A Trip To The Clinic

You seek help for an injury at the fracture clinic. Unfortunately, the doctor isn't interested in your arm. He wants to know a lot more, asking in an increasingly disparaging manner for irrelevant details from your childhood, and probing your emotional response to the accident. At one point, he insists that you tell him about your sex life. It seems that the burden of proof is on you to demonstrate not simply that you have indeed broken your arm, but that you are also in a great deal of pain and therefore require treatment.

This narrative can be found in the short ‘choose your own adventure’ text-based browser game A Trip To The Clinic. It was released for free on the internet by indie game creator Wojit in January 2013, in the immediate wake of #transdocfail. The game, which was shared widely on trans and feminist blogs and social media spaces, is a transparent satire of gender clinic appointments. To ‘win’, thereby gaining access to treatment, the player must present the correct narrative to the doctor, and respond in a deferential manner to his requests. This can be done by clicking on the ‘correct’ response to questions where an option is available. A failure to provide enough ‘correct’ responses may result in the player character waiting longer for treatment, or being denied treatment altogether.

A Trip To The Clinic reflects and feeds into prominent discourses of trans health present within community and activist spaces. Firstly, it addresses the fundamental differences of definition and understanding that can sometimes exist between practitioner and patient, as discussed in Chapter Four.