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It's not about attainability but relatability. Nearly everyone in the world would want 1 million dollars if you offered it to them. Moving to germany is a bit more situational but most people can acknowledge that germany has pretty good sausage, kraut, beer, and fast cars. But ask a random person what's in it for someone who wants to be a woman and he'd likely be at a loss.
And it's not just that they want to be a woman. They want it so bad they'll chop off their dicks and pump their bodies full of chemicals to make a poor imitation of this.
I mean, let me just ask: do you really think that there's so little to recommend in the lives of half of all humanity, approximately 4 billion people, that no rational actor, under a Rawlsian veil of ignorance, could ever want to be one of them?
If you do believe that to be the case, then the logical corollary is that you should become the most ardent of committed feminist activists. Alleviating their suffering would surely be the most pressing of political issues.
(I'm intentionally being a bit glib, but, what you said could be interpreted in that way.)
I'm sure there will be many people who can answer this. And they will probably be more sympathetic to the trans cause. But to the average person's point of view the trans person's pov is so alien as to be indistinguishable from insanity.
Well now I'm kinda curious. Do you think being a woman is that much worse than being a man? (I don't want to draw you into a long obnoxious argument, I just want to make sure I'm properly understanding you.)
I don't think it has anything to do with "better" vs. "worse". I just think the imaginative gap that a lot of people struggle to even get their heads around the hypothetical.
The average person with a net worth of less than a million dollars does not struggle to imagine what it would be like to have a million dollars. The average person who does not live in Germany does not struggle what it would be like to live in Germany. (I'm not even saying their imaginary conceptions of these two counterfactuals are accurate: I'm just saying that most people don't struggle to imagine them, even if their imaginary conception thereof is wrong.) But waking up tomorrow morning as a member of the opposite sex is such a bizarre and alien concept that the average person struggles to get their head around it. I think the average person would have an easier time imagining what it would be like to be blind or paralysed than to imagine what it would be like to wake up as a member of the opposite sex.
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I think you're making some good points and my argument is phrased quite poorly. I think it kind of conflates and the idea of wanting to become a woman and the idea of wanting to transition. I'm kind of too tired to put this coherently for now but you're definitely largely right.
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That is not the first time that bottom chirurgery has been characterised in such a way on this forum, and I would like to correct the record:
To the best of my knowledge, vaginoplasty (male-to-female) does not involve 'chopping off' anything. The male genitals in their entirety are rearranged into female genitals, with the penis becoming the clitoris and the scrotum becoming the labia; phalloplasty (female-to-male) is the same but in the other direction.
Also, the methods used are very similar to those used in within-sex reconstructive chirurgery in cisgender patients who have suffered genital injuries.
My brother in Christ, what do you think the endocrine system does?
It may have been a 'poor imitation' a century ago, but much progress has been made; the regret rate for transgender operations is less than that for knee replacements.
This is just flat wrong, and brings your supposed expertise about "gender-affirming care" into question.
You may have noticed that female people have no flesh in between their legs which can be used to fashion a crude imitation of a penis. To accomplish this, surgeons (or "chirurgeons" as you insist on calling them, apparently for no better reason than obfuscation and misdirection) must carve out a chunk of tissue from elsewhere on the patient's body, typically the forearm or thigh. It's similar to a skin graft, except that much more flesh is required, meaning the tiny minority of trans-identified females who undergo phalloplasties have telltale scars on their thighs or forearms for months or years afterwards. Wikipedia has some NSFW photos. So much for "correcting the record".
Even if it was the case that the majority of trans people who undergo bottom surgery don't regret doing so, that doesn't tell us anything about how poor the imitation is. Even if 100% of people who get breast implants don't regret doing so, that wouldn't tell us anything about how realistic breast implants are. Satisfaction is not perfectly correlated with realism.
I've heard so many trans activists independently recite this canard, and they never provide a source. Until one is provided, I'm taking this about as seriously as "trans panic laws have enabled people to literally get away with murder!!!1!"
I said that it was to the best of my knowledge. I am not an expert compared to professional chirurgeons, but compared to those who think a vagina is a lack of penis, and imagine the male-to-female operation to be something akin to the work of Lorena Bobbit, I think I'm doing fairly well, much in the same way as, while I do not claim be able to run the U. S. Defense Department better than James Mattis, I am fairly certain I could do a better job than Pete Hegseth.
This is a common misconception held by many men, leading to an epidemic of bed-time headaches among their wives.
'Chirurgeon' is from the Greek 'χείρ' (hand) + '-ουργός' (worker); 'surgeon' is an eroded form of the same.
I am getting just a wee bit tired of the snide insults.
The same applies for cis-men, who were born biologically male in all respects, identify as men, and suffer injuries between their legs. Does this make such a man less male, or is this merely an appeal to disgust?
Well, are we talking a woman whom you never suspected had implants because she went to a chirurgeon who made them look natural, or a woman who chose a doctor whose work was obvious at first sight so that everyone would know that she could afford them?
https://www.scotsman.com/news/opinion/columnists/transgender-debate-gender-affirming-surgeries-have-a-regret-rate-of-one-per-cent-or-less-for-knee-replacements-its-17-per-cent-vic-valentine-4258947
D. F. McLaughlin?
Paris Lee?
And despite not being a professional "chirurgeon", I can do a better job than you. So you were obviously wrong to arrogate to yourself the responsibility of "correcting the record" on bottom surgery. (There's actually a specific Facebook group devoted to cataloguing this kind of behaviour.) If I ask someone if they can drive a car, I want to know if they can actually drive a car. Being able to drive a car better than an amputee who drank a fifth of vodka is not a high bar to clear.
Har de har har. You knew perfectly well that I meant that female people have no flesh between their legs which could be used to fashion a crude facsimile of a penis.
It's not an appeal to disgust: it's pointing out that you were mistaken. You described a phalloplasty as "the same [as a vaginoplasty] but in the other direction". You were wrong: there was a massive piece of the procedure that you were conspicuously omitting. The appropriate response to this being pointed out to you is to admit your error, not to throw a strop, bring up a completely irrelevant "analogy" and say "oh whatever, stop trying to make gender-affirming care sound gross!"
I could just as easily make the same argument in the opposite direction: that by failing to accurately describe what a phalloplasty entails, you were either ignorant of the procedure, or you were knowingly trying to make it sound less invasive than it really is. Neither is a great look.
I will happily desist, if you can provide me with a better explanation for why you insist on using antiquated terms that aren't even terms of art in the professions under discussion.
I note that this is an opinion piece, and that Valentine doesn't actually show where they got their figures from:
This paragraph doesn't contain any hyperlinks. I asked you for a source for the claim that knee replacement surgery has a higher regret rate than gender-affirming care, and instead you provided me with an example of someone else making the exact same unevidenced claim as you.
From the source you provided "The jury acquitted Patnode of second-degree murder and convicted him of second-degree manslaughter".
From the source you provided "Ward was convicted of voluntary manslaughter in May 2025." I understand a retrial is pending, but Ward certainly hasn't "gotten away with murder" yet.
I suppose technically being convicted of manslaughter rather than murder is "getting away with murder", but I'm not aware of a single person who used the "trans panic" defense and then walked, which is the affirmative claim that dozens of trans activists have independently made to me. Show me an example of that, and we can talk.
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No, I'm sorry, you're doing worse than Pete Hegseth. You don't need to know the fine details of the surgery to know what you're proposing could never work. It's basic anatomy.
If you really actually believe it can be fashioned into a penis, how do you explain doctors carving out huge chunks of forearms during phalloplasties?
Is he wrong though? What's the point of using a form of a word that no one uses when writing in English?
You claimed a vaginoplasty does not involve chopping anything off, and that a phalloplasty is the same process in reverse. He's pointing out how you're completely wrong on the facts, why are you trying to change the subject now?
The only link around these statistics is the word "London", it leads to the "London" tag of the newspaper you just linked to, not a study done in a London clinic.
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Sure, if you don't count people that stopped responding to your surveys, the responses you get will tend to say they're quite satisfied.
Also, if the results were so great, you'd think the overwhelming majority of trans males wouldn't be avoiding it like the plague.
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Suicide rate post gender reassignment still a lot higher than it is post knee replacement.
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To the average person, what you describe and "chopping off" are basically the same thing and repugnant for basically the same reasons. If it isn't literally "chopping off", that's a technicality, like "the burger doesn't taste like sewage, it tastes like excrement, so you're wrong when you say it tastes like sewage!".
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