But a Jape

“‘You ride your broom too much,’ I said! ‘It’s a nice night, I should get some steps in,’ I said! ‘It’s not like anyone’s gonna bother you in the middle of the night, in the middle of an empty park!'”

– Witch Girl, on her broom

Every now and then, the internet posits the hypothetical of what you would do if you were suddenly transformed into the opposite sex. I feel like people’s answers to these always carries a massive amount of implications you could unpack, but the one I want to talk about today is how so many men imply that they would be transformed, specifically, into a conventionally attractive woman. They’ll say they’ll use their newfound womanhood to slut it up – get free drinks, sleep around, make money off of stripping/OnlyFans, etc.

It really strikes me that, to these men, being a woman inherently implies being an attractive woman. And I don’t believe these guys think this in an “all women are beautiful” kinda way, I think they just do not register the existence of unattractive women, never mind the possibility that they could be an unattractive woman if placed in this hypothetical scenario.

Anyway, these questions always get me thinking on the specific terms of the hypothetical – what kind of woman am I? Do I keep my same brain? Do I look exactly the same but with different genitals? Breasts? Or am I a version of myself that had always had female biology?

Or – when the question is just posed as, “What if you became a woman?” – am I transformed into a woman, but my body remains unchanged?

– James