naraburns
nihil supernum
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User ID: 100
I'm very bad at guessing this sort of thing, but also I think it would be nigh impossible to get reliable empirical data on the proposal without actually inventing the necessary technology/magic and then seeing how it played out. But I don't think 25% is an unrealistic guess, and I think the MMO check is an interesting way to approach the question. If anything, I suspect 25% is probably a bit low, depending on some further details about this supposed "change biological sex" button. In particular, I think the percentage goes down drastically if the button does not ensure that one becomes a sexually attractive member of the opposite sex.
My sense it that this is all quite complicated. A lot of the trans people I know--but especially the females--are drawing from the well of "gender eliminativism," where they are trying to break down unnecessary social norms, free themselves from the "oppression" of imposed expectations, "queer" (as a verb) things, etc. Some other trans people I know--and this group is exclusively males--are more squarely in the autogynephile mold of "gender essentialism," where the highest success is not passing but being perceived as an extremely hot girl. They lean so far into idealized femininity that they mostly just end up looking like grotesque parodies of women, though some work through this by then embracing the grotesqueness in ways that generate new, weird subculture standards of "beauty." (In particular, the whole "drag queen" aesthetic is just utterly mystifying to me. Every last one of them seems so deep into their own psychiatric bullshit that attending drag shows strikes me as exploitation on par with spectating bum fights or picking on people with Down syndrome.)
Obviously, gender eliminativism and gender essentialism are not intellectually compatible. Feminists know this and have been wrestling with it for decades; the trans movement just inherited and imported all that. But as complicated as all those arguments can get, I find myself increasingly sympathetic to some of the things Foucault argued about all of these things just being power struggles. People aren't (mostly) arguing for principles they believe in for good epistemic reasons, but backing whatever argument seems most likely to get them what they want.
One thing a lot of people--but especially, men--really want is sexual gratification.
From the individual perspective of a heterosexual male, the most powerful person in the world is usually an attractive female. The gnashing of "incel" teeth on this speaks for itself. The blame they place on women is because they really do see themselves as powerless to get what they want--while attractive females are not only withholding what those men want from those men, attractive females can, if they so choose, secure for themselves an essentially limitless supply of what those men want. (At least until they age out of attractiveness!) Give them a choice to actually become a sexually attractive female, and they would likely take it, even though they have zero "self conception" of themselves as "really" being a woman.
But if you gave those same men a choice between a button that would make them an extremely attractive female, or a button that would definitely make them a sexually irresistible male (whatever that ultimately means!), I think a larger number might choose to remain male. Last time I discussed this thought experiment with someone, it had been specified out to details like "your family's memories will be edited so that they don't even realize you've changed," and "your professional life will not be impacted in any way" and "your interest in and ability to experience sexual gratification will not change, nor will your taste in sexual partners, except to the extent that you may want it to," and all sorts of other caveats that arise when you really, seriously think about what it would mean, to live inside a different body. I think those are all significant details, and I don't think they scratch the surface of all the questions one would want answered before pushing the button.
This is related, I think, to something I often observe concerning abortion. Abortion is a young woman's game. The centrality of abortion to the culture wars is, I think, a direct outgrowth of mass media making "youth culture" the dominant culture of America. Likewise, the trans movement is mostly young people doing young people things. A lot of people simply grow out of their sex and gender obsessions; most adults have more pressing business to attend to. So when someone hypothesizes a true "body swap" magic or technology, people tend to imagine transforming into an ideal, and ideally young, specimen of the opposite sex. Essentially nobody's going to push a button that turns them into an ugly woman, unless they have first devoted themselves to a culture that inculcates an "ugly woman" aesthetic (in which case, from their perspective--they aren't an ugly woman after all).
CNN had an article at the top of the webpage this morning. It refers to the shooter as female, which is strictly false, and intermittently swaps between "she" and "they" for pronouns. Eventually, far down the article, it quotes someone else explaining that the shooter was born male.
The central philosophical grounding of transgenderism is that gender is socially constructed (and correspondingly malleable) and thus separable from the biological notion of sex. The idea that a "woman" (gender) is not necessarily "female" (sex) may be arguable, but it is at least comprehensible. Forget expecting future Supreme Court justices to know what woman means--journalists don't even seem to know what female means. Or, more likely: they are part of the trans prospiracy to simply deny facts about biological human sex typing. The sex/gender distinction was drawn for political purposes, and now is being collapsed for those same political purposes. They are pointing at deer and calling them horses.
"Running interference," indeed.
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