I am not asking this to be transphobic or anything but I had this debate with myself at 2 o’clock in the morning and every time I remember it I can’t focus.
On one hand, it is what they want. Let’s assume it causes no harm to them or any unforeseen circumstances.
On another hand, it would erase their identity as trans people. At the extreme you could consider it a genocide, since turning them into what they want would mean there is no more trans people and their unique identity is erased.
Are you magically doing something to them without their consent? Then it’s bad
Are you magically doing something to them with their enthusiastic consent? Then it’s great.
But for me, if you had some tool to turn me in to a cis woman, I’d say no. It would disconnect me from my community, in order to let me fit in better with the societal norms that taught me to hate myself for being trans in the first place. Fuck that.
That is one of my conundrums. If all trans people get turned into cis people, the community would cease to exist altogether.
Destruction of a community, especially globally, would be genocide. By trying to make a group of people happy with who they are, one ends up committing one of the greatest atrocities against them imaginable.
That’s why it has to be a choice.
Society at large is a community identity too, and many trans folk value that community connection more than I do for example. Many of us would absolutely choose the magical option you suggest in your initial post, but for others of us like myself, it would come with an incredible sense of grief and loss. I spent my life learning to embrace and love this part of who I am, and to have that taken away, just so I can blend in to the society that made the process so hard in the first place, that would be a punch in the stomach for me…
A community is just a social construct. If all members are alive and happy and choose to leave, no one was harmed.
It’s all about consent.
It’s sort of like magically turning everybody into a middle class white guy. Would it be good for each individual? Probably. But it’s probably worth thinking about why it’d be so good, and what that says about our real, non-magical world.
What if you could just magically gift anyone the ability to change gender at will? Sure there wouldn’t really be the community you are referring to, but consent would be maintained