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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?
Not sure about percentages, but the Transgender Social Ecosystem (TSE) offers a lot of social reinforcement to transitioners, especially to the alienated “weeby sperg” (your characterization). By clicking the transition button, you receive: a peer group that believes you are innately valuable and beautiful; a peer group that will talk affectionately and supportively about your body; an in-group that makes you feel as an intimate member of the tribe, replete with shibboleths; a political coalition which provides a sense of mission and morale; an excuse for past and future failures; a colorful subculture (color=engaging); and a subculture where being a loser is considered at least acceptable and at most honorable. The female stereotype that exists ambiently in American media culture and is greatly exaggerated in anime only amplifies this: women can be cute and ditzy yet incompetent and still retain ultimate social value; I believe this is why anime is a risk factor in transitioning.
Verbal social reinforcement is an extenuation of the physical body-grooming that primates engage in as a social need, required to feel socially secure and bonded to members. There is still a relic of this link in our instincts: men still embrace with hugs, coaches pat on the back, and in the past it was normal to sit on your friend’s lap or hold hands (the early Christians had “laying of hands”, and would smooch their brother on the lips before prayer, this kiss ritual mentioned five times in the epistles). So TSE is highly desirable: you get the verbal “grooming” and it is linked to your own body, satisfying a deep evolutionary need.
The transgender epidemic also appears right at the advent of “toxic male gamer” discourse. It’s easy to forget how <2012 entertainment culture catered to men who were mediocre. A chubby guy in a dirty room lifting a middle finger to his improbably attractive girlfriend was an acceptable form of gamer media. You had Weezer, Shaun of the Dead, etc where being a male loser in a bromance was a romanticized social identity. Perhaps this is related, too: maligning “loser male identity” means those guys have to find identity elsewhere, unlinked from being male.
Honestly the recent adventures of Will Stancil has been a good reminder of why posing as atleast gender questioning as a white male in left spaces is probably a good idea. Stancil is a true believer but has no Idpol clout so gets nuked every time he thoughtcrimes.
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I think you put a bit too much stock into the TSE thing. A good number of people online are Just Like That, you don't need to psyop them. I don't deny that there is a social contagion element to it ("Nerd communities devastated by HRT", etc.), but it's not the only thing that originally attracted people to trans-adjacent stuff. MtF TSE got off the ground because there were initially people who created the ecosystem – they did not want to be men, fulfill the male role or abide by the male social engagement etiquette, so they went and created pleasant spaces with norms of support and positivity, sort of "LARP as a woman you want to see in the world" clubs, where weirdos could be free from those male social codes, which later attracted others who also wanted in on that, as those were much nicer than default male-coded spaces, at least to a certain type of person, and eventually the whole thing reached escape velocity and TSE we know and are ambivalent about emerged, although not without many twists and turns that changed the original idea.
To illustrate with a bit of personal history, way back in the day I started hanging out in a few chatrooms full of people who mostly went by female nicknames and addressed themselves as female online, while being unmistakably male offline and not really denying that fact. This was in the early 2010s, in the non-English-speaking parts of the internet, long before TSE was a thing. Some of them came from MMOs, some from imageboards, others from different internet places still. Yet these people had similarities – most of them were autistic, heavily into anime, extremely online and probably experienced some degree of AGP. They didn't like or fit in with male social norms and culture of the time (despite ostensibly being mediocre men, whom the culture revolved around), so each LARPed as an anime girl archetype they enjoyed. They wanted to act cutesy, ditzy, haughty, flirty, et cetera, whatever is the opposite of the standard male MO. Color is a good way to describe it, the regulars indeed wanted to be colorful and emotionally expressive rather than stable and stoic. They didn't act like real women, but they acted out idealized female stereotypes instead. It wasn't a political thing, and politics would rarely be discussed, certainly not identity politics. Most everyone tried their best to act how their ideal of themselves as a woman would act, because they enjoyed it, and that's who they wanted to embody. Those were very nice places to be part of, certainly much nicer than the current trans-adjacent spaces. I believe all of the regulars there would press the button with zero hesitation, and not because some nefarious TSE made them do it.
(I've kept contact with many of them since, half of these individuals have transitioned, and if we were in the US, the number would probably be closer to 80%)
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