• fracture ( fracture@lemmy.blahaj.zone ) 
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    1 day ago

    i know that the trans community around here overwhelmingly leans transfem, and that’s chill, but these hypotheticals always entertain me, as a transmasc

    like, does this button do nothing to me? does it undo my surgeries and hormones? does it give me gender dysphoria about my surgeries and hormones? it’s funny to wonder about

    however, i would not press the button to find out :)

    • kkj ( kkj@lemmy.dbzer0.com ) 
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      17 hours ago

      It also specifically says “girl” and not “AFAB,” so it might just change a trans woman into a trans girl with most of the same problems. I guess it might be helpful for someone who lives in a place that has recently become better about trans healthcare, since they’d effectively start earlier.

      Trans boys would benefit the most. No change in age and your dysphoria disappears. Even better for those who haven’t come out, because that would be an extra awkward conversation to have the second time (except now instead of trying to stop you, they’re trying to give you a podcast).

  • Here’s some real horror. Let’s create a real trans version of Button, Button.

    One day a man shows up at your door and hands you a wooden box with a button inside. He tells you, that if you press the button, it will instantly change your sex. But in turn, when you press it, it gives, “a total stranger whom you will never meet gender dysphoria as strong as you have ever experienced.” The stranger than leaves to let you mull over your options.

    If you fall to temptation and press the button, the strange button indeed changes your sex, instantly and totally. You literally end up with the same body you would have had if you had been born the opposite sex. And you know beyond a shadow of a doubt that you just gave gender dysphoria to someone. You have cured your curse by giving it to another.

    The next day, the person you got the box from shows up to collect the box and says, “it will be sent in for reset. After that, it will be sent to a total stranger whom you will never meet.”

    Ultimately, you end up with a fully transformed body…and gender dysphoria in the opposite direction.

    • kkj ( kkj@lemmy.dbzer0.com ) 
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      17 hours ago

      I’m agender and not dysphoric, so I might press the button just to see what it was like. And then of course get screwed, because this is some genie shit and I should have known better.

      • I don’t trust genies. If I ever meet one, my wishes will be:

        “For my first wish, locate a black hole at least one hundred billion light years from Earth. Find a particle like a stray proton that is about to fall into that black hole. Make it fall in a nanosecond faster than it otherwise would.”

        “For the second and third wishes, just do that two more times.”

        If genue lore is anything to go on, simply not wishing for anything is a bad move. Otherwise, the genie might just magically pop up one day to grant your wish when you accidentally say “I wish…” at an inopportune moment. Best to exhaust the wishes on the most inconsequential and trivial thing I can imagine. Find a black hole that’s literally outside our light cone. Find a particle that was already about to fall behind an event horizon and be unable to have any affect on the outside universe. Simply give it a little push and make it fall in a trivial bit faster. It’s a wish that’s both utterly trivial but also incredibly specific, thus minimizing the ability of the genie to twist it.

        Also, meta-gaming a bit, this type of wish protects you from certain kinds of genies. If you’re dealing with one of the truly evil ones, like from the Wishmaster series, they’re still going to do everything they can to fuck you over. But some genies just like to punish mortals more for the hubris of it, a human daring to meddle with forces beyond their understanding, usually for their own greed. But make a wish like this? The genie will instantly get what you’re trying to do and hopefully be less likely to actively seek to ruin your life in some horrifying way.

  • fun fact: that something has 0% probability of happening doesn’t necessarily guarantee that it won’t happen. consider the following example:

    you take a needle and throw it some random distance. now you measure the distance of the needle’s tip to you. assuming that the distance is exactly one well-defined real number, then each of these numbers must have a probability of 0% of occurring, since there’s infinitely many possible numbers and if you divide 100% probability of “any of them” by the (infinite) number of possibilities, you’re gonna arrive at 0% for each possibility. but one of them must still be the measurement outcome, despite having a 0% probability.

    • That isn’t how that works. Throwing a needle doesn’t yield infinite probabilities. Nor does any action. Statistics are always calculated within human, useful limits. It is never fully free of context.

      An unpredictable event like “where will this hurricane take my paper plane” may have a lot of potential outcomes, but “a lot” is way, way less than infinity. If you’re standing in China you’re not gonna throw a needle with your human arm and have it land in France.

      Nor are very very small numbers equivalent to 0. The needle will land at 1 position. That means there simply must have been at least a 0.0…1% chance for it to have landed there. Not having enough context to calculate exactly how many zeros would be “correct” is not the same thing as there being infinite possibilities

      • Cass ( Cass@piefed.blahaj.zone ) 
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        20 hours ago

        Probability doesn’t live in the real world, it’s maths and maths is full of actual infinities. The probability of a specific event in a continuous probability space is like the area of a line: zero. We can’t make actual zero-width lines in the real world but they’re very simple mathematical objects

      • Hugucinogens ( Daxter101@lemmy.blahaj.zone ) 
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        20 hours ago

        Yeah, well, not that it matters, but this thing you’re saying here:

        Statistics are always calculated within human, useful limits.

        , is not some great truth lol, it’s just what we usually do in the real world to make decisions.

        Statistics in math, sure as fuck can, and often are calculated to mathematical abstractions that make “no sense”, because the abstractions many times, are the point.

        The abstract ideas of 0.0… …01 == 0, and the chance of something in the physical world landing exactly somewhere being 0% (< clean and true 0), are actual truths, that just point to a breakdown of the system of measurement and communication, in some true way.

        The “chance for the needle to land precisely there is 0%”, for example, just says “the physical world we measure, has an infinitely subdividable infinity of submeasurements”.

        There’s math that calculates and compares those infinities with other infinities and such nerdy shit, that’s honestly beyond me. Just don’t be an asshole when something if foreign to you.

    • How does it work on repeated button presses? Does it flip you back and forth between male and female, or does it just keep driving you further and further into the the female side of sexual dimorphism and female gender stereotypes? If you press it a dozen times, does it turn you into a 4’8" woman with a large chest, narrow waist, huge hips, and whose only desire in life is to become a tradwife?

  • SomeRandomNoob ( SomeRandomNoob@discuss.tchncs.de ) 
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    13 hours ago

    There are so many men that propably would push the button. I wonder how many of them would want to change back after a year of period cramps every 4 weeks.

    Edit: Note: I’m not talking about LGBTQ+ or Trans people here. It was about “regular” men being confronted with the Fantasy choice of being a Woman by the push of a Button.

    • Zorg ( Zorg@lemmy.blahaj.zone ) 
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      14 hours ago

      Period cramps do really sound horrendous. If I was going to end up a smokeshow like zero-2, with the same main character energy & charisma, I’d probably risk the chance of having debilitating periods every 4ish weeks.
      If I’d just be a women but still overweight and average looking, I’m not really sure it’d be worth the risk.

    • Hugucinogens ( Daxter101@lemmy.blahaj.zone ) 
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      13 hours ago
      Entire comment I wrote thinking you might be an intentionally TERF-coded transphobe

      Everyone say yay for casually transphobic comments!

      Don’t know if you’re intentionally being a passive-aggressive terfy little bigot, or are just very, very uneducated and unlucky with your wording, but trans women (who are not men), actually get periods! Cramps included!

      And the regret rate remains below 1% regardless!

      I would like to know what you were thinking when you posted, but hey, it’s the internet, it’s easy to misunderstand people, so I’m just asking instead of assuming.


      Hey, sorry for being aggressive right away @SomeRandomNoob@discuss.tchncs.de, I really actually need to ask first. Did you literally mean it, when you said that “so many men would push the button”?

      • SomeRandomNoob ( SomeRandomNoob@discuss.tchncs.de ) 
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        13 hours ago

        I Absolutely support LGBTQ+ People! My Comment was not made with Transpeople in mind. It was about “regular” men being confronted with the Fantasy choice of being a Woman by the push of a Button. That was indeed not clear from my comment. Thank you for asking! I added a note to my original comment!

      • kkj ( kkj@lemmy.dbzer0.com ) 
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        17 hours ago

        Sure, but getting rid of dysphoria is a pretty compelling upside that a cis man wouldn’t have. In fact, they might acquire it. The regret rate for -dysphoria +periods is low, but the regret rate for +dysphoria +periods would almost certainly be higher.

        Of course, that’s assuming that the button makes you female, which is not what the OP says. If a cis man pressed it, the most straightforward interpretation is that they’d turn into a trans girl, so they’d de-age and get dysphoria.

        That said, and while I get that you’re probably sick and tired of dealing with transphobes, their comment didn’t actually mention trans people at all. I think you might have been a little trigger-happy there. As you said, trans women are not men, and their comment was talking about men, so it wasn’t talking about trans women.

        • Hugucinogens ( Daxter101@lemmy.blahaj.zone ) 
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          13 hours ago

          As you said, trans women are not men, and their comment was talking about men, so it wasn’t talking about trans women.

          Huh.

          Wait.

          …

          You’re not wrong.

          Shit, just a moment, I should edit my comment, thanks.