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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?
So basically we would no longer be human in any real sense? We evolved for gender roles to facilitate procreation with quite distinct personality traits.
The world you describe gender becomes completely non-existent. A female and male me could not be the same person. At that point we have just eliminated gender and at that point I think we have evolved past humanity and are some other kind of intelligent algorithm.
I feel like the term algorithm is odd here since we'd still have biological bodies and flesh etc... just swapping genders. This has happened before, certain species evolve into other species that are able to swap genders, be hermaphrodites etc. The only difference is intentional evolution vs natural evolution. Life always changes its form, staying static is the opposite of what living beings do.
This kind of reasoning strikes me as odd. Is evolution and change in life only valid when it's supposed to help procreation? If so, what is the point of art, or enjoying life, or anything besides procreation?
Is changing our gender roles actually enough to make us die out as a species, and be outcompeted? I am highly skeptical of that.
Yes. Survival is the terminal goal of all life. Existence has to be sustained or it stops.
In material terms the reason for all these behaviors is procreation and facilitation thereof. How art in particular does so is a deep topic (my take is that it is the best way to communicate predictive heuristics), but ultimately it still serves that purpose or is a temporary waste of energy.
You can of course imagine that this is or isn't the "point", but that's entirely immaterial to why it exists.
Given all (modulo a handful of contested sociologist fakes) known human societies prior to modernity shared them, it's unknown if human societies are sustainable at all without. The trends in birth rates in the modern Western experiment make me skeptical that this can be achieved.
if procreation is so important then why do so many people not want to procreate? I think you are just projecting your opinion on everyone else and think they are misguided if they don't act accordingly.
What people want or claim to want is completely irrelevant to the sustainability of their actual behavior.
If you don't do what is necessary to keep existing you stop doing so. The popularity or ethics of suicide do not change this reality. Antinatalism is doomed to irrelevance by construction.
Note that none of these claims are normative. I haven't even expressed my "opinion" on this matter.
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