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Notes -
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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