Originally a comment by Artymorty on Deepity of the day.
Yes we can have a fantasy that we’re the other sex. Yes we can try to live that fantasy 24/7, but we shouldn’t, because it has consequences beyond our personal contentment. In any case living the fantasy 24/7 is not the same thing as reality. Living any fantasy 24/7 is not reality.
There are two major Hollywood sci-fi blockbusters that address this very question, and I’ve always felt like they’re in a kind of dialogue or debate with each other.
The first is The Wachowski Brothers’ The Matrix. Most of us know by now that the film is an allegory for trans ideology. (Helen Joyce devoted a whole chapter in her book Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality to an analysis of it, and the writer/director duo now both identify as transgender “sisters”.) The film acts as an argument for “living the fantasy 24/7”: it argues that the plane of existence we know as the material world may actually be just an artificial level of reality, a virtual world, whose rules can be bent to our wills if we can attune ourselves to the true reality hidden beneath. This idea is surely catnip to the men whose malfunctioning sex drives compel them to wish so badly to be female that they’ll believe any fantasy that offers them the possibility that their wish might come true.
The second film is Ready Player One, directed by Steven Spielberg. The film is set in a dystopian future where the real world is in ruins and humanity spends most of its time online in a virtual reality universe. You can see already the similarity in themes between both films: real world vs. virtual world. And, as in The Matrix, gender identity comes up: an ostensibly male character we meet in the virtual world turns out to actually be a female in the real world. We learn that she’s a butch lesbian who takes comfort in role-playing as a man in her online life. But unlike in The Matrix, her character recognizes that she’s still a woman in reality, and she comes to terms with it, reconciling her fictional identity with reality as the film progresses. In fact, the big moral at the end of Ready Player One can be seen as a direct rebuttal to that of The Matrix: after the big conflict is resolved, the heroes decide to implement limits on humanity’s use of the virtual world, forcing people to make sure that they remain grounded in material reality, no matter how much they may prefer the fantasy and escapism that the online world provides.
The trans activists made a film that argued for “living the fantasy 24/7”. But Spielberg rebutted them with a film that argues instead, as you said, “Living any fantasy 24/7 is not reality.”
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