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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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