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I've heard it pointed out that transwomen who embrace the female in long hair and flirty dresses never seem to connect with the unsexy but more psychologically and socially deep-rooted parts of stereotypical female gender performance, like being held responsible for emotional labor in conversations, over-contributing to household scut work, organizing office parties and remembering birthday observances, spontaneously volunteering care for the sick and elderly, feeling impulses or pressure to politely apologize, compromise and defer in conversations, feeling sorry for winning in a competition (because it hurts someone's feelings), fearing unwanted sexual contact and altering behavior to avoid it, fearing pregnancy and ditto, shouldering by default the more grueling parts of childcare responsibilities, etc.
Not all AFAB people experience all of these to the same extent, but I bet the proportion of women who experience their femaleness partly in one or more of these ways is vastly greater than the proportion who experience femaleness through short skirts, pert boobs and glamour makeup.
Might a real point of compromise be to clarify that AGP individuals desire to be, not women, but specifically hotties? It's possible that the few women who also self-identify as hotties would have an easier time embracing men who do the same, and it would clear up a lot of the issue for the many, many other women who feel that their womanhood is something more complex and fairly unconnected to hotness.
In my experience, they totally do. Not the pregnancy ones but the social through romantic ones. The o the point of loudly proclaiming how great it was to do housework.
I’d have said it was downstream of viewing everything through a gendered lens.
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What AGP individuals desire above all is attention for simply being. This also explains why even handsome and widely known men like Bruce Jenner would be AGP despite being objectively sexually successful, rich and famous (largely) heterosexual men. The reality is that 95% of women don’t really experience this, but male attention is so overwhelmingly focused on the hottest women, often without them even knowing, that they extrapolate this to the wider female experience. The trans fantasy - and this part is true for both AGP and HSTS - is to be a 95th percentile hotness woman. The rest of womanhood or womenfolk don’t concern them or factor into it at all. It’s like how acting students never imagine life as a merely moderately successful actor scraping by on bit parts and background roles in off-broadway shows and police procedurals; the fantasy is being the star.
I can see the appeal of transitioning to become male (if the button-push scenario were real versus hormones and surgery); menstruation is a horrid, annoying hassle at best, pregnancy and childbirth can have severe deleterious effects on the body, and men don't have to be very concerned about aging, because their eye wrinkles and gray hair are viewed as distinguished and not extinguished by society. Men who go overboard with botox and surgery come off kind of sad. Wearing makeup and cute outfits are the FUN part of being female.
But if I were to transition, I wouldn't look like George Clooney; I have female hips, testosterone can cause baldness, and I'm 95th-percentile female tall, but as a man, I'd be average. It's shallow of me, maybe, but I don't see a point to doing it without a serious gender dysphoria element if you're not going to pass easily and end up hot.
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There's a lot to unpack here.
You raise a valid point in that there are a lot of ugly/undesirable women who miss out on a lot of the benefits that conventionally attractive women get. But at the same time, I think the average woman (so, not outright ugly/disabled/etc, but decidedly not 95th percentile either) still underestimates how much attention she gets just for being a woman, because she's never had to experience the other side of things.
To put things in perspective: if you even have a "social circle", like at all, then you're already doing pretty damn well for yourself relative to the entire adult population. There's a non-trivial number of men, especially among the spergy AGP population we're talking about, that have essentially no friends or social connections of any kind. They got nothin'. There are women who find themselves in this sort of position too, but they're significantly more uncommon than their male counterparts.
If only the top 5% of women were experiencing substantial amounts of male attention, could feminism really sustain itself? It's a rare woman who doesn't have a story about a bad relationship, or at least an instance of catcalling or harassment, something. Clearly there are lots of women who are having lots of interactions with men! Otherwise the "gender wars" wouldn't be a political topic in the first place. For the type of isolated recluse who's been essentially invisible for his whole life, even the idea of negative attention like catcalling can become part of the erotic fantasy.
(I'll also just note that if you actually dive deep into AGP porn, you'll find a surprising number of "status loss" stories, i.e. rich white businessman gets transformed into a poor Mexican cleaning lady, things like that. It's not always a power fantasy of being in the top 1%).
Most friends are same gender (and most people heterosexual), though. Isolated men often aren’t even particularly ugly and lack of physical attractiveness (even if this is an issue for them) isn’t the primary reason they don’t have male friends. The reason men are more likely to be loners is likely biological, women make friends quickly but these friendships are more superficial, men have always had fewer friends but they tend to last longer and be ‘deeper’ in some ways.
Is she hot, though?
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Three separate objections, I guess:
Generalizing from the most visible member of a population is probably not a good way to draw conclusions about desire for attention. Most of the trans women I know very much care about unsexy, routine things so long as they can be labeled femme.
Wait, do you know any common fantasies that don’t involve being on the tail end of a bell curve?
In the spirit of the “male fantasy” meme, I think you could swap out “AGP individuals” for most any recognizable subgroup. They don’t just wanna be tradcons, they wanna be the 95th percentile tradcons, with a homestead and 11 children!
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That would certainly explain a lot. Including, potentially, the silly debate over "what is a woman". Because if by "a woman" they inadvertently mean "a 95th-percentile hotness woman," i.e. the concept of womanhood inheres in the hotness not vice-versa, then "I'm smokin' hot because I feel hot/ because I believe in my hotness" actually is a popular meme in the wider culture.
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