Transhumanism and Gender Relations

daenerys

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.

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.

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.

there was nothing intrinsically male (or female) left. I had dissolved my gender identity. Explained it away.

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 form have existed in every human society, given that there are clear evolutionary reasons to expect the existence of some psychological sex differences due to differing reproductive strategies, and given the experimentally-demonstrable fallibility of human introspection, I'm more inclined to interpret my personal feelings of disliking gender roles as more of a statement of values and of ideology than of my actually being ungendered in an empirically verifiable sense. I don't think my mind feels intrinsically male from the inside---but it's easy for me to say that, because I don't know what it feels like to be female; any claim to androgyny that I might make could easily just be due to my ignorance of the real differences.

Thus, while I long for a transhumanist future in which people can self-modify to be whatever they want, and I celebrate and honor people's rights to self-identify however they want, I tend to be respectfully skeptical of claims that a proper degendering can be accomplished with presently existing technology.

There is far greater psychological variation within each sex than there is between the sexes, is there not? Even if the space of all possible minds from XY-grown human brains and the space of all possible minds from XX-grown human brains do not perfectly overlap, I know of no evidence that suggests that the disparity is actually significant enough to be meaningful.

Is it even possible to reliably tell the difference between an XX brain and an XY brain just by looking at the structure of neurons? Has anything ever actually been found that was exclusive to one or the other?

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