‘I was having a much better time as a girl in that parallel life’

And now I got deleted for saying something truthful...honestly MN seems to be actively working against woman sometimes.

Probably.

I wonder if anyone who has used this sort of app and discovered this magically happier, more attractive opposite sex doppelgänger has thought to run those images back through the software again and see what emerges?
I'm going to bet that alternative would also look happier and more attractive than the original did. Though they might not have the same, um, amazingly gorgeous person appeal as the opposite sex one of course.

At least you didn't (I hope!) look like your MN namesake

Yeah I think those things are so dangerous actually! Even selfie mode on my phone subtly changes my face to "better". And those smooth rounded avatars people use on Facebook.... people just don't look like that. Real people are shadowy and textured and animated and uneven and I think that is increasingly disappointing for people.

I looked exactly like my brother as a man on Faceapp thing. Was quite disconcerting.

I wonder if part of the thing is the FaceApp also acted as a general sort of filter, smoothing out the oddities,so most people looked better in it than real life.

I looked great as a man with FaceApp, better than I do as a woman I think. Maybe I'm missing a trick, time to transition!

Do you think Luc thinks that Lucy is the female variant of Luc?

Two completely different roots linguistically I think.
(Maybe not as irrelevant as you think).

That FaceApp thing was meant to be just a bit of fun. It wasn’t supposed to give you a boner. Mind you, I did consider identifying as a Viking warrior woman after playing around with a similar AI app recently.

It's planted quite the image in my fragile little brain.

Oh FFS 🤦‍♀️. My parallel life was a lot better than my real one when I was a teenager. I was absolutely amazing in my parallel life. I didn't use it to argue for massive surgery and damaging medication

I remember the craze of the face swap app a couple of years ago. The amount of men who commented "I would" on their own swapped image was illuminating.

I haven't heard of this but it's brilliant.

Sadly person 3 is a woman who believes in reality....

Urgh, vomit

The whole 'is it raining outside' for a journalist applies. They might hear four different opinions but their job is to assess those opinions - person one is sat in a car and has their eyes closed, person two is a liar and likes to live in a self confessed fantasy world, person three is outside the building in the street and person four is 600 miles away in a different country. The journalist is told by 1, 2 and 4 that it's not raining and person 3 tells them it is raining.

Should the journalist publish all four opinions uncritically and with equal weighing?

Ikr! Daydreaming about a better life as a different version of yourself is pretty common!

Literally nobody imagines themselves less happy for fun, do they?

Sure, use the daydream as a prompt to wear dresses/ lose weight/ grow your hair / learn Spanish whatever.

But, that huge mansion with pools and a helipad you imagined yourself living in, or that career as a professional ballet dancer and the unicorn you rode to work..... Not everything we daydream can translate to reality.

This! We're going backwards.

I think it's bonkers that a journalist didn't pick up on it!

Even if you feature the opinions of someone that doesn't stop you reflecting on those opinions rather than just republishing them unfiltered or verbatim.

How can anyone think that someone who says their parallel life is happier is mentally ok and emotionally mature enough to change gender?!

Imaginary parallel lives are almost always happier, because they aren't real.

Adults are supposed to understand this. The ones who go running off after these imaginary scenarios, whatever that scenario is, are almost always emotionally immature.

Of course it happens all the time but it is weird that the writer here doesn't see the parallel.

Fair enough Squeaky but from where I’m standing (HE explicitly being ‘queered’, workshops, pro noun badges, anonymous reporting, fetish societies, captured union, misrepresenting the pc’s etc) rest assured that far from the other side’s voices being being silenced, they’re still shouting from the rooftops and getting louder. Meanwhile, the GC side daren’t even whisper for fear of retribution.

OK, balance was DEFINITELY the wrong word to use in my previous post. I don't mean balance as in "We've got an environmental scientist on to talk about climate change so here's a bloke with a 4x4 for balance". I suppose I mean that these people have a right to airtime (though maybe not quite as much as some of them think). We have protested about our voices being drowned out - I think that is getting much better now - but I don't think the answer is that the "other side" should lose their voice, either.

I mean, if they did, Operation Let Them Speak wouldn't be working as well as it is....

Such drama.

Then later writes

'When I uploaded my first picture to FaceApp I felt liquid and melting in the core of my body. Now I feel a column of fire'.

I bet you do mate! I bet you do!

I disagree with your disagreeing in that there needs to be ‘balance’ between these different views. Why not some degree of journalistic ethics in realising the more Luc/Lucy’s stories are celebrated, fawned over and lauded, the more we are going to see children and young people thinking they’re trans too?

Even in this story, the bigger issue is that Lucy does not seem to be doing Lucy. You may do you. I may do me or Red does Red, but there are a lot of extremely suggestible people out there being persuaded to do something that they’re really not. We know this from the many detransitioners.

Lucy talks of being influenced by a bloody app. Never mind the thousands of online influencers trying to … influence! (Or sell books). And succeeding. Most of the young people I know flirting with being trans were / are highly highly suggestible and very much easily influenced. Sometimes also carrying trauma.

Is there not some degree of thought to be given to safeguarding them? Why review this particular book? Out of the thousand possible books to review and why include it in the digital edition? There is a ton of evidence that the more a claim is repeated, the more it’s believed even if it is patently untrue.

I know there is lots of focus on porn's impact. But I don't think we are even at the start of understanding the impact of technology more generally. Its interesting (and a bit scary) how literally/uncritically the very well educated writer views the apps choices

This ^^ 💯times