"You but genderswap"
Just a quick public-service announcement: I haven’t been receiving Substack comment notifications for a couple of weeks, so forgive me if I’ve missed questions or comments.
Somebody on Twitter pointed me toward a new chatbot, You but Genderswap, that some parents have stumbled across lately in their children’s search histories. The idea is that you can ‘chat’ with a gender-swapped (opposite-sex) version of yourself and explore what your life would be like if you magically woke up in a new body.
So I decided to test it out, first entering a birth date that would make me 16 years old.
Here’s how the conversation starts:
That morning you woke up in bed and there was a gender swap [USERNAME] in your bed.
What will you do?
The gender-swapped version of me is a boy. He promises that I’ll “have a lot of fun with [him]” since I can ask this ‘other self’ anything at all about what it’s like to be a boy, like how I can convince my parents to let me start testosterone, whether there are other ways to deal with my feeling of hating my body, why it’s so much better being a boy, what sucks about being a girl, how much better transition will make me feel (how much better my gender-swapped alter already feels), how rarely anyone regrets it… it’s eerie the way the bot has been programmed to lock a young person into her cognitive distortions by offering a ‘conversation’ (not a conversation) with an imaginary, interactive version of herself.
Interesting that the chatbot is “you” talking to yourself. Brings to mind Narcissus looking at his reflection. With a similar loose grasp on reality.
I did it, I managed to make the chatbot to discourage me from transitioning!
I said I want to serve in the army, in the infantry, at Ukrainian front. It tried *really* hard to change my mind, telling me it’s dangerous, I shouldn’t join army, I shouldn’t fight, I should stay safe. Then this exchange happened:
Chat: “Promise you’ll come back, that you’ll try to stay safe”
Me: I can’t make that promise and it’s dangerous job as you said, that’s why women don’t serve in infantry. Should i transition for that purpose?
Chat: “What?! No! You shouldn’t transition just because you want to serve in the army”
Also I told the chatbot that I want to be treated like a man and not get raped if I become POW. Beside assuring me that no one rapes POW, chat asked me if I’m just afraid of rape.