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Okay, first off, I said this stuff wouldn't necessarily happen in our lifetimes. I don't grant that it's outright unlikely to happen in our lifetimes, depending what you mean by 'unlikely'. I think I'm right even if it takes a thousand years, but I do think there's something like a 1/10 that we live to see it. And there's a much better chance that our children live to see it, which makes it very relevant to the kind of values we want to educate them with.
Second, I am against sour-grapes morality. We must acknowledge that good things are good even if practicalities prevent us from getting them just now. We must shout it from the rooftops. We must write it on our monuments in letters ten feet high, so that even if we cannot seize the chance, our children or our children's children will as soon as it is possible for them. If trans rights are currently socially unworkable, but desirable in the long term, both these truths need to be communicated and promoted. The state owes it to trans people to tell them, "we can't give you everything you ought to have just yet. but we know in an ideal world you'd obviously get it. we're sorry, we're so sorry"; not "what you want is incoherent and bad, stop asking for it". Sometimes you can't save everyone, but you have to acknowledge the sacrifices you make, and bear them in your heart forever. To do otherwise is morally outrageous. That is why, regardless of the facts re: practicality, I would view an intellectual alliance with gender-criticals of the breed whose idea of Heaven/Utopia includes no trans people at all as viscerally unacceptable.
Third, sour-grapes morality is a great way to turn your nose up at solutions that already exist, or that could exist in the short term. "In a perfect friction-less Utopia trans rights work" is an extreme assumption that proves a point. I'm not sure the social engineering needs to be quite that extreme, nor that we need this many technological miracles, to get us there. I think there are ways for a society at our current level of technology to allow for a lot more trans rights than conservatives would be willing to grant; and if we don't keep a firm hold of the premise "trans rights are highly desirable if they can be obtained", we won't look for them, we won't find them.
One thing I think you're glossing over here is the possibility that some of the things some trans people want really are incoherent and bad.
In the transhumanist future in which anyone who wants to undergo a body transplant and transfer their brain into a body of their desired sex, I'm confident some significant number of trans people would take the deal. But I'm equally confident that some significant number of trans people wouldn't take the deal, would keep their bodies more or less as-is, and would demand to be "treated like a woman" anyway.
My evidence for this prediction is the current state of the evidence in our world. For such a seemingly straightforward concept ("a trans woman is a man who wants to be a woman"), it's surprisingly difficult to pin down a workable definition. One of our resident trans posters proposed "a woman is someone who prefers to have a vagina rather than a penis, and vice-versa. But of course "prefers" is really hard to confirm, so let us instead say: a woman is someone with a vagina". But in response, I noted that such a definition excludes almost everyone who calls themselves a trans woman:
I'm sure it will not surprise you that the resident trans poster in question refused to bite the bullet, and stated that she would still consider a trans woman a woman even if she knew for a fact that the person in question had a penis which they had no intention of giving up.
Now, granted, the current state of the art in bottom surgery produces a very crude facsimile of a real vagina which has to be dilated indefinitely, isn't self-lubricating and is useless from the point of becoming pregnant (and all related auxiliary functions). I'm sure there are some trans women right now who would really like a vagina instead of a penis, but are holding out until the state of the art improves significantly. Or perhaps they can't afford it or it isn't covered under their insurance etc. This is all perfectly understandable. (Even if you're only on a waiting list to undergo bottom surgery, I'm going to take your claim to identifying as a woman a lot more seriously than if you aren't.) In the transhumanist future in which undergoing a cross-sex body transplant was as quick, cheap and painless as getting a vaccination, I'm sure significantly more than 9% of trans women would avail of it. Especially if it was reversible.
But I'm also confident that if I surveyed the ~90% of trans women who haven't undergone bottom surgery about what they would do in the hypothetical future where body transplants are cheap and painless, a significant proportion of them would say "I wouldn't avail of it. I like having a penis." A "girldick" is the preferred term, I understand.
Like, at what point am I allowed to say "what you want is incoherent and bad"? Demanding to be treated like a woman despite possessing a penis and wanting to hang on to it seems incoherent and bad. Demanding to be allowed to participate in female sporting events without having made even most the token effort to reduce your T levels seems bad and unfair. Demanding that lesbians let you put your dick in them and calling them bigots if they don't want to seems bad. I feel zero qualms about saying my idea of utopia includes zero creepy male people who use trendy identity politics to emotionally manipulate women into fucking them, or to secure an unfair competitive advantage in sporting events.*
Likewise, in our hypothetical future in which undergoing a body transplant was quick and painless, certain male people refused to undergo one, but demanded that they receive all the social and legal privileges** associated with being a woman anyway - I feel like I'd be well within my rights to say "you're a bad actor and a malingerer, knock it off". A male person who wants a female body, but cannot yet achieve this because of the current state of medical technology - that's an engineering problem. A male person who wants a female body, but cannot yet achieve this because they lack the financial resoures to make it happen - that's a scarcity problem. A male person who wants to keep his male body but wants to be "treated like a woman" anyway - that's just someone taking the piss, and we both know it.
If your idea of utopia includes some amount of these people, then I have to ask - why? Is there any point at which you say "what this person is demanding is incoherent, bad and unreasonable"? Or is every demand a trans person makes de facto a reasonable demand to make, by virtue of their being trans?
*Two particular kinds of bad behaviour which, needless to say, are not peculiar to trans women.
**Assuming that any such privileges still exist in the world in which female sex is literally an elective category.
I think the problem is that we have very different ideas of the ideal transhumanist future. Any transhumanist future worth its salt is by definition going to be, well, transhumanist: to involve people transforming themselves beyond the standard human forms and lifestyles. Never mind fretting about people who want to inhabit bodies that have mismatched but naturally-occurring sexual characteristics: I expect that quite a lot of people, in the long run, will find that they prefer to interact with the (virtual?) world as glowing obelisks, anthropomorphic cats, anime girls complete with Roger Rabbit black outlines, and, doubtless, all manner of much stranger things we couldn't even predict from our pre-singularity vantage point. It is these hypothetical posthumans who I imagine cringing at the thought that "she" is inherently wrong/a lie if applied to a person whose body has a penis, when it will routinely be applied to people who have no genitalia or chromosomes at all.
(And, indeed, people who may never have had any because they only ever existed as digital consciousnesses. Thus far I've talked about VR, brain uploads, and so on - but what about A.I.? If we crack sentient A.I.s, what will that do to our understanding of gender, do you think? Do you think it's radically wrong for people in the Star Trek universe to call Data a "he"?)
I also see the sleight of hand you're attempting here. "In the future there'll be sentient individuals who have no genitalia or chromosomes who everyone considers it unremarkable to call 'she'; therefore there should be nothing objectionable about calling penised individuals 'she' in our world (in which every sentient individual has chromosomes and only a negligibly small portion don't have genitalia)".
I will reiterate that my grandmother has no wheels.
I'm arguing that the trans-inclusive policies you're endorsing have a demonstrably negative impact on women and children's safeguarding. You're dismissing this criticism by saying none of it will matter in the post-Singularity transhumanist future. Fair enough - but that doesn't mean it doesn't matter now.
Frankly, this line of reasoning proves too much. I presume, as a self-identified progressive, you are a staunch opponent of racism and think that colour-blind policies which don't take historical oppression into account make the lives of people of colour worse. Why couldn't I retort "pfft - after the Singularity, the idea of discriminating against someone on the basis of their skin tone will be as alien to humans as the idea of discriminating against someone on the basis of their preferred flavour of ice cream"? Even if this is true, so what? What would it have to do with your criticism? Fucking nothing, is what.
My point is "therefore there is nothing objectionable about calling penised individuals 'she' in principle". By all means we can discuss the cold hard utilitarian consequences of promoting the practice. But the Singularity thought experiment was meant to refute the idea that it's inherently, irreducibly "wrong/"a lie"/etc.
You might think this is unimportant pie-in-the-sky thinking, but I think it makes a great deal of difference to how we approach the moral quandaries nowadays. By analogy, it's the difference between "we recognize that it's a moral tragedy that thousands upon thousands of Africans starve to death, but America physically wouldn't have the resources to feed everyone while still caring for itself in the long term, so we should stop ruining ourselves by trying; we can only hope that someday we are secure enough to start the work anew", which is very sensible; and "thousands and thousands of black people dying is fine and none of our business, we should actively beat the urge to help them out of our children if possible, it's a disease holding them back from being Übermensch", which is fucking evil.
It's the difference between drawing an apologetic but firm line in the sand ('we will delineate bathrooms by biological sex to prevent rapes; this doesn't mean we don't think you're real women in some ineffable way, it doesn't mean we don't think you should live as trans women if you like, it just means we've found it's the statistically most effective way to prevent rapes') and the current way gender-criticals fight the great lavatory wars, where they treat it as just a sub-item of their general and much less defensible point that they don't think trans people should exist at all.
This isn't to say I concede that the optimal amount of state recognition of transgenders in 2025 is as low as you probably think it is. (Though I don't think it's as high as radical trans activists want it to be.) But the point of reaching for the thought experiment, and the principle that derives from it, is that even if I conceded all the immediate practical points it would imply a very different platform from mainstream gender-criticals.
(You presume wrongly.)
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I have a hard time accepting your apparent claim that wanting to live your life as an embodied anime girl and not being able to constitutes some kind of unspeakable tragedy, on a par with (or in the same ballpark as) the reality of sickness, aging and mortality. I don't believe that "being able to live your life as an embodied anime girl" is a project that any public monies should be invested into achieving. If, a result of the overreaches and poor message discipline of the trans activist movement, there is less of an appetite for investing public monies into making this desire a reality, that strikes me as an unequivocal good.
That's not exactly my claim. Beating mortality is clearly more urgent than guaranteeing anatomical freedom for all sapient beings. And at the individual level, "I really wish I could turn into a flying octopus" is not typically an immediate crisis in the same way as "I really wish I wasn't being raped right now".
But I do claim it would be a terrible waste of a universe if we made it past a technological singularity and yet continued restricting ourselves to some marginally-improved, sharp-edges-sanded-off approximation of "classic" Homo sapiens existence, even though the technology for much more interesting avatars and transformations existed, purely out of some weird sense of parochialism. I do claim it'd be an existential tragedy to get Brave New World instead of the Culture. HOAs who demand that everyone's garden be an identical plot of uniform flat turf, tiling the universe. A Luddite boot stamping on the face of human whimsy, forever. The prospect horrifies me.
(The anime girls and anthro dogs were more of a gag than anything else; I expect they'd be popular choices in the very earliest day of the technology but be gradually replaced with less shitposty things that are less funny to say out loud, but are more fun to be. Note also that I'm not saying my utopia doesn't have classic Homo sapienses anymore, either; it just seems very unlikely that everyone would choose to remain a baseline-human if given the choice.)
This being the case, I think it's important to get trans rights right insofar as the kind of post-singularity world we get, if we get one, may very well depend on today and tomorrow's prevalent values. It's the kind of question where the underlying moral principle. This is a time to open people's minds, not close them.
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Nothing much. However AIs copy themselves or iterate upon themselves, it will bear little relationship to sexual reproduction and sexual dimorphism as we currently understand it.
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In my idea of Heaven/Utopia, the problem of people's inner gender identity being mismatched with their body is solved, one way or another, whether through widely available and accepted psychosurgery or resleevable bodies. If there are conclaves of people who wish for some reason to continue to inflict the trans culture of the early 21st century onto themselves, like there are communities of "capital D Deaf" people now, in my idea of Heaven/Utopia I do not have to interact with them or accomodate them.
Many leftists and leftist-adjacents online seem to mistake the crutch for a permanent solution in this way. No there's no "UBI" or "healthcare" in a perfect world - in a perfect world you just own the commons and don't get sick.
See my post here — in my idea of a post-Singularity Utopia, a large number, perhaps even a majority of living people would no longer be using what we'd recognize as human bodies at all. They would consider "she/her is appropriate for a trans woman" obvious not as its own free-floating principle specific to 21st century trans people made of flesh and blood, but because they would recognize that using "she/her" might be trivially correct for a digital consciousness which presents itself as female, whether it's the upload of a once-biologically-male brain, the upload of a once-biologically-female brain, or indeed an A.I. that never had a biological sex.
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