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Notes -
One of the minor weekly dramas in my corner of X, the everything app, had to do with this tweet by Flesh Simulator, where he states that
(Flesh Simultor is a somewhat popular youtuber who specializes in talking about existing conspiracy theories and seems to be one of the few actually heterodox leftists, combining stuff like rabid support for socialized healthcare and the Palestinian cause with reluctant support for ICE even after the MN shootings, but that is not directly relevant to the current micro-drama)
In response he got hundreds of quote tweets and replies from people who called the 25% estimate comically unrealistic, mixed with MTF-run accounts suggesting that he is a "repressor" (someone who, in trans slang, feels gender dysphoria, but chooses not to transition due to various fears) because, again, no way a normal cis man would think that 25% of fellow men would press the "magically change one's sex" button. That seemingly caused FleshSim to backpedal a bit, stating that his estimate assumed that the button could be used to change your sex back, but my impression is that the original tweet was supposed to mean a one-way ticket to womanhood.
I was very surprised by that reaction to the tweet, because I'd give around the same estimate. My impression always was that if a "magically change biological sex" button was on the menu, the world, or at least the developed parts of it, would be at a 35:65 M:F split within a year or so. Basically, the real world would turn into what you see in most MMOs – almost all women would stay women, but a significant minority of men would choose to become women as well.
Now, I'm far from unbiased here, given that, I, for one, would absolutely press such a button. While I have no plans of transitioning IRL and belong to the 95% that are "still fine" living as the sex I was born as, my post history has me admitting to being a weeby sperg who does not feel much of a connection to his IRL body and physical reality and spends most of my time on the computer, so me choosing to press the button is probably not exactly surprising. But still, I just fail to see FleshSim's 25% conjecture as particularly outlandish. Surely, the quote tweets are all just signalling, and the share of people who'd press the button's gotta be at least in the double-digits, right?
So I ask you, minds of The Motte, what's your best guess about the percentages of men and women that would press the magical "change biological sex" button (for the purposes of the experiment, the button, due to being magical, also solves minor accompanying issues such as getting the new legal name on documents, etc.) if it was freely available?
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 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.
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