The character “Birdo” premiered in the Mario-verse in 1988 in the Nintendo game Super Mario Bros.

The character “Birdo” premiered in the Mario-verse in 1988 in the Nintendo game Super Mario Bros. 2. She is a pink dinosaur-like creature of the same species as Yoshi, steed sidekick to protagonist Mario. Sources such as The Advocate have described her as one of the first trans characters in the video game industry, but there’s an obvious problem with this characterization.
While many fans identify with her, the Nintendo company has yet to fully embrace Birdo as trans. The company instead has waffled on how to treat her character — sometimes depicted using “she”; other times “it”; always unaccepted — her depiction underlines a contentious issue in both fandoms and media consumption alike:
What types of representation are valid?

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Do you call out Nintendo’s transphobic characterization for what it is, or do you accept the interpretation of her fans?
And how does this rewriting of history shape the video game community’s collective understanding of queer history?
The initial portrayal of Birdo’s transness was complicated. She was initially not in a Mario game at all, but the 1987 Nintendo game Yume Kōjō: Doki Doki Panic or Dream Factory: Heart-Pounding Panic. It took place in an Arabian setting and was a promotional game for the characters of a carnivalesque event in Japan called Yume Kōjō ‘87.
That previous year in 1986, Nintendo of America had rejected a prototype of Super Mario Bros. 2 (later called Super Mario: The Lost Levels) because they thought it would be too hard for Americans to play. Doki Doki Panic was easier and met many of the series requirements. So with some minor modifications, they reskinned the game with classic Mario characters and released it in 1988 as Super Mario Bros. 2 for American audiences. Characters such as Shy Guy, Birdo, Pokeys, and Bob-ombs were initially designed for Doki Doki Panic and were kept in the sequel for the sake of convenience.
In the game, Birdo was a minor boss who fired eggs at the player. The manual for the Japanese version refers to her as Catherine, a man who thinks of himself as female, and the name Catherine is still used in Japanese descriptions to this day. The manual for Super Mario Bros. 2, also misgenders and deadnames the character (i.e., the practices of refusing to use a trans person’s preferred pronouns and name), but in this instance, she is referred to as Birdo. The text in the manual is as follows:
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“He thinks he is a girl and he spits eggs from his mouth. He’d rather be called ‘Birdetta.’”
It’s important to remember that this transphobia comes from a clear cultural context. There are few places in the world that have known trans equality. The United States has an abysmal record on transgender acceptance, and so does Japan. As recently as 2019, the Human Rights Campaign defined the process for changing one’s gender there as “regressive and harmful.” The misgendering and deadnaming of Birdo in the manual above would sadly not have been considered strange in the 1980s in either the US or Japan.
LGBTQIA+ representation existed in the 80s — queer people have always existed — but insensitivity to such groups was the norm. Several years before Birdo debuted, the textbased game Mad Party Fucker (1985) started with the text: “The object of this game is to fuck as many women as you can without getting bufu’ed by fags (contracting AIDS).” The makers of this misogynistic game were using homophobia here as a punchline to appeal to conservative straight people.
It should surprise no one that Birdo, as an early piece of trans representation in video games, followed this trend of using queerness as an edgy punchline. When the Satellaview version of Super Mario Bros. 2 was advertised to the Japanese public as BS Super Mario USA (1996), the character Birdo was used to promote it. One commercial has a sexy Birdo laid out on a couch, beckoning the viewer with text that translates to English as “Welcome to Catherine’s Room.”
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1996 Japanese Commercial for BS Super Mario USA
This commercial (as well as the BS Super Mario USA game itself) employed an “Okame” voice actor to play Birdo, which is derogatory Japanese slang that can describe a range of “sexual deviant” people from homosexuals to transsexuals to crossdressers. The term Okame, like with the English term transvestite, is complicated, and now is mostly considered to be offensive. It would not have been uncommon, however, for cisgendered people (and even some trans people) during the 80s to use the term to describe the sexual or gendered “other.”
There were famous queer people in Japan during the 1980s (cabaret singer and drag performer Akihiro Miwa, real name Maruyama Akihiro, immediately comes to mind). This acclaim earned by a few, however, does not change the reality that trans people were (and still are) not widely accepted in larger Japanese society. The humor here for Birdo comes not from a place of empowerment, but the all too common trend of the majority ridiculing the disenfranchised as a means of control.
Birdo is supposed to be funny because she is an “other.”
A strong example of this otherization is the Japanese exclusive Wii game called Captain Rainbow (2008). The protagonist of the game is a human named Nick, who has a superhero alter ego, Captain Rainbow. There is a sidequest in the game where Nick has to rescue Birdo from jail after she was arrested for using the wrong bathroom (i.e., the women’s bathroom). You then have to find an object from her house, probably her vibrator, that “proves” to the robot police officer that she is a woman. The bathroom debate for trans people is a very contentious issue, and this joke plays into that painful history.
While transphobia in Japan translated into a belittling trans caricature for Birdo, in America, it (mostly) resulted in silence. References to Birdetta were scrubbed following Super Mario Bros. 2’s initial release. Her secondary sex characteristics (e.g., pink bow, pink skin, etc.) meant that she was primarily portrayed in US media such as the Super Marios Bros. Show! (1989) as a cisgendered woman. She was even shown to be in a relationship with Yoshi in Mario Tennis (2000).