Would you be any
different now if you
had been born
another gender?
Truthfully I’m wary of any question that asks us to determine if we’d be any different had the circumstances of our existence changed dramatically from what they were. Partly because I don’t think a lot of us are truly self-aware enough to properly answer the question in the first place. I mean, every time I’ve seen the infamous Milgram Experiment discussed online virtually every commenter has insisted they would be the exceptional person who refuses to press the button, bringing up vague assertions of their past refusals to kowtow to authority to justify their declaration.
And partly because as hypothetical questions go, they are really the hypotheticalliest. We can offer up ideas about how we believe we would or would not be different, but we can never ever know for sure, because we are who we are and nothing’s going to change that.
Still, I ask such a question today because a) I couldn’t think of anything else and b) there is probably some good to thinking about how much where we are now has been affected by where we began.
It’s a hard question to answer, though, because our tendency is to assume that our current consciousness would simply manifest itself in another body–that we would still be us regardless of how we were originally born, and that seems highly unlikely to me. It’s also a question that some would accuse of being inherently transphobic, since it is predicated on the idea that there are inherent differences in the sexes in the first place.
I can’t speak to that. All I have to judge is my own experience as a man who has largely felt alienated by traditional masculine culture, but who has also never questioned his sexuality and who regards many of his responses (ie. boners) to the world around him as biological rather than cultural. My guess is that I would be different if I had been born a woman. The main benefit would be that my small size would no longer be considered a character flaw, as it is now, but that would probably pale in comparison to the many pricks and arrows of outrageous fortune that come without the possession of a penis.
I like to think I would still be creative, that I would still be funny and that I would still love to cook, but I would be okay if I ended up as someone completely different, so long as I was kind, curious and a good friend to those who needed me.
Have you ever thought about this? Do you have a much more concrete conception of who you would have been? Or is it something so hazy and far-off from who you are that you cannot even imagine it?
“All I have to judge is my own experience as a man who has largely felt alienated by traditional masculine culture, but who has also never questioned his sexuality and who regards many of his responses (ie. boners) to the world around him as biological rather than cultural.” So he feels largely alienated by traditional masculine culture but still feel the need to point out how he never questioned his sexuality (I guess he meant gender identity? very different things) and feel the urge to insert his boners into the conversation, out of the blue. That sounds odd. 😛 But… Read more »