Christina Coffin

Specifics of her programming SGL?

I have no doubt she did notable programming work on the Saturn's SGL. But I'm curious about the specifics. Short of just messaging her, I wonder - SGL is attributed to Sega AM2. Either she worked with AM2 directly somehow, or worked on the SoA-side's implementation of it. I don't have enough information right now to confidently write either into the article, but I'm sure a little research should find something. In the meantime, wanted to put this here if anyone had any insight/info/etc :) CartridgeCulture (talk) 01:45, 31 October 2021 (EDT)

Production credits to add

• Quake (fix)
• Sonic X-treme

She may be trans.

I know there's an entire section stating that she gets misgendered. The last line says she isn't trans, but doesn't give a source for when she said that, no link to it, and the forum she said it on, she hasn't logged into her account since 2006, but the sentence claims she said that in 2021? Also, if you look at that old photo of the man attributed to be her in that magazine scan... the facial features look very similar. And in some of her photos, her features look a bit ambiguous. Almost like she has some facial hair shadow, shoulders a bit broad, and her nose is so slim but looks artificially so, like facial feminization surgery.

It's just very unlikely to me that someone would get misgendered so many times, and even a false picture of a random male attributed to them. The most likely story is, she's trans. And that's completely fine.

Also, if you're wondering why she may not be out, some trans people want to live in stealth. Another game dev, Brianna Wu, tried to do the same thing, even flat out called herself a cis woman, even though she isn't. And Nikki Tutorials was stealth for a long time before coming out. If Christina doesn't wanna say she is trans, she doesn't have to.

I think the entire "Misgendering" section should be removed.

We definitely can't base our information on how big people's noses appear in photographs. However, I'm glad this was brought up, because I'd like to address this:

1. We trust Coffin's statements to be true. On numerous occasions, she has objectively identified herself as a woman, and when specifically asked if she had a sex change, she responded no. We don't believe she's lying. However, we cannot base our information on speculation over facial features, nor a single photo in a mistake-prone video game magazine from 28 years ago (it misidentifies a handful of other people in the same article), especially when other reasons are far more likely - remember, she was a loner with a male nickname, and memories get fuzzy after a couple decades. We have no actual evidence she received a sex change, and far more evidence to the contrary, including a personal statement. Again, we trust Coffin. She's the most qualified to talk about herself.

2. We don't have a ref to JoeBro64's message because we want to respect both user's privacy while still trusting their information. That's one of the big differences which separate Sega Retro from Wikipedia: because the game industry is both relatively-new and poorly-documented, a lot of our history has to come from individual research and developer statements. JoeBro64 is a well-known and respected member of this community, and I equally trust Coffin's response: again, I believe neither is lying. This environment allows Coffin to establish her gender without having to like... publicly publish any personal messages. It's not entirely ideal as a reference, because it sacrifices verifiability for privacy, but otherwise the information wouldn't be included at all.

Regardless, I do agree that (in this very specific case) a brief statement from Coffin would be useful for clearing things up. I'm going to reach out to her shortly after posting this. I also think it's best if we ended this conversation, as I don't want speculation over private details like her gender identity to overshadow her programming and game development - this was barely relevant to her work in the first place. Nothing personal, I know you mean the best :) Hang tight for a possible interview. CartridgeCulture (talk) 22:06, 5 December 2023 (EST)