If changing sex became easy, should society allow it?

Amen!

There's an irony that gender dysphoria is the mental fantasy that you are the opposite sex, and that several polls are around fantasy situations.

Someone obsessed with sci-fi, fantasy and trans? If I had a Venn diagram, the intersection would say TRA.

Plus of course your brain changed. The brain interacts with the endocrine system so that’d need to be changed too.

It’s a hypothetical based on a universe so different to ours that it makes no sense.

Why don’t you define what you mean by changing sex in this hypothetical world? Is it like a brain transplant, putting your female brain into a male body?

Look, if we had a world like Iain M Banks's Culture novels then we wouldn't need to have any of these conversations because literal fluidity could be built into our genes, society, laws and social codes.

(And if we ever achieve the technological state of the Culture, I would argue that perpetual wide eyed 'what if' type posting would have the offending individual slap-droned for everyones benefit)

I find these ‘let’s imagine something that doesn’t exist and then argue on the basis of it’ absolutely infuriating. But then I don’t like science fiction, whereas lots of people seem to enjoy it. I don’t like magical realism very much either, although there are absolutely top flight authors who can make it work, usually by leaning heavily on the realism with a small dash of the magical.

Sex is more interesting than this. It’s a total organising basis of the human race. There were some feminists who argued that we ought to move beyond sex completely, but there were far more who said firstly that the oppression of gender was so strong that it was more that we didn’t know what choices women made that were the result of sex as opposed to socialisation, rather than that none of them were; and secondly that sex, though real and important, shouldn’t limit women’s lives. I personally used to find the ‘we’re all goddesses, let’s daub ourselves in menstrual blood and perform a woodland ritual’ strand of pagan gynophilia as oppressive as straightforward sexism. But nonetheless I am female and regard that as both definable and important.

It is much more interesting to me to try to define why anyone thinks that changing sex is desirable. When Gwen Raverat, who to the untrained eye is as autistic as it is possible to be, wrote about her longing to be male, she was describing the 1890s when she was required to perform femininity in various miserable ways, making her desire to be male very comprehensible (though she didn’t mention anything about wanting to be conscripted into WWI later on). It’s possible now not to be forced into femininity in that way. And yet the longing of even more girls to be male and men to be female remains, and is still highly associated with autism. It is still incomprehensible. And it’s also unachievable.

Not sex. I cannot see that ever being possible without deleterious effects

Seems highly unlikely, what with humans being mammals who reproduce sexually and much of the world still lacking access to basic healthcare.

Changing sex will never be easy as it will have to involve muscular and skeletal changes amongst other things.

Men just need to stay out of women's spaces. It really is that simple (and easier).

<insert 'hey you're a fungi' joke, if you can be bothered>

Wait, though, what if we were all actually mushrooms who had been infected with a virus that just made us THINK we were humans?

Sex characteristics or sex, @TightlyLacedCorset? If people completely change their sex, so all bones realigned, all muscles realigned, all organs realigned including sex organs, then sure, change your sex marker. But it sounds painful to have all your bones and muscles realigned and more along the lines of an Altered Carbon storyline

Someone who has enough time to worry about fantastical and hypothetical issues clearly doesn't have to worry about reality.

There are plenty of real trans issues to worry about and what effect they have on everyone else.

The endless threads and polls, please do get a hobby, I here cycling is fun

but just to play along…. If the cock has been lopped off, do you still fear them perving over the toilet door even though technically they cannot rape? Do you think all lesbians do this too because every woman is irresistible to them?
I’m 💯 sure that is not the case

Dress how you want, behave how you want, be yourself. You can’t change sex though.

I think this is where things are going anyway. Not necessarily the complete changing genetics thing, that is much more complex, but people becoming so sexually fluid they change outward appearing sex characteristics on a more frequent basis aided by technology and improvements in medicine. Eventually going through life as the experience of a mono-sexual being, with just a monosexual lived experience and perspective will be rarer.

Even now many people are moving through life experiencing far more sexual identities and perspectives as queer people. I'm seeing people say now they will only date queer people. Going full sci-fi mode, I can see people including robot tech either as integrated physical appendages or advanced simulations.

As to whether it should be allowable, I don't see why not in a liberal democracy. The question is at what age and how far that should deviate from facts about what sex you were born. In the near future we will be able to have a greater influence over how we look. We are seeing the start of that with these GLP-1s but eventually with gene editing technology such as CRISPR you may be able to go even further.

It never seems to work in the Science fiction i read. They still feel like the same people with the same attitudes. Rather like tourists or dressups.

How incredibly original 🥱

This is not a good-faith question, it’s designed to further the argument that men today should be allowed into female-only spaces, sports and services.

It’s designed to elicit a yes that then leads to the follow-up question of where the line should be drawn.

This happens in the Culture sci fi books. They're in a sort of post-scarcity utopia and illness is basically eradicated. People will change sex to have a baby or just to try it out.

But the answer to both is yes.

”If humans could fly, should it be allowed?”

”If God was a human should it be legal to have him round for tea?

Equally pointless questions