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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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25% sounds about right to me, but this is an area where I really, really cannot recommend generalizing from internal experience. People have been reporting wildly different experiences on the subject since long before it reached the mainstream Culture War.

I personally find women attractive, play female characters in games, et cetera. It is rare for me to do something and think “ah, it’s great to be male”. When that does happen, I usually think of comorbidities—“this is a cool engineering problem,” “I feel so competent,”—rather than framing it as masculine.

By the same token, though, I don’t think I’ve ever gotten excited about expressing something feminine. The idea isn’t offensive, but it’s far enough removed to be an intellectual question, not an intuitive one. “Sure, nobody should be judged by her sex.”

Others have mentioned Cis by Default; I’ll endorse the followup. There is a fraction of the population which cares deeply about something called “gender identity,” and another fraction which finds the idea alien. These groups are the long tails on a distribution. More importantly, they are correlated with, but distinct from, the “trans” and “cis” categories.

As an aside: this model explains the worst parts of gender discourse. The skeptics aren’t (usually) lying repressors, and the evangelists aren’t (usually) cynics building a coalition for the inevitable purges. Such groups are just having very different experiences. I like this because I think conflict theory is overrated.

So I would guess Flesh was more or less correct. The percentage of men with a weak masculine gender identity probably dwarfs the percentage with a strong feminine one. Encouraging these men to transition using current technology is a recipe for dysphoria. In a fantasy world with no downsides, though, plenty of them would push the button and remain roughly as happy about it as they are now.