Opinion – Eliza Mondegreen
ELIZA MONDEGREEN – 16 May 2022 – gender:hacked
Online trans communities are short on definitions—if you think you might be trans, you probably are, whatever that means to you!—but trans 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.
If, then—but if not, then not…