I started replaying Pokémon SoulSilver recently as my pre-bedtime wind-down video game. I can’t explain where the hankering came for, but I really wanted to enjoy the simplicity of an older Pokémon game and so turned toward one of my favorite entries in the series. It’s old enough that I can play it on my 3DS, new enough to have a bunch of quality-of-life improvements to the series, and is from a period in my life where I could just enjoy things without being aware of what the larger world thought about them, so I’ve got no difficult feelings or frustrations to ignore while I’m trying to calm down for sleep. As I booted it up, deleted my old save file, and started a new one, I discovered quickly why it had been so long since I played a Pokémon game. I was prompted pretty much immediately to identify as a boy or a girl and that little bit of text reminded me immediately of the complicated feelings around gender in Pokémon games that I developed while playing the latest mainline entry, Scarlet/Violet. Feelings that I might have only started to properly examine in the more recent years of my life but that had been foundational and important to me as I grew up in ways that I’m still figuring out. Feelings that developed as the Pokémon franchise developed depictions of gender via it’s ability to actually present characters and Pokémon that looked different. A thing that existed in the first game as only symbols in the name/nickname entry field, symbols on the Nidoran names to tell you which one you got, and as an abstract concept which, for a long time, my childhood brain literally only understand via hair length because that was how my parents and all the media I had access to explained it: boys had short hair and girls had long hair.