How A MrBeast Event Descended Into Misery And Transphobia

Honestly, at this point, it’s almost expected for any given MrBeast-based event to generate controversy, misery, and bullying. So perhaps it’s not surprising that the creator’s latest video, a Minecraft-based contest in which 500 men were pitted against 500 women, has resulted in accusations of cheating, sabotage, and transphobia.

The video, which has already seen nearly 13 million views on Jimmy Donaldson’s MrBeast Gaming channel, was poorly organized from the start. Rather than recruiting players deliberately, the event accepted the first 500 men and 500 women who tried to join a server when it went live, naturally resulting in a chaotic selection. It also, according to one person who claimed to have taken part (thanks TheGamer), meant many of the women players were very obviously “Russian guys [using] AI images/deepfakes.”

The purpose of the event, which was recorded over a week of three- to six-hour daily sessions, was to see which team would prevail in what the video claimed to be a simulation of “civilization.” You know, that type of civilization in which men and women live entirely separately, and are pitched against one another based on…their…um…for fuck’s sake.

Of course, this being a MrBeast event, the whole thing was structured around requiring players to inevitably turn on each other. The side with the most players left after the week would share $50,000 between them, so it created the sophomoric dilemma of wanting to eliminate as many people on your team as you can, while still having more than the other side, and enough to win a war that was due to happen toward the end of the event.

© MrBeast Gaming / Kotaku

In case there were any pretense at this being anything other than a retrograde endeavor, the whole thing was presented with every cliche in place. The video’s title card shows men in blue diamond armor, and women a woman in a pink dress, with the word “PEACE” above the pink lady side, and “WAR” over the legion of armed men. (Oh, and dividing the two is the gurning face of James “MrBeast” Donaldson himself, despite this being a co-production with YouTuber ish.) Men are then presented as battling one another, fighting for dominance, while women are “making sure” others don’t get more attention, and “turning on each other.”

“We had thousands of players try to join our first large scale, multi day, competition civilization event in a first come first serve basis,” says the video’s introduction without a single hyphen, and without ever going on to state what was intended to happen as a result. Instead, the bulk of the description is devoted to mitigating the enormous amount of cheating and bad play that took part, reading,

“If a player broke the rules they agreed to in any way or lied on their application about any information to try and sabotage other players, they were banned by the staff who were monitoring 24/7 after an investigation, their actions were reversed and players they killed were revived, and they were replaced with the next boy or girl in line who had tried to join the server earlier in chronological order.”

Zavvy, who claims on X to have been one of the participants, gave a damning report of the week-long event. Their first accusation is that Russian men were infiltrating the women’s team, then “mass murdering every girl they could see. This went on for irl DAYS.” They claim the same players also left signs around the map with sexist messages and images of swastikas.

Despite the protestations in the video description, Zavvy claims that another player on the women’s team identified who many of these infiltrating players were, but was then unable to do anything about it until pressuring staff into adding a way to report them on the event’s Discord.

The women’s team, naturally, featured trans women players, but after word got about about the trolling male players, Zavvy says that “a lot of girls began reporting/targeting our trans girlies as infiltrators just because of the pitches of their voices and it started this huge fight on the girls’ side about transphobia and such.”

I was in this event. Please keep in mind that we only had like 3-6 hours of server time each day.

"The girls' side fell apart for SOME REASON"

1. We unironically had Russian guys use AI images/deepfakes to cheat their way onto the girls' side and then just start mass murdering… https://t.co/fxFKZHkEbA

— Zavvy 💜🎮 (@ZavvyGamer) December 27, 2025

Despite ostensibly being an event about building “civilizations,” it soon became far more of a PvP event. I was unfortunate enough to overhear an awful lot of the 52-minute video as my son watched it, and the narration from both Donaldson and ish feigned bemusement at why the women were “turning on each other,” when it seems the reasons were widely reported and known. Zavvy also claims that the event had so much trouble filling the women’s team (and no wonder, good grief) that the Discord link was spread far and wide to try to reach the 500-player target. This resulted in many players who Zavvy says “didn’t even know how to make a crafting table.” The player then posted what they say are screenshots of signs and chat from the event in which abusive messages were posted in Russian.

© Zavvy / X

Another person who says they were at the event, Code Mercy, corroborated Zavvy’s claims. As well as agreeing with all the previous claims, they add that players had been told “it was a social experiment to see how boys and girls would survive and thrive,” and given no idea there was to be any PvP.

As someone who was in this event it was so poorly planned. Everything said above is correct.

The story told obviously didn’t mention any of this going on. Heck some of the story was wrong anyways. Wrong leaders on girl side. Timing all wrong as I died and things that happened…

— Code Mercy (@realcsgomercy) December 28, 2025

Still more players chimed in to back up all the same claims, contradicting the narrative presented in the video. The video, instead, included scripted, tiresomely obvious tropes of a stunningly organized women’s side, and a disloyal, fractured men’s side, all so this could be stunningly reversed later in the event.

Of course, any video of this nature is—like reality TV—going to carve storylines from dozens of hours of footage across hundreds of different situations that don’t accurately reflect events. It’s inevitable, justified by the excuse that it makes for a better viewing experience. The issue is that it’s not a depiction of what actually happened, and when you’re a participant who is aware how poorly events are represented, and the genuinely serious issues that are written out of existence, speaking up is often the only way the truth gets heard.

Given MrBeast’s own history with issues relating to transphobia, it’s perhaps no surprise that the video didn’t want to portray the awful situation of trans women being hounded out of the game and the infiltration of bad actors that preceded it, despite its being so core to why what happened, happened. Far more fun to say, “Wow, those girls seemed so organized, but then it all turned to in-fighting!!!” right?

Can we maybe all just move beyond “boys vs girls” as a concept? That’d be good.