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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   25221 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 26, 2024

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In the Culture Series by the sadly departed Iain M. Banks (not to be confused with his more mundane doppelganger Iain Banks) humans can decide to change sex entirely and actually become the opposite sex in a very real sense, they are exactly like someone born that sex including womb or sperm etc... Often couples that want 2 kids will take turns doing the gestating.

If humans go on long enough a perfect sex change will indeed be possible at a genetic level. Would anyone living hard in the trans debate still have a problem with it then? How could they?

I say this as someone that thinks it is ridiculous that a man can DECLARE FEMALE Michael Scott BANKRUPTCY style and crush swimming records and smackdown college girls in basketball.

John Varley, if anyone's old enough to remember him, put quick and easy sex changes in his Eight Worlds universe in the early seventies.

Such a technology would be a perfect wedge for the trans community as it exists today. It would split the people who just want to have a different body and then move on with their lives from the people who want to always and forever be a markedly different counterculture. The latter would have to resort some nonbinary or fully posthuman neoforms to keep their unique status. Think Gibson's Tessier-Ashpool, Herbert's Harkonnen, Fading Suns' Decados, Lem's 21st Journey of Ijon Tichy. They wouldn't have existing category of people to base their status claims on. I love it.

Oh man. This is the best take I've seen all day! I mean this sincerely.

The trick is to spend a lot of time theorycrafting outlandish ideas, so that when somebody asks an out-there question you have a ready fully baked take instead of coming up with one on the spot. The downside is that it's slowly making you insane and unable to carry a normal political conversation because you jump to faraway conclusions ;)

If humans go on long enough a perfect sex change will indeed be possible at a genetic level. Would anyone living hard in the trans debate still have a problem with it then? How could they?

I don't think this will be possible in the near future, maybe it will never be possible, or at the cost so high that in practice the whole procedure will be undoable. I mean a perfect 100% (or 99%) sex change. Today's sex reassignment surgeries work at least on hormonal level and are sufficient for some very small number of people.

It's not only the problem of changing DNA in all 37 trillion cells of human body, that would maybe even be possible in some very distant future, but humans would need the ability to generate and kill cells arbitrarily in every place of the body and with remarkable precision. And it's not only a matter of adding some cells here or there, we would need to generate the whole extremely complex patterns. Maybe you can fit the uterus in a male body, but how can you change the shape of the pelvis?

Human body is not a machine or a Lego set, where you can add and remove parts arbitrarily, but it is generated by a set of remarkably difficult rules, many yet unknown. It is generated from the embryo like a flower is generated from the seed. And the process of generation takes many years, even decades. Looking from the perspective of developmental biology it is almost impossible to build human from the scratch and this is what would need to be done from the perspective of a perfect sex change: the bone structure between men and women differs, the skin structure differs, muscle structure is different.

Probably it would be more reasonable to swap consciousness between two bodies (how?!) then to rebuild a male into a female or otherwise. I cannot think of any physical or biological process that could be reasonably used in such a transformation.

I don't think it's good that such a transformation seems extremely difficult, it would be even interesting to under go a perfect sex change. I just make some observations based on my knowledge of biophysics and developmental biology.

The thought exercise proposes a 99% effective sex change - it doesn't even need to be that good to bring to the forefront many of the issues everyone's discussing - "A perfect wedge" as @comicsansstein put it.

I've had disagreements with other forum members in the past on this front, but people who are truly committed to being trans already have extremely high-quality surgeries available to them that will only get better. At least for the purposes of passing in public and getting to fuck who they want, if not bearing children.

I think the feasibility of excellent medical procedures, in concert with anyone younger-or-equal-to zoomers moving a point or two on the Kinsey scale will lead to those with true dysphoria being in an OK spot. The rest of these folks who want to win at sports or signal their rebellion against the culture are a different story.

I agree with you on most points. I'm only considering theoretical possibility of a nearly ideal sex change. But I have my doubts, when you mention 'extremely high-quality surgeries'. Seriously, FtM cannot have real penis and MtF cannot have real vagina. I know that some may wonder on the latter case, but you cannot place nerve endings where there are none. The elasticity of female vagina is remarkable and cannot be reproduced during the surgery.

However, I think that on the level of sexual response it may be sufficient for many trans-people, so I don't deny that many of them will find the sex reassignment surgery helpful or sufficient.

I disagree with this. The human body is a replicant writ large based on a very tiny amount of informational DNA. Most of that matter is replaced regularly, you replace it a bit faster with the right stuff and...poof, you have a new person. A virus can do it. They can kill you, they can certainly change you instead. The rules aren't difficult. They are just complex.

I disagree with this. The human body is a replicant writ large based on a very tiny amount of informational DNA. Most of that matter is replaced regularly, you replace it a bit faster with the right stuff and...poof, you have a new person.

No, this is not true. This is what many people think, that all the information is in the DNA, but that's not exactly right. There is a whole, extremely complicated process of gene expression above that. Part of information is encoded in the environment, maternal hormones help orchestrate the development of different tissues and organs in the growing fetus. They play a role in the development of the nervous system, reproductive organs, and other essential structures. The brain of the fetus is differentiated with respected to gender as early as in the twelfth week and after that there is no way to undo the changes.

Most of the large-scale gene expression happens in embryo and when we are young. Changing the DNA in reproductive organs doesn't make them vanish or change, there is no biological process that taps into this.

A virus can do it. They can kill you, they can certainly change you instead.

It is extremely easy to kill a human, and unbelievably difficult to apply some very sophisticated changes (we need highly specialized surgeons and something can still go wrong). Wolbachia bacterium can feminize some species of insects and this is the limit of complexity that it can handle.

I hope you know something about this, because I would like to learn more. Loosely related, this funny youtube video is the best introduction to evolutionary developmental biology for a layman I know.

Yes life is complex, it is also simple. You CAN reprogram cells and it will be possible to do all of this very soon. Everything is knowable and understandable and malleable.

No, it won't be possible in hundreds of years, maybe never. You just throw some generalities, without any reference to the basic biological processes. I have nothing against general philosophical musings, but the sheer ignorance of some of the rationalists (I don't know if you count yourself among them), including Yudkowsky (famous nanobots), with regard to the hard science repels me and gives me a vibe of empty pondering.

Yeah, I feel you on this. I don't have anything against these kinds of farfetched hypothetical "What if magic was real?" conversations, they can be useful points of comparison for sussing out why one holds particular real-world opinions, but I groan whenever a transhumanist hyper-optimist strolls into a discussion about HBD or gender and starts talking about how the problem can be solved by magical Ninja Turtles biotech within a timeframe short enough to even be relevant to current social issues.

nowhere is this more prevalent that with the Doomers obsession with Skynet.

I challenge you to look at this and not see what is coming very soon. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/global-gdp-over-the-long-run

I wonder which part of the incline belongs to the different Intersectional consulting services so ubiquitous now a days.

Challenge succeeded.

Personally I don't take much umbrage at somebody choosing to identify as another sex/change their pronouns, but I feel that gender confirmation surgery is a crude facisimile that's 99% likely to be considered Lobotomesque in a generation or two. Whether that's due to the whole transgenderism thing falling out of vogue, or the evolution of something (whether digital avatars or genetic remixing) that actually accomplishes the goal.

gender confirmation surgery sorry, what confirmation?

there's gender reassignment surgery aka "bottom surgery" which is already felt out of vogue -- most transgender people do not consider it necessary.

I agree!

They would be a transitioned-sexual on account of having deliberately chosen to transition from one sex to the other. Changing what you are can't change what you were, and both the change and the decision to change is a separator from those who developed without intervention.

In that society, the very idea of "what does it mean to be a man? to be a woman?" will have changed dramatically. The concept of gender roles mediated by society isn't total nonsense, there are different views at different periods and in different cultures of how men and women should behave.

So in the Culture, we're at the point where it's not behaviour on the grounds of leading or advancing society (as with the argument that men are more rational, more intelligent, more inclined to STEM, more adventurous, and the rest of it) because well, the Minds do all that. Social roles for humans are pretty much "you're a pet; a cherished, indulged, and well-maintained pet, but a pet". Sometimes some of the humans are given jobs, the same way we have working animals like draft horses and sheep dogs, interacting with other societies outside the Culture.

On a physical/physiological basis, as you say, there's no "on average men are stronger/taller/whatever than women", because you can rewrite your body so that "you want to be a seven foot tall Olympic weightlifter champion female? done and done!" Complete sex changes, so that now former male you is in a female body and pregnant by your former female, now in a male body, lover happen. In the same novel, that sex-swapped male to female back to male human gets changed into the body of a different species because he wants to explore their society which he finds more exciting than that of the Culture.

So there will only be a psychological notion of "I feel like a woman/I feel like a man", and that's pretty much what is going on with trans issues today. I think in Culture terms, since there is such a huge difference between what is possible for us today, and what they can do in their society, that even the ideal of maleness/femaleness will have greatly changed. If you can indulge in recreational gender-hopping, then the idea that you should be one particular sex forever is probably gone, even the idea of "okay, you're trans, now you're a woman, stay like that" will be too limiting.

I think the change in mindsets will be too great for arguments of today to hold for the future society; they won't accept "you are one particular sex and must be that way" because they're used to being able to tweak their selves any way they want. Even, as I said, the idea that "okay not your natal sex but your real innermost Real Woman sex", because what's a woman? what's a man? That depends on what you want it to be.

So to address it on the basis of today's arguments, I don't know. If you take an adult, or even an adolescent or child, and transform the body into the body they would have had if only the chromosomes had lined up... they're still going to have the experience of living as a man (just to take male-to-female trans people) and having that mindset. If you do it very early, at the ages of "my two year old knew they were trans" as some claim, then that may be different: if little Timmy is only Timmy for two years and is then Talitha for the next twenty, how much of an effect does the tiny period of 'boy' treatment affect them?

But then we run into the David Reimer case, where the person raised as a girl resisted and revolted against that, and maintained they knew they were really a boy (a very sad case, and John Money should have been locked up for life instead of celebrated as a pioneering genius).

So in that case, we're back to the arguments about the brain: is there such a thing as a male brain and a female brain? Is being trans a result of having a feminized brain in utero and so the sex change to the new body only works if there is a female brain in a female body?

Suppose we grow the brain along with the body, and everything is 100% female from the start, and then we transfer the mind over. Again, is there such a thing as the male mind versus female mind?

I think it theoretically would work best in the case of "we can identify at three weeks old that this is a trans baby, now we just need to switch the original's mind into the correct body and let it grow up as their real sex and gender" but at that stage, we're so far advanced that we're back in Culture territory where the parameters of the debate have changed drastically.

The real problem is the "I'm a real woman but I am not obligated to pass, or even try passing, and that is society's problem if it can't accept me as a woman" people/activists. I don't think someone with that belief would be happy about being given a 'real' woman's body, because that isn't the precise thing they want as acceptance. Indeed, by offering that, you're forcing them to comply with your views on gender and sex, which is the problem in the first place about cisnormativity and heteronormativity.

I guess I just an adaptable human. I'm a man's man today. I hunt, love to fuck, ski way too fast. If you plunked me in a woman's body tomorrow I would also love those things and I've met woman who do. Why wouldn't any curious human want to see both sides of sexuality if they could do it with perfection?

If a person lived for 20 years as one sex and acquired the interests, mannerisms and habits that are associated with it, then did a perfect sex change, I reckon they'd still be clockable as trans. However, if we assume a society where such experiments are possible from a young age, and accordingly neither gendered socialization nor biological-based habits that might be dependent on biological sex (such as, as the memes go, the interest in coding and obscure political forums) have time to settle in - I'd assume only a minority of "natal essentialists" would care which bits and chromosomes you were originally conceived with.

We'll be way past such quaint historical practices as "natural athletes", let alone dividing them by current sex.

what if they lived 20 thousand years?

Tell me what kind of societies they'd be living in for 20 thousand years, and there's your answer.

You don't think that might be fundamentally different?

Different from living 20 years? Well, sure that person would likely be far more set in their ways, whatever "their ways" ended up being, but is that really fundamental?

I dunno man. Why don't we reductio ad absurdum and add furries into the mix?

Say "what if genetic engineering gets SO GOOD that people can incorporate animal biology and become human-animal hybrids or 'manimals' that have many of the psychological traits of other creatures?"

At some point the psychological changes might end up becoming 'irreversible' because they take with them the desire to alter yourself.

Because the implications of this tech would suggest we can ALSO psychologically tweak people to be completely content with their current identity.

What if we could engineer people to feel 100% straight, have no doubt about their biological gender, and no curiosity about experiencing what the other genders were like, and they were about as non-dysphoric as you could get?

Wouldn't that be a little bit preferable to a scenario where people spend resources jumping between body's identities on a mere whim? I mean, in a post-scarcity situation it hardly matters, but as a practical concern it seems MUCH SIMPLER to just have everyone take the "accept your gender identity" pill.

the implications of this tech would suggest we can ALSO psychologically tweak people to be completely content with their current identity.

What if we could engineer people to feel 100% straight, have no doubt about their biological gender, and no curiosity about experiencing what the other genders were like, and they were about as non-dysphoric as you could get?

The problem with opening that can of worms is that one then invites "What if we could engineer people to not need work-life balance?"/"What if we could engineer people to not find it degrading to 小便 in bottles rather than needing bathroom breaks?"/"What if we could engineer people to be content eating bugs/living in a pod/owning nothing?"/insert whatever you fear your outgroup imposing on people.

That's why I oppose it.

Yep.

I think we can rigorously define certain behaviors that we don't ever want to become 'acceptable' but there are a lot that will be borderline at best. "Make everybody feel satisfied working 16 hour days 7 days a week" seems far beyond the pale, I don't even know how you'd argue FOR that ideal.

The Brave New World outcome where everyone is in a chemically-induced state of satiation is seeming less likely to me, but the version where Molochian incentives push us all into a very unfortunate part of the payoff matrix seems probable.

(As as aside, this is why I see the AI alignment problem as important. If the AI is 'friendly' but isn't actually in tune with what makes humans/humanity thrive, it'll come up with solutions that are subtly miserable.)

Wouldn't that be a little bit preferable to a scenario where people spend resources jumping between body's identities on a mere whim? I mean, in a post-scarcity situation it hardly matters, but as a practical concern it seems MUCH SIMPLER to just have everyone take the "accept your gender identity" pill.

Are you advocating for this or are you arguing that it would be simpler from the society-government-blob point of view?

No, a "simple" future where everyone is homogenized to be 100% straight, 100% right-handed, and then (why not? it makes calculations and assumptions about strangers so much easier!) 100% the same body type, same temperament, same phenotype etc. is not "a little bit" preferable to me. It is, in fact, highly unpreferable. It feels weird to be, for once, the one who is assuming his opponents literally want to create a society of bugmen who will live in a pod and be happy, but that's the vibes I'm getting right now.

No thanks. Give me the furries. Hell, let them vore each other all they want as long as they do it somewhere else with mutual consent.

Are you advocating for this

I am not advocating for any policy prescription or even expressing a real preference here.

Just pointing out that zeroing the thought experiment in on only gender identity is is pretty limiting once you assume the sort of tech level that this implies.

No, a "simple" future where everyone is homogenized to be 100% straight, 100% right-handed, and then (why not? it makes calculations and assumptions about strangers so much easier!) 100% the same body type, same temperament, same phenotype etc. is not "a little bit" preferable to me.

Sort of? You're suggesting taking the 'natural' biodiversity and homogenizing it. I'm suggesting that we could help people be satisfied with the biological/genetic card they've been handed, disturbing as little as possible otherwise. On the far end we could make people who were born with disfigurements or disabilities 'accept' who they are, but we'd also, presumably, be able to 'cure' these conditions and restore them to functionality.

I'm also pointing out the risk of people's preferences getting locked into weird edge cases because they decided to combine their DNA with Moray Eels and suddenly they have an irrepressible urge to keep eating raw fish and see absolutely NOTHING wrong with that, thank you.

The trick in both cases is that it would be hard to undo that process if it turned out to make people miserable over the long run.

Ultimately this is really a question of what 'voluntary' means in a world where we can edit our own psyches with drugs and genetic treatments. If we edit ourselves to 'lock in' a particular set of preferences, is that reducing our agency? Can one voluntarily agree to remove their ability to make voluntary choices?

I don't mind the furries doing what they will as long as all involved consent. I'm just wondering if there's any strong argument against telling furries "you might be happier if you adjusted your brain a bit to NOT think you're a wolf." If they agree and undergo a procedure that removes their bestial predilections, and thus forever cut themselves off from that lifestyle, how do we judge the outcome?

I guess this will rely somewhat on the social superstructure environment we're operating in.

Anyhow, I don't know why we privilege the world where everything gets exceptionally and increasingly weird and degenerate as our technological capabilities increase to one where things mostly remain within some (fairly wide) guardrails, but pure practicality governs our use of our powers. Neither one seems inherently more likely than the other.

If humans go on long enough a perfect sex change will indeed be possible at a genetic level. Would anyone living hard in the trans debate still have a problem with it then? How could they?

In my opinion, and the 'mainstream' tracks this as well, the current hormone mix is good enough for many transwomen to be indistinguishable from ciswomen. They may not all be 'pretty'; but the majority of them will have the hormonal and physical appearance of women as far as their secondary sex characteristics are concerned. The whole 'transwomen are women' and all that...

In general this debate is quite well settled at least from the perspective of the establishment and mainstream professional opinion. People may have issues with it, but I don't see this being overturned and I would predict that trans-rights will be even more embedded over time as the phenom becomes more normalised.

I don't. Seven or eight years ago I think it was South Carolina tried to pass a bathroom bill and the entire media and a shitload of huge companies and sports leagues and such all flipped their wigs and threatened to basically boycott the state until it caved in and the bill was gutted. You'd think they passed a bill to legalize slavery.

Nowdays, not so much. There isn't as much media hoopla, companies are way less eager to wade in, and bills have passed in a number of states. That's not the way this was "supposed" to go. If anything, the last couple of controversies have actually put the boycott shoe on the other foot.

I mean thanks to Hogwarts Legacy it's now been conclusively shown that progressives flipping out on social media over "transphobia" can be safely ignored while promoting your mass-market media product. Sure enough, Rowling sits on Twitter shitposting at trans activists all day like it's 4chan and that hasn't stopped the head of Warner Bros from publicly touting her involvement in the new HP show as a positive.

Compare that with the shitstomping Bud Light took for letting a mere hint of transgender activist marketing waft in the general direction of their product. Behind the scenes people have clearly had serious conversations reassessing what they do and do not need to care about in regard to public opinion. The amount of shits given about progs mad at transphobia has visibly plummeted.

Besides, statistically it's not like the people saying "trans women are women" would actually date one. The number of straight people willing to even countenance such a thing is essentially just a lizardman's constant, and even among the rest of the LGB community the proportion is shockingly low. This is a social/political signalling meme, not something people are living when the lights go out. Memes like that can have great power to be sure, but eventually they run their course.

Sure enough, Rowling sits on Twitter shitposting at trans activists all day like it's 4chan

I do have to laugh about that. It may not be edifying, but she didn't buckle to the pressure to self-flagellate in public as a wicked sinner and change all her views. She leaned into "okay, if I'm Lady Hitler, let me do that!" I think that's why the aggravated are throwing "she's anti-Semitic, the goblin bankers* are Jewish caricatures! she's pro-slavery, look at how the books mock Hermione trying to free the house elves!" accusations at her. Anything at all to pull her down and let them be the victors. And it's not working, and it's driving them nuts.

*They're not caricaturing anything but the gnomes of Zurich, and if you want to tell me that Swiss bankers are famously Jewish, uh I don't think so.

she's anti-Semitic, the goblin bankers* are Jewish caricatures!

I think that argument has been quietly dropped since Oct 7. Its very difficult to argue that *she's * dog-whistling by setting the goblin uprising during a year when something bad happened to a Jewish community elsewhere in Europe, but that chanting a slogan used by an openly genocidal group isn't an anti-semitic dogwhistle.

It will, of course, still be vaguely remembered on the internet that of course she's been proven to be anti-semitic and that the details don't matter, but that's just the way things always work. (And, as an aside, that sort of thing really pisses me off in a general way - that the accusations are bunk, but get forgotten and stick regardless)

I think that argument has been quietly dropped since Oct 7.

I've still seen it in the wild.

"Thou calledst me dog before thou hadst a cause. But since I am a dog, beware my fangs."

The house-elves could have been an interesting discussion; what obligation do we have to beings that are as sapient as humans, but aren't human, and have very different preferences to humans?

I mean thanks to Hogwarts Legacy it's now been conclusively shown that progressives flipping out on social media over "transphobia" can be safely ignored while promoting your mass-market media product. Sure enough, Rowling sits on Twitter shitposting at trans activists all day like it's 4chan and that hasn't stopped the head of Warner Bros from publicly touting her involvement in the new HP show as a positive.

And yet Hogwarts Legacy still has a highly conspicuous trans character (who must have been directly approved by Rowling given she maintains absolute creative control over her setting), and it’s likely the new show will too.

There were multiple backlashes to the growing gay rights movement between 1967 and 2015, but in each case the long term trajectory was clear.

Sure they're still hedging their bets, but in the process they're learning that A) it doesn't actually take the heat off them and B) nobody really cares anyway. Zaslav going out of his way to make sure the public knows Rowling is directly involved in the new show, even as the headlines about her dunking on the trans community flow, is a significant signal.

Everything isn't the gay rights battle. Social media is a lot more ubiquitous now than it was ten or fifteen years ago, and frankly the trans community uses it to be their own worst enemy in ways that are uniquely their own.

There were multiple backlashes to the growing gay rights movement between 1967 and 2015, but in each case the long term trajectory was clear.

The question of how inevitable is the inevitable march of progress is a pretty fascinating one to me. I don't really have an answer here, and you may very well be right that over the long term the trans movement will keep winning, but it's not like there has never been a Science backed Progressive idea that has turned out to be a short-lived fad, and an embarrassment, forcing progressive elites to run damage control, and lay thick layers of dust on historical documents, lest someone finds and reads them. Or maybe they'll just redefine victory. A world where transgender people aren't cast out of mainstream society as weirdos, but their demands to be treated as literal women in every aspect of society go unanswered, and everyone pretends pediatric gender care was a Big Pharma conspiracy to exploit children for profit, looks like a win for the trans community to me, if you look at it from the perspective of 20 years ago, but a massive loss from nowadays.

I don't really have an answer here, and you may very well be right that over the long term the trans movement will keep winning, but it's not like there has never been a Science backed Progressive idea that has turned out to be a short-lived fad, and an embarrassment, forcing progressive elites to run damage control, and lay thick layers of dust on historical documents, lest someone finds and reads them.

That particular capability relied on monopolistic control of the media and a general consensus that the media they controlled were trustworthy. Both are now absent, and history is coming for them.

In my opinion, and the 'mainstream' tracks this as well, the current hormone mix is good enough for many transwomen to be indistinguishable from ciswomen.

Are you sure about that? I'm not sure what you mean by "indistinguishable" here, just going by hormone levels, or a full examination. But even going only by hormones, without looking it up, I'd be willing to bet on the opposite. My understanding is that barring an orchiectomy / hysterectomy you're not going to get the T/E levels down to the opposite sex average, and if you do, you'd make them absolutely miserable. Maybe an early puberty blockade might work, but that alone would be a giveaway re: distinguishability.

In general this debate is quite well settled at least from the perspective of the establishment and mainstream professional opinion.

What do you mean by "this debate", just adult transition, pediatric gender affirming care, or the whole shebang? What are you basing this opinion on? From what I understand anyone that actually looks at the evidence is forced to conclude gender affirming care has flimsy backing

but I don't see this being overturned and I would predict that trans-rights will be even more embedded over time as the phenom becomes more normalised.

So far it seems that the more embedded it gets, the more it drags down movements that already gained acceptance.

Do you think concerns for the welfare of detrans people are unfounded?

Edit: actually, the above isn't a good response. Here's what I should have written:

The topic of "trans issues" contains many questions. The question of whether or not hormones are good at replicating secondary sex characteristics is just one of those questions. Is it one of the more important questions of the topic? I wouldn't have thought so. I don't really think the more intellectual people of any stance would consider it to be, either. Would you feel vastly different about trans people if they weren't? https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/TGux5Fhcd7GmTfNGC/is-that-your-true-rejection

So I ask you, what does it mean to say "the debate is well settled"? There is not one debate, it's a vast number of smaller questions. I don't think it's intellectually rigorous to pretend like it's all one big question. Even if you think that every one of those unlisted questions has been settled in favor of trans people, even the ones where it's not obvious which answer would necessarily be the one that favors trans people the most, I think it's sleight of hand to act like it's all one big question which has been answered. And then I can't help but feel that it's also sleight of hand to reference one small and not necessarily consequential aspect of the debate before saying that the larger debate has been settled, as if one small question decides answers all the other questions too.

If humans go on long enough a perfect sex change will indeed be possible at a genetic level. Would anyone living hard in the trans debate still have a problem with it then? How could they?

I think we'd hit an empirical question, along the lines of: How much do men and women have in common? Or: what fraction of women would seem like a 'typical' man once they'd had their sex swapped?

To illustrate the problem with a silly example: I'm not native to the Early Medieval Period, and couldn't pass as a resident.

Part of this is language and biology; I speak modern English, I have dental fillings, and I wear contacts. But, if we addressed the obvious stuff, there'd still be a lot of differences left in terms of personality and ideology. I'm from an era without nobility or kingship. I don't think about social hierarchies like an Early Medieval. I don't think about relationships like them. I wouldn't respond right when insulted, and wouldn't laugh at the same jokes.

So, even if I got sent back, the locals would be able to tell pretty quickly that I wasn't one of their own. I'd be too alien in too many ways to pass.

The same thing would happen if I got sex-swapped by some super-science process. There might be women who are my height. There are women who code. There are women who argue politics on obscure internet forums. But, add together all the ways that I'm an outlier, compared to the 'typical' woman, and people would notice that sex-swapped me wasn't especially like a natal female. If a bunch of men-like-me got sex-swapped, people would pretty quickly (in my view) come up with a concept for "natal male, in a woman's body" and see us as different.

So, this gets into the empirical question: How many men would be huge (and obvious!) outliers, in terms of personality and interests, if they got sex-swapped into being women, and how many men would pass?

It's possible that, in a sufficiently advanced world, we'd learn that something like blank-slatism is true, or true enough that there'd be 10%+ of people who'd easily pass as a 'typical' member of the other sex. It's also possible that blank-slatism is false, and that it would be very, very rare to meet a woman who's enough of an outlier to pass as a typical man.

In the latter case, the objection would be that there are real practical differences between "natal-female, current male" and "natal-male, current male" and that it's useful to track these as different categories when making social distinctions.

There was a good Yud post where he tried to unpack what that would mean in detail.

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QZs4vkC7cbyjL9XA9/changing-emotions

You'd be changing how your body is mapped to your brain. How do you fit a male mind inside a female brain? Are we changing the structure of the brain or not - and to what specifications? How would you know how 'your' female brain should look? What about personality? Say you're more violent, aggressive, tech-oriented and antisocial than most women, probably a lot of that comes from being a man. Would you keep your personality or would that change too? Are we changing all the Y chromosome's to X and if so, what data are we putting in the X chromosome?

What about the in-between stages, are you just unconscious while the rewiring goes on? Are we killing you and replacing you with an imagined person? How do you access memories of how you were as a man if you're now a woman and those memories are targeting neuron patterns you don't have any more?

Besides the obvious physical facets, I think we're seeing the mental issues already. I recall seeing this tiktok of a FtM (James Barnes) complaining that she no longer had the easy female friendships she was used to, how men were treated a lot more coldly and she could now understand why the male suicide rate was so much higher (none of this delegitimized the validity of all those oppressed by men of course).

I couldn't help but feel disgust at the tearful expression of what looked like a short, weak man. I was thinking 'you don't get it, this isn't what you are' - which I'm sure she would say was my internalized patriarchy or whatever. You can't apply female expectations to male friendships or say that you've learned emotional maturity because you were raised female, as if you have a monopoly on defining emotional maturity. OK, technically you can and make a career out of doing it as a Transformational Leadership Speaker. But even so, that doesn't innately legitimize your conception of what men should be, it goes against my understanding of how men should behave. And even if I'm not a Transformational Leadership Speaker, I am a biological man and can judge male relationships by male standards because I've experienced them comprehensively. It's not about being vulnerable to each other that makes male friendship, there's a sense of comradery, shared humour - and even these words don't really fit because there's no way to describe it to people who don't know it.

That's the issue here, I bet there are similar expressions of femininity that men just don't get, or they try to ape but in the wrong ways. Men probably don't have a comprehensive understanding how women act in friendships, how could we know? Or how they bring their own male attitudes to things and say no, I'm the one who defines what womanhood is and you will respect my authority, which is backed by violence. Punch a TERF!

Even with very advanced technology, this seems like a difficult problem.

So what happens after everyone has had a thousand years to think about this? Personally, as an undying person?

Radical feminists would have a major problem with this, based on one of their stated reasons for rejecting MTF transwomen. Which is that transwomen do not have the experience and thus memories (and/or trauma) of living childhood as a girl. They see this as an important shared experience that connects all women for having been oppressed by the patriarchy as girls, which transwomen are trying to encroach upon.

Now, if we were to develop memory alteration technology such that transwomen had memories perfectly indistinguishable from that of a female, then perhaps that might change? I don't think radical feminists would particularly buy into that, though.

But what if we tacked on literal time travel, manipulating the genes of the sperm that led to you so that it produced a female instead of male (or vice versa, though people care much less about this one), a la Luka Urushibara from Steins;Gate? I wonder.

Me, personally, I would agree with everyone who says that the concept of "trans" would be largely incoherent in this world. If you can switch sex perfectly with as little trouble as switching a tee-shirt is now, how does it make sense to identify someone as whatever sex they are at the moment? They're not transitioning from something to something else, they're just selecting something.

important shared experience that connects all women for having been oppressed by the patriarchy as girls

I think this proves too much: would radical feminists consider someone born with female parts in a non-patriarchal society to be a woman?

I don't know nearly as much about radical feminists as I do third wave feminists due to not knowing as many and not being one of them at any point, but from what I can tell from them, the concept of a society that isn't patriarchal might exist in fiction or fantasy, but one hasn't existed yet. At least, in the sense that, for any real society they talk about, they can find SOME source of patriarchal oppression. And if asked to speculate, the answer is usually some variation of "But I did eat breakfast this morning."

from what I can tell from them, the concept of a society that isn't patriarchal might exist in fiction or fantasy

I was thinking of the society postulated in the pre-Indo-European--matriarchal-society hypotheses....

but one hasn't existed yet.

...and the radical feminists' ideal future.

"Assuming the ancient-European Mother-Goddess worship hypothesis to be true, would someone born with female parts in such a society be a woman?"

"If you succeed in your goals and remove the patriarchy, would your great-great-granddaughters be women?"

At the point where human modification is so good that you can casually get functional new gametes with no risk of deleterious mutation, you’ve basically moved past the point where traditional reproductive processes are going on. The AI double-checking the process is choosing the shape of the next generation, not the messy historically contingent mating process of H. sapiens. At that point x and y are just spandrels.

You mean hard transhumanism? I think the million other implications thereof would be a bigger deal to broader society.

I agree. I think the obsession with sexuality is already silly.

In such a world, the word 'trans' wouldn't even mean anything.

In a nutshell, the entire trans debate is 'Trans women are women (Y/N)'. If you could perfectly transition from a man to a woman in every measurable way, the only thing that would separate a 'trans' woman from the 'genuine article' would be that the trans woman would have memories of being a man. That doesn't seem particularly important.

Would anyone living hard in the trans debate still have a problem with it then?

You'll always be able to find someone that fits the bill, but they would be anti-technology, rather than anti-trans.

Would anyone living hard in the trans debate still have a problem with it then? How could they?

Almost certainly, in the same way that they capital-D deaf community can be prickly about things like cochlear implants.

This would be the literal manifestation of “If my aunt had balls, she’d be my uncle.” Human descendants who develop such technology would have changed enough in the intermediate steps to no longer be the same species.

Love it! "If my grandmother had wheels she would be a bike!" energy.

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