I think that question is more designed to cut through internalized transphobia. Our culture is still extremely transphobic, so I think it still has value. It doesn't really seem to apply to you, which is fine, but I also don't think anyone asking that question would hear your response of "well I want to be trans without erasing my own identity and past" and conclude that you are cis.

based materialist transition does not acknowledge liberal fantasists' tautological propositions

seriously tho i couldn't be prouder of a long-time user discovering yourself. you're straight up my idol for actually going to central asia and you've gone even further and made me question my own gender expression

It's a common feeling for a lot of us, some others wish they could have been born cis. Both are valid and have their reasons, both are beautiful. You don't have to be or think a certain way for you to be valid. If you wanna be a girl just go be a girl, you don't need to justify anything to anyone. If you want to explore these questions, do it for your own understanding of yourself.

I feel this super fucking hard. Wanting to feminize my body is not the same as me wanting to be a cis woman. Like, NOT AT ALL. I do not want to be cis, that is completely irrelevant to my transition process. There's cis women that look more masculine than pre transition me (which, btw, is completely ok, no shade here), the entire idea of linking transition progress to being more cis like is transphobic, mysogynist bs. I do not even care about passing anymore, i'm fine when people can't tell if i'm a boy or a girl, it's actually hillarious that some of the cissies break so easily that they need to know this. That i keep transitioning further is (apart from one procedure i have deeply personal and to a straight guy forever inscrutable reasons for), more of a quality of life update at this point, because HRT is fucking magic and has done things unimaginable to me, in spite of not making me the tiniest bit more cis. If i keep getting blasted with lasers on top of that is now a question of how often i need to shave and how much concealer i need to put on, no longer one of stalling the body horror that sprouted from my upper lip. None of that has anything to do with being cis, either. I could press the button and always have been a cis woman that is able to grow a beard that connects, something which i have never been capable off in this life. That's a thing. That's actually something some cis women have to put up with, i have cis friends who went through as much laser hair removal as me. The button does fucking nothing but giving you menstrual cramps, uncontrolled hormone levels and the risk to get preggers when your goth GF cums inside of you. As hot as my goth gal pal is, neither of us is fit to raise a baby, i'm sorry but that's how it is. And let's not even begin on the binary nonsense that is "the opposite gender" that has been sneaked into the wording of the question as the rotten cherry on top. My gender is and actually always has been something like "transbian mailbomber witch", what is the opposite to that? Jordan fucking Peterson on dubious testosterone supplements? A gay frog? A new type of male somebody on 4chan just made up? Who fucking knows?

And yes, i feel you on my past being part of who i am. Surviving when people tried to break me and shoehorn me into the boy role, finding my gender nonconforming niches to weather the storm until my egg was ready to crack, going through the questioning process and understanding gender in ways that just aren't accessible to cis people, living my wild and wonderful and weird experiences as a nonbinary transfem lesbian are what has made me the communist monster woman i am today and i'm fucking proud of all of that. It wasn't the happiest life, but it's mine and if i'm being honest, it's cool af.

The button test conflates basic comfort and survival needs like not wanting to feel dysphoria or not being exposed to transphobic hate crimes with the asinine, unattainable and actually undesirable idea of wanting to be cis. It is the pure distillate of the conditions under which gatekeepers struggle to reconcile the clinical reality of us existing and sitting in their practice with their need to keep believing in the actual existence of two neatly seperated boxes named MAN and WOMAN. Fuck. That. Noise. Gender is made up nonsense, even biological sex is just the reification of a loose cluster of optional characteristics, we are just blessed by the accident of our birth as trans people to realize that and be free to live the way we want to.

Let me tell you something: If i could choose between two buttons, one that instantly transforms my body into the likeness of Tailor Swift and one that instantly makes all transphobes shit themselves to death in agony, i'd immediately opt to live in a world with still just one Tailor Swift, but zero J.K. Rowlings.

I would like a gender button, because ideally I would just switch genders at will. That would be dope as hell

I wish I had a slider where I can just change my gender from one side to the other, or somewhere in-between, through nano-machines that can rapidly disassemble and rebuild my anatomy.

A lot of thos sorts if questions and stuff are a holdover from a bygone Era of 10 years ago. Jokes aside things have changed so much so fast in the last decade that a lot of the legacy trans culture feels increbly archaic and wrong. This is because for a long time, for lots of reasons, there really wasn't a "trans community" within which to have large scale dialogs. A lot of this stuff wasn't meant to help other trans people, it was meant to try and justify ourselves to cis people. So yeah a lot of this stuff is just weird and bad, especially laden with transmedicalism. If you want a real laugh check out this stupid shit:

https://www.transsexual.org/cogiati_english.html And this was for trans women to help trans women. Can you rotate a cube in your head comrade? Lol

I don't really like this, because my time as a boy/man is part of who I am. I would not be me without it, and despite all of the problems I had and have due to my gender, it is still part of who I am. I fought through all of this and worked to find out who I want to be by myself. I wouldn't wanna be cis, and I also don't want to cease being the me born out of this struggle.

I felt this suuuuuuuper hard when I finally came to terms with myself after realizing I had spent years in denial. One of the reasons why I didn't feel like I could be trans was that I felt like there was a lot of me I did like. That felt like it was in conflict with the narrative I grew up with, where you basically need to want to erase all traces of your past self to consider yourself trans. I spent quite a bit of time grappling with "what parts of me do I want to save" and I basically decided I would do whatever the fuck I wanted and not try to stress over being in some kind of binary. Honestly the only thing I have tension with now is my voice but I manage by flipping between a fem voice and masc voice in different contexts.

Replying again because I remembered a thought-

A sort of version of this question I've seen, that for me was a loooottt more helpful, but is more kinda aimed at sussing out if you're nonbinary vs male/female, was:

If you had been born as the opposite sex, would you have felt the need to physically transition?

And like. No? If I'd been born with a penis I think my main body dysphoria would've been over the fact that (based on my family) I would've been circumcised. The only physical change I would've done would be foreskin restoration, lol (also I'd work way harder at taking care of my butthole and not having hemorrhoids, since I wouldn't have the easier bottoming option I have now). Other than that I believe I'd just be a queer sometimes femme sometimes masc guy, I doubt I'd identify as any kind of trans.

But as is I was born into my body and have experienced decades of dysphoria and have been various states of egg for most of that time. I'm not a woman but living as a girl and then a woman has shaped so much of who I am, that to remove that, would fundamentally change me.

If there was a magical get a full sized uncut penis button I think I would probably (but like, I'm not even certain of that) press it?

But I'm not interested in any button that undoes my life. Because then I'm not me. And that line of thinking is confusing and gives me existential dread. No thanks.

Yeah those questions made me doubt my gender for over a decade

(I'm not trans myself so I have an outside perspective)

I remember watching a video that basically said that gender essentialism ("born trans") is something you tell conservatives to accept you. The radical stance on the other side is "gender isn't something you are but something you do" if that makes sense. So in your case, you did a lot of male and now you want to do female. There is nothing wrong with that. You don't have to say that your former life was a lie nor that it defines what you are.

This isn't against people who say they felt it since they were little. So they did the other gender without showing.

I hope that makes sense. It's my outside perspective and I'm willing to learn. I can look up the video if you ask me to.

Edit: I took the time to rewatch the video and it is worth it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a4r0CoXsGmk

Its the fact that it will whitewash my identity as trans, so I would not. Just making me have betta gender body would be good. If i had to press the button that is.

There is a lot of variations of this question. One that helped me was about button that changes your body in the way you want it to be but doesn't make everyone forgot your past instead it makes them accept your new presence. I would press the button in that case and this answer made me realise that i am not afraid of changes in my body and overall appearance, i am just afraid to be rejected. So my point is that those questions might not fit for everyone and that's absolutely valid but it might help someone in exploration of their identity.

there were times in my life i would have pushed the button without hesitation. but now i certainly would not

Yeah I feel that too. Like would I press the button now? Idk maybe haha. But also I know I definitely wouldn't press the "Be happy as a cis guy" button. The button question was helpful to me early on because it was my first inkling of "Ohhh shit I'm trans aren't i" years ago, but I rationalized it away.

All in all it's just a hypothetical, a tool to get to the heart of an issue. You don't have to use it or like it