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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.

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.