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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.
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?
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