@persheptions
CaraDuneRedux
That's irrelevant. In a writing group you have to keep it about the writing as writing. It's not a place for politics etc.
No, it's absolutely central to the point.
Suppose for example I wanted to use sci fi as a vehicle for a political satire, riffing off the Gloria Steinem quote that "If men got pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament." In my sci fi world, I make an American president, his VP, key members of his cabinet, his male right-wing picks for the Supreme Court - all the men in that now infamous photo of Trump signing off an Executive Order banning federal funding to any overseas aid charity which even provides abortion advice - and I make them all pregnant.
Then work through, within the story, the ever more Baroque after-the-fact justifications they would come up with for why it was okay for them as men to have abortions, even if they'd been denying them to women.
A fair plot for a book, I'd say. Might not be your cup of tea, but definitely within the remit of what a lot of sci fi writers might want to tackle (because the best sci fi usually involves using the literary device of sci fi to shine a light, for good or bad, onto contemporary society).
Having some wokebeard come along and say "but transmen get pregnant all the time" would entirely miss the point of what I was trying to do. Namely to explore what would happen when men - the old fashioned kind, who wield the power but can and do duck out of their reproductive responsibilities, while denying women the agency to take control of their own reproduction - suddenly found they were the ones gestating the sacred foetus.