The Button that Makes you Trans

A thought experiment.

1. The Button

Here’s a thought experiment¹.

There is a button before you. If you press the button, you will instantly switch to the gender deemed “opposite” the one you were assigned at birth. You will fall within the broad biological norms of the “opposite” sex². You will be socially accepted as a member of the opposite sex immediately, without any social consequences.

Do you press the button?

2. Variations On The Button

There is a button before you.

(i) If you press the button, a process begins. The process involves months or years of stressful, expensive medical procedures. The process involves a slow change in social status, during which many people you know will struggle to address you correctly, or will refuse to do so. You will be treated differently within your family, among your friends, at work, and on the street. People will make jokes about you. People will make laws about you. People you don’t know will make you into a bogeyman. The process will be slow and visible. You’ll struggle to find a place to pee. You get no benefit from this.

(ii) If you press the button, your body will become the sex opposite the one you were assigned at birth. People will continue to perceive you as the gender they currently do.

(iii) If you press the button, people will perceive you unquestioningly as the gender deemed opposite the one you were assigned at birth. Your body will not change.

(iv) If you press the button, you will instantly switch to the sex opposite the one you were assigned at birth. People will know that you pressed the button. Your family, friends, workplace, and perhaps even some people you meet on the street will know that you were once the sex you were assigned at birth, and will know that you chose to press a button to change that, and will treat you accordingly. Your family will know that you chose to change the person they knew. Some will mourn that person. Some will try to avenge them.

(v) If you press the button, your life is overwritten, or your consciousness switches to a parallel universe, such that you have always been the gender deemed “opposite” the one you were assigned at birth. You were raised as that gender, have always been treated as that gender, and lived in a body that falls within the biological norms of the other sex. No one will ever remember you being anything different, except for you.

(vi) The button is presented to you in utero. You can pick “male” or “female,” although there’s no guarantee you’ll get the exact results you imagined.

(vii) The button was presented to you in utero. Assume you picked one option out of two. Why did you do that?

(viii) If you press the button, your relationship to misogyny switches. Understand that misogyny has existed in the world of every iteration of the button I have proposed. You may gain or lose privilege. You may gain or lose the right to stand in sisterhood. You may gain or lose your pride. Really think about it. For some of us, a convincing case for pressing the original button is that being seen by others as a man is a real career advantage. In addition, the pressure of simply deciding whether to go through with the extremely dangerous processes of pregnancy and birth in order to have a child is immense, and removing it is a serious temptation. Press this button, and the threats, violence, pains, and shames leveled at women now become your burden to bear, or are lifted from you.

(ix) If you press the button, your gender changes. Nothing else happens except that you know you chose to press the button.

In which scenario might you do it? Is your answer different depending on the details?

3. The Anti-Button

Someone pressed the button for you. You now fall within the broad biological norms of the sex “opposite” the one you were assigned at birth. You will be socially accepted as a member of that sex.

Transition exists as it does in the world now. Do you put in the effort required to change back?

4. Put This in Manual

If I surgically removed your genitals, would you feel unmanned or unwomaned?

5. Disclaimer

If I could effortlessly give myself a dick I probably would. I think I would enjoy it more. I’m not sure why. Whether I would choose to effortlessly be perceived as a man, though, I’m not sure. In a world without misogyny, maybe my answers would be different. But I know “woman” to be a politically constructed entity, and I have lived my life within that group – defying, in small ways, the expectations forced upon that group. People assume I am nonbinary or a man far more than they assume the same of my other AFAB friends who want to be perceived as such. They start pronoun circles when they see me. I’m not sure if I should resent this. What, you think a cis woman can’t wear button-ups? God forbid she have short hair or ambition.

Maybe I’m just a woman to prove a point.

6. My Button Now

If I pressed a button right now that instantly erased all sexual dimorphism in humans and rendered us all androgynous, neither male nor female, would you still consider yourself a man or a woman?

If pressing that button also erased sex, sexual sex, dirty stuff, ie Fucking, made us all give birth by cutting off our limbs and growing new people out of them, I don’t know – would your answer change? How does the presence or absence of childbearing or of Fucking affect how you think about this problem? Being Fucked, getting Fucked, having the kids, raising the kids, getting the job… now everybody or nobody does any of it. It belongs to everybody. How’s your ego?

Would it be hard to live in a world that doesn’t tell you you’re naturally on top or underneath? Would you still be a man or a woman?

7. The World Without the Button

When I pose this question in real life, I receive a lot of surprising answers.

If a cis woman says she would love to press a button to have a penis, deeper voice, height, and other “male” characteristics, but would want to continue living as a feminine woman, is she transgender?

If a cis woman says she would press the button to avoid the pain of childbirth, be respected as men are respected, and lessen the threat of rape, is she transgender?

If a cis man says he would press the button if it had no medical or social consequences (other than misogyny), but not if it required the other significant social or physical sacrifices associated with being transgender in our world, is he transgender? Philosophically, I don’t know. I asked him, and he gave me a weird look and said, “Of course not.”

8. Conclusions

I think, if we lived in a world where the original iteration of the button existed, there would be a lot more transgender people than there are now.

But, then, what does that actually mean? If being transgender is an innate desire, or even simple willingness, to live as the gender “opposite” the one you were assigned, then many people who have not and never will transition in any way – are, indeed, explicitly unwilling to do so – Are transgender. People who choose to live within the precise binary gender role and bodily layout they were assigned. People who extract privilege from doing so. Some people who barely think about gender or sexuality in a political or interpersonal sense at all. I’m not talking about nonbinary people, alright, at least not those who would identify themselves as such. I’m talking about, like, firemen and teachers and Tiktok models.

Are such people in self-denial, unenlightened? If they aren’t, then are they cis?

And what about the people who do acknowledge to themselves some innate sense of being another gender, but do nothing to present themselves as such socially? Are they transgender?

If people constantly assume I’m nonbinary or a man, then am I transgender, regardless of what I say?

The reason I ask all of these questions is that there’s no clean answer. You may not have a clean answer even within yourself. Basic facts force us to acknowledge that gender is not biological, but it’s not fully social and separate from biology, either. We need to mature past the idea of a complete unity between sex and gender and the idea of a complete split. Neither model is completely true – the social is biological, the biological is social³.

Let’s sit with that discomfort for a minute, then. Let’s take it for what it is. Gender is a messy ideology. Transgender is a shifting word. As it should be – trans-gender, transverse, transcendent, revels in the ambiguity, the blurred distinctions, the discomfort, the questioning of an established paradigm. It doesn’t claim to have the answers.

So I leave you with a muddied definition of a word, and a single insight. Whatever transgender people are or are not, the line between them and the rest of us⁴ is not so stark at all.

1. I’ve been thinking about this idea since Chuck Tingle first talked about it in a Tumblr post.

2. I will be using binary language as shorthand throughout this post. This language implies a physiological system made up of two completely distinct sexes. However, my true position is that biological sex follows a bimodal distribution where traits tend to fall into two major but overlapping groups. The separation of those groups into the sexes as we know them is a social model. When I refer to gender, I refer to the social roles and expectations conferred upon the nodes of that model.

And please don’t lecture me about “elementary biology” and whatnot. I did college biology.

3. I don’t have the space to defend these assertions in this post. I intend to write a piece about gender from an animal behavior perspective and a piece about the invocation of biology in social rhetoric in the future. For now, I must assume you’re at least vaguely familiar with the contours of this topic.

4. My “them” and “us” here is deliberate and ironic, Your Honor

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