Is Link Trans Or Not? The Internet Debates

Two significant things that happened in the past month were the release of Tears of the Kingdom and the start of Pride Month, which evidently meant it was time for media outlets to begin looking at The Legend of Zelda franchise through a queer lens.

Over the past month, multiple outlets have published pieces looking at franchise hero Link as a gender-neutral icon. Gizmodo interviewed many trans players who talked about how they saw trans signifiers in Link. One player stated:

“As a trans man, Link is soft-faced and hard-bodied yet slim, elements I think a certain subset of trans men can identify with. As a trans woman, Link is seen as a man but is soft-faced, and often bucks male gender norms or wears women’s clothes… he’s a character who simply emanates t-boy swag. The way Link dresses, carries, and presents himself across the entire series SCREAMS transmasc to me.”

Others noted that in the Zelda series, most characters are very clearly coded as male or female, but Link, a silent protagonist, presents in an "almost genderless" way. The piece notes that the section in Breath of the Wild where Link has to dress like a Gerudo was a "very liberating moment" to several trans players of Zelda.

From there, several other publications began analyzing Link as a potentially queer-coded character. The Gamer's Jade King, a trans writer herself, echoed the sentiment that the Gerudo segment in Breath of the Wild was "a powerful thing to witness" and voiced how Link's features lent themselves to a "genderless" reading.

PBS News Hour notably interviewed several game journalists who said that Link, while canonically male, has many feminine characteristics that allow players to see gender neutrality in the character.

It isn't mere happenstance that the idea of Link being non-binary has taken off. In 2016, Zelda series producer Eiji Aonuma wrote that starting with Ocarina of Time, he instructed designers to give Link a gender-neutral design. "I wanted the player to think, ‘Maybe Link is a boy or a girl.’ If you saw Link as a guy, he’d have more of a feminine touch; or vice versa, if you related to Link as a girl, it was with more of a masculine aspect," he said.

However, as the articles have mounted up in recent weeks, those against the idea of Link being gender-neutral began posting as well.

On May 31st, Fox News posted an article about the growing trend, highlighting the negative reactions to the various posts. For example, Fox noted on the PBS post how one user wrote, "I'm about as independent as they come, and I disagree with the claims made here. […] The infusion of identity politics on this feels like ideological projection, out of touch on the topic and a stain on the PBS name."

Still, the fact that Fox News, reputationally a very conservative media outlet, had weighed in on the discussion only solidified the meme that "Link is Trans" for some.