Jennifer Diane Reitz moves through culture like a quiet constant, sometimes visible, sometimes hidden, always
shaping the space around her. Born in Oregon at the end of 1959 and raised in a childhood of perpetual motion, she
learned early how to live between places, between definitions, between what is permitted and what is necessary.
Science, fiction, music, and imagined worlds became not escapes but lifelines, ways of giving structure to a reality
that rarely offered her safety or recognition. Her creative work, from the early days of independent game design to
the formative chaos of the early internet, reflects this instinct to build worlds when none exist. With Happy Puppy,
she helped define how games were discovered and shared online, and with
Boppin’, she insisted that games could be strange, emotional, uncomfortable, and unapologetically adult. Her later
webcomics, especially
Unicorn Jelly, continue this refusal of simplicity, unfolding as living systems of myth, logic, and transformation that demand
patience and curiosity rather than passive consumption.
Alongside her work in games and webcomics, including the long-running
Unicorn Jelly
and other formally inventive projects, Reitz has consistently explored themes of identity, perception, and
transformation. As a trans woman who transitioned in the early 1980s under hostile social conditions, her personal
history is marked by resilience, conflict, and moments of profound crisis, but also by enduring partnerships and
chosen family. She later founded the website
Transsexuality
as an attempt to systematize and explain trans experience at a time when accessible information was scarce, a
project that remains debated and contested. Taken together, Jennifer Diane Reitz’s career forms a singular narrative
at the intersection of early internet culture, independent game development, and lived transgender history, making
her a compelling and sometimes challenging voice to engage with in conversation.
Monika: Hello Jennifer! Thank you for accepting my invitation.
Jennifer: Thank you. I feel honored to be chosen to be interviewed.
Monika: I came across your website by chance, and it struck me as one of the most extensive and influential gaming
sites of the late 1990s. Suddenly, you stopped maintaining it. What led to that decision, and how do you look back
on its impact today?
Jennifer:
HappyPuppy.com
was sold to investors during a hostile takeover, so we were basically forced out of it. Soon after, the investment
group shut the site down, and that was that. We tried, unsuccessfully, to get the domain back afterward, but it has
always been priced ridiculously high, so we eventually gave up.
Of all our websites, Happy Puppy was the most influential. For one lone week, it was the most visited website on
Earth. But it suffered a very unhappy end, although we did come out of it with a minor, but still substantial,
amount of money for our trouble.
The site was initially created by one of my polyamorous partners, Sandra Woodruff, who very recently died, and whose
loss I am deeply grieving. She saw a need for a single site that collected game demos and information.
She was far ahead of her time in creating such a gaming website.
Monika: The number of transgender women in the gaming industry is substantial. Do you think that is because of our
unique talents and skills, or because gaming happens to be one of the more liberal and accepting industries?
Jennifer: Research has shown that trans folks tend, statistically, to be more intelligent and creative than the
general population by two standard deviations on average. This makes sense. Merely comprehending that one’s gender
does not match one’s physical sex likely requires such additional cognitive flexibility. It is, on the whole, a
remarkable realization, quite beyond what most people are ever required to confront. This, I think, naturally
produces, again statistically and on average, a greater tendency for trans people to enter technological, complex,
and intellectually stimulating fields of study and work. Clever people like clever things.
|
| On a trip to Canada in 1992. |
Monika: Hearing you speak about intelligence and creativity among trans people feels like a direct challenge to
the old narrative I grew up with, that transitioning meant choosing between survival jobs and invisibility.
Jennifer: It is true that far too many trans people, especially trans women, end up in impoverished situations doing
societally marginalized work. I would argue that this is an issue of opportunity, chance, social position, and above
all else, economic class. Ultimately, it is bad luck.
Monika: So why are we often underrepresented in highly visible fields, despite our talents?
Jennifer: Right now, there are statistically around 250,000 people alive on this Earth with an intelligence equal
to, or greater than, that of Albert Einstein. Why are they not advancing physics and science? Because they are
almost entirely busy digging ditches, farming desolate land in impoverished nations, or otherwise living desperate
and uneducated lives without hope of opportunity or the possibility of escape. Humanity does not value equality or
justice, as a rule.
But trans people are very highly, even overrepresented, in fields of technology and science, because when a trans
person does have a real opportunity, they tend to take it. When chance offers a trans person the hope of delighting
their mind and senses in some advanced and creative pursuit, they are naturally drawn to exactly that.
We are told stories about how miserable and useless trans people are to dissuade us from existing and to demonize us
as a class. But there are many successful trans people who have greatly advanced science, research, technology, and
entertainment who are not promoted or made visible in the culture. To do so would not fit the social narrative that
being trans is wrong and should be erased and eliminated, because nothing good can ever come of it.
Monika: What story about trans people should be told instead?
Jennifer: Stories shape perception and define culture. One story that needs to be eliminated is the story that being
trans means failure, suffering, and wretchedness. The story that needs to replace it is that trans people are
bright, creative, and have tirelessly worked to advance civilization. That trans people have been revered in
cultures all over the world throughout history. That trans people are especially talented and possess evolutionary
and cultural value.
Monika: Your career spans decades and includes some of the most iconic games and companies. How do you view your
professional journey?
Jennifer: A clusterfuck of a train wreck in the middle of an axe fight, and I did not win the blue ribbon. I went
into Activision in 1984 and sold my first game that very day,
Multiverse, which was intended to be a procedural game of infinite RPG-style exploration. I got ten thousand dollars up front,
and they never went any further than that. My game died the same day they bought it.
Instead, I was farmed out onto countless projects of every kind. Eventually, I left and worked at nearly every other
company at the time, always trying to get some version of my
Multiverse
game made, and always being used for other projects instead. I tried raising money on my own with a puzzle game
called
Boppin’, and that failed as well. For fourteen years, I chased promises and contracts to make my game, and it never, ever
happened. It was truly a career made in hell, and save for one single producer, the wonderful Brenda Laurel, I
worked for devils. And the worst of the lot was Electronic Arts.
Monika: With the rapid growth of AI in recent years, how do you see the future of gaming?
Jennifer: Whatever people think, AI will increasingly be used at every level of game creation, and eventually it
will be completely accepted and nobody will fuss about it any longer. Whether this is sad, good, or evil does not
really matter. That is what will happen.
But the real threat is not AI. It is gaming as a service. We are losing, and will ultimately completely lose, the
ability to own, or rather possess, any game. Everything will be download-only, never preserved, never on your shelf,
and lost forever when the company that owns it shuts down the servers. As Ubisoft once put it, “In the future, you
will own nothing, and you will like it.” Well, that future is essentially here, and I do not like it one tiny bit.
Monika: Let’s talk about your childhood. You were a prodigious child, full of girlishness that was not only
tolerated but even admired. Your mother described it as something expected from a “delicate” genius. When did that
protection fade, and the admiration turn into rejection?
Jennifer: Um, you are perhaps mistaken. Girlishness was literally beaten out of me, or at least a sincere attempt
was made. It arguably never truly succeeded. My first memory, my very first, at age five, is being backhanded across
the room by my father for daring to state, clearly, that I was a girl and not a boy.
I was very insistent, and I expect that my hyperviolent father thought that brutal violence against a child was a
rational cure for being trans. This attitude never grew kinder. My last view of my father was him sitting on my
chest in the middle of the road in front of my family’s trailer, putting a gun to my head while screaming that he
was going to kill me. I was saved only because a car turned the corner at that moment, its headlights forcing him to
scuttle back inside the trailer.
My mother would become violent as well whenever I made the mistake of admitting who and what I truly was. Once, she
threatened me with a paring knife over the issue. My inability to act masculine was tolerated only under the belief,
common at the time, that exceptional people are naturally quirky.
|
| Jennifer at home. |
Jennifer: I was considered a child prodigy for a while, until I wised up and deliberately lowered my grades. Even
so, the taint of being clever protected me somewhat from my parents’ worst physical and emotional abuses. As long as
I occasionally demonstrated what I could truly do, that protection remained intact, and by keeping that display
flawed, I mostly avoided impossible demands being placed upon me.
But make no mistake, while my inability to perform boyhood accurately was tolerated, actual girlish behavior was
always punished most severely. I learned to repress myself as much as I could. In moments when I failed, I was hit,
thrown against walls, punched, and beaten, and that was just my father.
My problem was that I was fundamentally bad at hiding my true nature. I am hopeless as a liar and pathetic at
deception, both skills required for life among humans. I was seriously fucked.
Monika: At what point did survival stop being about performance, and turn into something happening entirely inside
your mind?
Jennifer: Ultimately, the trauma became so severe that my mind kind of split for many years, filing my identity away
separately unless something triggered it, at which point I would awaken to full realization. This strange fugue
state kept me alive, I suppose. “It wasn’t lying if I couldn’t remember” may have been the plan my brain was
attempting to implement. But it also cost me dearly.
This split reached a crisis at age twenty-one, when I tried to kill myself and all of my mental files came back
online. In that moment of clarity, I knew who and what I had always been, and that I could not live without doing
something to fix it. Gender dysphoria was agony to me. Not suffering, not mere pain, but agony. I was more than
willing to die rather than endure it further.
Monika: Before that fracture, what did you learn about yourself as a child?
Jennifer: Before that mental fracture, in early childhood, I understood that my natural femininity meant violence.
So I tried very hard to pretend to act like boys did, but my imitation was often absurdly poor. I simply could not
comprehend the creatures.
My failure was demonstrated repeatedly in each new town we moved to for my father’s government job. Again and again,
I became the target of angry boys who attacked and beat me for perceived differences, usually described as being
“faggy”, “girly”, or just plain “weird”. I became increasingly withdrawn, escaping into Golden and Silver Age
science fiction and a growing fascination with science and technology.
Monika: Your mother, Margaret, was a striking mixture of early tenderness, later emotional harm, and deep
complexity, not a simple portrait of cruelty but of someone who herself seemed to break under the weight of her
life.
Jennifer: My mother was wonderful to me until I reached roughly the age of ten or eleven, when she had some kind of
breakdown and was never the same. She endured a great deal in her life. She was very old when she had me,
forty-eight, and I was the unintended result of my father date-raping her, or so she told me.
She was always apologizing to me for having an “elderly mother”, which clearly weighed heavily on her. My father was
violent and abusive, and my mother went to great effort to hide her own history. She had been a sex worker during
Prohibition, and she isolated herself completely out of shame, fearing recognition by the wrong person. When she
mentally and emotionally broke, she transformed from someone utterly kind to me into someone bitter, cruel, and
harsh. This was something I could not reconcile, and it hurt me deeply.
Monika: How did you come to understand your mother’s life before your childhood, and which parts of it stayed with
you most?
Jennifer: My mother lived an extraordinary life. She grew up on a ranch, rode a native-trained pony that knew
countless tricks, and the farmhands were among the last real cowboys. She witnessed electrification arrive in Baker,
Oregon, saw the genocide of Native peoples, and the removal of Chinese workers driven by white supremacy.
She had a pet barn owl named Hoot and a dog named Beans. My grandmother, her mother, stood six foot two in the late
nineteenth century and was a student of the mystic Helena Blavatsky. My mother claimed her mother possessed unusual
abilities. Not enough to save her from the “lucky” piece of radium she carried in her pocket, though. Bone cancer
from radium will kill even students of mysticism. I suppose that is a ProTip.
After my grandmother’s death, my mother became deeply involved in the Prohibition underground, as a madam and in the
liquor trade. She was well known and respected in Baker, where we lived during summers. As a young child, I was
treated like royalty because of her, although all the reasons for that treatment were kept secret from me, as she
was deeply ashamed of it all.
Goddamn, but my life has been filled with oddness.
Monika: Did she ever embrace you as her daughter? And do you feel any connection to her in the way you look, carry
yourself, or even in your style and mannerisms?
Jennifer: The last time I ever saw my mother, she was sitting in the family trailer, hooked up to an oxygen tank,
dying of emphysema. She had foolishly been a smoker. Even then, in that final moment, she would not use my name or
my correct pronouns. There is a cruelty, it seems, that transcends even the imminence of death itself.
Despite this, I grieved my mother for a year. I was deeply affected by how kind she had been during my first ten
years of life. Also, I am horrifically sentimental in general. But in retrospect, if there is anything about me that
resembles her, I would consider it a flaw, save for her original kindness. That is worth emulating, I feel.
Beyond that, I believe I am fairly different from my mother in every possible way, except physically.
Monika: I found an interesting fact. At just fourteen, you were placed on an experimental hormone treatment to
address severe acne. For many trans girls, that sounds like a dream come true. What was that experience like for
you at such a young age?
Jennifer: That was the greatest failure of intellect in my entire life. The estrogen was exactly what I needed. It
was glorious and wonderful. Yes, it made my acne vanish almost overnight, but more importantly, I could feel my own
emotions again. I felt present in the moment. I felt fully alive for the first time since the horror of puberty had
begun. But I was stupid, so goddamn stupid. You see, I had no idea, at that age, how breasts actually grow. When I felt the initial hard cores develop, my first
thought was cancer. Even at fourteen, I had what I jokingly call “intern syndrome”. I had self-studied enough
biology and medicine to understand that estrogen causes cell division, growth, and female sex characteristics, but
nowhere had I read about how that process actually feels.
Fearing for my life, I reported the development of my breast tissue. I did not know that it all begins with hard
little cores. I thought they were tumors. To this day, I regret that ignorance. I panicked and lost everything. They understood, of course, and took me immediately off the precious estrogen. I have often thought about how
different my life could have been if I had not been so easily frightened by two tiny, hard lumps and had simply kept
my goddamn mouth shut. What a loss. What a fool I was.
END OF PART 1
All photos: courtesy of Jennifer Diane Reitz.
© 2026 - Monika Kowalska
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