How Donkey Kong became a trans icon

By Laura Dale // Guest presenter on Original Pilot Material

As a full time gaming critic, as well as a transgender woman, one aspect of video games I find really interesting is live streaming, where gamers play games online for an audience, who can watch along and interact by talking to the person playing the game.

Over the past few years, one aspect of streaming which has become more and more prevalent over time is charity streams, where players set a lengthy or complicated video game task and vow to keep playing live until it’s completed as a way to encourage donations for a certain cause.

Summer Games Done Quick for example, where gamers annually try to complete games as quickly as possible, brought in over two million US dollars last year during a single event. Twitch, the place where most of these livestreams take place, estimates that $75 million was raised for charity with livestreams between 2012 and 2017, which should give you an idea of how big charity streams can become if they manage to take off.

However, today we’re here to talk about a particular video game charity stream, the 2019 HBomberguy Donkey Kong live stream, which made international headlines not just because of the money it raised, and the story behind the stream’s creation, but also for the unbelievable number of hugely famous people outside of the gaming community who came to lend their support to the stream, and the transgender community.

What made this particular live stream so special, and such an important moment of support for the transgender community, is that for a few days, it felt like the whole world was standing up for us. As a trans woman, someone who is often made to feel lesser or harassed within the gaming community, this stream felt like it was drowning out that hate for a few days. It showed that while one loud man with a megaphone can do their best to financially strip support from the transgender community, the world can come together and undo that monetary harm.

But, what actually happened? Well, let’s start off with a little background on the events that led to the live stream taking place. Back in early 2019, the UK’s Big Lottery fund, which distributes funds from the UK’s National Lottery to good causes, announced that a planned £500,000 grant for the charity Mermaids was being reconsidered and was at risk of being cancelled. The charity, which provides important resources and support such as counselling to transgender people under the age of eighteen and their families, was at the time facing attempts to have the funding decision revoked by those opposed to increased rights for the transgender community.

This is where Hbomberguy, or Harry Brewis, becomes a part of the story. Brewis is perhaps best known for his Hbomberguy YouTube channel, where he creates long form video essays about political issues, as well as critiques of pop culture, including video games.

Brewis decided to host a charity live stream to try and recoup some of the funds that Mermaids were at risk of losing. He picked a game, Donkey Kong 64, and decided to play it to a ludicrous degree of perfection, raising money for the charity and discussing topics around the rights of transgender people along the way.

Around this time, Brewis contacted CaseyExplosion, another streamer, who is, herself, transgender and sought her help setting up guests to join his planned 50+ hour long stream. The hope was that together they could get a few names in gaming to hop on, draw attention to the stream, and help raise more money for the charity.

“When Hbomberguy was doing the charity stream he reached out to me with the idea being he'd have some guests on to.... talk with him while he was gaming, so that when he was gaming it wouldn't just be dead air”.

When all the dust had settled, the stream had raised an amazing £265,000 for a charity which supports young transgender people, and nobody was more shocked about that than the charity themselves.

Helen, who worked as a volunteer during the live stream, said:

“We'd never heard of Harry Brewer, nobody had said to us that he was doing anything. I did the usual thing of saying 'thanks so much and you're ever so generous and that's great'. I didn't really think much more about it I just thought 'I'll check up and see how they're getting on in the morning this kind of weird random online thing. So I went to bed, got up the next morning and I think by then it was about £20,000. I was like oh my god this is amazing.

When Alexandria Ocasio Cortez came on, everything went ballistic. You couldn't even read the messages they were just going so fast.

Obviously the money was amazing, but one of the things that was really obvious when you went on to the stream itself was the messages of support for trans kids and young people.

When you went and looked on the thread literally every couple of seconds there was popping up a 'support trans rights' 'support trans kids' and I saw this and thought this is what families and kids should be looking at, this is what they should be aware of.

Then sort of like Saturday afternoon ...Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez retweeted a tweet that we'd put out saying this is amazing isn't it great. She actually then quote tweeted it and suddenly we saw numbers that were in their hundreds in terms of people on the feed at any one time going up into literally thousands and thousands of people.

One of the first people I tweeted out was Cher, and she retweeted. It was so exciting. When you saw the message stream on Twitch, normally it's really slow, but it was like toilet roll rolling off. It was moving so quickly.

AOC came on, Chelsea Manning as well and Mara Wilson. I went on and spoke to Harry. It must've been about 2 or 3 in the morning. That whole weekend for me is totally surreal now, sitting back and looking at it.

When she [AOC] came on, everything went ballistic. You couldn't even read the messages they were just going so fast. The other thing with AOC/Chelsea Manning/Mara Wilson coming on is that all these young people were hearing this and seeing this as well so it was such a massively positive message after a really crappy couple of months.

At 77k Harry broke down and had a cry because he thought he was going to make £3/4 thousand. He kept on making himself little challenges like "if you make another 10 grand in the next hour then I'll go to the supermarket with ... written on my forehead".

One of the lovely things was that he had this team and they were there running the show while he was sleeping. Actually, one of the most poignant thing was the voices that came through at that time. While he wasn't playing, there was a lot of trans people on talking about their stories. I remember he got a young person and I'd spoken to them [on the helpline] and they said they thought they would've been dead if they hadn't have found someone to talk to who understood. I had a conversation with her as well online and that was really moving.

There was another person who had been desperately crowdfunding for months and months for a wheelchair. By the time they came off the Twitch stream, the wheelchair had been crowdfunded and more.

Essentially, for Mermaids as an organisation, I think we took on five members of staff based on having that much in the bank in terms of unrestricted funding so it gave us a boost. As a small charity, one of the things that is always difficult to have even if you go for grants and apply for projects etc, is actually getting core funding that covers your baseline functions and the salaries. Actually getting on with the general running costs of the charity is one of the hardest things to do and this gave us such an enormous boost and it also allowed us to put people into places that we knew we desperately needed but we just didn't have the funds to be able to do.

We got to the middle of February and then the Lottery confirmed that they were going to give us the grant because they'd looked into all the accusations made against us and found them to be baseless.”

While it’s undeniably amazing how much money this charity stream was able to raise, I think the bigger part of its legacy is undoubtedly the fact that it turned the simple two word phrase “Trans Rights” into a rallying cry, a call for people to share a simple message of support, in the face of a world where transphobic rhetoric and abuse are on the rise.

Seeing people like Alexandria Ocazio-Cortez, Mara Wilson, Adam Connover, Chuck Tingle, Grant Kirkhope, Niel Gaiman, Cher, Adam Savage, and more come together and announce their explicit support of the transgender community and our fight for rights felt like, for a brief moment, the tides were shifting.

It was a few days where, as a trans person in the video game industry, I felt excited, safe, and welcome. Sure, “trans rights” as a phrase lacks nuance. That phrase alone isn’t tangibly fighting for improved rights, but it’s a powerful start. It’s a phrase that says you’re safe with me, and honestly, as a trans person, just knowing which celebrities I can safely enjoy, without worrying that they secretly wished I didn’t exist, is a relief.

If nothing else, we can all smile knowing not that a simple jpg of a video game gorilla protagonist is now a powerful act of protest and a way to remind one man that his attempt to remove financial support from the trans community failed in a spectacular fashion, only serving to bring our supporters together.

This story tells us that in the attempt to defund Mermaids, those who sought to harm our community ultimately brought trans allies visibly together. No matter how much you may wish to remove the rights from one minority group, know that there’s probably a gamer round the corner, willing to raise that money that you’re trying to remove.

Gaming streams are the new telethons, if telethons allowed every person watching to shout their support from the rooftops while they watched along. They have a global reach, to bring causes across borders, and long may that continue.