“I don’t like mirrors. It’s almost like there’s an unknown world right on the other side. And the person staring at me isn’t really me, just an imitator. I know how stupid that sounds, but that’s how I feel. But if I keep thinking about it, it just makes me feel sick.”

— Heather Mason (Silent Hill 3)

My name is Chandler, and I am 34 years of age. For years I have lived with the feeling that I was “different” or that something was “wrong” with me. When I was younger I was like a lightning rod for abuse from other kids my age. Hell, even the adults around me found it quite entertaining to tease me to the point of tears. Luckily for them, that point was easy to reach. I went through the usual words of encouragement from my single mother who was trying everything in her power to ensure that we had a peaceful life. She told me I was “special”, “different”, and “misunderstood” by the world. Throughout most of my life I thought I knew what it was she was referring to, but it was not until recently that I developed the vocabulary and bravery to truly discover what made me so “different” to those around me. What I have come to realize is that I am genderfluid.

Although I have not always possessed the right words to express my gender identity, it has always been felt. When I was young I often had to correct teachers and service workers about my gender. I was constantly called a “girl”—both as an insult and as a genuine reading of my performed gender. I went through the stages you would come to expect from such a situation. At first I would scream loudly, “I’m not a girl!” to any poor sap who misgendered me when I was feeling fed up. In my teens and early twenties I started to own those comments. I wore a pixie cut for a time, painted my nails, wore women’s gloves, among other little details. Whenever someone called me a girl or “ma’am” I would just respond normally and smirk when they heard the bass in my voice. I thought I was just performing a certain way as a means to diffuse a lot of the bullying I had experienced in my younger years.

That was, until I played Silent Hill 3.

“What a nightmare…”

I first played the game back in 2006. I was 19 at the time. I instantly felt an odd connection with the game’s protagonist, Heather Mason. [It should be noted that the character’s preferred identity is that of Cheryl Mason, which is established at the end of the game. However, to avoid confusion for those not acquainted with the game, I will refer to her as “Heather” unless it is important to make the distinction.] In the game Heather is a 17 year old girl whose world is turned upside-down when she is seemingly stalked by a man in a trench coat while running errands for her father at the local mall. After attempting to shake her apparent stalker, Heather finally confronts him to discover that he is a private investigator hired to inform her of who she really is: Cheryl Mason, the reincarnation of the girl whose soul is key in bringing upon an age of death and paradise for the Order of Silent Hill.

Heather runs away from him before he can properly explain his intentions. However, it may have been wiser to stay by the man’s side, as the entire mall slowly transforms into a hellish mirror version of itself. Once the transformation is complete, Heather comes across faceless, pulsing monstrosities that stalk her endlessly. Eventually she comes face-to-face with the leader of the Order, Claudia Wolf, who reiterates Heather’s birthright in full. She is the chosen vessel for their god, and they will have their new age of paradise. What follows is Heather’s journey through loss, grief, suffering, and nightmares made manifest, as she comes to terms with who she is and how to accept this new reality.

As is evident from this brief synopsis, there are no clear allegories to genderfluidity in any direct way. Yet, I did find many of its themes and imagery similar to my own experience with trying to find a better understanding of who I am over the last three decades. Like Heather, I spent the majority of my life dealing with people trying to tell me who I was, what my strengths and weaknesses were, and even what my tastes were. Heather’s resistance against Claudia’s attempts to conjure forth an identity that she did not align with made a great impression on me. It was an impression that I harness to this very day. In a sense, this game struck the spark that led to my fiery path of self discovery in the first place. It started with me saying that I would no longer adhere to how others wanted me to be. Mind you, this did not come easily, and there were giant missteps along the way. For instance, it was not until my marriage of ten years came to an end that I realized how I had molded my appearance to the desires of my partner—even when it was detrimental to my mental health. Still, the pulsing, androgynous shadow of Silent Hill 3 followed me all those years later. It enveloped me once more in its dark embrace, and the lessons I had learned from that game came back to me slowly, but surely.

“Monsters? They looked like monsters to you?”

Overarching themes aside, there is far more to Silent Hill 3 that spoke to me about my gender. The Silent Hill franchise is widely known for its contorted and mangled enemies. Each one serves as a misshapen manifestation from the protagonist’s psyche. Silent Hill 2 famously imbued its various enemies with overtly psychosexual undertones to illustrate James Sunderland’s guilt and sexual suppression. Silent Hill 4 presents its enemies as ghoulish phantoms that are twisted representations of the people murdered by the game’s antagonist. What has always been striking to me regarding Silent Hill 3’s enemies is that they are all rather nondescript. I am not saying that they are uninspired or simple. Rather, that they lack any clear or discerning features outside of their general shape. Each creature Heather comes in contact with is a writhing mass of flesh and pain.

The game’s most notorious enemy types, the Closer, are hulking humanoid beasts with rounded appendages. The skin around their face is stretched over like a fitted sheet over a mattress, making them devoid of any semblance of anything but pulsing flesh. They twitch and twist as they stalk Heather with a deep, gurgling moan. Other monsters include what appear to be wasp/hornet-like flying creatures that spin in place while creating a piercing screech that compels the player to dispatch them if to do nothing more than to bring peace to their auditory senses, dogs whose flesh has started falling from their bodies and contorted into a lumpy mass of fur with a vague resemblance of the hounds they once were, and pistol-wielding nurses who have their faces covered in long black hair much like Sadako from the Japanese horror classic, Ringu (1998). What all of these monsters have in common is how their faces are predominantly obscured and how they twitch across the screen.

What these faceless, screeching creatures represent to me is a painful topic for many LGBTQA+ people: gender dysphoria. They are the pain felt when those like me look into the mirror but are not met with a reflection of who they truly are. Genderfluidity can feel like a super power at times. I sometimes feel as if I am able to exist in many gendered social groups with little difficulty. As my mother recently called it upon me coming out to her, we are like social “chameleons'' able to blend with our environment. Unfortunately, this comes with the added caveat that, as a result, we only truly exist in liminal spaces.

We are the space between the binary.

My sense of being neither accepts nor fully rejects gender binaries, because I feel the pull of one or both at any given time. This is not to say that I agree with gender binaries on a socio-political level. Not at all. Gender is like a kaleidoscope of shapes, colors, and the melding thereof. My meaning is that my lived bodily experience is one met with either a pull toward or a push away from a specific gender at any given time. The horror of this comes in the form of unexpected bouts of dysphoria. There is nothing more horrifying than looking in the mirror and seeing only a shadow of yourself. Most times I am proud of who I see, because I can see me. I see the true self that lies within my consciousness. Sadly, there are plenty of other times when what I see is a horrid, misshapen mockery of myself. My hair, the shape of my shoulders, my general stature, or simply the lack of femininity or masculinity expressed in my appearance at the moment of catching a glimpse of my reflection can lead to a split second of crisis.

“All I know is that things are getting really screwy around here and I got a weird feeling it’s got something to do with me.”

This allegory is not only shown in Silent Hill 3 by way of its creature designs, but also through Heather herself. Heather harbors a fear of her own reflection, which is explored in the opening quote of this article.. The quote comes about when you approach a mirror in the mall bathroom. Due to the technical limitations of the PlayStation 2, her reflection is blurry and distorted on the screen. As they did with the fog of the previous two entries in the franchise, the developers turned this limitation into a feature of the story. Her reflection is not distorted merely due to technical limitations, but because it is how Heather views herself. This point is hammered home when the player enters a certain room in the otherworld wherein the developers have created a true reflection in a large mirror. However, the mirror world is overrun with a pulsing mass of veins that eventually consume Heather and result in her death both in the mirror as well as in the “real” world. For me, this sequence presented a clear metaphor for the fears that can come with gender dysphoria. What if the reflection is the real world, and who you feel you are is the lie?

When Heather looks into mirrors what she sees is not the person she knows herself to be. There is always a tinge of something, or rather someone else lingering in her reflection. She feels the pull of Alessa, when all she desires is to be herself. This tumultuous relationship with her identity is further exacerbated by the fact that Heather is unsure of who she truly is until the ending of the game. Like Alessa, the guise of “Heather Mason” is a pure fabrication pushed upon her by her father. In this case she is harboring a false persona out of protection against the dangers of the Order. The fact remains that deep down, she is Cheryl Mason. That is who she was and has always been. She knows this, and it is not until she has embraced the liminal identity between Alessa and Heather that Cheryl is truly at peace with herself.

Just as Cheryl found tranquility upon accepting herself in spite of the views of the world around her, I did not feel quite as whole as I have since the day I accepted my own identity. Gone are the days of being “one of the girls” with an ironic laugh from my end. Instead, it will serve as a compliment and affirmation of how I feel at times. The world will continue to try to impose gender roles on each other, but I am proud to be able to hold my head high. I am the thing they fear most:

A monster who is self aware in the truest sense.