Hi, Guys and Girls!
This isn’t really a proper thread—which isn’t to say it’s an improper one. I’m not that kind of girl. What it is is an analysis of two threads that were started recently on this forum:
[1] “How far will you go to be feminine?”, started by Katie Barns on 19th April, here:
http://www.crossdressers.com/forums/...to-be-feminine.
and [2] “Do you want to be a girl or just look like one?”, started by Kate Simmons on 21st April, here:
http://www.crossdressers.com/forums/...-look-like-one.
I was interested in these two threads for this reason: one member on this forum informs us from time to time that she’s worked with lots of TG people, and in her experience all CDers in their heart of hearts really want to transition.
These two threads basically address this question: do CDers really want to be women? I looked at the replies given on these threads and kept score. When asked whether or not they want to be women, what did our members say?
One difficulty with keeping score was that not everyone gave a clear “Yes” or “No” answer to the question asked. You’d have to read their reply carefully and try and judge their intent. In certain cases, in reading a reply I found it impossible to judge the respondant’s intent. So I simply ignored that reply. But obviously, this procedure would leave room for disagreement, and if someone else wanted to go back and do their own analysis of these threads, they might come up with somewhat different results than I got.
But to look at the threads individually:
[1] Katie asked the question, “If you could take a magic pill that would turn you into a woman, would you take it?” There were 44 more or less clear replies to this question, which I divided into four categories:
(1) Those who declared they wouldn’t take it. (16 people gave this answer, which works out to 36.3 %.)
(2) Those who said that perhaps they would, or perhaps they would have at some time in the past, but who found good reason not to do so at present. (4 replies, 9.1%.)
(3) Those who said they definitely would, or definitely would have at some time in the past, were it not for circumstances which ruled it out. (8 replies, 18.2%.)
(4) Those who declared they certainly would take it. (16 replies, 36.3%.)
To give you an example of the sort of judgement calls I made: a few people said they’d take the pill, if there were a second pill that would change them back to male when they wanted. I judged these people to be replying “No, they wouldn’t take the pill.” Firstly, because Katie wasn’t offering them a second pill, but secondly, because they wanted to be “part-time women”, and there’s no such thing. A woman is a woman full-time. There’s no switching back and forth.
At any rate we see that 36% declared they would take the pill. We might have a case for lumping in the Category 3’s with the Category 4’s. We could construe their replies as meaning that in their heart of hearts they really would like to be women. And this is what Our Beloved Member is claiming—that CDers really want to be women. But even if we lump the two together, we still only get 54.5% saying they’d like to be women—which is hardly all CDers.
[2] Kate asked the question, “Do you want to be a girl or just look like one?” There was a greater response to her thread (94 replies that I could score), perhaps because the magic pill question has been asked before and perhaps some people who’d previously answered the question didn’t bother to answer it again.
At any rate, I again divided the replies into four categories:
(1) Those who said they only wanted to look like a girl. (46 replies, 48.9%.)
(2) Those who said that perhaps they would like to be a girl but would settle for looking like one. (6 replies, 6.4%.)
(3) Those who said they would like to be a girl but would settle for looking like one. (14 replies, 14.9%.)
(4) Those who said they wanted to be a girl. (28 replies, 29.8%.)
Only 30% clearly said they wanted to be a girl. However, again, I think there’s a case for combining categories 3 and 4, since in many cases those who said they’d “settle for” looking like a girl only said so because given their circumstances, actually being a girl was out of the question. And again Our Beloved Member was claiming that in our hearts we want to be girls. So combine the two, and we still have only just under 45% who want to be girls.
One person who replied to Kate’s thread stated that her question was the one that would divide the forum into two camps—and she was right about that. We see that those who replied to either of these two questions pretty well divided down the middle. To be a girl or be a happily CDing man—we split pretty evenly on that question.
So I think we can safely say that these two threads refute the claim made by Our Beloved Member to the effect that all CDers really wish to be women. Only about half of them do—on this forum, at any rate.
Best wishes, Annabelle