Tag: Gender

The White Pearl Salon: A Home for the Trans Community in Second Life (and in Real Life!)

Have you read my previous blogpost on Sex and Gender Issues in Virtual Worlds? Or on LGBTQ Spaces in the Metaverse?

The entrance to the White Pearl Salon

At a time when many red states in the U.S. are passing laws against drag performers and transgender people, it’s vitally important for LGBTQ people and their allies to have safe places in which to gather and find like-minded community, both in real life and in virtual life. Second Life has always been a welcoming virtual space for the LGBTQ community, with its own special landing page and numerous sims devoted to any and every aspect of the queer community (of which I, a cisgender gay man, am a part).

Last week, while club hopping as Vanity Fair, I came across the White Pearl Salon, an LGBTQ-friendly space which caters to the trans community. I received such a warm welcome from the staff and patrons of the club, that I have paid many return visits! I think I might have found my new hangout spot in Second Life, the first since Bray’s Place Blues club sadly closed its doors (you can read more about it here on my blog).

The White Pearl Salon is the brainchild of its proprietor, Robin Palmer (Robinpalmer7 Resident), who describes herself as “just a simple garden variety cross-dresser”, and who very kindly agreed to be interviewed for this blogpost, while she worked a DJ set at her club:

Robin Palmer (R): I was a guy first, then a woman.

Ryan Schultz as Vanity Fair (V): In real life, or in Second Life?

R: LOL… SL only. I came out as trans 30 months ago. I go to real-life trans parties when on the road (not in my town).

V: It can be a scary step to do in real life. I have a lot of respect for the trans people I have met at my local bars and elsewhere. And what is happening right now in some U.S. states just enrages me. So I fully support what you are trying to do here, Robin.

R: Oh yes. And it’s good that, in my experience, there is no judging.  Some are out, others in.  No pressure ever to “come out.”

V: First question: when did you join Second Life?

R: 12 years ago? Let me check. It was before this account. Yes, about 12 years.

V: When did you decide to create the White Pearl Salon, and why?

R: Well, first, my old avatar was a guy. I dated some ladies, and they told me [most] guys are creeps in SL. So then I created a lady account… this one…”Old Robin.” I created an entire sim dedicated to Victorian art and culture, a “Disneyland for Victoriana,” as a lady. About 30 months ago, I came out as trans. I visited the other [trans] clubs, and thought there should be at least ONE with a focus on relationships, not quickie pose ball sex. Thus the Pearl. 🙂

V: Tell me a bit about the art gallery in the Pearl.

R: Well, the one in this club is called the Gerda Wegener Art Gallery. Did you see The Danish Girl?

V: Not yet, no. It’s on my list of movie to watch, though.

R: Eddie Redemayne won an Oscar as a 1920s SRS [Sex Reassignment Surgery] trans. His wife was Gerda Wegener. Gerda was fem, but an advocate for trans in the 1920s, a heroic person and great artist. I created the gallery as a draw to real-life trans people. We can have exhibits that no other gallery in the real-life world can ever have. I want to promote trans and trans-friendly artists like Gerda. No porn, no BDSM; pride, dignity, beauty, and elegance only.

V: So you want to bring more real-life trans people into Second Life?

R: Exactly. I forget the figures, but the UN estimates at least 2% globally are trans. So, of 8 billion people….we’re talking millions.

V: Can you tell me what sets your club apart from other trans clubs in SL?

R: I’ve come to feel that a huge majority of current “SL trans” are cosplay trans… young boys playing games for some quick sex. And the other [SL trans] clubs are mainly part of the global “Adult Entertainment” industry…i.e. porn/BDSM.

V: And you wanted to provide an alternative space?

R: Yes. One tiny island of social engagement, love, joy, laughs, chat, romance. and relationships for SL trans people. I am liberal. I do not judge.  If you want porn/BDSM, fine… but I just want to offer an option.

V: How long has the White Pearl Salon been operating?

R: 25 months. We have 1,030 members now, and over 7.5 million views of our White Pearl Salon Flickr photo pool.

V: Cool!

R: Yes, we’ve been growing a lot after the “Covid drop.” As COVID restrictions eased, visits here fell. I guess it was true for all SL.

V: Yes.

R: Since January 2023, we have had strong growth We track traffic to the club. I try to run Pearl as a real-life business.

V: Oh, interesting. I notice that you also have a room devoted to a matchmaking and/or dating service. Could you tell me more about that?

R: Well, as a great part of my vision is relationships. I thought a direct dating service for trans would be useful. Again, not porn or escort stuff.

V: Understood.

R: This year, I’ll try to get some RL corporate sponsors…. perhaps Bud Lite? LOLOLOL!

V: You can always dream! Tell me your vision for the White Pearl Salon, Robin. What is your dream for this place?

R: To have 1-2 million members. 🙂 Truly, the global potential is almost infinite. Within SL, it is limited; Linden Lab does not [really] understand that at all. Of LGBTQ, the T can use SL the most. A huge percentage of global trans people are in the closet. Second Life can be a path out of that closet.

V: So you see SL as a way for trans people to step out of the closet.

R: Exactly.

V: Experiment with how they wish to be perceived by others.

R: Exactly.  🙂

V: Thank you! Before we end this interview, is there anything else you want to add, Robin?

R: One sec. About 20% of our Flickr photos have a text. Let me get it for you:

SECOND LIFE – A Path Out of the Closet

For the LGBT community, and especially for transgender Ladies and Gentlemen, Second Live (secondlife.com) offers a world of opportunities to explore new worlds, both romantic and exotic, adventurous and relaxing, beautiful and mysterious.

But most importantly, Second Life (SL) allows you to explore yourself – your heart, needs and desires – and to share your journey with thousands of other lovely people – both transgenders (TGs) and their friends and admirers.

Basic membership in SL is free.  Create your account, your avatar, your wardrobe and begin exploring.

Searching for a friendly companion?  Come to SL. Searching for a shoulder to cry on?  Come to SL. Searching for virtual romance?  Come to SL.

As in Real Life (RL), SL is not without perils.  We are all avatars—we all create our perfect self-images, whether close to our real selves, or dreamboats. But take a chance.  Step into a world of endless virtual possibilities.

And if you do, please visit the White Pearl Salon (in your Second Life client, Search > Places > “White Pearl Salon”). Here’s your limousine to the Pearl. Our calendar of exciting DJ dance and costume/theme parties is here. Photo albums of past and future events are in our award-winning 7,000,000 view Flickr albums can be found here (there’s also a visitor’s photo pool). We also run a fashion blog.

For transgenders, their friends and all people, the White Pearl Salon is dedicated to the principles of respect, dignity, pride, beauty, charm and, well, the best time ever in a virtual environment.  The Pearl is Second Life’s most “safe space” for transgender people.

So take the next step and join Second Life. Celebrate the woman… or man… within.

In addition to the main club, there is a small store, The Cultured Pearl, off to the left of the main entrance, selling fashions for avatars of all genders (along with a generous selection of fashionable freebies, no group required!):

A selection of gifts available for free from The Cultured Pearl

Also off the upstairs balcony are a changing room, a ballet studio, the previously mentioned matchmaking/dating services room (please click on each image in the gallery below to see it in full size).

Upstairs, you can also find the previously=mentioned Greta Wegener Art Gallery:

Please note that there will soon be a second art gallery on the same sim, the White Pearl Art Center (SLURL), which will have its official grand opening on May 7th, 2023. If you are an artist who is interested in having your work shown at any of the galleries, please contact the White Pearl Salon art curator, Juana Ametza (Juana Secretspy).

The main floor of the White Pearl Salon is down the winding staircases. Tucked under the stairs is a cozy, well-decorated bar:

The dance floor offers both couples and singles dances, as well as one of those fancy synchronized dance floors! Just touch the gold ball next to the grand piano to dance in sync with the other avatars, or use the pink dance balls for couples and singles dances. There’s even a blind dance board if you want to find a dance partner!

The main stage at the White Pearl Salon

There’s an extensive calendar of events, with a list of DJs performing. Many days at the White Pearl Salon have a theme (e.g. Formal Friday, Hat Day, Angels and Devils, Spring Fling).

The recent Spring Fling day at the White Pearl Salon

I leave you with a two-hour Netflix documentary on YouTube, which Robin Palmer highly encourages those people, who might want to learn more about the trans community and why she created the White Pearl Salon, to watch:

Why not pay a visit to the White Pearl Salon? Tell’em Vanity sent you… 😉

From Her to ME: A Gender-Affirming Surgery Fundraiser in Second Life, Nov. 22nd to Dec. 22nd, 2021

A memorial to those transgender people we have lost this year, at the From Her To ME event

Metaverse platforms are natural homes to transmen, transwomen, the non-binary, and the gender fluid, where you have the ability to choose how you are seen by other avatars. Many trans people take the first steps of their journey in a virtual world.

But while virtual worlds can be a haven to transgender people, they are not perfect, either. In November 2017, I wrote an extensive blogpost about how many virtual worlds and social VR platforms still tend to codify the male/female dichotomy as a hardset binary rather than a fluid concept. Still, many people who want to present as a different gender from the one they were assigned at birth seek out metaverse platforms where they can express themselves freely, without judgement or harassment, and where they can help build vibrant, diverse communities.

While I was in the Belle Epoque store in Second Life, doing their 6th anniversary hunt (see this blogpost for a view of some of the many lovely hunt gifts), I came across a poster on the wall which intrigued me, so I teleported over to the event titled From Her to ME, which opens Nov. 22nd, 2021 and runs until Dec. 22nd, 2021:

The From Her to ME event in Second Life s a fund-raiser for Danny, a transgender man who is getting top surgery (here’s his GoFundMe page; he wants to raise US$6,000 to reach his goal).

Up here in Canada, chest masculinization surgery is usually covered by our universal healthcare, but the overall situation could still use improvement, according to CTV News:

Transgender Canadians and advocates are calling on the federal government to implement comprehensive trans and gender-affirming healthcare coverage across the country…

As it stands, all provinces and territories offer various levels of care for transgender and non-binary individuals. But often barriers crop up within the first instance of trying to access that care, an issue advocates say is due to a lack of training, forcing trans and non-binary people to become experts in their own healthcare.

But, while the situation in Canada is far from perfect, it is still far better than in the United States, where thousands of transgender Americans like Danny have to pay out of pocket for often-expensive gender-affirming surgeries, and sometimes resort to opening crowdfunding pages on GoFundMe and similar services in an effort to raise the necessary funds.

Hence, the From Her To ME event in Second Life, where dozens of Second Life content creators are donating all or part of their sales towards the cause. Here, for example, Belle Epoque is selling two complete fatpacks of former gacha prizes, and donating 100% toward’s Danny’s GoFundMe campaign:

There are also special auctions, where the winning bidder gets a rare or even one-of-a-kind item, like this purple fantasy outfit from Belle Epoque, with the proceeds again going to Danny to help fund his top surgery (the auctions start when the event opens on November 22nd, 2021).

Here is your taxi to the From Her To Me event, which starts Nov. 22nd, 2021 and runs through to Dec, 22nd, 2021. Why not pay a visit (they’re already open early, although all the vendor booths are not set up yet), and see if anything strikes your fancy? Your Linden dollars will be going to a good cause!

An Excellent Video Essay on Identity, Gender, and VRChat (or, Why Everybody in VRChat Seems to Be an Anime Girl)

One of the best decisions I have ever made as a blogger has nothing to do with this blog: setting up the RyanSchultz.com Discord server, which currently has over 500 members who discuss, debate, and argue about the ever-evolving metaverse and the many companies building it—and who are often the source of great story leads for this blog!

And so it was that Madman, a member of my Discord community, tipped me off about this great, thoughtful one-hour YouTube video titled Identity, Gender, and VRChat (Why is everyone in VR an anime girl?), by a guy named Strasz. In a world of VRChat videos chockablock with livestreamed shenanigans, racist memes, and tomfoolery, Strasz presents a refreshing alternative: a one-hour, well-edited, thoughtful video essay on issues of identity and gender in VRChat, addressing a commonly-asked question: why is everybody you run into an anime girl?

It’s well worth setting aside an hour to watch this in full (I watched it last night before I went to bed):

The video is divided into five chapters; if you want to skip ahead, the part about anime girls is in the third chapter, but I would strongly recommend you watch the entire thing so you can see the excellent groundwork Strasz lays in creating an academic framework for his discussion, weaving in various research studies (which he footnotes both in the video itself and in the video description, something that gladdened this academic librarian’s heart!).

Now, coming from my 14 years of experiences in the virtual world of Second Life (where I could be, and often was, anybody and anything), I was already somewhat familiar with Strasz’ premise that social VR and virtual worlds give us an unparalleled opportunity to play with gender and identity, but I found I still learned quite a bit by watching this video, and I can recommend it highly! And I agree with his assertion that adding virtual reality to the mix greatly adds to the feeling of actually embodying your avatar representation in VRChat.

(If this topic intrigues you, you might also be interested in a 2017 blogpost I wrote about sex and gender issues in virtual worlds, and how some worlds impose artificial restraints upon non-binary users, forcing them into male or female roles.)

If you want more of this (and I certainly do!), then follow Strasz on Twitter or Twitch, check out the rest of his videos on YouTube, or join his Straszfilms Discord server. I look forward to future video essays!

Thanks to Madman for the heads up!

Sex and Gender Issues in Virtual Worlds: “The male/female dichotomy was viewed as binary and the technology (literally) codified that concept.”

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Photo: by geralt from Pixabay

WARNING! This is a rather meandering blogpost. Please stick with me until you get to the end, thanks!

—

I had posted my popular blogpost about the idea of the Universal Avatar to the Second Life discussion group SLUniverse (where I still participate in after all these years!) and it sparked a lively discussion, which went off on an interesting tangent, which I want to share with you.

One poster, a long-time member of SLUniverse called Beebo Brink, whose Second Life avatar could be described as a “butch” lesbian, said:

My own standard is the Beebo Queer test. Can you put any kind of clothes on your avatar? If you’re limited to wearing only the clothes assigned to a female avatar or only the clothes assigned to a male avatar, then I’m not interested in your virtual world.

When someone else noted, “It’s apparently common for the male and female avatars to have completely different mappings so putting the ‘wrong’ clothes on, even if the game allowed for it, would just break horribly”, she replied:

That’s the stark technical explanation, but underlying that limitation is the original concept of how you create avatars, how you gender them, and how you accessorize. The male/female dichotomy was viewed as binary and the technology (literally) codified that concept.

When I look at supposedly cutting edge technology, such as Sansar, I look for some awareness of the cutting edge of culture. How does this technology fit the mores and values of the people who will use it? Linden Lab fails rather spectacularly in that regard, which is no surprise since user adoption has always been a weak point for the company.

Meanwhile, in mainstream gaming culture The Sims 4 has gender fluidity integrated into their avatar creation tools. They get it, while Linden Lab flounders in the past.

…

I specifically called out the CULTURE derived from a preponderance of men who code. Not every individual guy is going to have that set of values, just as not every woman who codes is going to be an exception. But the culture takes on a life of its own and individual developers can’t change the entire course of a product as large as a virtual world, which requires teams of developers and other support staff. And tech firms are notorious for being run by guys who used to be developers, so that mindset is cemented up and down the food chain.

I’m speaking from 20 years of experience working as a user interface developer. There were always one or two developers who could adopt the perspective of a user when writing code to vague specs. They could be trusted to deliver an interface that was intuitive for ordinary users, without wireframes that spelled out in detail how the program interface should flow. The rest of the developers, however, were completely, totally clueless. They were only interested in “making it work” and if you had to click a button with your left hand behind your back on Tuesdays and Thursdays and with your right hand on Monday’s and Wednesdays, but on Fridays you had to click with your big toe, they were perfectly fine with that. “But it works, right?” they would say, blinking in puzzlement when I started to scream.

So yes, there are male developers who love avatar customization and female developers who couldn’t care less, but in general, the male-dominated culture of programmers assigns lower priority to avatar customization. We can see that in LL, Blue Mars, Cloud Party, Sansar and apparently even EA…(but at least EA finally listened [for The Sims 4]). Meanwhile, in SL, it’s predominantly women who drive the fashion industry’s mesh avatar enhancements and accessories, working furiously to overcome the deficiencies of the platform.

Beebo has a very good point. Virtual world developers think that “as long as it works”, they don’t need to pay attention to things like perpetuating binary gender stereotypes.

The failed virtual world of Blue Mars was especially off-putting for the coquettish, sexist default animations of the female avatars (which could not be turned off). I remember how I and Beebo (who was also in Blue Mars at the time) tried and repeatedly failed to make the software developers understand just how inappropriate this was, or at least to give users a choice of what animations to use. But the software “bros” went ahead with their own projects and nothing changed.

Even worse, they created a set-up in one of the welcome areas where legions of NPC female characters would automatically mob any male avatar and flirt with him like lovesick groupies. Whose f***ed-up idea was this?!?? Obviously, this heterosexual-hormonal-teen-male fantasy absolutely failed to work for me:

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Hmmm, maybe it’s a good thing Blue Mars died a nasty, horrible, lingering death.

But back to Beebo’s (and my) point: virtual world developers in general, and Linden Lab in particular, have so far failed to accommodate (or even acknowledge) the gender fluidity that occurs in real life, and instead have merely entrenched the classification of sex and gender into the two distinct, opposite and disconnected boxes of ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’. They had a chance to fix things with their new virtual world, Sansar, and frankly, what we have again is two boxes: male and female. It’s so disappointing.

Let’s take a concrete example from Second Life, not from back in 2003 or 2007, but from late this year, 2017. Linden Lab released a new series of “starter” avatars, including two on horseback.

Avbatar Selection

Do you know that a female avatar cannot use the brown horse attachment that the male warrior uses? It is scripted to only work with male avatars! Yes, it actually checks! Of course, the white horse attachment for the female archer works on a female avatar….but it forces you to ride sidesaddle, “like a lady”!

I had a very frustrating half hour trying to get the “men’s” horse to work with a female avatar, only to give up in disgust. (And yes, I *know* that there are horses for sale in SL, from Water Horse and other vendors, that work properly, and allow females to sit properly astride the horse. But this was a Linden Lab-sanctioned product for new users!)

Look, I must confess that I am really no expert in this subject area. I’m just a cisgendered gay man who knows transgender people, both in virtual worlds and in real life. I often inhabit a female avatar in Second Life, something that I would not have predicted when I first started in SL over a decade ago! My “digital drag” has opened my eyes to how women are treated by some men in virtual worlds, and it’s been quite an education.

I often have to refer to the handy Genderbread Person chart to keep my terms straight: gender identity, gender expression, biological sex, sexual attraction, romantic attraction. The point is, I try to be respectful, and if I fail, I apologize, learn from my mistake and try again. We all need to learn how to do that, to make the “other” feel comfortable in our midst.

genderbread-person-3

The point is, any virtual world that forces binary sex, gender identity, and gender expression standards upon people who don’t fit into the standard “male” and “female” boxes, in this day and age, is doing all its users a disservice. Let’s hope that Linden Lab keeps the needs of all members of the LGBTQ community, including the gender fluid and the gender outlaws among us, in mind as they move forward in their product design.

And maybe someday, Beebo Brink will be able to pick any item of clothing she wants to wear in Sansar—”male” or “female”—and be able to wear it with pride.