If it lowers your social status, and can be treated, it's treatable condition.
I'm sure if blackness could be treated, it would be consider an illness.
I'm sure if blackness could be treated, it would be consider an illness.
Does anyone remember a scene from the short-lived tv show Gideon's Crossing? I never watched it, but they hyped one episode ad nauseum by showing this one very relevant clip, which remember as follows:
A black doctor is trying convince a deaf woman to let her daughter get cochlear implants to cure her deafness.
Mother: You're saying that hearing people are better than deaf people.
Doctor: No, I'm saying it's easier.
Mother: Would your life be easier if you were white?
There was some talk here about height taxes, but there's a better solution - redefine shortness as a treatable condition and use HGH to cure it. They even got FDA on board with that, at least for 1.2% shortest people.
Unsatisfactory sexual performance became a treatable condition with Viagra. Depression and hyperactivity became treatable conditions with SSRIs. Being ugly is already almost considered a treatable condition, at least one can get that impression from cosmetic surgery ads. Being overweight is universally considered an illness, even though we don't have too many effective treatment options (surgery is unpopular, and effective drugs like fen-phen and ECA are not officially prescribed any more). If we ever figure out how to increase IQ, you can be certain low IQ will be considered a treatable condition too. Almost everything undesirable gets redefined as an illness as soon as an effective way to fix it is developed.
I welcome these changes. Yes, redefining large parts of normal human variability as illness is a lie, but if that's what society needs to work around its taboos against human enhancement, so be it.