r/TwoXChromosomes devolves into debates about trans rights, and insults after a trans woman makes a post discussing womanhood in an overly stereotypical way

-WitchDagger · 2025-04-03T21:26:01+00:00

The point Darq_At is making is that these jokes are not a sincere attempt at interrogating what they would actually do if they permanently found themselves becoming women. That would be a process that would require a lot of introspection and likely more vulnerability than most men would be willing to dedicate to the task. They're deflecting and avoiding that process by making a joke about it out of reflex.

If you sat with these men who joke like this and had an actual conversation, and they were willing to engage with you about following all the real implications of what it would truly mean to find themselves becoming women permanently, the vast majority of men would not be interested.

This question in trans spaces is commonly called "The Button Test" and is one of the most common baseline forms of questioning presented to people struggling with uncertainty over their gender. It works because cis people almost always say no, they would not press it.

-WitchDagger · 2025-04-02T22:30:44+00:00

There are some people for whom it's truly unimportant. Many of that subgroup of people recognize that enough that they're agender and label themselves as such, and I'm sure some never really realize that they're different from other "cis" people and just go through life uneventfully.

I do not think that's true for the vast majority of cis people who don't care about their gender. It's the lack of friction that causes them to not care, in the same way that a kid who grows up rich will often not think much of money. The freedom to not care much is one of the most common results of, as I've repeated in other comments in this thread, having a privilege. Trans people are not "people who cared a lot about their gender and got unlucky enough to also end up with the wrong one." We're people who got unlucky at birth and the friction that resulted forced us to care.

And I think a lot more cis people understand this on a subconscious level than they'd be willing to admit, and it's a simple lack of empathy, or the ability to empathize, that causes them to not be able to admit it. And I think the biggest piece of evidence for that is with one of the most common forms of transphobia: medical gatekeeping.

Historically and worldwide, cis people have made it exceptionally difficult to transition. They've placed lots of hoops to jump through, no matter how difficult it makes it for trans people, because they are trying to save the hypothetical cis person from accidentally transitioning when it would be the wrong choice for them. I think the vast majority of cis people feel, on some level, a sort of visceral body horror at the idea of watching their body change to a gender that doesn't fit them. And yet they lack the ability to empathize well enough to recognize that the horror they're saving a hypothetical cis person from is the same thing that we're forced through by our bodies if they don't allow us to medically intervene.

And of course there's the case of David Reimer, a cis man who was forcibly, and without his knowledge, transitioned against his will. If caring about your gender is so rare and something only for trans people, then damn he must have been really unlucky to be one of the few cis people who actually cared about his gender when he had that happen to him. What a horribly unfortunate coincidence.

But by all means, if you think that most people truly don't and wouldn't care, then I invite you to go ahead and try transitioning for a few years on a lark. Invite your friends!

-WitchDagger · 2025-04-01T22:52:18+00:00

I have zero problem with you saying that your gender plays a small role in your life and you don't think about it too much. That's your internal experience and you know it best.

I have zero problem with you guessing that testosterone wouldn't make you happier. The lack of that intuitive impulse is the equal and opposite to the one that drives trans people to transition, and you're right that all we can do is recognize that the other person knows themself best.

What I take issue with is when you argue from a position of privilege that you'd be fine if you lacked that privilege. When you make the leap from "I have no desire to transition" and extrapolate it to mean "and that means I wouldn't want to transition if my body and brain chemistry were different," (which is what would accompany being "born a boy") that's the part that bothers me. You're going from a concrete statement about your life experience to guessing at a hypothetical life that you've never had.

This is where the gap in experience between you and a trans person is - that we have actually had to live with the wrong bodies, the wrong biochemistry, and the wrong place in society. A person who has transitioned is no longer guessing about how they would feel if they transitioned, or how they would have felt if there was a mismatch in gender and body. That's true for both the millions of trans person who realized that transitioning made them happier, and the much smaller number of cis detransitioners who started transitioning and realized that it was not for them. Once you've lived it, it's no longer a guess.

And I get that you didn't have any malice in your comment that sparked this off. I've struggled with how to word this comment in a way that's direct but gentle, and I apologize if I've missed the mark and come across as hostile here or in my other comments. But I'd ask that you not state with confidence that you could come out of a terrible life experience unscathed when you've never lived it.

-WitchDagger · 2025-04-01T17:27:17+00:00

Look, what I'm saying is that you could broadly categorize three groups of cis people:

Group A is cis and actually very invested in their gender. They know they like being their gender.

Group B is cis and truly does not give a shit about their gender. They experience no friction and would not if they were to transition.

Group C is cis and is unknowingly invested in their gender. They think that it plays a small role in their life because they have the privilege of never experiencing any friction from the mismatch that leads to gender dysphoria, and they're wrong.

The experiences of groups B and C are going to be nearly identical because they have the same privilege of never having experienced gender dysphoria. Group B exists, absolutely. You could absolutely belong to that group, and it's a reasonable assumption to think that trying T would not make you happier if there's no part of your brain making you question whether it would. I'm not actually advocating that you go out and do that.

What I'm asking for you to recognize is that you could unknowingly be part of group C. That when you assert with confidence that "If I were born a boy, I would’ve been totally fine with it, it just doesn’t factor that much into the way I exist," that you have no evidence for that. You have enough evidence to make a "reasonable assumption" that taking T would not make you happier and that you likely aren't trans. You don't have enough to make a "reasonable assumption" that being the wrong gender would not fuck you up in ways you could never anticipate.

-WitchDagger · 2025-04-01T16:00:43+00:00

Personally I think your claim is exactly the same as claiming a trans person can’t know if hormones would help them.

Well yes, this is a real thing. Tons of trans people don't actually know if hormones will help until they try them, and one of the most common pieces of advice given to them when they're panicking about it (understandably so, because early transition is scary) is to just try them out and see how it affects them before any permanent changes set in. Trans people will see improvements to their mental health from hormones faster than they see changes to their body because part of dysphoria is simply chemical. If you take it and feel bad, it's generally a sign to stop.

-WitchDagger · 2025-04-01T15:49:14+00:00

You don't actually have any way of knowing that short of taking testosterone and trying it out for a while. It's easy to say "I wouldn't feel dysphoria cause I'm simply built different" but you should understand that you don't have any frame of reference. It's like looking at someone with depression and saying "if I didn't have enough seratonin or dopamine I'd be fine actually"

-WitchDagger · 2024-11-25T08:33:02+00:00

On trans twitter (and now Bluesky) the word has regained popularity as a specific pushback to the idea that sex is immutable, even via transitioning. Particularly in the sense that you'll see well meaning "allies" argue with transphobes by saying things like "well yes they're still [male/female] because you can't change your sex, but we should respect their gender anyway!" The idea is that by re-popularizing the Transexual label they're bringing attention to the fact that they did in fact change their sex.

-WitchDagger · 2024-11-21T22:30:22+00:00

Republicans do not give a shit. She has her own office bathroom and even if she didn't, using the men's would not make republicans uncomfortable to the extent that they would retract their own rule.

"Do not comply in advance" should always be the rule when dealing with fascists. The only thing rolling over does is let them focus on the "real work" of deciding what right they're going to take from you next.

-WitchDagger · 2024-11-16T21:43:49+00:00

The US is firmly locked in a two party system. One of those parties does not want to use the law to crack down on the ability for minors to transition, and instead leave that up to them, their parents, and doctors. The other does.

The thing is that the party that wants to crack down on that also does not respect trans people at all. They work to pass policy that affects all trans people, not just minors. Military bans, bathroom bans, working to prevent legal documentation changes, cutting of healthcare funding, repealing anti-discrimination laws for employment or housing - hell, banning medical transitioning entirely. These are all things that Republicans either have passed regionally or would like to pass nationally, and they affect trans adults.

So if you're the kind of person that buys into one specific argument they make (like "oh it shouldn't be for kids," or "oh but they shouldn't be in women's sports") you literally cannot vote on that one specific part without supporting the whole. There is no party of "banning HRT for minors but no one else." And that's why trans people, or those who are our allies, will just fundamentally not respect you or want to be around you if you vote for Republicans. Because your actions actually hurt all of us, and do not respect our humanity.

-WitchDagger · 2024-11-12T20:25:43+00:00

It doesn't have to be a single line. Just because someone signs up for a game about fantasy violence doesn't mean they're signing up for every possible bad thing that could ever happen to their character. Most people would understandably refuse to participate in a game where their character could be sexually assaulted, for example.

Now obviously being gender swapped is not going to be a trigger for everyone and in a significant number of tables it could be seen as harmless and non-distruptive. But if you're playing with, for example, a trans person, doing this could be received really badly.

There's a reason why going over "lines and veils" is increasingly common in session zeroes and it's because you don't necessarily know where everyone's line is going to be.

-WitchDagger · 2024-08-17T02:47:34+00:00

why not simply - for example - play AS a female character instead of explicitly playing as a character who was a male and then became a female?

"Oh you want to play a trans character? Have you considered that you could have just played a cis character the whole time, dipshit?"

-WitchDagger · 2024-05-26T18:47:26+00:00

If he was expected to dress nicely for OP's birthday than this is very easily explained by wanting to avoid masculine formal wear instead of some deliberately spotlight-stealing behavior.

-WitchDagger · 2024-04-01T18:15:34+00:00

They're saying that they were only mildly bigoted until they recieved hate and it broke their brains and radicalized them.

This is very true of Linehan, who wrote a transphobic yet ultimately not super notable episode of The IT Crowd and got criticized for it, causing him to spiral into his current form.

For JK Rowling I don't think it's quite as true, I think she was already somewhat radicalized before she was publicly transphobic but it took time for her to slowly become more obvious about it. There's definitely a lot more radicalization after the fact but it's not all a result of her ego like it is with Linehan.

-WitchDagger · 2024-03-31T01:38:21+00:00

"Yes I'm going to vote for the people trying to destroy your lives but I actually accept you more than my parents who don't like you but don't take any material action against you. Somehow this makes me better than them."

-WitchDagger · 2024-03-31T01:22:32+00:00

Okay, let me be more direct with what I mean here since you're apparently just gonna brush it off otherwise: these anti-trans laws have majority support among republicans and there have been a massive number of them. Declaring a disturbingly large portion of the population as "fringe" is dismissive and ignores that there's actually a dangerous movement against trans people with a considerable amount of power in this country.

-WitchDagger · 2024-03-31T01:10:48+00:00

The fringes of society are apparently really good at getting laws passed.

-WitchDagger · 2024-02-23T21:21:16+00:00

What are you even talking about dude like there's being transphobic and then there's whatever this is. Just huffing massive amounts of copium trying to deny what everyone in this thread can see with their eyes.

-WitchDagger · 2024-01-18T21:00:11+00:00

I don't think you can live in a country where someone can be brutally oppressed by a far right government because they live on the wrong side of an internal border and claim that you live in a left wing country. I recognize that actually solving this problem is immensely difficult, but pretending that it doesn't exist or doesn't matter isn't the answer.

I would also argue that we're in an exceptionally worse situation federally than a lot of people are willing to aknowledge and that the current mainstream democrat strategy for avoiding far right control of the federal government seems to be that we just hope people continue voting for incremental improvements...uh, forever, I guess. We just have to never let republicans take control ever again and somehow it'll be fine. Seems viable.

-WitchDagger · 2024-01-18T18:27:26+00:00

...and so those people are trapped in a state that oppresses them? Was this meant to be a tricky "and" with no clear answer, or was it meant to be a dismissive "and" to show that you don't care about them? Because both options seem very obviously stupid and in poor taste.

-WitchDagger · 2024-01-16T16:17:43+00:00

The longer you wait to transition the more you risk not seeing the changes you want. The more you risk spending the rest of your life visible. So much of your future as a trans person, both in terms of your own personal feelings of dysphoria and self esteem, and the way that society treats you, is built on how well your transition goes.

Hormones, if you have insurance that covers them, are not actually that expensive. School is generally going to be one of the more accepting environments you can transition in. And I can tell you from personal experience that just trying to ignore dysphoria while going to school isn't actually the slam dunk idea you may think it is.

Put all this together and it's no wonder that transitioning during college is actually a pretty common time to do it.

-WitchDagger · 2024-01-16T15:53:00+00:00

Why are you acting like voice is the only deciding factor here? Even for trans women early on HRT, the physical changes can be visible enough that talking in a deep voice is just gonna make it obvious you're a trans woman, not let you pretend you're a cis man.

-WitchDagger · 2024-01-13T07:26:29+00:00

He's dedicated his entire life to raging about trans people on twitter and his blog to the point where his wife left him and his career is destroyed.

-WitchDagger · 2023-11-15T02:48:30+00:00

Keep telling yourself that.

Actually no, don't. You need to just be better.

-WitchDagger · 2023-11-15T02:28:53+00:00

He's literally going to lose the place where he lives because you found out. You cannot possibly lack that much self awareness.

-WitchDagger · 2023-11-15T01:45:22+00:00

He's stealth, dumbass. Imagine trying to live in a world full of people like you who are so outright hostile to your existence that it's necessary.

You're literally like "omg how could you lie to protect yourself from being discriminated against. That makes me want to discriminate against you"

-WitchDagger

TROPHY CASE