If changing sex became easy, should society allow it?

[ByTheRiverside]

This is a hypothetical question that lives in a sci-fi like future.

Transgender people currently don't have access to an awful lot of options to change sex characteristics. Early intervention prevents a lot of secondary sex characteristic development. Other than that, there's hormonal and surgical interventions that do not change a lot of their underlying anatomy and genetic/epigenetic sex traits.

In the future, let's imagine that changing sex is an easy medical option available to anyone. Transgender people can quite easily change their anatomy, and even their genetics. They do this while still remaining the same human, with the same prior experiences.

Then the question becomes less 'have they changed sex' but rather 'ought society to allow it'?

What are your thoughts?

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.

How come I missed this delight?

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

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

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.

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.

Your Dad is a wise man.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I should have been less general, I didn't mean 2 years I meant 10 approx, I assume there is already a lot of money in it and probably some religious right money as well (unlike their money in UK TERFing...) medical stuff is on an exponential curve, not quite like tech but certainly improving and unlike a huge amount of AI, there is a market and money for it. We shall see

It is of course, very very very complex and I expect mistakes to be made along the way

very good points, the value of thought experiments like this

Interestingly Helen Joyce addresses this idea in her book Trans.

In our computerised age, mind is imagined as software running on the brain’s hardware. Unsurprisingly, this idea has an intuitive appeal for those who believe that a true self may be housed in a body of the wrong sex. Transwoman Martine Rothblatt, a billionaire biotech entrepreneur and author of From Transgender to Transhuman: A Manifesto on the Freedom of Form, takes it further, arguing that transhumanism, a loose movement that seeks to conquer death, is a natural extension of gender-identity ideology.

She goes into the philosophical aspects in some depth, eventually rejecting the idea that femaleness can be divided into mind and body and the assertion that

if the mind is female, the body male and that of the body can be modified somehow to be female that the resulting person is then a human female in all (or even most) respects.

That doesn't really answer the question about whether a theoretical 'enhanced' sex change should be made illegal, but it does mean that it's still irrelevant to the discussion of trans rights and the rights of women..

Who will have access to changing sex?

Clue: it won't be poor people.

Exactly.

Most of things individuals are paying for though, should an NHS which is struggling be paying for plastic surgery for men who want to look more feminine.
What about the secondary costs of women taking testosterone- I know a lot of the cost of the NHS is fixing peoples choices, but to pay for those choices and then the fallout is another thing.

Yes, I think people are assuming the surround sound/micronutrition/hormonal rollercoaster/day and night biological feedback the embryo gets from its mother is replicable. It’s probably key in developing the foetus to be exposed to so much fluctuating information on being human.

I always think of that poor woman who died in America and they kept her alive for her baby, and wonder how her baby is doing. I don’t think it’s well.

We do police those things though.

For example, age limits, such as being over a certain age, before you can get a tattoo.

An important age limit is the age of consent regarding sexual activity. You can't consent to being choked to death.

Even plastic surgery has limits. For example, regarding transplants, you can't just have any old donor, you need the right donor who is a match to the recipient. Maybe you were thinking of cosmetic surgery, but even then, there are regulations.

The eunuch maker was jailed.

The man who consented to being killed and eaten gave consent, but this didn't stop his killer from being jailed.

Yeah, age of course. I get that.

If we were on track to solve these problems there wouldn't be so many unexplained miscarriages

Great points

I'm guessing that two main features of our society will remain

1. as mentioned by PP, rich people will get choices, poor people will get used

2. some men will twist shit around to be able to rape children easier

So imagine some miraculous Star Trek far future, where you can go through a transporter thing that breaks your body down, then rewrites your dna and reassembles your body into a body of the opposite sex. In that case, you would henceforth BE the opposite sex, regardless of your previous history. Of course such a woman should be legally recognised as a woman, and allowed into women's spaces.

It's not your experiences that make you a woman, it's your body. At the moment it is totally impossible to turn a man's body into a woman's body, and there is no prospect whatsoever that it will ever be possible. Extreme cosmetic body modifications that make some men resemble women don't change their sex.

Then you would genuinely have a "man in a woman's body"
i.e. A woman with a male (socialised) brain.

Freaky!

And of course, the opposite could also be true.

Continuing the thought experiment though - being female isn't just a state of chromosomes. It is the result of a developmental process conditioned by your chromosomes. The development process (gestation and childhood development) includes the brain, skeleton, musculature - indeed every tissue in the human body. What the technology would need to do, at a minimum, is to rerun that develop process, i.e. create a brand new person, with among other things, a new brain.

Your previous history would still exist in this scenario. Your learned experiences in your formative years would still be male. You didn't go through having your first period when you were a teen at school like the other girls - your ability to cope emotionally and physically would therefore be a man who had changed to a woman not a woman's still! Likewise your identity is tied up a lot in relational identity - I've talked about this a lot - your identity is formed by stuff like being the eldest daughter or a sister etc. The expectations others have of you are formed by this. If you experience sexual abuse at a young age that is going to shape your confidence - growing up as a little boy the risk of this is fundamentally different and again that may affect how your parents treat you compared to if you had been born a girl.

So the magic wand, really needs to also change your history and lived experience as well as your body.

We know it matters.