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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 19, 2022

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For the folks here who talk heatedly about trans issues - I want to pose a thought experiment. Let's say it's the year 2300, and people can quickly, cheaply and painlessly switch their sex from male to female, and vice versa. There are no long term side effects, and it's as simple as going to buy a pill from the corner store.

On top of that, fertility issues have been handled, babies are grown/raised by artificial wombs and many different types of family structures are available with parents being able to choose what works best for their preference. Gender and sex can play a role if needed, but only for those who wish to have traditional families. It is not socially stigmatized to raise a family with two women, or two men, etc.

If this all were the case, would you have issues with people transitioning genders/sex still? If not, at what point along the line do you think it becomes okay to freely switch?

Ah yes, the Culture scenario.

The problem with such hypotheticals is that they by design brush away all the concrete criticisms of modernity. It never is that easy to fuck with nature and get away with it. The magic pill always has side effects, and in practice what is being advocated is to hide them or make a new pill to fix them and create new ones. To just gobble the drug cocktail that makes what is ostensibly a miserable life not even worth living acceptable. And be under ever more control.

I don't want to live in this world that you describe. It is inhuman. I don't want people to be designer laboratory product, I don't want to be under control, I don't want to be liberated from our condition. I just want to be a human, same as my father before me, and his father before him. And if people can't be satisfied with that, I want them far away from me and my children.

And I predict that by 2300 people will either have been disillusioned with these fanciful delusions and chosen new ones or have been long destroyed.

I don't want to live in this world that you describe. It is inhuman. I don't want people to be designer laboratory product, I don't want to be under control, I don't want to be liberated from our condition. I just want to be a human, same as my father before me, and his father before him. And if people can't be satisfied with that, I want them far away from me and my children.

This! I would want to join the village commune where we proclaim the outside world as evil and shun it and patrol the borders with tanks.