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There can actually be something important to a potential partner about the psychology of someone who would step into that lab grown body and the framing is doing a lot of work. It's like in the same scenario but instead you find out they have made all of their life decisions by consulting an aggressive psychic who they refuse to stop consulting the psychic or agree that psychics are not purveyors of truth.
I just want to point out that using irrational means to make difficult decisions isn’t necessarily wrong.
In traditional matchmaking, the irrationality of astrology was one of the best aspects of it. The matchmaker had knowledge of parental preferences and their broader social standing, so it wasn't fully random. But choosing one match over another was often considered a slight against the losing family and could result in a loss in standing. Astrology's opaqueness gave plausible deniability so everyone could walk away from the encounter while saving face.
Contemporary people sometimes use it now to soften the blow of rejection: blame it on the fact that the suitor is an Aquarius, and the suitor can just walk away mumbling to himself that the rejector is just crazy.
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I suppose a variation of the framing would be to compare whether you'd judge a transwoman more harshly than a natal female who just took on a hotter synth female body.
You can still imagine there's just something off about someone who really didn't like their birth sex, in a way that's deeper or more problematic than someone who just wants to look hotter. But I'd want to see evidence of that (in that hypothetical world). Would gender swappers generally have worse outcomes or behavioral patterns than regular people?
This discussion would probably at some point call for an examination of Blanchard's autogynephilia hypothesis, i.e. that some men are sexually aroused by the thought of themselves as a woman, and that this is the motivational mechanism behind some trans sexuality. Now I am not the person to have that discussion because I know way too little about it. Autogynephilia sounds like the kind of thing psychologists would make up, honestly, but I am not qualified to make that claim on any proper foundation.
Many people are sexually interested in excrement, imagining yourself as the object of your desire seems like the kind of philia you'd be surprised if it didn't exist.
I think there's two different claims that need to be distinguished here.
It is undoubtedly true that some men have a "forced feminization" or "sissyfication" fetish. One only need google those two phrases, and you'd be presented with a ton of examples of this.
And at least some of the trans women online are open about formerly being AMAB with such fetishes.
However, the question is one of causality. Do the transwomen with sissyfication fetishes have them because they are trans, or are they trans because they have sissyfication fetishes?
I could easily imagine a world where people who are trans happen to like sexual fantasies where they magically get turned into women. It wouldn't be that different from women with rape fetishes - their guilt is a turn off, so a scenario that takes the control out of their hands and bypasses their guilt is incredibly attractive.
Seems like bog standard fetish drift to me. Didn't that come up some while ago in a discussion about conversion therapies? But yeah, fetishes tend to get more extreme over time, and you can absolutely meme yourself into having one. Combined with all the aggressive trans-propagandising going on where people say things like "if you're even asking the question of if you might be trans, then you probably are"...
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Right, and my possibly slightly spicy take on this is that this is a much more understandable and reasonable justification for identifying as a woman than most I hear from trans advocates. I'm not surprised it's what many people assume is going on in most MTF cases when they called MTF Trans women perverts. I can't figure out the internal logic on transgenderism without a motivation like this. The only other reasonable alternative is that there is some internal sense of gender that I and people like me are blind to, and this is really hard for me to believe.
Even Blanchard's typology allowed for "homosexual transsexuals" ("gay men" who transitioned young in order to score straight men), so even in his theorizing there's more reason than sissyfication fetishes to explain being trans.
That said, I'm not sure I think one needs a bespoke "sense of gender" to explain trans people either. I doubt people evolved a specific biological mechanism to become true "weeaboos", and yet some subset of American youth immerse themselves in Japanese culture and entertainment all the same. I think this can easily be explained by more general mental mechanisms - autism-like special interests, being an outcast from mainstream culture, being extremely online, etc.
I suspect that sex is such an obvious social trait, that there would always be a non-zero number of people who get a trapped prior that their life would be better if they had been born the opposite sex (or could start living as the opposite sex), or who have general feelings of body dysphoria or feelings of social ostracism that get channeled through envy of the opposite sex in some way.
The question then becomes the best way to deal with this trapped prior. Unlike with a phobia, where the person is going to keep living in a world with, say, dogs, and it is probably best to use a reliable, evidence-based therapy to lessen or eliminate the person's trapped prior, I suspect that the existence of hormone treatments and surgeries make it more difficult to remove this trapped prior.
Supposedly, people's pain tolerance is lower if they know they can get a pill that will block their pain. This makes sense to me - if your only option is to endure pain, better that your baseline biology pony up with natural painkillers or distractions that make it easier to endure. But if you now know that there's a quick fix, your strategy naturally shifts to convincing the gatekeeper of pain pills that you deserve pills to block your pain. You'll subconsciously convince yourself that your pain is unbearable, because truly believing that your pain is unbearable is the best strategy to convince a gatekeeper of that fact.
Maybe the trapped prior of sex or sex role dysphoria is the same thing? You think the grass is greener some way (your soft male physique would be better received with boobs and make up, people would treat you more nicely, etc.), that your current life sucks (possibly true), and that your best option is to jump through all the hoops the local doctor sets up for you and get some hormones (or to just acquire some hormones from the black/grey market.)
In this model, the "social contagion" would just be the simple knowledge of the fact that semi-reliable treatments exist.
I don't know what the most responsible thing to do if the trapped prior model is correct. Do we have reliable ways to move trapped priors? Somehow, what gets called "conversion therapy" by opponents doesn't seem like a very likely way to work, but I don't know what the evidence actually looks like on that front.
My understanding of the sissification stuff is that it's also usually at least bisexual if not outright homosexual. During the pornhub/mastercard happening someone said all the forced feminization/sissy stuff was being kicked off and linked warning this is a porn site very NSFW sissyhypno.com warning this is a porn site very NSFW as where a lot of that group of people migrated to and it looks very much like the viewers are expected to be if not primarily male attracted attracted to the idea of male attraction.
I disagree that this is a good way to model the transgender phenomenon. Weaboos aren't usually making claims or demands and those they make are not taken seriously. I don't think transgenderism in general can be modeled like a hobby.
I definitely find this line of reasoning compelling. I can model the headspace of a perspective trans person who has convinced themselves that all of their problems are downstream of their gender and rationalize something that looks a whole lot like modern transgender theory. What I don't understand is why so many people that should know better endorse these rationalizations.
I think the treatment availability takes a far back seat to the memeplex and community surrounding the phenomenon. Even if all we had no treatment whatsoever I think this same thing can happen, which is underlined by apparently the trend of young trans people who feel no need to undergo any treatment.
I think a lot of this collapses if society can broadly agree that this isn't how sex/gender work. At the very least this will stop doing harm by giving more people the meme of being born the wrong sex with which to form the prior even if it can still come about naturally. Then just basically the therapies Scott oulined in that article to deal with the natural cases. This is of course assuming that there is no there there with trans people which I'm not quite ready to do although I grow tired of the complete lack of engagement on these topics with the trans advocate side.
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Understandable to who?
Because the US political milieu and arguably legal system is biased towards claims about inherent characteristics (i.e. you can't discriminate against me cause I was born this way!). I don't think the "trapped in the wrong body" position is really carving reality at the joints (at least not in the normative sense people want - someone with a foreign limb could claim they feel "trapped" in their body - nobody thinks this validates their "identity", we just think they're delusional).
But that doesn't mean that it isn't useful, politically.
Edit: removed for potential consensus building, repetition.
Understandable to a theoretical neutral observer. It doesn't require a bunch of assumptions that are difficult or impossible to investigate.
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It's a whole can of worms, it would also be very important how they framed it. I find most of the current thought justifying transgenderism to be pretty vacuous and would be much more receptive to someone just saying they did it because they reviewed their options, maybe tried both and pragmatically decided that they'd prefer to be the opposite sex rather than all this mysticism around some immeasurable innate gender. Which I think is where your hypothetical breaks down, people care quite a bit about what their prospective partners think/believe. Someone who is convinced on psychics would make a bad partner for me regardless of their body. I do think there is also some matter of a lot of path dependent psychological development happens on one side of the fence or the other that can't be undone, and if it can that machine starts seeming a whole lot more like something that kills someone and then creates a new person.
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