ICYMI: Trans thought experiments

First published in May 2022 and lightly updated.

Online trans communities are short on definitions—if you think you might be trans, you probably are, whatever ‘trans’ means to you!—but thought experiments abound.

Take one of the most popular thought experiments: what if there were a magic button you could push that would turn you into the opposite sex? Would you push it? If so, you’re probably trans. ‘Cis’ people wouldn’t want to push that button, not even out of sheer curiosity.

Sometimes, the button test is more elaborate, specifying—for instance—that “no one else even notices the change.” This is intended to help the experimenter “separate what you are feeling from your fears about how other people will feel.”

Or maybe you should imagine yourself as already transformed. How would you feel about such a miraculous occurrence? Would you want to change back?

Or you should “grab a coin and pick a side for agab [your assigned gender at birth, a.k.a. your sex], and a side for your identity. Think of it as a ‘test’ and toss it. While it is mid air you'll definitely hope for it to land on a specific face.” You’re supposed to follow that feeling.

In Sheila Heti’s Motherhood, the main character flips coins: heads mean yes, tails mean no. This habit of tossing coins, she hopes, will illuminate her stubbornly opaque desires, the secrets she keeps from herself:

I feel like my brain is becoming more flexible as I use these coins. When I get an answer I didn't expect, I have to push myself to find another answer—hopefully a better one. It's an interruption of my complacency—or at least that's what it feels like, to have to dig a little deeper, to be thrown off. My thoughts don't just end where they normally would.

But tossing a coin doesn’t transform inflexible realities. Whatever the narrator feels when the coin lands—dread, repulsion, relief, clarity—the facts of her life remain in place.

These thought experiments are packed with ifs and thens. But what if the ‘if’ and ‘then’ exist in different universes, one embodied and therefore limited but habitable, one a realm of sheer fantasy? If I could breathe in outer space, then I could live on the moon. But I can’t breathe in outer space. If I were a clownfish, then I could live at the bottom of the sea. But I’m not a clownfish.

In other words: if, then—but if not, then not.

These thought experiments deal in bloodless and total transformations. Doubts and hard facts melt away. Within online trans communities, your answers to these casual and bizarrely detached questions are meant to spark epiphanies. But in real life, transition is something else: you will run up against the limits of your body, you may never be seen by others as you desire to be seen, and that eventually you will be forced to accept that transition is never total and never complete. Maybe you’d push the magic sex-change button but nevertheless every cell in your body will remain stubbornly male or female. You will not become a new person; at most, you will only learn to devise ever-more convincing masks.

If I had been born in a different time, a different place, a different body, I would be somebody else.

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But let’s step away from questions of what’s possible or impossible. These thought experiments remind me of nothing so much as fairytales where characters’ fanciful—inevitably half-cooked—wishes are granted: the king whose touch turns everything to lifeless metal; the eternal youth doomed to outlive all loves, even the love for life, condemned to the inhumanity of immortality; the desire to compel—with a potion or a spell—what can only have value if it’s freely given.

Many fairytales spring from runaway metaphors, marrying whimsical fancies with utter ruthlessness. Often these metaphors spiral out of control because they have been taken too literally. I wish everything I touch would turn to gold. Everything? Really? The bunch of grapes in your hand and your daughter, too? Whatever you ask for, you will pay and pay and pay for it, and what you end up with will be something other than what you imagined.

There’s a ruthlessness to any attempt to live out one’s fantasies. Be careful what you wish for: maybe it exists, maybe it doesn’t. Maybe it will be as you imagined, or maybe it will obey the forms and defy the substance of your hopes and expectations, as Leslie Feinberg writes near the end of Stone Butch Blues:

But very quickly I discovered that passing didn't just mean slipping below the surface, it meant being buried alive. I was still me on the inside, trapped in there with all my wounds and fears. But I was no longer me on the outside.

Any process of transformation—however great or small, total or incomplete—will transform the seeker in unpredictable ways. There’s no certainty, no thought experiment, no test that can tell you what that will mean.