The Sims 4, and the franchise in general, has often been considered somewhat ahead of its time for its inclusion of members of the LGBTQIA2+ community. The addition of Pride content and gender customisation options in Create-a-Sim are all things the game has done well in recent years.
The franchise as a whole has greatly improved, too. The first edition initially allowed only Sims of opposite genders to “try for a baby”, which is no longer the case.
But as things stand, there are no gendered pronouns available with only masculine and feminine used when selecting body frame type, for example. These two options are also the only ones available when refining fashion choices and hair styles.
The Sims 4 has been making an increased attempt to use non-gendered language with more recent DLC, referring to Sims by their names rather than he/she, but some players feel that true representation for Transgender and Non-Binary Sims is still missing.
On the back of this, streamer @MomoMisfortune has started a petition calling for some changes to be made.
“If we could have the option to choose pronouns for our Sim or for the team to switch older game texts to be gender-neutral like current pack dialogued it would be impactful for those of us who are still unable to truly feel represented in the game by having our sims selves misgendered,” they said.
The Sims 4 is available in over 20 languages, which could make the translations of some text challenging, something Momo said they are aware of.
At the time of writing, over 5000 players had signed the petition for Pronoun Options for Trans and Non-Binary Sims in The Sims 4 on Change.org.
Momo added that even if these options cannot be added to The Sims 4 – or are not added to The Sims 4 – they hope that y creating the petition it will show EA and The Sims team how something like this would be beneficial to add to future versions of the franchise.
As with many other things in The Sims 4 though, what the game is lacking officially, modders have already created.
Over on ModTheSims, NeonOcean released Refer, a Non-Binary Pronouns mod for The Sims 4 in August last year.
The mod is described as follows: “Refer is a mod that allows sims to finally be talked about with pronouns that match their gender identity. Gender non-conforming sims can now easily change their preferred pronouns, sims can swap between the “male” and “female” pronouns, switch to using they / them, or select a “neopronoun” to be called by.”