Comment by danielodievich | Hacker News Reader

Comment by danielodievich | Hacker News Reader

One of my favorite sci-fi authors is Ian M. Banks (discussed here on HN with regularity). His Culture series describe a post-scarcity interstellar society of human(oid)s who among many, many things can change their own gender just by thinking about it. After suitable body alteration time, you can be a male, female, or even something in between (that happens to be important part of one of the characters in one of the books), with most citizens transferring back and forth at least once to act as both a father and a mother at least once in their long lifetime.

In this society, there is no gender inequality. Ian's own "A Few Notes on the Culture" essay http://www.vavatch.co.uk/books/banks/cultnote.htm states it best:

A society in which it is so easy to change sex will rapidly find out if it is treating one gender better than the other; within the population, over time, there will gradually be greater and greater numbers of the sex it is more rewarding to be, and so pressure for change - within society rather than the individuals - will presumably therefore build up until some form of sexual equality and hence numerical parity is established.

Until our science invents this, this is a great thought experiment to conduct.

The Ian M. Banks quote equates gender and sex. That's probably a product of when it was written (1994) and I don't think too badly of Banks for writing it, however, in the contemporary dialogue, these are not equivalent terms. I caution you against getting caught up in an uninteresting semantic argument here: the question isn't one of definitions, but rather whether the phenomena classified as gender (clothing, hairstyles, etc.) are or should be tied to the phenomena classified as sex (genitalia and/or chromosomes). I won't comment my opinion on that as I don't have the time to do it justice, but I will say that to ignore the fact that those phenomena are very much in debate, misses a pretty big point:

That point being, that you can actually change your presentation of gender with relative ease. Norah Vincent did it (dressed as and pretended to be a man) for a year and wrote the book Self Made Man about her experience. The fact that the majority of people never change their presentation of gender and those who do change their presentation tend to feel strongly about it, says that there's more complexity to the choice of how to dress or style your hair than an economic cost/benefit analysis. The fact is, people want to be their gender even while claiming that their gender is treated poorly, and in the case of trans people, choosing to present in a way that is obviously treated poorly. If the hypothesis that people will gravitate to the gender presentation which is treated most positively were true, few people would choose to be the gender that gets spit on in the grocery store (happened to a trans friend of mine).

This won't happen though. It reminds me of 'Star Trek' futurism where we crudely apply some neat technology to our own circumstances, without thinking about the real dynamic changes that would come about if the tech did exist.

If we ever get to the point of this level of technology, then the notion of 'gender' would be completely arcane.

People would be 'growing' wings, tails, horns, extra limbs, extra large brains, fur, hoofs, cross breeding with animals, creating new species in petrie dishes.

The 'regular humans' in that culture would be viewed like we view Amish people or Mennonites.

This seems very interesting, however instinctively I would have thought otherwise, meaning a society would tend towards the most rewarding, to the extreme of resulting in a non viable civilization. If you can change at will, why pick up the losing side?

As much as I would like it to be different, I wouldn't trust the human race with this capability.

Will definitely read, thanks.

You may also enjoy some of John Varley's early work (the short stories and books about the Eight Worlds). Physical sex changes (by cloning a new body and plopping the brain in, plus some extra "science magic" to make that work) are routine.

I really loved Banks' work. Sadly he's gone. But there was always this split between the humanoids and the Minds. I want to be a Mind, not a humanoid.

Sort of a star-bellied sneetches deal, yes.

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