Transhumanism and Gender Relations

daenerys

11 Transhumanism and Gender Relations

11th Nov 2011

2 min read

11

Upon reading Eliezer's possible gender dystopias ([catgirls](http://lesswrong.com/lw/xt/interpersonal_entanglement/), and [verthandi](http://lesswrong.com/lw/xu/failed_utopia_42/) and the other LW comments and posts on the subject of future gender relations, I came to a rather different conclusion than the ones I've seen espoused here. After searching around the internet a bit, I discovered that my ideas tend to fall under the general category of "postgenderism", and I am wondering what my fellow LessWrongians think of it.

This can generally be broken down to the following claims:

A higher level of egalitarianism between the sexes increases utility. For example, if only men are generally allowed to do Job A, then you are halving the talent pool of people who can do Job A, AND women who would otherwise be happy in Job A lose that utility. It is equally of dis-utility if only women are socially allowed to be emotionally expressive, etc, etc. In other words, Equality = Good.
The differences between men and women are a mix of environmental factors, such as social conditioning, and biological factors, such as varying levels of hormones.
Some of these differences are optimal in the current environment, and others are suboptimal. For example-Women have better social skills (good!), but are more prone to depression (bad). Men are better self-promoters (good!), but are more prone to suicide (bad).
Should transhumanism occur, it will eliminate the suboptimal differences. We can help people become less suicidal and not depressed.
This will lead to a spiraling effect- Fewer *actual* differences will lead to a lessening of socialized differences, which will lead to less actual differences, etc

I am positive at least *some* of this will occur. In fact, I would posit that it is already occuring in that we have drugs to treat depression, and hormone therapy to assist people with hormonal problems, etc. Some postgenderists claim there will be no need for different genders at all, as we can have male pregnancies, and female paternity, etc. I rather doubt it would go that far.

My questions to you all is- When do you see these changes occuring, if at all? How far do you think we will go? Will we end up as essentially a one-gender society? Will we move towards the middle but still retain some gender differences? What would they be? Will they be purely physical, or some psychological differences as well?

A possible contention is that the forces of natural selection would not allow this to go too far. In other words, women are attracted to high-testosterone men, and men are attracted to feminine women. However, we already have studies that show that birth control can make women desire lower testosterone men, and I don't see a reason why we wouldn't end up just being attracted to the new/different standard.

Another possible contention is that people *like* having both men and women about. This is an acceptable argument, but is based solely on personal taste. I would also surmise that most the people who desire the current two-gender system to persist are men (and therefore used to being the dominant gender, and therefore not personally feeling a reason to change it).

One Good Reference-

[Postgenderism: Beyond the Gender Binary](http://ieet.org/archive/IEET-03-PostGender.pdf) , George Dvorsky and James Hughes, PhD, IEET-03, March 2008

EDIT- Due to some really insightful comments;

I replaced men being prone to aggression as a negative, with men being prone to suicide.

I made the verbiage a little more explicit that no one would be *forced* to change, but would seek out the changes that transhumanism would have available.

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11 Transhumanism and Gender Relations

by daenerys

11th Nov 2011

2 min read

118

11

This can generally be broken down to the following claims:

A higher level of egalitarianism between the sexes increases utility. For example, if only men are generally allowed to do Job A, then you are halving the talent pool of people who can do Job A, AND women who would otherwise be happy in Job A lose that utility. It is equally of dis-utility if only women are socially allowed to be emotionally expressive, etc, etc. In other words, Equality = Good.
The differences between men and women are a mix of environmental factors, such as social conditioning, and biological factors, such as varying levels of hormones.
Some of these differences are optimal in the current environment, and others are suboptimal. For example-Women have better social skills (good!), but are more prone to depression (bad). Men are better self-promoters (good!), but are more prone to suicide (bad).
Should transhumanism occur, it will eliminate the suboptimal differences. We can help people become less suicidal and not depressed.
This will lead to a spiraling effect- Fewer *actual* differences will lead to a lessening of socialized differences, which will lead to less actual differences, etc

One Good Reference-

[Postgenderism: Beyond the Gender Binary](http://ieet.org/archive/IEET-03-PostGender.pdf) , George Dvorsky and James Hughes, PhD, IEET-03, March 2008

EDIT- Due to some really insightful comments;

I replaced men being prone to aggression as a negative, with men being prone to suicide.

I made the verbiage a little more explicit that no one would be *forced* to change, but would seek out the changes that transhumanism would have available.

Transhumanism

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11

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EphemeralNight15y60

Theres something wrong here and I can't quite articulate it. I am confused.

I still use male pronouns simply because there is no gender-neutral pronoun in the language and I am physically male, and I don't think it's sane to include attachment(or unattachment) to a gender-pronoun in one's self-concept.

What is the extent of this mind hack? How did it work?...How did you do it?

It wasn't something I did in an afternoon or anything, so I'm not sure I can give useful instructions or explanations...

It began as a quest to identify and purge all of my Cached Thoughts that were sexist or had sexist connotations, not just about other people but also about myself. I discovered two things in doing this, first, that there is a LOT more sexism that goes unquestioned in our culture than I originally thought there was, and second, that in my own mind, without those Cached Thoughts there to complete the pattern, there was nothing intrinsically male(or female) left. I had dissolved my gender identity. Explained it away.

I'm not sure if this is something everyone could do, but it sure seems like it would be.

What is it like throwing out the concept of gender?

Subtle, but pervasive. You start to notice those little sexist Cached Thoughts in others, even those who self-identify as not-sexist. You start to notice little false beliefs about your own personality, things you assumed were there but aren't, or things that are there but that you made excuses for. It makes knowing yourself easier, definitely. And spotting these assumptions in yourself helps you notice when you try to make similar ones about other people, as well.

I make myself think of myself as a human rather than as a man (that is, I deliberately do not think of myself as male, which was difficult to actually do at first, like breaking a bad habit); sex is a feature of the body no different than height or skin color. (height is a better analogy, because that has obvious physical consequences that are a lot harder to not care about if what you have isn't what you want, like sex.), and gender identity was a bad habit which I broke. It can be a significant shift to one's perspective.

MixedNuts15y20

Aw. When I did the same thing, the male parts of my identity did turn out to be cached... but I couldn't want to remove them. (I don't know the mechanism that led me to absorb them, rather than the female equivalents, given that everyone including me thought I was a girl.) For example, I'm weak. I dislike being mocked for it, and I'd like to live in a world where men can be weak; but given that the norm exists, I want it to apply to me.

2daenerys15y

I am upvoting a lot of these posts. E Night- You are offering a wonderfully unique view on this issue and I would love to see you make a discussion post about it!

8Zack_M_Davis15y

Before anything else, let me say that I applaud and admire your self-hack. What I have to say below is merely an expression of some of my personal thoughts on this issue, and is not intended as any sort of attack on your self-identity. [...] What do you mean by gender identity, exactly? One might disclaim any explicit, verbally-endorsed gender identity, while still retaining the psychological traits that others would categorize as characteristically masculine or feminine. For myself, I don't consider myself to have a strong gender identity, and am somewhat repulsed by the idea that some part of my core essence is intrinsically male. Thus, it is sometimes tempting to think of myself as agendered or androgynous, but I find myself rather persuaded by intellectual arguments to the effect that it's simply not true, that as a question of simple fact, my psychology is intrinsically male, and that this remains the case no matter how I choose to verbally self-identify. Sex isn't just one trait; it's a bundle of correlations between traits, a cluster in a high-dimensional configuration space. If I know the shape of your genitals, I can make all sorts of probabilistic predictions about your other features. The fact that these predictions are probabilistic in nature and that there are many exceptions (some men are shorter than most women, some men are gay, some men have two X chromosomes, &c.) doesn't change the fact that they are doing useful cognitive work. You can think of this from a minimum-message-length perspective: if you're trying to describe an adult human male in a limited number of bits, and the recipient of your message already knows a lot of things about humans, you can shorten your message by saying that you're taking about a man and then describing the specific ways in which the man departs from the human male average, rather than describing every feature of the man from scratch without making any reference to sex at all. Given that gender roles in some for

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