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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   1805 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for February 8, 2026

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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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).

I think this gets to the heart of the argument that the original tweet is making: the "egg cracking" movement also carries the same sort of implicit assumption that transitioning will turn you into someone attractive. It only takes a bit of scrolling through /r/egg_irl/top listings to find memes about how trans is when you want to be a hot anime waifu or pretty video-game princess.

This fallacy works even if people's perception of what a "woman" is is more realistic. If you're in the half of men that are below average attractiveness, and you imagine that transitioning will make you more like some composite image of what a typical woman is like (i.e., average attractiveness), that's still a positive change.

Those same men would also buy a button that magically transformed them into a man, if not for the fact that they are already men, and thus the expected outcome of the button is "nothing happens" rather than "I become what you'd get if you look up 'man' in a stock photo library".

The one thing missing from this analysis is that it doesn't need to be a fallacy at all (in the context of the unrealistic hypothetical button); for most values of n, the nth percentile of attractiveness woman is more attractive than the nth percentile of attractiveness man.

Half-joking idea: Ugly people do not get the dignity of a gendered pronoun, and instead are referred to as "it" rather than "he" or "she".

Men who are not attractive or useful certainly stop being read as "people" and fade into the background.

That already happens in some (usually crass) all-male circles when ugly women are mentioned.

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.

I am not American, but my impression is the opposite - that abortion politics (on both sides) is, like almost every other political movement in the west, dominated by boomers fighting the last war. The exception is Very Online Feminism, which is a Gen X thing. (Jessica Valenti was born in 1978 and Amanda Marcotte in 1977). In the UK, the loudest pro-life voice was Nadine Dorries (born 1957) and the women Labour MPs who put full decriminalisation of abortion on the agenda in 2025 were mostly in their fifties.

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.

Here's an even harder choice:

  • button A turns you into a perfect man as defined by the average revealed preferences of het women
  • button B turns you into a perfect man as defined by the average stated preferences of het men

Here's the hardest choice, but it's for women:

  • button C turns you into a perfect woman as defined by the average revealed preferences of het men
  • button D turns you into a perfect woman as defined by the average stated preferences of het women

I feel like the male attractiveness button has a bunch of non-physical aspects like earnings and social cachet that can't really be transmitted the same way.

From what I've read, women's revealed preferences are actually shallower than they say.

Isn’t part of the point of the hypothetical that it makes you rich and not just 6’2?

What do you believe the differences are?

I forget the comic who said it, but I recall a line that went "you know, being an ugly woman is a lot like being a man. You're gonna have to get a job."

The point about age is a good one - if you ask me to picture 'a man' or 'a woman' in the abstract, I picture a fit, attractive person in their 20s or 30s. Culturally I think we do tend to idealise 20-something women, even more than we do 20-something men. I can thus imagine the woman there being an appealing thing to become.

But ask someone, "Would you rather be a 50 year old man or a 50 year old woman?" and I'd bet the woman starts to do a lot worse. What about if it's age 60? More than that? Culturally I think we have a model for middle-aged or elder men still being charismatic, authoritative, and even attractive, whereas that is not the case for older women at all.

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