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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 think it's one of those questions that really depends on how exactly you phrase it. Obviously in the real world there are no magic buttons, so we have to use our imaginations.
Like, is this a button that's constantly available, every single day, but once you press it there's no going back? In that case i could see a lot of men pressing it in a moment of recklessness (possibly while drunk) just like how people get bad tattoos or other questionable body modifications.
Also, does it just work superficially, or does it affect their brain, too? Will they suddenly wind up with a drastically different personality? I don't think a lot of people would want that.
Also, is there an equivalent magic button for women turning into men? Otherwise, the world might end up with a huge surplus of women, which changes the gender dynamics quite a bit.
I've talked to a couple of straight non-dysphoric women who said they would press such a button for some interesting reasons (although I don't know if they actually would). Some of these reasons are around avoiding periods and apex-fallacy misunderstandings of men and their lives. Even perceived male camaraderie compared to female consensus making and 'bitchiness'.
The whole thing is probably performative and a case of 'be careful what you wish for'.
Aha, yes, that's exactly the sort of thing I was talking about below. It's easy to romanticise the other sex and believe that it's so much easier for them, but everything seems easier from a distance. You don't understand how hard it is until you've actually lived it.
Whether women or men in general experience greater happiness or life satisfaction is difficult to measure. Most surface polls show women reporting greater satisfaction, but that link suggests that women tend to use a higher scale than men and may actually be less satisfied. I don't want to make a general statement about which sex is, on average, happier, at least, not without a lot more research, but I would at least say that there probably isn't a vast difference.
Yes, and for a lot of the intrinsic problems that men and women face, the coping mechanisms are discovered through hard learned experience. I think it's probably better to deal with 'the Devil you know..' then trade it in for perceived greener grass on the other side.
The transman I linked above for example. Most men have a gradual change from being a child, through teenage years, to being an adult man. They can slowly transition from being valued intrinsically as a child towards being more disposable as the years pass and develop emotional resilience to cope with that in a controlled manner. It must have been rough to go to sleep being valued and then wake up and realise suddenly no one cares about you at all expect perhaps for the value you can provide them (I'm exaggerating here to make a point, but guys will get what I mean).
Yes, I notice this with both trans women and trans men. In the normal course of development, you're socialised into your own sex and you learn a whole array of tools for how to be an adult man or an adult women. Trans people, even if they pass very well as their preferred gender, usually don't have all those tools. It's one of the reasons why they often look a bit uncanny-valley-esque, or can make natal members of that sex uncomfortable.
In the case of the person in that video, I think part of the issue is not knowing how men make friends, or how we express close, deep friendship. We don't do it the same way women do. There's a seemingly-endless genre of observational humour about how men and women have different languages for this sort of thing, and while the jokes are silly, they get at something real. Trans women have the reverse issue - they don't know the script for how to behave in female spaces. Thus that joke about how if a trans man is devastated, he hides and cries in the bathroom, and if a trans woman is devastated, she kicks a hole in the wall.
Anyway, resilience is definitely part of it. As a young man you learn things from your father, other older male relatives, role models, and so on, and one of them is how to suck it up when times are tough. When you've been a man your entire life, you probably don't realise how many things like that you do know. And the same for women in reverse.
I'd push back slightly here in saying that I've met trans women who are very much more on the "cries and hides in the bathroom" side of the fence, along with other behaviors that are often seen as exclusively female, like reading romance novels, preferring feelings-talk over camaraderie-talk, disliking playful trash talk, etc. I also know men like that without desire for gender transition as well. I think this is a stereotype of millennial men for a reason.
My native social orientation is more in the middle than something that falls into strict gender alignment. There are things about me that are clearly masculine and things that are questionably feminine. I have a penchant for making friends with people who 'fall through the cracks,' because often I find they're more raw, and you can get more depth out of them than people who follow the practiced scripts handed by socialization. I like people who are raw, a little unpracticed, real, authentic.
A concern I have about the trans movement is I worry that people with a less rigidly-gendered personality, but without gender dysphoria, are being handed a pathway that would purportedly connect them to other people who share their feelings of alienation but also comes with serious risks and drawbacks. The thing I would note is that a lot of transgender people just seem congenitally lonely, though of course the argument across the political spectrum is going to be that this is a chicken-and-the-egg problem -- are they lonely because of bigotry, or lonely because they always had things about themselves that didn't 'fit', which their transition never alleviated?
I did say it was a joke. If nothing else, I've never kicked a hole in a wall - I'm more likely to find somewhere quiet and put my head in my hands. Like most jokes, I think it exaggerates a real point for effect, that trans people often still have some of the 'scripting' of their birth sex.
Sometimes they do overcompensate by trying too hard to adopt the 'culture' of their preferred sex? Anecdotally I think I see this more with trans women, but for all I know there are trans men who try really hard to lean into a macho concept of masculinity.
I agree with the observation that trans people tend to be lonely, at least judging from those that I've known. It seems plausible to me that people who are already lonely for non-gender-related reasons are likely to be more willing to consider radical changes to their lives. If you're lonely and sad by default, you may feel you have less to lose and be more willing to consider transitioning, and there's the possibility of the kind of love-bombing coffee_enjoyer describes.
There was actually a wellness Wednesday thread a long time ago, before the site move and maybe even before the split from SSC, where someone gave the advice to a depressed poster that if you’re dissatisfied enough with your life that you’re severely depressed, you should try It seems plausible to me that people who are already lonely for non-gender-related reasons are likely to be more willing to consider radical changes to their lives. change in your life before giving up on it. That post was actually one of the catalysts that led me to re-evaluate my relationship to faith, so I credit it positively. So I think the impulse to go, “let’s try something boldly new” isn’t terrible, even if we can raise an eyebrow at various ways in which people might try to do that.
But I’m also not a very radical dude, so “consider radical life change” apparently meant something like “maybe you should go to church.” The wildest and most unhinged thing I’ve ever done was drive to Indiana.
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