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lucidfox comments on Gender Identity and Rationality - Less Wrong
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Comments (111)
I think it's helpful to consider transsexuality as cosmetic surgery. It's another case of "I'm unhappy with certain aspects of my body and I want to change them." Currently, doctors in the US won't perform this cosmetic surgery unless you convince them you're an X trapped in a Y's body.
The cosmetic surgery viewpoint goes beyond binary sex choices of male and female. Given better technology, in the future one could choose to be a blue-haired futanari catgirl. Why? Not to fit some story about finally becoming one's true gender, but simply because it could be fun.
So you'd give the claim "I need to reshape my body into a catgirl/elf/dragon to achieve true happiness" the same credence as "I need to reshape my body into the other sex to achieve true happiness"?
Today's society gives one of those statements less credence than the other. Do you think it's a bad thing?
I hate to sound callous, but I don't really care why people want to change their bodies. I am simply glad for them when they feel better about themselves afterwards.
To respond to your question: Yes that's a bad thing, but I can extrapolate the moral trajectory. In the past, more people disliked transsexuals and total body revision wasn't even on the map. Today, transsexuals are making inroads and some fringe people are speculating about more extreme modifications.
There are other times where I disagree with society giving different amounts of approval to things. For example, more people are for medicinal marijuana than for completely legalizing it.
I'm at a loss for how such an open-minded and kind statement could be interpreted as callous. It just sounds like the obvious Right Thing. Am I missing something here?
It could, but hopefully in the context of LW wouldn't, be interpreted as 'the fact that you're distressed doesn't matter; your preference for a certain kind of body is no more significant than $LowStatusGroup's similar and low-status preference'.