A former Elder Scrolls Online developer has spoken out about her experience as a transgender woman at ZeniMax Online Studios. In a four-hour video, former ESO Media Artist Leona Faren shares audio recordings that appear to confirm that management misgendered her. She also claims that her manager repeatedly outed her to workers who didn’t know she was transgender, and pressured her into resigning when she needed time off work for gender-affirming care.
After a year of contacting ZeniMax HR about her experiences, Faren says she took her complaints to Bethesda corporate, expecting a different result. Instead, she says the company viewed her as a “liability”, and offered a resignation package that would cover her upcoming surgeries. However, taking the deal would also mean signing away her right to bring a discrimination lawsuit against Bethesda. Due to this, Faren says Bethesda was “holding [her] surgeries hostage” in a bid to force her out of the company.
Faren shares her accounts, which include video and audio recordings taken between January to September 2022, on her YouTube channel. Here, she tells how she first informed her manager she was transgender and wanted to come out to the rest of the team. This is when the problems began, as her manager (given the pseudonym Elphaba) instead outed her during a work meeting without permission.
Faren says the manager claimed she was “trying to help”, and told Faren she should come out to the team via Slack to explain what happened in the meeting. Faren later brought this up to her manager in a tearful one-to-one meeting, in which she did not apologise and said she can’t remember the incident.
In another meeting, Faren informed Elphaba she was still seeing her old pre-transition profile picture used in IT. When Faren said this was causing her distress, she alleges Elphaba said “everyone” hates old images of themselves, and seemed to dismiss her concerns. Later in the same month, while Faren was discussing upcoming medical leave, Elphaba suggested Faren take a lesser position in the department as her time off will impact her workload.
This continued, the recordings show, into April 2021, when after multiple tense meetings with her manager (during at least one of which she seems to be misgendered), Faren decides to contact HR. She reported Elphaba for outing her to coworkers and allegedly denying her work opportunities. At this point, she also notified HR and IT of her legal name change - something which the system constantly reverted back to her deadname.
In the video, Faren shares an audio diary from this period, in which she’s awake at 5:30am and crying over the situation at ZeniMax, calling the workplace “toxic, ludicrous, and cruel.”
She adds, “There’s nothing that can fix it. [The manager’s] instance on intruding in on our lives has made working from home and my transition a fucking nightmare. Working under this person has been one of the worst professional experiences of my life by far.”
IT issues not only left her deadname in the system but also locked her out of accounts. Faren says this caused her to fall behind on work, as her manager would need to help her log in on most days. The manager tells her she would be better off just “sticking with” her deadname.
HR apparently refused to take action on her initially being outed, calling it an “unfortunate mistake”. Another HR rep fails to see the problem in what has now been repeated alleged instances of Faren being outed as trans to new employees. In a recording, the rep says this shouldn’t be an issue since Faren has come out to workers in the past.
According to Faren, IT issues persist for the rest of the summer, meaning she and the team are seeing her old image and deadname constantly. She also says she’s rarely able to log in to do her work. In audio recordings, her manager appears to have little sympathy.
Due to this constant alleged outing and dismissal from HR, Faren took her complaints directly to Bethesda. However, she says the company instead treated her as a “liability”, and pressured her into quitting and signing away her right to sue for discrimination in exchange for continued medical coverage.
Faren turns the offer down, despite it covering two surgeries she had scheduled for spring and summer 2022. She was then put on a performance review, which was conducted by Elphaba despite her previous complaints of transphobia. In the review, Elphaba noted that Faren had been “rude” in meetings, and didn’t complete her work. Faren argues that this was because she was locked out of her accounts for months.
Given a new manager, Faren says she passed the performance review. However, constant battles against HR to take her allegations of transphobia seriously left her unwilling to remain in her position, so she decided to take the resignation deal after all. While this hasn’t prevented her from sharing evidence on her YouTube channel, it would mean that she can’t bring legal action against Bethesda.
“I signed because I was terrified,” says Faren. “I wish I didn’t. I wish I wasn’t so scared.”
Court filings online indicate that Faren is taking some kind of legal action against ZeniMax, but it's not clear if it's related to her allegations of transphobic discrimination.
TheGamer has contacted Bethesda for comment but did not receive a response by the time of publication.