Hypothetical perfect sex change

[pop91]

Hypothetical:

Say there was a perfect sex change in the future where every single cell could be recoded as male for a trans man, would you then accept transmen as men? or would they need to be born male even if their entire physicality and biology were changed?

(To be clear this sex change would hypothetically naturally dissolve breasts and naturally create a penis as well as ALL other physical changes)

@pop91

Hypothetical:

Say there was a perfect sex change in the future where every single cell could be recoded as male for a trans man, would you then accept transmen as men? or would they need to be born male even if their entire physicality and biology were changed?

(To be clear this sex change would hypothetically naturally dissolve breasts and naturally create a penis as well as ALL other physical changes)

Could it be like The Golden Compass too? We could have medical procedures to enable us to shape shift into animals (and plants, and elements). Better still 'beam me up Scottie' could be the future. Science and medicine allow us to break down into our atoms and be assembled elsewhere in the universe. Now that is 'fluid'.

Would the other Llamas accept me as a medically enabled Llama, though. Or Alpaca. I'll go with either. I don't know op.

Not necessarily. But here is the thing. You identify as what you believe is your version of a man. But it is your version and only your version of what you think a male is. It may have some or a few similarities of the male lived experience.

Living as your expectation of what a male experience is, helps you.

I would love society to stop stereotyping any one. I am sure I am not alone. Unfortunately, it is not going to happen overnight. It would be helpful though that people stop forcing anyone into labels to start with.

should ALL children not be raised 'non-binary' where gendered socialisation itself is entirely removed?

• Another parent here who raised children without gendered socialisation, as much as was possible. (Is that what 'non-binary'means? I thought it was something else, to do with the fantasy of gender identity in some way. No matter.)

We were not in UK, which made this much easier to do, in many ways.

And results? Well, we only had girls ... but all our children now have serious jobs in STEM-related areas, some academic, some not. All have PhDs in STEM subjects ... all are happily partnered, some married, some not, all successful mothers ... all happy women who have no truck with gender nonsense.

However, those of my children who themselves have children in UK now worry, as I do, about the shite we hear (from people like the OP on this thread, from Stonewall, Mermaids, the SNP, some schools ... and all the rest) about 'gender' and 'changing sex' and all that bloody nonsense.

[And here I delete a rant about gender identity true-believers. Just leave my grandchildren alone, is all. I mean it. Go fuck up the minds and lives of your own offspring if you must. Just leave mine alone. (I had to say precisely this to a religious nutjob who once tried to influence one of my children: I repeat it to all you identity-crazy loons. Leave other peoples children alone!) ]

@tajifiv

should ALL children not be raised 'non-binary' where gendered socialisation itself is entirely removed?

• Another parent here who raised children without gendered socialisation, as much as was possible. (Is that what 'non-binary'means? I thought it was something else, to do with the fantasy of gender identity in some way. No matter.)

We were not in UK, which made this much easier to do, in many ways.

And results? Well, we only had girls ... but all our children now have serious jobs in STEM-related areas, some academic, some not. All have PhDs in STEM subjects ... all are happily partnered, some married, some not, all successful mothers ... all happy women who have no truck with gender nonsense.

However, those of my children who themselves have children in UK now worry, as I do, about the shite we hear (from people like the OP on this thread, from Stonewall, Mermaids, the SNP, some schools ... and all the rest) about 'gender' and 'changing sex' and all that bloody nonsense.

[And here I delete a rant about gender identity true-believers. Just leave my grandchildren alone, is all. I mean it. Go fuck up the minds and lives of your own offspring if you must. Just leave mine alone. (I had to say precisely this to a religious nutjob who once tried to influence one of my children: I repeat it to all you identity-crazy loons. Leave other peoples children alone!) ]

Just leave my grandchildren alone, is all. I mean it. Go fuck up the minds and lives of your own offspring if you must. Just leave mine alone

I have no idea who or what your grandchildren are nor do I have any desire to. I sincerely hope not a single one of them suffer from gender dysphoria or end up trans. I hope they all end up with PhDs in STEM as it seems their worth to their Grandmother is determined by how normal high achieving they are.

Out of anyone who has replied to me you remind me most of my Mother.

I do think it’s fair to say that - though anecdotal of course - pretty much of all of the young women I know with gender identity issues, all have some kind of interpersonal issues with their mothers, and often see identifying as a man as a way of acting out against a mother-figure.

@nightwakingmoon

I do think it’s fair to say that - though anecdotal of course - pretty much of all of the young women I know with gender identity issues, all have some kind of interpersonal issues with their mothers, and often see identifying as a man as a way of acting out against a mother-figure.

IDK what I can say to that other than my transness isn't based in my mother and if that were true we'd need a mass scale re-education of mothers who are clearly failing.

Why the vitriol directed against your mother, then, pop91, if she has nothing to do with it?

…and come to that, why would you see transness as a mass failure of mothers in any case? (Which wasn’t exactly what I asked…) Especially if you don’t think there is anything wrong with being trans…? Why would it be a failure, exactly..?

You might think of exploring some of these ideas. It’s certainly the case that the young gender-questioning and trans/NB people I know have preexisting family, health and parental issues. Is it too much if a stretch for you to imagine that it might be that gender ideology, whilst somewhat incoherent in itself, is appealing to many young people precisely because of its ability to externalise other problems and other desires?

“The mother-child relationship can be seen as the first relationship violated by patriarchy.“ -Adrienne Rich

Blaming the mother is a trick of the patriarchy. Read "Of Woman Born: Womanhood as an Experience and an Institution."

But hypothetically if society as a collective agreed to raise children free of gender then you believe there would be no gender dysphoria?

Isn't that what feminists and allies have been trying to do for years? Free kids up from gendered expectations? My parents gave it a damn good go. We have done our best with our kids. I don't agree with pretending kids don't have a sex, I think that is too ostracising and they do need to know their sex to understand biology. And you can't completely remove them from surrounding culture. But being neutral in the home, and talking about stereotypes so they understand when they see them, goes a long way towards freeing kids.

And yes I think it would help a lot to free people from dysphoria if we could free up society more from stereotypes. FFS, lots of kids need to declare themselves a different gender before they feel able to do simple things like grow their hair/cut their hair, wear a skirt, wear makeup, be friends with the opposite sex. Every transition story I've ever read starts with a child who feels they don't fit in, want to wear different clothes, play with the other sex, are bullied for stereotype non-conformity etc. Clearly they do feel heavily hemmed in by both the stereotypes themselves and other people's applications of them. If they were already looking glamorous and cheerfully accepted as a boy, would they still feel the need to declare a gender?

I don't really understand accepting what your mind tells you over material reality. The human mind is so easily fooled and fallible, and the material reality of a sexed body is so unarguable. If what I feel doesn't match up with reality, I just accept it's my mind that's mistaken, not reality. And have done. And if other people tell me I 'should' have a certain personality or style because of my sex, the older I get the better I get at telling them to sod off.

Y y thirdfiddle — I think many young people don’t really appreciate that to older people who grew up believing overwhelmingly in science and material reality, our objection to the discourse of gender identity is not because we’re stuffy old right-wing “phobes”.

It’s that it quite literally sounds like a mass brainwashing of a whole load of young people with an antiscientific, ideological, religiose system of thought, which idealises imaginary entities into a theology of gendered souls and woolly vague beliefs in imaginary things like “identity” (is identity inside or outside? In the mind or outside the body in clothes and stereotypes? Gender ideology will not enlighten us on this point….)

It sounds to us like an ideological, even propagandist, delusion - like people in Russia saying that Putin is great and isn’t invading anyone because Russian state TV days so; or Americans wearing MAGA hats and chanting about Hillary’s emails; or Scientologists talking about the great Xenu.

Quite literally, none of us can imagine what it’s like to be in another body. Our bodies and our brains have no way of knowing that. How could a brain tell a body that it feels like it should have been born with a dick? How could it know? Telepathy? The Jungian Unconscious? Spirit travelling? Past life memories? Religious ecstasy? It might as well be nineteenth century idealists talking about the Absolute and the spiritual world of Forms. It simply doesn’t mesh with rational materialism, or indeed anything logical that we know about the world.

You really haven't been reading replies on your other thread have you? The one where your so-called gender critical parents enforced sex stereotypes?

If there was a medical procedure that could dissolve your brain and completely rebuild it do you think you’d be less obsessed with asking bizarre questions on public forums then refusing to engage with the fact that the hypothetical question bears absolutely no relevance on real life issues?

Also, it’s odd that you (who sees yourself as a man I believe?) would choose this forum to come and antagonise. Why wouldn’t you feel more comfortable asking other men your hypothetical thought experiments? I mean what do we women know about what it is to be a man?

[quote Kanaloa]@Zapx

Not yet 😂 it does look like exactly my kind of rubbish. It’s called The Assignment and basically the hitman then sets out to kill the people who gave him the sex change.[/quote]
Pedro Almodovar's The Skin I Live In has a similar premise.

@Kanaloa

Also, it’s odd that you (who sees yourself as a man I believe?) would choose this forum to come and antagonise. Why wouldn’t you feel more comfortable asking other men your hypothetical thought experiments? I mean what do we women know about what it is to be a man?

I suggest ‘dadsnet’, or pistonheads. Or maybe there was a reason to come here late night onto MN to process a childhood that sounds like it doesn’t fit anything advocated by a feminist on this board, or actually, any where.

Really titchy had the right of it. This really is an issue with people identifying as something that they don’t fit the definition of in reality.

No way 😂 I was astounded that one person had thought up such a bizarre idea and there’s another one! I mean why do the sex change to him? If you know he’s a hitman and you hate him why not kill him because it’s pretty obvious he’s probably going to try killing you for revenge!

Kanola - The Skin I Live In isn’t about a hitman, it’s a revenge story involving a plastic surgeon.

A bad movie you may enjoy is Predestination. It’s awful.

Oh okay just a similar premise but not actually the same plot. Still a bizarre plot line, why would surgery be your first revenge idea? That’s my favourite thing, being able to ask who the hell gave these movies the green light. Must look up predestination too. Looking forward to next weekend watching some crap now!

Pop91:
But hypothetically if society as a collective agreed to raise children free of gender then you believe there would be no gender dysphoria?

What would gender dysphoria even be for children raised free of gender?

How would it manifest itself? -- Not in terms of gender, by hypothesis. But then, even supposing you wanted to distinguish a particular kind of body dysmorphic disorder (see NHS BDD), it would be perverse to describe this as gender-based in the stipulated absence of gender in such circumstances. No?

I wonder. Can you, Pop91 , distinguish your own gender dysphoria from BDD without recourse to the notion of 'gender identity'? How, if so?

It does seem gender dysphoria will collapse into nothing more than a particular form of body dysmorphia if we deny ourselves talk of gender identity as a causal factor in its production. But, as some of us keep saying, no-one has yet explained a way of detecting the presence of gender identity in this sense -- as a cause of dysphoria when mismatched somehow with sex.

So, Pop91 , it seems we have no reason to believe there is any such thing as gender identity in the required sense. What, then, makes your dysphoria anything other than a particular form of BDD?

@Kanaloa

Oh okay just a similar premise but not actually the same plot. Still a bizarre plot line, why would surgery be your first revenge idea? That’s my favourite thing, being able to ask who the hell gave these movies the green light. Must look up predestination too. Looking forward to next weekend watching some crap now!

I hope you enjoy!

You do ask some very interesting questions pop91, and I'm struggling to keep up because I want to give well considered response but the threads move along very fast and fill up before I can!

Before I could answer your question, I need some answers from you about exactly what you mean by "changing sex". Sex is easily observable at birth but physical sex doesn't start or end there. Big permanent changes happen at puberty, and other changes happen later on, as a direct or indirect result of sex. So I need to think more clearly about what this total physical sex change would mean. We can both suppose (for the sake of the discussion) that in future medical science can make all these changes. The only thing it can't change is the past. My questions are about exactly what you want medical science to do, physically, in your own scenario.

First an easy one. What happens to a man's voice when he becomes a woman? Does his voice "unbreak"? If he has a baritone, does he keep it? Would his Adam's apple disappear? Or would she be a woman with a barotine and a large Adam's apple? And would a woman's voice break when she transitioned and an Adam's apple appear? I am guessing your answer would be that the science would change the Adam's apple and the speaking voice, but do correct me if I am mistaken.

Now let's get a bit harder. Other permanent physical changes at puberty differ between men and women overall. Height. Skeletal form. Muscle mass. Lung capacity. Physical strength. Suppose we do this sex change at the age of 25, when height and all these other things are pretty much determined. Would medical science shrink some or all of them when a man becomes a woman, for instance taking about six inches height off each man who changes sex? Or (as the data scientist in me feels obliged to say) adjusting for randomness and average distributions between sexes. And if a woman becomes a man would she grow six inches? I am not wedded to a female gender identity myself, but one of the (many) reasons I would not wish to change sex is that I would go from being a rather short woman to being an exceptionally short man, with all the problems that would entail. So, in your view of science, what should happen? Height and build and physical capacity and strength the same as before, or fully adapted to the distribution of these traits in the new sex?

And then let's move into the further future. Suppose science does the transition to someone at aged 45 or older. By this time most women and many men have children and as a result many of us women have damaged and weakened pelvic floors. So what does medical science
do when the men transition? Do they have very nice strong pelvic floors, like women who haven't given birth? Or do they get medically provided damage too? (I rather like the idea of giving them the same effects as the women who have borne their own children ) And supposing science did impose this damage, what would you think of the mindset of someone who chose to accept this damage when they didn't really need to because their children are already in the world?

Whether I would think of these transitioners as men or women, and to what extent, would at least partly depend on the answers to these and similar questions. Happy thinking!

And one book you may find amusing and thought provoking - though you'll probably struggle to find it as it's old and out of print - is Esmee Dodderidge's The New Gulliver (Women's Press 1979). It's a proper modern Gulliver's Travels in which Gulliver's spaceship crashlands on a planet where all gender roles are reversed but physical sex isn't.

But hypothetically if society as a collective agreed to raise children free of gender then you believe there would be no gender dysphoria?

Yes, I do pretty much believe that. Or at least that gender dysphoria (well, sex dysphoria, as there would effectively be no gender) would be vanishingly rare. If there were not any such thing as personality/appearance/role expectations specific to people with a particular set of genitalia, I don't think those feelings of being the wrong sex would ever arise. Your body would just be your body. It wouldn't say anything about your rolein society except what biological sex you were.

That can't really ever totally happen though, because you can't maje society do that, and in the extremely unlikely event that society evolved into that, the long history and memory of a gendered society would still be there to affect people's views.

Imo the craziest thing about the TRA agenda is how regressive it is - embracing and emphasising stereotypes and using them to determine what sex someone is or should be, rather than the much more progressive attitude that clothes, make-up, hobbies, jobs, personality etc are equal for all and do not determine a person's sex.

I think this has already been said, more or less, although in a different way, perhaps. But to emphasise:

What OP suggests would be in no way a sex change, even were it medically possible.

-- This is because there is no one person in the story who could be thought of as undergoing the change. There is the person at the start, a woman (in OP's telling), who is then destroyed to be replaced by a man.

The woman does not survive the process -- she must be thought of as dying, as the man is brought to life.

Suppose a woman were to die at the same moment her grandson was born. No one would call this an example of a sex change, perfect or otherwise. A woman dies; a man is born. This is just what OP postulates.

So, no, Pop91 and other wannabe sex-changers: changing sex is not even theoretically possible. Sorry!

[Btw (and this might not be strictly on topic), the scenario OP describes does have echoes in recent philosophical literature, mostly following Derek Parfit in his book Reasons and Persons and elsewhere. Those of you who like thinking about such things might like to have a look. It is good fun, and interesting, at least to some of us.

You might notice Parfit and others consider personal identity, which, following John Locke I suppose, we can take to be about what makes a person the same person over time. -- Are you, or to what extent are you, the same person as that horrible child who peed on my uncle's carpet back in the day? (Or, perhaps more seriously, 'organised that transport of Jews to Auschwitz' so long ago?)

This connection between 'identity' and 'sameness' (they mean the same, roughly speaking) often seems to fall by the wayside in present-day discussion of identity in politics and gender theory to the detriment of clarity of thought in such domains, some would say. But enough for now.]