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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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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