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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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