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# Samus Being a Woman Isn't Even the Most Trans Thing About Metroid
- URL: https://malloryelliott.ghost.io/samus-being-a-woman-isnt-even-the/
- Published: 2026-04-14T18:44:10.000Z
- Updated: 2026-08-23T19:27:07.000Z
- Description: It's everything
- Author: Mallory Elliott
- Tags: video game criticism, trans, transfemininity, vintage gaming, metroid, lgbt, Newsletter, #Migrated-1787496673720, #Import 2026-08-23 14:51

*Disclaimer: I often speak here of trans girls and women in general, as if any or all of this applies to anyone but me. I think it does, but I don’t know know the extent to which other transfeminine people will relate to this. If you don’t see yourself in this description of experience, that’s fine! Maybe it’s all just me, but I doubt it.*

## Part 1: Not like other games / not like other girls

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/cc/68/cc68e97d-7af0-45c2-89f6-b9903d3d3811/content/images/2026/08/958cd5ed-ef7f-44a5-9021-b96896e5665d_256x240.gif)

Early Nintendo games had a wonderful way of just dropping you in without any sort of fanfare. *Metroid* (the first one, for the NES, from 1986) is a particularly extreme example. You hit the power button and are immediately confronted with the title screen’s bleak atonal music. Is the NES broken? Compared to the rousing high fantasy theme of *The Legend of Zelda*, the medieval fairy-dusting of the title music for the first *Final Fantasy*, or the chipper ragtime of S*uper Mario Bros. 2*, the *Metroid* title screen music is ominous doom-fuel, its jagged three note melodic scheme screeching over low, long bass notes as stars sparkle in the blackness over a rocky, seemingly lifeless planetary surface.

Mario is alone (aside from the bad news provided by Toad at the end of each castle), Link is also alone (aside from the shopkeeps and weird old men and women hiding in certain caves). So are Kid Icarus, Mega Man, Simon Belmont—all of them singular heroes battling an endless onslaught of monsters, machines, and obstacles. But none of the early NES characters feels as alone as Samus Aran. Maybe it’s the sheer darkness of the game—you start in a cavern and you just go deeper and deeper into the bowels of this weird planet, which isn’t Earth or even Earth-like. The music, save for the heroic theme on the game’s starting level, is just as atonal and disquieting as the title screen’s. By the level called Norfair, the landscape, already strange, becomes sort of sickening, built from uncanny bubbles that look like some kind of petrified organic fluid, or a pile of tumors.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/cc/68/cc68e97d-7af0-45c2-89f6-b9903d3d3811/content/images/2026/08/92836300-55eb-4b59-b5f5-1cad56f5e0ec_386x259.gif)

Nothing about this game seems designed to make you comfortable. No one is holding your hand or even providing so much as a hint as to where you’re supposed to go next and what you’re supposed to find there. Crucial passageways and items are maddeningly hidden. It’s possible at certain points to fall into pits you simply can’t get out of—you just have to reset the game. Without any help from walkthroughs or maps, you’re likely to try several excursions that won’t get you anywhere, jumps that prove to be impossible, attempted demolition of every inch of wall and floor. The monsters here have none of the cuteness of Mario’s goombas, Link’s moblins, or the slimes of the *Dragon Quest* series. They’re eerie, cold, and relentless, seemingly inspired by the same dark corners of *D&D* monster manuals that inspired the hideous Upside Down creatures from *Stranger Things.*

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/cc/68/cc68e97d-7af0-45c2-89f6-b9903d3d3811/content/images/2026/08/16b36a45-8f23-4ddb-9c32-2384b63fbc68_104x100.gif)

Get it away from me. Get it the fuck away from me.

The high technology and advanced civilization that allowed Samus to come here and survive here are nowhere in sight—we don’t even see, as in later games, her spaceship. Instead, we walk around in the ruins of a lost civilization. *Metroid* offers a sense of the gothic that goes way beyond the Halloween cliches of *Castlevania*. It’s a uniquely sci-fi gothic that draws from the horrific, claustrophobic outer space of the *Alien* films rather than the utopian visions of *Star Trek,* the cishet camp of *Star Wars,* or satirical cynicism of cyberpunk.

In the place of Link’s helpful hermit advisors are the silent Chozo, offering items but nothing else—or are they even offering them? In order to survive, Samus has to rob these creatures’ graves, or temples, or whatever they are—but what sort of wrath is she incurring by doing this? This kind of thought probably didn’t occur to the average player in 1986, but it’s baked into the game nonetheless—later, in *Super Metroid,* a Chozo statue comes to life and attacks Samus after she grabs the item in its hands, and if you’re not expecting it, it’s genuinely scary, prompting the eerie recognition that *you aren’t supposed to be here*.

Despite all this fantastically creepy, anxious atmosphere, *Metroid* became best known for its surprise ending: if you finish the game fast enough, you can see Samus without her suit on and play through the game again with this suitless Samus. Probably some players—the best ones, who didn’t see only her helmet come off, but the whole suit—didn’t get it at first. *Who’s this pixelbabe greeting me? Has Samus’ oxygen cut out, and she’s the last the last thing he’s seeing before he dies?*

But if they were to hit start and try to replay the game, just for kicks, they’d finally understand—they’ve been a girl this whole time. (Some people, apparently, *still* didn’t get it even after seeing this. An old off-brand gaming mag [describes Samus being turned ](https://www.acriticalhit.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/VGCE%5FUS%5F06-from-Sega-Retro-53.png?ref=malloryelliott.ghost.io)[*into*](https://www.acriticalhit.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/VGCE%5FUS%5F06-from-Sega-Retro-53.png?ref=malloryelliott.ghost.io)[ a woman](https://www.acriticalhit.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/VGCE%5FUS%5F06-from-Sega-Retro-53.png?ref=malloryelliott.ghost.io), not turning out to *be* one.)

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/cc/68/cc68e97d-7af0-45c2-89f6-b9903d3d3811/content/images/2026/08/96358e2e-608a-444c-8809-43bfdb042203_256x240.gif)

You’ve been a girl the whole time! How does it feel? Weird? Good? A little **too* good?

Finishing the game fast enough to play as suitless Samus—in less than three hours— was very difficult—I never managed it. The ordinary way to see her was to use a password: JUSTIN BAILEY, followed by a bunch of dashes. The origins of this name are a little mysterious, but the truth is that the name Justin Bailey is [one of many possible passwords](https://gaming-urban-legends.fandom.com/wiki/Justin%5FBailey%5FCode?commentId=4400000000000401002&ref=malloryelliott.ghost.io) that can be created with recognizable names or other words. But Justin came first and so it stuck, and the male name became indelibly associated with the shock of learning that Samus Aran was a woman. A few years after my first experiences with *Metroid,* in my late teens, I would begin using Justin Bailey as one of several online pseudonyms. I was well over a decade away from realizing I was trans, but it just made sense to me. “Justin Bailey” was the keeper of a certain secret, and also the key to unlocking that secret.

There’s no good reason to assume Samus is, canonically speaking, a *trans* woman, but the revelation of her gender struck an uncanny chord for many young trans girl gamers of the 80s and 90s. We may have seen transsexuals on a daytime talk show, in a “human interest story” on the news, or in a movie, but they were always presented as a circus sideshow, exotic and rare. Such people were not a part of *real* life. For many of us, the idea that *we* might be like those women in some way was not even ridiculous—it was not a *thinkable* thought. It could only be accessed, mysteriously, by proxy. Samus’s appearance in the suit, her dangerous, adventurous work as a bounty hunter, her phallic gun-arm—they all, especially in the trad 1980s, indicated masculinity, just like our own bodies, a lot of the things we enjoyed (video games included), and a lot of the friends we had. Just like with her, there was no good reason we shouldn’t be boys, canonically speaking, but the funny thing was, if we could allow ourselves a moment of quiet reflection to search our deeper feelings and identifications, we became aware that we just *weren’t.*

For some of us, this was a source of private suffering; for others, who coped by dissociating from the emotional weight of it, it was just a strange fact of our existence that we didn’t know what to do with—a little embarrassing, a little amusing, a little wistful, but in any case, certainly not *actionable.*

Besides, there was nothing we could really offer, even to ourselves, to prove it. Try to imagine: you don’t seem to look like a girl, you don’t seem to talk or act like a girl, you don’t seem, except on a certain elusive level of desire, to *feel* like a girl —and besides, what does that even feel like? How could you even know, from this side of the fence?—you just *are* one, in some obscure but indefatigable way. You’re Samus, buddy.

## Part 2: “If you wanted to be a girl, why did you keep being a boy?”

  
By the time I was using Justin Bailey as a name online (ages 18-21), it was pretty clear to me that I identified in a strange way with femininity, if not exactly *as* a woman*.* My progressive female friends were very good at reminding me I had no idea what it was like, and they were right. Identification, even our identification with our own reflection in a mirror, is always aspiration. The French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan [argued](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirror%5Fstage?ref=malloryelliott.ghost.io) that we have no unified concept of self until we see ourselves reflected, whether in a literal mirror, or by the mirroring behavior of caregivers. Thus, the unified self—the ego—is always something outside us, an idea, a goal of integration we strive for amid the maelstrom of our actually chaotic, unintegrated selves and bodies. It is imaginary, but no less important for being imaginary. We need it, but we also need to come to terms with the fact that it is, in the end, only something we've dreamed and could dream up differently—and if we’re going to adapt to life’s changes, we’re going to have to dream it up differently.

Although they have traditionally been viewed as pathological, conscious and unconscious disjunctures between gender identity and gender assignment have been noted and commented upon since the earliest days of psychoanalysis. It wasn’t unusual for Freud and his disciples to encounter a man whose whole way of relating to others, though he didn’t realize it, was as a woman—and vice versa. In some cases, these cross-sex identifications might only exist in relation to particular people or in particular situations; in others, they could be pervasive and fundamental. Take, for example, this remarkable passage from Karl Abraham, one of Freud’s earliest students:

![Image](https://storage.ghost.io/c/cc/68/cc68e97d-7af0-45c2-89f6-b9903d3d3811/content/images/2026/08/48a400d2-1053-4580-aed4-6df9ea4b3bad_577x461.png)

The point is, from this point of view, whatever we *think* we are on the surface, we might also *know* ourselves to be something very different, without being aware of it—or perhaps being aware of it *only as a fantasy*.

Of course, a male-assigned person who merely desires on any level to be a woman is not yet a trans woman. One must actually transition in some way, which means taking ownership of this desire, not just by admitting that you have it, but by *pursuing it*. In this sense, transition is a retrocausal act that changes not only who you are and will be, but also who you always were. It’s an alchemical process in which desire is transformed into identity.

While a minority of trans girls consciously recognize their transness from an early age, instinctively seeking female socialization whenever male socialization isn’t being forced on them, many others take a different path, passively accepting rather than actively refusing the masculinity being offered to us—at least for a time. By definition, none of us are *completely* comfortable with being boys—and under the surface, we’re usually even less comfortable than we think—but we’re able to find some workable, normative male persona.

It’s easier to understand how a trans girl would take the former path, but harder to understand the latter. This lack of a complete allergy to male culture and male roles seems to call our transness into question: “If you wanted to be a girl, why did you keep being a boy? Why didn’t you seek out all the feminine experience you could?” But the strange truth is that being a boy/becoming a man is attractive to many trans girls precisely *because* of their transness.

The first reason is negative social pressure: the whole culture is pressuring you to avoid anything “girly” like the plague, lest you be seen as “gay”—a term that, even before you really understand what it means, is clearly a social death sentence. Deviations from the accepted range of male expression are often punished through ridicule and/or violence. We could see other boys being bolder about their femininity, and though we may have envied their apparent freedom on some level, we could also see them being punished for it, both in front of their faces and behind their backs. No sir, that wasn’t going to be us.

Is this cowardice? Hell yeah it is. But give us a break, we were freaked out kids.

The second reason is that, however much she might be attracted to the world of girls on the other side of the fence, any observant closeted trans girl could see the drawbacks to girlhood: girls were more “protected,” more fussed over, less appreciated for their thoughts than their looks, encouraged to put their desires second to others, less permitted to be rough, loud, and crazy—and a great many girls and women were not very happy about this state of affairs. Every year of childhood, girls’ restrictions for behavior and expression seemed to tighten, while boys were just allowed to “be boys.”

What was attractive about feminine culture could also be unattractive—for example, girls’ friendships may have seemed more emotionally intimate and supportive, but they often proved to be equally competitive, and that emotional entanglement could prompt intense feuds, compared to which the casual cruelty of male friendships might feel, if not less painful, at least less complicated. The culture of beauty and makeup and fashion seemed fun, too, but it also seemed to give girls and women a lot of complexes around their appearance, complexes that were reinforced by the social structure, and from which boys and men were comparatively free (at least back in my day).

The third reason has to do with the fact that the kind of repressed trans girl I’m describing is usually primarily sexually attracted to other girls and women. She has little desire for male sexual attention, and watching cis girls turned to objects in the lustful eyes of other boys is usually a pretty uncomfortable experience for her. It is even more painful to recognize *yourself*, an ostensible male, as the bearer of that gaze. In most cases, it makes dating and sex confusing; in some, it makes them virtually impossible. Often, we felt like monsters. But to be on the receiving end of that monstrousness! That seemed *much* worse.

The fourth reason is something I already mentioned above, but it bears repeating: transition, if we even knew it existed, was inconceivable to us. What would be the point of trying to act on our feelings? We didn’t just want to be allowed to be feminine boys. We wanted to *become girls*. As far as we were concerned, it was like wanting to be able to fly, or make ourselves invisible, or shoot fire from our hands. It was comic book stuff. It wasn’t going to happen. True, some of us passionately kept this secret dream alive, praying every night for a miracle, but a lot of us—I can’t be the only one—didn’t see much of a point, most of the time, in even thinking about it very long.

Besides, even if we could magically become girls through a spell or wish, though it might be fun and exotic for a time, all of the preceding observations suggested that it probably wouldn’t make us happier. Before we actually experienced much of life, before we realized how tortured we’d become, how much we’d end up starving ourselves spiritually, it wasn’t hard at all to convince ourselves that tradeoffs of masculinity were a bit better, overall. Like Samus’ armor, masculinity afforded us power and promised to spare us from a great deal of drama, scrutiny, self-loathing, and trauma. Our feminine self would be safe and sound beneath this disguise, immune to exploitation, invisible to patriarchy and the stigma of male queerness. Just like with Samus, nobody would know we were girls. It would be our secret with ourselves, a secret we kept so well that most of the time, we completely forgot about it.

## Part 3: Oh right, I was talking about *Metroid*, lol

One thing we couldn’t protect ourself from, however, was the stigma of having this desire at all. As joyful as it felt to recognize our femininity when we could, in the safety of our private worlds, it was also a source of isolation and shame—why weren’t we like the other boys? What the hell was wrong with us? How were we really going to hack it in life? In this way, we developed an intense ambivalence toward our femininity, both loving it and loathing it, and, unfortunately, often feeling the same way about the women in our lives. And the men too. And gender in general. And sort of just being alive.

When it comes to transness, or anything else you need to be but won’t let yourself be, repression rarely works forever. The only way out is through. Video games, for many of us, were an early form of escape, but they also gave us a way of staging psychic realities that were too confusing or scary to approach directly. Think again, now, of the planet Zebes’ underground labyrinth as repressed femininity seen in the mirror, ambivalently. Desire, in the form of curiosity, draws you in, but your resistance to it makes it dark and menacing, a hostile world symbolized by a properly vaginal series of caves, filled with monsters and lava pits. You can only survive it all thanks to your power suit, but if you want to go deeper, you have to power up even more.

![Mother Brain/Gallery | Wikitroid | Fandom](https://storage.ghost.io/c/cc/68/cc68e97d-7af0-45c2-89f6-b9903d3d3811/content/images/2026/08/ca6a7ae4-1531-4371-99ee-19124da64acd_497x587-jpeg.jpg)

Since I’ve already described the game, you can do most of the math, but I haven’t yet mentioned the ultimate enemy, the big boss, the Mother Brain. For some (putting my Freudian hat back on here), she might represent the internalized image of a mother who never recognized you as her daughter, who abandoned you to the masculine world. What feminine relationship is more primary, more foundational, for good or ill, than mother-daughter? The recognition, though unconscious, is immediate—it all started here. You know very well that your *actual* mother had no clue she was doing this—how could she have?—but somewhere in your mind there is still this cruel mother, dissociated from her womanly body, representing horrifically here on the screen by a giant, cybernetically enhanced brain in a glass jar, silently advancing her cold assault on the galactic order. Of all the hideous genetic abominations she’s thrown in your way from the very beginning, nothing is more fearsome than the metroids, who quickly smother you and rapidly drain your energy, just as you fear would happen if anyone found out who you really were. Pulsating like a heart, plotting like a brain, and looking like some grotesque combination of both, she represents both the evil mother of infant psychology[1](#footnote-1) and the whole threat of the player’s femininity. 

But hold up—none of this is real. We made it up. It’s all a mirage, a trap we made for ourselves, a cage we locked ourselves in. We are Perseus, the Minotaur, and the Labyrinth. The weird, tumor-like building blocks of Norfair are our flesh, the lava our blood. The Mother Brain, and all of these weird creatures, are really ourselves in our darkest visions: neither man nor woman but abomination, hideous in our own eyes, distorting our living, real-world bodies through the lens of a painful confusion. Another writer on *Metroid* [puts it this way](https://www.gamerswithglasses.com/features/metroid-motherbrain?ref=malloryelliott.ghost.io):

> *Staring into that inscrutable, fleshy mass without a face, I’m forced to confront the limits of my body and agency. Mother Brain terrified me because \[…\] it left me with only silence as the answer to one of the oldest existential questions: what am I without a body?*

The answer is nobody. Ultimately, we have to struggle with the demons of our imagination if we’re ever going to be able to take control of our destinies—to whatever extent we ever really can. We have to blast them all to pieces. We have to journey to the depths of this hostile world, come to terms with its claim on us, destroy its ruler, emerge alive, shed the power suit, and expose ourselves to the light of day.

If this all sounds crazy to you, then I guess you have never really felt compelled to play a video game like your life depended on it.

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1. Other examples from media/literature/mythology: Medea from Greek myth, driven by vengeance to murdered her children, the Wicked Witch from *The Wizard of Oz*, Norman Bates’ mother in *Psycho*, The White Witch and the Lady of the Green Kirtle in *The Chronicles of Narnia*,Malificent in *Sleeping Beauty*, Mrs. Robinson in *The Graduate,* Norma Desmond in *Sunset Boulevard,* Meredith in the 1998 *Parent Trap*. Sometimes this figure is contrasted with a “good mother,” such as Glinda in *The Wizard of Oz*. If she she isn’t an actual witch, she’s very often she a stepmother, as in *Cinderella*, or a seductive “cougar.” She oppresses sons and daughters alike, and as a villain she commits the dual sin of both attempting to assume power outside of patriarchy and, like male villains, simply being a malicious personality. I may write more about this trope in another piece, because it’s fascinated me for a long time. [↩](#footnote-anchor-1 "Jump back to footnote 1 in the text.")