If changing sex became easy, should society allow it?

So the premise is that if you can easily reconfigure your genetics and physical form to completely switch sex, should this be legally permitted?

If we have the technology available to do that, the same breakthrough would also mean the door is not only unlocked for changing any existing physical characteristics, but also growing entirely new body features.

Once that technological genie is out of the bottle, enough money will get you the chance to have whatever body you can envisage - there'll be at least one place in the world that is happy to take your money. Some of the bodies created this way will even be life sustaining.

The lawmakers across the globe will then frantically try to work out whether legal limits can and should be applied to any and all excessive or creative anatomic traits. Current society will cease to function, when someone can walk through the door a typical human, and walk out of the door an unrecognisable monstrosity that can overpower and outthink anyone who objects.

So, frankly, someone deciding to simply swap sex will be the least of concerns.

Society can't and shouldn't police what people do with their bodies. Someone enforcing something on someone else's body is wrong of course.

Tattoos
Body modifications
Scarification
Plastic surgery
The type of sex we have
Who we allow to have access to our body

We are all entitled to autonomy with what we do with our own body.

I'm really not certain of that at all.

I don't believe we will be able to replicate the feedback between foetus and mother whereby the mother's body adjusts the conditions for the foetus.

We have a terrible track record of thinking we can artificially replicate a natural process but failing to recognise juat how complex it is. Look at the mess we made with UPFs by not understanding how much we need from food other than calories, and that's way simpler than building a baby.

Even if it was possible, you would need a pregnancy test before doing it, for sure, then I wonder if you would need to have a quota to manage the population balance, ie all teenaged girls hate periods and become boys so the population struggles to maintain itself. And would you sign an agreement when you married someone not to change sex.
I wonder if you could change to a man to be stronger when you are moving house say, or walking home after a night out, or running a marathon, then change back to being a woman later. Although, why would you ever change to being a woman, if you are stronger and less likely to suffer discrimination and violence, you would be living in a world free of fear, the only reason to be a woman would be to procreate.
It would leave pregnant/breastfeeding women in a world of men, which is a very vulnerable place to be.

Interesting Sci-Fi novel premise.

Your Dad is a wise man.

This x 1000000

I was going to say that socialisation counts for so so much, even if, like me, your parents tried hard to be gender neutral. Society socialises you too. IME it's one of the things that gives away a "passing" transman - you realise the handsome, bearded, short dude you're chatting to is asking the same questions a woman asks! And it definitely gives away aggressive transwomen online.

But of course, AGP. The actual reality of many women's inner worlds and life experiences would be a right boner killer. And..... I've yet to see a male trans person volunteer to step aside and give up privileges in recognition of supposedly no longer being male?

The first thing my dad said when he read about transwomen was that a pay cut ought to be required in order to get a GRC.

If I could produce a magic wand and become a frog, should society allow it?

If I could produce a magic wand and become a fairy princess, should society allow it?

Sadly Cinderella doesn't get to go to the ball in real life, because magic doesn't exist and instead she would need to call the anti-slavery hotline and go on benefits to start to rebuild her life from scratch away from her toxic family. If she was offered a carriage and pretty dresses and a date with the Prince, I'd wonder if his name was Andrew and whether she was being groomed because she was a vulnerable low status woman.

Reality v Fantasy.

Should society allow reality, when there a perfectly good fantasy world we can all live in.

Would he need a jockey? Because I imagine there would lots of volunteers to ride Simon MacCorkindale.

How come I missed this delight?

But I don’t think it would be fair on the poor horses.

And I am certain we will have the technical solution to grow embryos to healthy conclusion within a few years. Expect the discussion around terminations to tick up quite a bit when it does.

It's interesting isn't it that we find it easier to believe humanity will have the technical progress to be able fully change a person from one sex to other before it has the ethical, social and emotional progress to treat each other with equality and respect whatever our sex.

Reminds me of how Star Trek could envision a future of space travel, aliens and even that women and people of colour might be (almost) equal crew members (and all credit due to Rodenberry for that), but still assumed the women's uniform would have a skirt.

Yes absolutely - in this highly hypothetical world - bodily autonomy is paramount. The change would have to be total and absolute and I think the biggest issue would be brain patterns built up as a child or person in the opposite sex.

Iain M Banks has this built into human brains in the Culture novels it's fascinating
Quick summary of the books "In Iain M Banks’s Culture novels, people can genuinely change biological sex because they have been extensively genetically engineered. By consciously instructing their body to change, a male person gradually becomes fully female, or vice versa, over roughly a year. The process changes the whole functioning body, including reproductive capacity, so someone who was male can later become pregnant and give birth. Banks even describes it as a “viral change from one sex into the other”.
So, within the fictional world of the Culture, sex really is changeable. It is not simply a change of identity, clothing, hormones or surgically altered appearance. It requires imaginary, extraordinarily advanced biotechnology that does not exist in real life. Banks’s idea therefore does not demonstrate that humans can currently change sex; it imagines a future in which medicine has acquired the ability to make that literally true."

Of course - you can't, if this ever happens it's a very long way away and by then I think we will be well past the desire to do so.

If Manimal was real, and not just a fictional 80s tv show starring (the very dishy but taken too soon) Simon MacCorkindale, should he be allowed to run in the Grand National?

There would end up being very few women, especially in countries that already kill a large number of female fœtuses.

Homosexuals would be forced to change sex.

Vulnerable people (weak, poor, stupid, unlucky, disabled, or of a minority ethnic or religious group) would be pressured into doing all the gestation.

New (war) crime: turn them all into women, then forcibly impregnate them.

We'd go from women being vulnerable to vulnerable people being forced to be women.

Step one towards achieving this possibility would be to build a society where violence against women, and every kind of sexism and misogyny is totally eliminated, and girls and boys are brought up in the same way with no preconceived sexist ideas about what their personalities and preferences will be, and no children's clothing or toys push children towards choosing one or other set of stereotypes. In that utopia the only needs for differentiation between male and female would be in sporting categories, for fairness, and in communal changing facilities for privacy. Once that is achieved then a fully scientifically actualised sex change on a cellular level could be actually genuine.

But transgender ideology requires sexist stereotypes of male and female to remain firmly in place so that there is something solid to be transitive through. Eliminating sexism would be counterproductive to the whole philosophy so I have no confidence that will happen.

“Suppose men could be magically transformed into women, should it be allowed?”

That’s really what this “thought experiment” is saying, so of course it’s nonsense.

Yes, but being a tiger would be better (so long as in a location where tigers have appropriate protection from poachers)

Theres so many other things that could be achieve in the process towards making sex change a possibility.

Before sex change, we'd have the ability to eliminate lots of disabilities, aging. Maybe we could live forever.

Perhaps we would be able to make women as physical strong as men.

I think that'll be the stumbling block. Before sex change is possible, enough women would be physically strong enough to make these mens lives very difficult if they did transgres boundaries.

The government guidance suggests that women shouldn't confront men in their spaces and opportunities. They mean ask not threaten harm, because they know the average women couldn't hit an average men and come out on top.

They suggest men dont feel safe in men's spaces, and need alternative options, because they know men can harm each other and will.

So if women do get on average as strong as men, would men want to be in women spaces and be confronted? Theyd be liable to the same threats as currently claimed they are in the men's.

I think long before sex changes are possible, the other process will make the thrill of trans less appealing.

But we don't live in that world, so it's a little pointless to muse on.

I think it is a useful thought experiment because one of the accusations genderists make of GC people is that they want to reinforce gender stereotypes and social roles according to sex, and don't think anyone should be able to live a life outside the stereotypes attributed to their sex. That's completely getting the wrong end of the stick of course, but if you consider how you would feel about it if people really could actually change sex at will, that may reveal more about how you do think - even to yourself.

One of the reasons I don't support the concept of gender identity is that no one ever actually changes sex, but retains their sexed body (even with surgery) - which that means the concept of being "trans" brings huge benefits for males and generally disadvantages and endangers females, just one of many elements of its inherent sexism. So if they did really change sex, would that be better? I'm still not sure but it helps me clarify my thoughts to ponder it.

Yes much like people who think they're cats don't actually want to live on cat food. You can't possibly know what it's like to be the opposite sex, you can only imagine yourself into your other-sex idea of it. And unfortunately a large number of male people's idea of being female is totally sexualised and not about being a fully rounded human.

I suspect a lot of the current trans people, were they to actually change sex, would quickly discover it's not their thing at all, and change back.

They want to be a fantasy version of the opposite sex, often qhilst retaining certain characteristics of their own, and so would be unhappy with the reality. Or they think that changing sex will solve all their problems: but are quickly going to discover it doesn't.

'... if we could grow babies in bags...'

Say hello to the Brave New World.

Can we also choose to be werewolves in this little hypothesis?

You aren't thinking this through properly.

In a world where people really could change sex just like that, especially if they could go there and back easily, the lived experience of both sexes would be different. The social expectations and constructs around sex would be different. So other than areas where sex has direct consequences due to physical differences like sports and maternity, if sex-based or single sex provisions still exist they'd look very different.

Also, we don't know what actually losing their height and physical strength, dealing with periods and possibly pregnancy, and being genuinely 100% treated as an actual woman because they actually are one would do to a man's psyche/personality.

So, the answer to your question does I think depend on far too many things we wouldn't know until we got there.

Here's a similar, maybe better one: if we could grow babies in bags without a female pregnancy and without needing the male and female gametes, just a cell from each parent and the parents (or the state) chose the babies' sex, would we still have a population roughly half male and half female?

This. In such a hypothetical future, gender as we understand it would likely no longer even exist, as people would swap back and forth on a whim. We'd likely be unable to accurately imagine the dynamics within that kind of world, as they'd be so far removed from ours as to be entirely alien.

It's possible most children would be raised in a somewhat 'neuter' state, and that people would generally be male as adults except during the period of time that they wanted to gestate a child, for the benefit of increased size, strength, and no menstrual issues etc.

But we don't live in that world, so it's a little pointless to muse on.