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Notes -
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?
Men and women are useful phenotypes that exist for the purpose of reproduction. That 'cheap and painless' technology would have useful applications far beyond 'changing sex' - it'd correspond to - at least - artificial reproduction being easy, meaning 10k von neumann clones would be 'too simple' - rapid and sample-efficient exploration of genetic possibilities leading to incredibly smart people, and 'making your brain female' = technological integration with the nervous system leading to significantly more technically powerful individuals. All of that's not going to happen though because AI will be more versatile, powerful, scalable than it. Changing gender is bad because it prevents reproduction & perverts desires and attributes made in the context of, and only meaningful in the service of, mating and reproduction and many other complex phenomena related to human success. In that future, gender is physically outmoded - it doesn't matter anymore, and neither do many other things people assume are fixed but are merely eddies in the current of a large-scale struggle for growth and power! The question is like "If we had fusion power, should we replace grain windmills with it"? or "If we had superhuman AGI, should it respect the constitution?". We're not quite there yet though, and male/female still serves a reproductive purpose although we're working on that.
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