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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   16086 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 19, 2022

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The contention is that, since they think sex is innate, and “gender” is such a motte-and-bailey of a concept as to be useless, changing your sex is totally, categorically impossible and any claim/affirmation that it has happened is at best an error and at worst a lie.

Okay so you're saying folks think that there is never any way we could possible change sexual organs from one species to another (even though there are multiple examples in nature) regardless of the level of technology we achieve?

You might as well ask “If there was an immortality pill, how far back along the line from that point would you accept someone’s claim that they will never die?”

I don't understand the comparison here.

-I’m saying that people believe sex is innate, so they believe that whatever happens to you later is irrelevant. At best you would gain the “power of menstruation” or something, just as if you had functional wings grafted on you would gain the power of flight, but still not be a bird.

-My immortality thing is trying to point out that your question amounts to “does an imaginary world where something impossible is possible cause you to reconsider that possibility of the impossible thing in the actual world?”

there are multiple examples in nature

No there are not. Not of what you are describing in the first place anyways.

It takes a whole series of leaps and assumptions to transform the cases we do see in nature into something relevant to this conversation, and eliding those leaps is dishonest.

I'm not trying to say that sex changes would be outside of status or dominance hierarchies. Most of the examples I've read like clownfish change sex once they reach the top of the hierarchy.

I could I suppose imagine something like that happening with humans, although personally I think that world would be horrendous. I still think it shows that changing sex is a characteristic of some life forms, and outside of intelligence I don't see why humans are in a separate special class biologically. If @gog's main objection is that changing your sex is impossible, I think it's a good counterargument.

I don't see why humans are in a separate special class biologically

It's because they are mammals. There are no hermaphroditic mammals or birds.

The leap here is to pretend that clownfish and humans are anywhere close enough evolutionary that this would make sense. Which I find about as convincing as saying that we could maybe make humans live for centuries because turtles do.

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