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Notes -
Contrast Banks’s Culture.
As I recall it, sex changes are casual and fully functional. People transition over an extended period of time when they feel like it, and they can and do switch back and forth. It can be a fashion, idle curiosity, or a sense of obligation. Not that the Culture would admit to something so primitive as obligations, but apparently, one of its deep-seated norms is that each citizen fathers one child and mothers another. I can only assume this is part of its casual dismissal of Malthusian growth.
As an aside, omnisexuality is normalized in the Culture. Naturally, none of the male protagonists seem to go in for it. Whether this is author oversight or an intentional surrogate for his male audience, it’s almost conspicuous. For that matter, I can’t think of any characters, male or female, who are exclusively homosexual. The classic Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism isn’t actually all that gay.
I don’t remember any mentions of gender identity, dysphoria, or affirmation. (Caveat: I’ve read about half the series, with a bias towards earlier books.) Perhaps this is to be expected given their publication dates. I’d go further, though, and argue that gender essentialism is incompatible with Culture metaphysics. This is an aggressively materialist setting. The godlike machines which can swirl around your constituent atoms at will have found no evidence of a soul. Gender, as it might be formulated today, is relegated to a preference.
Good to see someone else rep the Culture, I just wrote a comment suggesting the same before I saw you had first.
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