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If I were making a science fiction game set in a future where bodies can be changed with ease and I was convinced by modern day gender theory I think I'd want to be confident enough in my beliefs that I would not need to have a transgendered character, or at least that any major body change being not considered a big deal would explain all an intelligent player needs to have explained. Including trans people in a world they'd be easily cured strikes me as like including lepers as well on the grounds that they were once marginalized, the action of someone who has thoroughly forgotten the reason they wanted to include them in the first place. I guess the question is would the inclusion be because you want to explore questions of gender theory or just as a flag to modern day culture. I generally find flags to modern day culture tacky.
In a future world with easy, 100% effective sex changes, then transgenderism would no longer be the signal that it is today.
Consider that, in the 1970s or whatever, having any tattoo was edgy and cool. By the 1990s, you had to have full arm sleeves to fill that same niche. And nowadays, of course, sleeves are meh and to be really transgressive you have to go full Post Malone with neck and face tattoos.
Powerful signals of group belonging and transgression need to be hard. Perhaps a Star Trek character filling the same niche would belong to an ascetic religious order. The audience could gasp at their naked back, deeply scarred from flagellation. Sure the person in question could use a TriCorder to erase the scars any time, but the scars would be a meaningful signal of deep devotion to a cause.
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Ghost in the Shell kind of barely dealt with this. Stand Alone Complex Season 1 Episode 1 focused on a politician who liked to drink and swap artificial bodies with women. The strangeness of that sort of behavior is tangentially mentioned in a couple lines of dialogue. They are the first generation of people with easy body swapping so this is a secret worthy of an eyebrow raise.
It's also regularly questioned why The Major uses a female chassis, with even other members of her own team spelling out that a male chassis allows for greater muscular strength. Her counterpoint is to beat Batou with his own fists. For a while, fan theories thought she might have been AMAB before cyberization, although 2nd Gig very heavily implies that she was the "little girl" that was a fellow plane crash survivor to Kuze (though diehard fans of trans Makoto suggest she'd started IDing as female at that age).
In a future where the (upper?) middle class and above can afford artificial bodies, what would it even mean to be trans? They choose body aesthetics the way we choose car styling. Picking a generic hot girl body from a catalog as the major did would be as easy for a guy as a girl. Those fans are silly, I would have thought officially wrong and better yet totally irrelevant the premise of pure brain-body disconnect.
Perhaps relevant is Batou's choice of a purely functional body. They animate him head and shoulders taller than everyone else and with expressionless metal eyes that can sort of see through active camouflage. And in one episode he admits to having no penis. He's a huge jacked expressionless cyborg spec ops Ken doll. High speed low drag enabled by sci fi technology.
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There's also her apparent surprise and amusement at being accidentally installed in a male chassis by Batou at the end of the original manga.
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