The Press-Switch Controversy of December 2023

Because who else is going to report on this…

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On December 5, 2023, Trigger, the creator of the TSF body swap visual novel Press-Switch, posted a lengthy message in the Press-Switch Discord server, pinging its several hundred members. The message was in response to a discussion that originated in the general-pictures channel on December 3, 2023, when Trigger detailed his views on the terms cis and cisgender, among other things. This conversation carried over into the DMs of members of the Press-Switch community. But rather than discuss this matter directly with this small group, Trigger roped in… everyone with an @everyone message.

People who had not posted on the server in months went on prolonged tangents about vaguely related topics. Trigger failed to perform proper damage control or offer sufficient clarification for their viewpoints. People accused Trigger of transphobia due to the things he was saying… sounded like things a transphobe might say. Such as “transwomen are not a subset of women, they [are] a subset of men.” And overt transphobes also started cropping up. But due to how late it was for Trigger and his sole moderator, Mariana, a trans woman, the conversation within the server was eventually put on hold by enabling slow mode.

This whole incident attracted anger from fellow creators, namely CaptainCaption of re:Dreamer fame. Shocked the Student Transfer dev team (at least from what I heard). And left many trans, and non-binary, members of the Press-Switch Discord server feeling as if Trigger had betrayed them.

Now, this whole thing struck me as… bizarre. Trigger has been kind and considerate to trans people in the past, and various regular members of the Press-Switch server are transgender. He has been collaborating with Mariana for years. The subject of gender transition was directly, and positively, referenced in multiple endings within Version 0.6a of Press-Switch. And… I find it very difficult to imagine that anybody who devoted over a decade of their life to developing a game extensively about a man switching bodies with various women would be transphobic.

Personally, I thought Trigger was being a dipshit. He was writing long, pedantic crap that failed to broach the issues people were voicing. He nonchalantly escalated the issue to an insane degree, as if he was trying to sabotage his own reputation. He was putting an unreasonable amount of pressure on Mariana, to the point where she described it as “just about the most stressful thing ever.” And as a server owner, he failed to manage the server as things grew more hectic and people grew increasingly angry at his responses. He, without question, fucked up.

…That being said, I should mention that Trigger was busy working forced overtime or asleep during the majority of this debacle. That does not excuse his actions, but it might explain why his behavior was so careless.

During the early morning of December 7, 2023, Trigger posted a public response. Apologizing for the way he handled the situation, but not apologizing for expressing or possessing different views. This in turn saw a public response from Mariana a few hours later, and later CaptainCaption.

What I found so frustrating about Trigger’s response here was, once again, the way he addresses these questions. He presented the subject as more of a thought experiment to be broken down into great detail, rather than ending this matter by offering something more succinct.

There is nothing wrong with having more complicated thoughts over a matter as semantic as the use of a particular term. However, Trigger was ultimately talking about a highly politicized issue about a very real group of people. People who are facing widespread discrimination by groups who want to make it impossible or incredibly difficult for them to exist.

During the evening of December 7, 2023, Trigger posted another response, dubbing it his “last spiel.” While even more verbose than his prior responses, he addresses the claims of transphobia by clarifying his respect for trans people. He claims to use their preferred pronouns, offer them the same “cordial understanding” he would for anyone else, and states that “trans women are women.” He acknowledges that trans people’s rights are being taken away, and frames it as a bad thing. While also claiming to “support trans people individually, but not the trans community.”

That might seem like a contradiction, but as a trans woman myself… I can see where he is coming from. Most trans people, and members of minority communities, simply wish to be given legal protections, access to employment, access to medical care, general human rights, that sort of stuff. However, it is difficult to extrapolate these ideas onto a broader community, as communities are made up of a large group of different people with different perspectives. Because groups of people are not a monolith. It is difficult to support a community, as it can be unclear, or ambiguous, what a community stands for or wants. Particularly if one is outside of it or, as Trigger puts it, only has a “foot in the door.”

Which is something Trigger emphasizes throughout this statement, explaining that he is not trans, and part of the 99.5% cis gender majority of the population. (That is a debatable number, but whatever.) He believes himself to be half-way across the bridge of compromise between cis and trans people. And he believes that trans people need to learn how to meet him half-way, putting the onus on them to “do better.”

While this is a reasonable sentiment in theory… it sort of isn’t when, again, this is people’s lives we are talking about, and not a matter of preference or opinion. This lack of understanding, acknowledgement, or just ironclad stubbornness, combined with the subject matter at hand… made civil discussion virtually impossible.

On the public Discord server, Trigger was subjected to a lot of anger and negative attention after his @everyone message. I can only assume he was met with similar frustration from people via his DMs, all urging him to change his mind, shift over to their side, and change his perspective. This could have functioned as a radicalization event, all due to a disagreement on terminology and semantics. But, fortunately, it did not. 

As someone who was there to observe this event in real-time… this was all a shitshow. Trigger mishandled the situation, misrepresented the arguments of other people in the @everyone message, and the situation exploded into infinitely more drama than it should have. Based on his “last spiel” response, years of observed behavior (I was a long-term lurker in the TFGS forums), and his own creations, I do not believe Trigger is a transphobe. But I do think he was being an absolute dumbass in both his senseless escalation of this issue and the way he initially chose to state his opinions. And I think he still does not understand the issues in having a server with so many members, so little moderation, and virtually no rules.

Hopefully, things can return to normal from here, and I don’t need to do a drama news piece like this again for the foreseeable future. I do not like drama, but I felt that someone needed to talk about this, include relevant messages, and make it available on the wider internet. I took on the duty because a non-insignificant amount of my site traffic comes from Press-Switch, and my site is the first result when searching for the game in any major search engine. …Even before the official TFGamesSite page. If I didn’t report on this, I just know some anonymous dilweed would just give their own account of events and muck everything up even worse.

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I screened this post with Trigger, Mariana, and Skillet (another regular member of the Press-Switch Discord) prior to publishing. If you believe there is a material omission or misstatement of fact in this reporting, please inform me via the comments below, DM me on Discord, or send me an email. My contact information is in my about page.

As of publishing this post, I still have every intention of reviewing future releases of Press-Switch.