that it is, and to ease people into the discourse present.
DISCOURSE
Although the media used in the portrayal of this documentive story is very intriguing, it would be a failed essay if I didn’t talk about the actual discourse present in the game/documentary. He Fucked the Girl Out of Me big conflict of which these formalist conversations arise is the conflict of sex work and trans bodies in art and society.
The medium of the retro game places this game in a history, it is in the past. Although this is understandable with the intent to show it to a broad audience it still largely avoids the broader themes at play. In the United Kingdom the waiting time to speak to a psychologist that is allowed to give you a diagnosis to start processes such as hormone replacement therapy is 15 years if you go through the NHS and not a private firm (, this is just for the first appointment). Even in a country with a status of being one of the most progressive countries in the world (the Netherlands) waiting are going up to 3 years while by law hospitals should strive for a waiting list of 4 weeks, recently parliament discarded a new law that would make it slightly easier to trans people to transition with the fear of people with bad motives making use of this. In the United States republicans in multiple states are trying to make it illegal to transition and have already qualified transitioning for anyone under 18 as child abuse (, these are all developments in the last year).
On the 25th of June 2022 someone killed 2 people and injured 21 at a pride event in Oslo, Norway
On the 20th of November 2022 someone killed 5 people in a gay bar in Colorado, US
CONCLUSION
This is not a pledge to the artist to portray this in a less retro aesthetic, on the contrary. Our world needs more artistic expressions such as these. While dealing with these kinds of complex topics whole new ways of expressing art start to form. Placing an artwork such as this in a discourse is important to reflect on its function and structure and sometimes, even in dire times, all art should ask from you is 20 minutes and empathy.
SOURCES
McCue, Taylor: He Fucked The Girl Out Of Me, USA 2022
Nash, Kate: Modes of Interactivity: Analysing the Webdoc, Tasmania 2012
Thorn, Abigail: I Emailed My Doctor 133 Times: The Crisis In the British
Healthcare System, London 2022 (last accessed 23/11/2022)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v1eWIshUzr8