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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.
Seems reasonable to assume based on what I've seen here that people have different reasons for not liking trans as an ideology or action. We've already had people espouse different views on this thread like @gog vs @omfalos.
I don't want any of those things either, and I still don't think increasing our technology is inhuman. Maybe 2300 is too early, if you prefer a slower pace of technological change. Do you think that, barring a massive drop in technology, it would be fair to say we'd still be human if we developed this tech in 23,000? Theoretically your children would be long gone, and your distance ancestors so dispersed in the gene pool as to be extremely common.
I doubt the 'fanciful delusions' that technology gives us increasing power over our environment, including our bodies, is going to go away any time soon my friend. Unless you're arguing there's some hard cap on technological progress outside of the laws of physics, I think your prediction is going to fail.
And yet that is exactly what is contained in the hypothetical?
It's not a question of time. "Nothing human escapes the near future."
Someone with that technology I do not recognize as human. They're something else.
More is a question of metric. There are things we can do that we couldn't in the past. There are things we could do in the past that we no longer can. History is not linear.
But to the point, It's not just physics we're limited by. It is also economics, sociology, mathematics, and generally reality as it is. You can't change nature. It's categorically impossible. You can negotiate with it by being a clever engineer of the outcomes you want, but you can't change what is.
Liberation from reality itself and specifically the realities of sex is a common feature of decadent empires. My prediction would have held if made about Elagabalus, I wager it will again.
Wrote a long reply but accidentally hit cancel... sigh.
Strong disagree. Think you're lumping me in with your outgroup here. We already have a ton of drugs and medicine to radically change our biology, I don't think there's anything meaningfully different in changing sex.
I'm a techno-optimist. I'd argue we're more likely to go extinct than stop progressing tech. It's too damn useful.
Cute nickname for Aurelius he was a great guy. Too bad we have far better technology than the Romans dreamed of and are progressing far faster.
Now we see the violence inherent in the system!
Oh it is more of the same for modernity, on that we agree. But I refuse to abandon trying to convince people to stop subjugating themselves.
I'm a naturalist, I don't believe there is such a thing as progress. The very idea is silly, and to be honest it seems to be the core flaw in the worldview you describe here. You think you're any better than the Romans. But you're not.
All ages are equal before God.
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