There are occasional appearances of trans flags and a few characters who may or may not be LGBTQ, but the majority of the characters appear to be cisgender and heterosexual.

Imagine completely ignoring a canonically trans character to try to dunk on a game. Also softballing that "may or may not" when half of the romance options are homosexual.

"....its portrayal of trans characters is anything but progressive. Many gamers have criticized how Cyberpunk 2077 and its developer, CD Projekt Red, choose to fetishize and commodity trans bodies and trans identity."

That's.... the entire point. There is a big, big difference between how CDPR feels about transgender people, and how the Late Stage Capitalist Pigs in Night City treats trans people.

Yes, the advertisements in the game are gross, they're supposed to be. Human beings are treated like garbage in 2077. You were never supposed to look at these ads and be like "Hey, this is totally cool and normal." If your reaction was "This is gross", that's exactly how you were meant to feel. It was supposed to make you reflect upon the culture the game takes place in and realize how messed up and broken it is.

You don't (I sincerely hope) watch a film and conclude that the views expressed by the villains of the piece are the views held by the actor or director do you? There is a reason Ad Agencies in Cyberpunk treat human beings as commodities, because that's exactly how they view them.

"Obviously, Cyberpunk 2077 presents a dystopian society rather than an aspirational one. Trans identity is treated as a product because everything is a product designed to be sexualized in this future. However, there's never any contrast established. With other elements of Night City, players see how the commodified image contrasts with the rougher, harsher reality. This is not the case with LGBTQ characters, especially not trans characters."

One of the main characters in the game is a trans woman, and she isn't fetishized in any way. There are also some very prominent LGBT characters, and they are treated respectfully as well imo. The person who wrote that article never even played the game and it shows. It's possible the "reviewers who have played anywhere from 40 to 60 hours have yet to encounter any meaningful trans NPCs." simply missed the fact that Claire was transgender because no one makes a big deal about it, but it is most definitely mentioned. She has a trans pride flag on her racing truck as well.

Edit: The same is true of the Gay and Lesbian characters as well. The "reviewers" may have missed that that's what they were because they are not treated as if they are different, they are just treated as people. You wouldn't know whether they were or not if you didn't spend the time to build a relationship with them so that flirting seems natural. I think that is actually really heartwarming, despite all the brainwashing by the corpos, (the people that V interacts with at least) don't seem to really have been affected by it.

E: In my first playthrough, I was a * "Male" V. Another one of the main characters is a woman named Judy. After spending dozens of hours with her and going through hell together we became really close friends. Then there was this really sweet 'mission' where Judy took me scuba diving and basically opened up her heart to me and told me what a good friend I had been to her. I awkwardly made a pass at her and she just gently brushes it off to let me know that I was barking up the wrong tree. I could easily see someone spending 40 hours in the game not having a clue what Judy's sexual orientation was- especially if they were a jerk to her.

E: With a couple of the guy characters it gave me the option of flirting with them, which I didn't try because my V was already in a relationship with a different character. After beating the game I still had no clue which one would have been receptive to my advances, I had to look it up. Basically the game seemed to be saying that someones sexual orientation is really none of your business unless you are tying to get with them.

E: * "Male" in this instance just means masculine voice and body type, sex organs aren't factored in when determining who you are able to romance.

During character creation you can choose genitalia for your character independently from their 'body type'. You can also choose a 'male' or 'female' voice artist for V no matter how your character looks. I don't know of any other game that let's you have that sort of freedom in character creation. This game let's you be whoever you want to be in a way rarely (if ever) seen in other games.

"Cyberpunk 2077 never makes an effort to reflect on this fetishization, which erases any possibility of satire or social commentary. If a game presents transphobic advertisements and never addresses these depictions, it just regurgitates and upholds transphobia."

Cyberpunk treats players as if they aren't idiots, as is the case with any good satire. The idea that it must specifically call out any bit of satire it's doing or 'it doesn't count', is insulting and ridiculous. Would "Monty Pythons Life of Brian" have been a better film if at one point the main character had turned to camera and said "This is just like Jesus, get it?"

After the tweet received massive backlash, the social media account responded with a non-apology.

The fact that they used CDPR's apology as proof that they weren't sorry is just... come on. Calling it a stretch seems inadequate.

I just think it's really tacky and gross to do a surface level scan of a piece of media you haven't personally experienced, put no thought into it, and then write a hit piece to get clicks on your website. There are plenty of actually transphobic assholes out there to call out. At the very least CDPR got people talking about these issues, name 3 other games you can say the same thing about.-

Oh great. Dead twitter links and so screenshots.

Yeah, you're a genius all right. You managed to completely miss the whole point of cyberpunk. I imagine any story much more complex than a children's book just flies right over your head.