Two transgender friends meet in virtual reality

Their names are Silent and Radar. The two transgender friends spend most of their time on the virtual reality platform where they met: VRChat. This growing community of approximately 70,000 people is a space where they can explore their identity and overcome boundaries, whether borders or language. Inside the 10-year-old software, they created an environment for unlimited, rapid creative expression. I spent several months working with Silent and Radar, their chosen avatar names, to uncover the intricacies of their particular digital lives.

Silent lives in his childhood home in Connecticut with his parents, brother, and niece. After suffering a severe concussion in high school, she transformed the gazebo outside her home into a place of solace and personal exploration. There, before discovering virtual reality, she spent entire days on the web. “Walking and traveling don’t exist, they don’t need to exist. It’s out of fashion,” she said. “It’s like horses and buggies. Why would I use a horse and buggy when I have a car? Why would I use a car when I could just teleport?

On Manhattan’s Upper West Side, Radar processes vinyl records from the ’90s rave scene at home. The rent-stable apartment complex where she lives with her parents and siblings is the only home she ever known. For her, VR “it’s like a simulation of a world without owners. Because it costs nothing to keep a world up and running. And it doesn’t matter if no one shows up to your world, or your event, or whatever, because it’s still there.

For both of them, it’s never about the technology itself, but about the human emotional need and how it is satisfied.

I began this project with a hint of skepticism towards digitally immersed lifestyles, which I thought could detract from real, physical lived experiences. But I quickly opened my eyes to a more complex perspective. Both Silent and Radar find great value in their digital world. Their avatars are a means of embodying and projecting who they want to be perceived as. The environment itself is an extension of where they live: rural and relatively isolated for Silent; urban, confined and unaffordable for Radar – circumstances that many of us can relate to.

Silent works at a cathedral-themed VR club called Sanctum. He is often asked to become a DJ or VJ to create visuals that are projected during DJ sets. “I may have more of a connection with my avatar than with my physical self,” Silent says. “She was the embodiment of the person I wanted to become. I want to be there all the time now so I can be that person, especially to constantly relive that memory of me realizing who I was. My “VR self” influences my “real self” and vice versa. I’m fully integrated at this point.

“I want people to find what is most meaningful. I want people to discover who they are. I want you to be the most you. As well as being as often as possible. » says Radar, who since the project moved to Vermont, giving free rein to his inner mouse.

Experience this photo report through virtual reality with voice-overs from Silent and Radar.