B2 EZ BD THE WASHINGTON POST.SUNDAY, OCTOBER 20 , 2019
govern, the more these moments will occur;
these three examples were all from the past
four months.
The idea of Donald Trump, president, has
always hinged on the suspension of disbelief.
No one was ever supposed to think that he was
kindhearted or sincere, just that the people he
was antagonizing weren’t, either, and that
there was some value, some authority or at
least some entertainment in his making them
twist in t he w ind. As t hat conceit a ges, calcifies
and b egins t o crack, he’s r unning out o f options.
More-skilled reality TV practitioners have
been dealing with participants who fight
against the formula for years. Pushing against
the c age is now o ften part o f the s how — look a t
the 2019 Bachelor, Colton, trying to flee the set
in heartbreak as the c amera pulls back to reveal
the crew members working to corral him. But
Trump carries on as though it’s 2003 and
nobody on TV or watching TV knows any
better. His most dedicated devotees will always
suspend t heir disbelief, of course, but e ven t hey
keep trying to turn the conversation to Nancy
Pelosi, to Hillary Clinton, to CNN — figure-
heads already embroiled in the show, enemy
participants l ong ago stripped of their humani-
ty. These supporters are working very hard to
pretend that there’s anything still compelling
in a very tired bit. For the rest of u s, the v iewing
experience is too cynical to even be a guilty
pleasure.
Twitter: @LucasWMannLucas Mann is the author of three books, including
“Captive Audience: On Love and Reality TV.”but they didn’t feel exciting or juicy; they were
simply describing an act of cruelty — lives
interrupted and manipulated.
I had a similar feeling when the White
House sent Vice President Pence to view the
crowded migrant detention facilities at the
border. Somehow, officials seemed to think
that if Pence p erformed sincerity and a uthority,
those suffering around him would conform to
that desired affect. Instead, Pence stood with
his arms folded and appeared unmoved as
humans inside cages screamed: “No shower!
No shower!” Only a week later, Trump himself
met with Nobel Peace Prize winner Nadia
Murad and tried to play the situation like he
was congratulating a triumphant “A ppren-
tice” contestant who would, as these moments
have always played out, bask in the glory of a
powerful man offering praise. When Murad
wanted to talk about why she’d won the prize,
for speaking out about her rape and torture at
the hands of the Islamic State, Trump could
only keep stumbling toward the emotion he
wanted — “So you escaped,” he prodded her
limply. He appeared unable to muster up even
the p erformance o f humanity; that wasn’t w hat
he’d s howed u p to do.
It’s n o accident that Trump’s m ost excruciat-
ing interpersonal failures come in these mo-
ments, when he must encounter humans who
aren’t politicians or who don’t cover politi-
cians, who aren’t celebrities or pundits, who
are not planning to give themselves over to a
show of any kind. When they recoil from him, it
is so genuine, so unambiguous, that he retains
no illusion of control. And the longer he has tochoose t o believe is much l ess cynical, you can’t
feel the emotion Karamo is pushing unless his
makeover subject seems to buy fully into the
conceit of his o wn forced catharsis.
This is why the c ampaign was s uch a perfect
setting for Trump’s r eality plotlines and w hy h e
always longs to be back within its familiar
parameters. He’s comfortable when everyone
can believably be accused of being in on the
show, and therefore when nobody demands
better. Like a reality episode, the stakes of a
campaign, and of so much political discourse,
feel both hysterically huge and also detached
from real consequences. Similarly, when
Trump solicited p raise f rom his C abinet as if he
was back on “The Apprentice,” or even had
wandered into a “Bachelor” rose ceremony, it
felt appropriate — an empty, m ade-for-TV con-
test, full of people who would do anything for
the star’s approval and a random title, a sea of
Bret Michaels and Gary Buseys, fitted with
muted blue ties. There a re sides to pick, h umili-
ations to gawk at, things to feel, a spectacle so
obvious and complete that it’s hard to think
anyone d eserves anything different.
But Trump cannot make compelling specta-
cle out of those who don’t want to be a specta-
cle, and that’s when the show starts to break
down. T he Dunns didn’t want to meet S acoolas.
They didn’t want to be paraded in front of
cameras. They brought to the White House no
desire for anything other than justice. After-
ward, w hen t heir s pokesman said t hat they felt
“ambushed,” that a “bombshell” had been
dropped, those words nodded pretty explicitly
at t he r eality show construction o f the moment,for l ife is waiting to meet him.
The very temptation to compare such con-
structed, formulaic theatrics to the drama play-
ing out on the global stage doesn’t just indict
Trump: It’s also a condemnation of the rest of
us, the viewers who voted him into office. We
fell for the spectacle. A few months after
Trump’s inauguration, Emily Nussbaum de-
tailed in the New Yorker the way his “A ppren-
tice” persona — the man in the power suit
calling the shots, never challenged — was a
cardboard cutout that could, at least, appear
presidential, however free of substance it
might be. Implicit in that point is the dynamic
that makes any reality television production
work: participants willing to engage in the
spectacle shaped around them, and an audi-
ence willing to suspend disbelief in the face of
that spectacle. Whether you loved or hated
Trump, h e was w atchable b ecause we’d s een all
the b its before.
It’s easy now to point out that for the past
three years Trump has been going back to that
same playbook. Reality television, as noted by
media critics like Nussbaum, political report-
ers like John Cassidy and the Bravo god him-
self, Andy Cohen, is the language he knows — a
flip book of insults and set pieces ready-made
for conflict or humiliation, or just fireworks.
But it might be more helpful, or at least more
hopeful, to point out all the ways the show
breaks down around him: moments when he
expects the production t o play o ut exactly a s he
wants, but participants and viewers refuse to
give him any moral or narrative authority.
Often these are interactions with normal peo-
ple, people who want nothing from him, who
won’t b e made to mean what t hey don’t want to
mean. They are not contestants, they are citi-
zens, and that is a distinction Trump seems
unable to make. When he forces them into the
show, their humanity i n the f ace of t he f ormula
turns the familiar grotesque.
We s aw t his d uring Trump’s i nteraction with
Charlotte Charles and Tim Dunn, who refused
to meet — let alone reconcile — with the
woman who had struck and killed their son
while she was driving on the wrong side of the
road. As they explained later, they had always
been willing to meet with Sacoolas, but they
wanted to do so at the right moment, with
proper preparation, prior knowledge and
trained mediators on hand. What they didn’t
want was to confront her without warning.
That apparently hadn’t occurred to Trump,
who reportedly t hought he could fix things.
I can almost understand his reasoning, if
only because it’s worked before, at least on
screen. I watched that scene where Karamo
introduces his charge t o the man who shot him,
and I enjoyed it, just as I do every “House-
wives” reunion, just as I spent my childhood
enjoying “The Jerry Springer Show.” Of course,
I’m aware of the wild ethical pitfalls and the
predictability, the obvious construction of a
moment d emanding a particular emotion. As a
fan, there’s discomfort in watching it play out,
but there’s a lso the pleasure of engaging w ith a
manufactured world where everyone has
shown up for the attention. They’ve left nor-
mality, and in some ways they’ve left free will,
in favor of the show.
Or I can tell myself that. Those who walked
onto the “Jerry Springer” set did so ready to
behave in a way that would make the security
guards sprint out from the wings. Nobody is
more aware of the requirements of their job
than a Real Housewife — part of what they’re
selling is the certainty that they’re in on the
whole thing, so they must deserve whatever
comes to them. E ven with “ Queer Eye,” a show ITV FROM B1woman must be: young, conventionally attrac-
tive and hyper-feminine. She certainly could
not be 6-foot-4 like me. So I resigned myself to
life as a lie.
But the fictional worlds of role-playing
games were something else. When a close
friend invited me to join a game of contempo-
rary s upernatural horror called “Trail of Cthul-
hu,” I created my f irst transgender character, a
disgraced ex-psychiatrist named Zelda. A good
horror protagonist should be emotionally
damaged, but I chose not to make gender
dysphoria a major part of her inner world.
Zelda had plenty of problems, but none with
living in her own skin.
Playing her, I experienced what game de-
signer and academic Jonaya Kemper calls
“emancipatory bleed,” as Zelda’s comfort in
her own body began to extend across the
barrier between fiction and reality, and into
me. Zelda was old and plain, but she had
decided for herself what being a woman meant
for her. She knew she could not live up to
society’s impossible standards of beauty and
femininity, and was determined to be herself
regardless. Instead of worrying about how she
would be perceived, I reveled in her psycholog-
ical prowess, using her skills to help create an
unforgettable story together with my friends.
During my time playing that game, I felt
what it was like to be a woman for whom
transition was no longer a looming ordeal but
a fait accompli. Being her made transitioning
seem like something I could actually do. It
didn’t t ake over her story. I t was simply her life.
Role-playing by itself would not have been
enough to help me find the will to come out. I
doubt I could have done it if I had not been
surrounded by loved ones who supported me
or if I did not live in To ronto, where the culture
has been moving toward inclusion and accep-
tance of transfolk. The real heroes of my story
are the people who came out before me, when
the world was much less kind to the gender-
nonconforming.
But for all that, it was role-playing that
provided the catalyst and showed me that first
big glimpse of what life might be like if I lived it
honestly as myself.
Twitter: @JoanMoriarityJoan Moriarity is a writer, speaker and
gamesmistress. She is a co-author of “Your Move:
What Board Games Te ach Us About Life.”They needed it, for stress relief or self-expres-
sion or both. Me, though? I couldn’t dance. It’s
not that I was bad at it. I physically could not
make myself do it. But when I realized that my
characters shared this in common, I wondered
if perhaps I was trying to tell myself some-
thing. So at t he age of 29 I went to my f irst rave,
and it was a revelation. A wall between my
body and mind was demolished. Now I share
my characters’ need to move with music.
Did I reveal this truth to myself by subcon-
sciously adding this inclination to the charac-
ters I played? Or did the characters bring it out
in me? In her research on the phenomenon
known as “bleed,” g aming scholar Sarah Lynne
Bowman has documented instances of person-
ality traits imprinting themselves from player
to character, or vice versa. I knew nothing of
this back then, but I began to pay closer
attention to what my c haracters might have to
say to me. And one of them in particular spoke
very loudly.
In my mid-30s, I began to realize that I was
not cisgender. But by then, I feared, it was too
late for me to transition. I also had a narrow
image in my mind of what a transgenderprimarily with trying to “win” — which is to say
kill a ton of monsters and collect a mountain of
treasure — as though it were a board game. But
a spark remained, and it was never quite
extinguished.
As I grew older and made new friends, new
possibilities began to open up at t he tabletop. I
played with more diverse groups of people, in a
broader variety of settings. In addition to
fantasy scenarios like those in D&D, I played in
games of horror, espionage, science fiction and
more. Many o f those games had less to do with
overcoming obstacles and defeating enemies
and more to do with relationships and charac-
ter development. I often played female charac-
ters. I sometimes asked the women playing
those games if they would be all right with me
playing as a woman, and even though they all
responded with enthusiastic assent, I still
worried about being disrespectful. What if I
came across as too feminine? Would they think
I was mocking them? Did I have the right to
claim an experience that was not my o wn, even
in play? But I kept playing, and I began to
notice patterns in the characters I embodied.
For instance, my characters loved to dance.T
he barrier between the real and the
imaginary is porous, and play is
more powerful than most of us un-
derstand. After all, every real thing
we create begins as an idea, and
when we pour our time and love into an idea —
even one that’s fundamentally fictional — that
creation can affect us in surprising ways. In m y
case, the results were dramatic. My life has
been transformed, in no small part because of
what I learned from my character in a role-
playing game.
I picked up role-playing games — in which
players take on fictional personas in a struc-
tured setting, typically guided by a “game
master” — when I was 10. The cover of the 1981
Dungeons & Dragons basic rule book had a
striking image painted by the fantasy artist
Erol Otus, known for his strange visions of
beauty and horror: a blond lady in a red dress,
throwing a ball of magical green fire at a big,
scary creature. In hindsight, she didn’t appear
to be attired or armed in a manner suitable for
exploring dungeons full of monsters. Her
dress was amazing, though, and she had
fantastic eye shadow. Inside the rule book was
a step-by-step example of a player (a woman!)
creating a character for the game, a badass
warrior lady named Morgan Ironwolf. In an
illustration that shows up later in the book,
Morgan’s waist appears to be about 18 inches
around, and her nipples are visible through
her chain-mail shirt. It’s a laughable image
today, but back then she looked awesome —
dangerous and ready to fight. I wanted to be
her.
There was just one problem: I was a boy. Or
at least, that’s what I thought I was. I wasn’t
very good at i t, though. My s peech, movement,
tastes and emotional responses were in many
ways more typical of what was expected of
girls. I got called “fag” a lot, and I didn’t know
what that meant, but I got the message that it
wasn’t okay to be a girl, or anything like a girl,
so I pushed away all thoughts of playing
Morgan Ironwolf or the lady in the red dress.
Still, the characters I did play weren’t like
the ones the other boys played. My characters
cared about the creatures they encountered.
They didn’t want to kill the monsters, they
wanted to talk to them. The other players (all
boys) thought that was stupid, so I learned to
conform. I started playing as more “mascu-
line” characters who concerned themselvesHow role-playing games helped me embrace my gender
Playing
Dungeons &
Dragons made
Joan
Moriarity’s
transition seem
possibleWhat happens when a reality TV president loses control of the plot?
JABIN BOTSFORD/THE WASHINGTON POSTPresident Trump
speaks with Yazidi
human rights
activist and Nobel
Peace Prize winner
Nadia Murad in
July. The two had
an awkward
exchange, with
Murad explaining
that the Islamic
State had killed her
family, and Trump
asking, “Where are
they now?”IRIS SCHNEIDER FOR THE WASHINGTON POSTRole-playing games
like Dungeons &
Dragons let players
inhabit characters
in fictional worlds.
But the traits of
those characters
can reflect and
influence the
players in real life.