As in, someone who sees themselves as a straight male, but a wizard curses them to suddenly become biologically female, but they themselves see them as still male, does that make them transgender? Or does trans only cover people who willingly change?
I think what they would be is “magically transformed by a wizard”. I don’t think modern neurobiology or sociology of gender identity anywhere addresses the issue of magical transformation by wizards.
I think you owe many people an apology for equating becoming female to being cursed.
And gender identity is much than biological, physiological attributes.
Meh, I kinda think that any non-consensual magical transformation to a condition that you don’t want for yourself would be fair to describe as a “curse”.
If before they were a biological man who identified as a woman, they were transgender.
If after they are a biological woman who identifies as a man, they are transgender
It’s not complex
Magical transformation into a female?
Dibs on the name “Ozma”.
If wishes were fishes could we all fly away using a piece of string this colour?
This question is fun but deeply open-ended.
Magic could potentially kill the man, convert them into dust, and then assemble a completely new female.
It could also turn the man into a supercool demigoddess whose ability to function far exceeds either gender norm, and barely plays by any limits. Woe to those who think she’s a demure little thing when she can punch for ten tons of force and simply levitate around.
So the first question that comes is how much does the man know about himself or want to be himself?
In the major materials I’ve seen on magic, as a longtime dungeons and dragons DM as well as several works of fiction, spontaneously creating new people is MUCH HARDER than modifying someone. My tilt towards gaming systems of magic strongly disfavors ‘something for nothing’ mechanics, which also sound out against some kind of major empowerment via the same means.
It’s easier to destroy than to create. It’s easier to degrade than to enhance. Magic follows this contour.
Cursing an unwilling victim with dysphoria by forcibly changing their gender, where they have zero interest in somehow conforming to the new gender, would logically create some kind of double transition scenario. Do people who transition twice count as cisgender? Particularly if there is no actual willingness to be female in the first place?
Now if the wizard is not doing this to drive a trespasser suicidal, trying to help or improve someone, magic is generally far superior to physical means. The wizard could, potentially, modify memories or create false ones that do no harm but build attachment and a sense of self. At the extreme, the resultant woman would reject any label of ‘Trans’ because they’re not that former man and may not even have a basic connection to him.
I think the question boils down to the specifics of the wizard’s magic. I would see a long line between ‘cisgender male/transgender female/cisgender female/new divinity’ based on how cool this all is.
My question is if a wizard changed someone from male to female, as in, someone who sees themselves as a straight male, but a wizard curses them to suddenly become biologically female, but they themselves see them as still male, and the consensus of Dopers consider that does that make them transgender, is the answer still the same if the wizard magically changes them so they are not transgender?
Do you mean changes them so their gender identity matches their new body?
You appear to have a misconception. Transitioning is not what makes someone trans. A trans person is merely someone whose gender identity does not correspond to their natural, medically unaltered biological sex.
Your example is someone I would call trans, yes. But that would be because he is biologically indistinguishable from a cisgender woman, but continues to have a male gender identity.
If he isn’t magically transformed back, he might consider transitioning in some way so that others would see him as male, just like any trans man might.
Of course, his experience would be different than any real life trans men–he wouldn’t have been identified as female at birth. But it would fit under the trans umbrella, I’d think.
Heck, this isn’t an uncommon method to have a trans man in a work of fantasy. That’s the entire premise of the original Misfile—if you replace wizard with “angel making a mistake.” Misfile is generally treated as a trans comic.
TBH I’m being somewhat flippant. My view is that once you introduce “magic” into the situation, who knows what the rules are anymore?
In other words if you can “magic” someone into being female who is to say? Maybe you can “magic” them into not being transgender?
If you are throwing out the rulebook, you are throwing out the rulebook. So who knows?
You still haven’t answered what you mean by “magic them into not being transgender”. I asked a Yes/No question, and further comment kind of hinged on that answer.
But assuming your answer is “Yes”, I would argue that you would have so altered their personality so as to effectively kill them and created a new one in their transformed body, that just happens to share their memories.
There was a movie to this effect, though it was a dead dude with God and Satan talking about who should get him. It was decided that he would be send back for a short time to see if he could get anyone on earth to love him. IIRC (it was a while since I saw it going on rusty memory of it from here on out) Satan gets God to send him back as a female to really throw him off his game. He is ‘himself’ when he gets back as male, though in a female body. There is quite of bit of necessary adjustment on many levels, but at first he is not transitioned in his mind. The circumstances that be sort of cause some transitioning over the movie. So to me I would not say the act of the magic would make that person trans, just made a biological female by a wizard, as there was no transition of the mind, but that wold happen if the person transitioned to the new gender.
Magic aside, this is the definition of transgender.
It’s pretty simple. They are no longer transgender. Simples. Because magic.
I think what’s really under discussion here is the concept of authenticity - which is one of those things that us humans seem to care quite a lot about, but the universe doesn’t really want to help with.
If we had magic-level technology, we could take Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa apart into atoms and reassemble it again into the exact same thing, but would it be the same? It’s no longer the ‘original’ thing that the artist put together. We could reassemble it in such a way that everything is in the right place, except all of the carbon atoms have switched places with a different carbon atom* - there would be no way to measure that this had happened. We could swap out the carbon atoms and replace them with different carbon atoms harvested from Van Gogh’s Starry Night. We could assemble a completely faithful copy, down to the atom (*or to any lower level of fundamentally indistinguishable components if you don’t consider atoms to be interchangeable).
We could dissasemble it to fundamental particles and reassemble it upside down - is this the same as just turning it upside down together? Why not? The end result is the same.
Sure, you could argue that provenance and continuity has been lost, but what even is that? It’s not a property of the collection of atoms you have in front of you - it’s not something you can measure or distill out - it’s something you know happened, but if you didn’t know, it wouldn’t make any difference.
I suppose information theory probably says that the information about the history of individual particles is never lost, but also, it’s probably no longer local either. Take an orange and rearrange its molecules into the exact form of an apple, and you have an apple. There may in theory still be traces of the history of this transformation rippling out into the universe, but the majority of that information is no longer local to the apple any more.
So… if a wizard transforms a human into a state that precisely matches something we already have a very clear description of, then that’s what the transformed human now is - any argument to the contrary is dependent upon some distinction that is not measurably present.
For fuck’s sake. It was a yes/no question. Answer it, or say you won’t, but this disingenuous bullshit is not amusing.
Do non-transitioned people call themselves “trans” ? I certainly wouldn’t call them ‘cis’, but ‘trans’ doesn’t seem to fit either. I’m not really in an authoritative position to say. Maybe “gender-dysphoric”.
I think if the wizard made the person’s biology conform to their own sense of gender identity, then that person is definitely trans. If a bad wizard made it go the other way, I would still call them trans, because a transition has taken place, even if the person feels it is an adverse transition. They’re just a trans person who needs to transition a second time.
I would have preferred some kind of at least sci-fi premise. Unwanted brain transplantation, radical gene manipulation, etc.