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I'll try to skip over the what-ifs -- though the alternate-universe where ~10% of XX-chromosone'd people went FTM in the '70s and early internet mpreg was drastically less bizarre is a funny thought -- but I really don't think this is a useful metric here, or for many matters involving the brain. People aren't livestock; to the extent any telos can be relevant on statistical levels, it doesn't really make sense at an individual one.
People also go to doctors get have ridiculous breast implants or sizable breast reductions, to reduce weight or help maintain it, so on and so forth. Even for matters pretty heavily tied to reproduction and fully autonomous, "what is the optimal time to start and stop lactating" for a mother doesn't have one Set and Correct Answer, and it's not even coherent to propose one. And the act of reproduction, despite the best effort of whiptail lizards and teenage boys first learning about lotion, is typically at least a two-player task: no matter how functional one person might be as an epitome of 'natural order', they're going to have a pretty rough time making a baby.
Reproduction might be more a telos than hair color (but don't red-heads have higher skin cancer incidence?), but it's not in the same category as eyes having a telos of seeing.
I think that would be a totally new fight, because mpreg is specifically about cis guys getting pregnant (unless we're talking A/B/O which is an entire subset of its own), so then there would be slapfights over "are you saying trans men are not men?" or "why are you making a normal thing - men getting pregnant - into this weird fetish?" Fights in the comments over "Totally disgusted, thought I was getting a nice romantic story about two guys and their expected baby, turns out to be weird cis shit, tag your fetishes before posting you sick fucks" versus "How dare you kinkshame, it's up to you to read the tags and it was clearly stated to be mpreg" versus "Yeah but not everyone knows what 'mpreg' means, they take it at face value that it's about pregnant men" "It is about pregnant men" "No it's not, it's about your obscure kink".
People can and will fight over anything 😁
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And yet the similarities are often astonishingly close!
Yeah, hard disagree. Reproduction is, if anything, more telos-oriented than vision. I think your mistake is that you're too focused on the individual. At the level of a species, the occasional blind or legless specimen is trivial by comparison to propagation errors. We do live in a society that has worked very hard to shove this to the back of our awareness in various ways, but the people I know who are infertile are often at least as upset about their disability as the people I know who lack other organ function. There are a lot of culture war fights going on right now over what health insurers can be required to cover in connection with ART, and as technology advances, I expect those fights to only escalate.
As far as I understand, redheads also feel more pain, respond differently to drugs, etc. but I'm not making an "intelligent design" argument, here. Not every feature of every individual human is crucial to our survival as individuals or a species. But barring certain extremely high-tech interventions, heterosexual sex played a fundamental role in the existence of literally every human. Writing that off as on the same "proper function" level as hair color just seems willfully contrary.
My objection's more at the bar between individual and group considerations.
As a metaphor, at the level of a species, "harvest crops" or "pumping water" played a fundamental role in the daily survival of literally every human on the planet. But most people don't do that often, and some don't do it ever in their entire lives. Sure, they'd be physically capable, for the most part -- but even the gayest guy or most gold star lesbian can find a turkey baster even if they couldn't lie back and think of England, and before that we had the invention of fingers.
But describing people as unhealthy because they don't want to harvest crops isn't even wrong, and wrong even beyond the (already obnoxious) tendency to conflate things like lack-of-exercise and the results of lack-of-exercise. Here, the problem isn't lack-of-hetero-fucking or even the lack of individual-results-of-hetero-fucking -- most men historically never reproduced, either! -- but some gauzy results-of-results matter. Society is downstream of individual actions, but "healthy" as measuring individual actions in how they effect humanity is less comparable to annoying advice to reduce bacon consumption and more like annoying advice to vote Properly.
Sure, but measuring individual actions by how they effect humanity is very much not the point of the word "healthy." We as individuals have both reproductive organs (we even call them "reproductive organs") and sexual-attraction circuitry. The reason we have them is for propagation of the species, that's important in understanding their proper function, but the point is not some utilitarian results-of-results analysis. The point is to say--what are the measures of a healthy heart? A healthy heart circulates blood, pumps in a certain rhythm, etc. What is a healthy hand? A healthy hand has thus-and-such dexterity, grip strength within a certain range, etc. A healthy reproductive system, among other things, successfully propagates the species. That's good for the species, but at the level of the individual, it's what we mean when we say the word healthy--something telos-oriented.
And you can totally deconstruct that word, after all, if we did intelligently design a species we would have different things to say about it, there is no magically necessary connection between the word "healthy" and the process of biological species propagation. This is why I suggested elsewhere in the thread that to really get to the heart of the matter we probably just have to taboo the word "healthy." But when someone asks "how is homosexuality unhealthy" there are a wide range of empirical answers that currently get overlooked in stupid ways because on most of the internet it is taboo to say anything that might be perceived as negative about homosexuality. All I've pointed out is that the "proper function" account we usually mean when we say "unhealthy" pretty obviously applies to homosexuality in the same way it applies to bacon and smoking.
And indeed, I regard crusaders against bacon consumption as approximately as worthy of my attention as crusaders against homosexual sex. I don't mind hearing that bacon is bad for me, when we're having a detailed conversation about empirical facts-of-the-matter. But when people start talking about legislatively banning it, then I feel like something has gone very wrong indeed.
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