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Eric McIntyre's avatar

"Imagine that there was a device which could, through some magical means, literally change our sex"

That paragraph immediately floods the the argument with an unmistakable bright light. I thought it would be a great paragraph to start an essay. Very strong

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Images of Broken Light's avatar

A few thoughts on all this:

Slippery slopes: They are real, but they exist as potential issues, not absolutes. Does drinking alcohol lead inevitably to alcoholism? Clearly not, since many people drink but never become alcoholics; but some people do become alcoholics, though they never would have had they never started drinking, so for them, the slippery slope was quite real. When it comes to the claimed slippery slopes of social issues, I think part of the problem is that people start out with over-simplified logic, which is then taken advantage of by others with different agendas. For the gay rights movement, it made sense to say, "We aren't suffering from a disease. Homosexuality is not a mental disorder. It's our natural orientation and we shouldn't be persecuted for it." Which is all well and good, but then pedophiles tried the same logic: "We didn't ask to be this way, we just are, it's natural for us, so we shouldn't be persecuted for being who we are." The logic, as presented, is basically the same, but we want to accept it in one case and not in the other, which leads us into complications. One common response is to say, "But sex between an adult and a child is harmful to the child, so it's different from homosexuality." Then the pedophiles deny (not very convincingly) that sexual relationships between adults and children are inherently harmful, and point out that homosexuality was once considered inherently harmful too, so therefore (watch this leap of logic) objecting to pedophilia is just as irrational and bigoted as objecting to homosexuality. Meanwhile, the cultural conservatives pop up to claim that homosexuals "groom" young people, and therefore homosexuality is harmful after all. Both groups thus have an incentive to claim that homosexuality and pedophilia are similar enough that society should treat them the same; but the pedophiles want their behavior to be accepted as normal, while the conservatives want to revert to a pre-Stonewall culture in which homosexuals are considered just as bad as pedophiles. And everyone involved is basically improvising their logic rather than constructing a consistent argument from the ground up.

Underlying all of this is the unstated claim that morality should be rational and consistent, that if we can't demonstrate that something is harmful, then we shouldn't forbid it because that would be arbitrary and unsupported by logic. Arguments for drug legalization follow this same pattern by arguing that it doesn't make sense to prohibit marijuana, cocaine, and other drugs while allowing alcohol and tobacco. (Margaret Mead made waves with a speech on this subject long ago.) The problem with this is that no culture in history has ever been rational in this sense, and worse, there is no simple, objective definition of "harm" that would compel universal agreement and that would be easy to apply in an indisputably correct way to all possible cases. Nor is it necessarily true that the only justification for a society to forbid something is because it can be proven to be harmful.

Societies actually are irrational about all sorts of things; that's part of what makes one culture different from another. I've become convinced that religion, for example, is largely a matter of cultural markers; the reality of one god vs. another (or none at all), or the superiority of one set of teachings over another, is not really the point; what matters is that believing certain things identifies you as belonging to a particular community and identifies someone else (who believes differently) as not belonging to that community. It is actually an advantage, in this regard, that it is impossible to objectively prove that one religion is "true" in the sense of its god actually existing and its scriptures correctly reporting how that god wants us to live. If a religion could be proven true or false, it would lose its value as a sign of cultural belonging. The impossibility of proving anything in this area is actually what makes it useful.

So, getting back on topic, let's list a few groups that have attempted to employ logic along the lines of, "We should be accepted because the hostility to us is based in irrational prejudice":

- Blacks

- Jews

- Homosexuals

- Pedophiles

- Zoophilists

Most of us reading this, I imagine, are sympathetic to those affected by racial or religious prejudice, and probably to homosexuals as well; but most of us probably get off the bus at that point, and are far less inclined to agree that society should tolerate pedophilia or bestiality. One could try to come up with a solid logical argument for why those last two items are fundamentally different from the others, but like any logical argument, it would be vulnerable to challenges to its premises. Perhaps it's better to reject the nonsensical goal of a perfectly rational society and accept that we make our decisions based on what we collectively want. Because that's going to be the reality in any case.

With regard to trans issues, I think you're right, at least in practice, if not entirely in theory, that the main problem is that what we call a "sex change" or "gender transition" surgery is really just cosmetic. If we had the magic technology to REALLY change someone's sex, then it wouldn't be controversial. (I've actually been saying this for a while, too.) The prior art I like to cite is a series of science fiction stories written in the late '70s by John Varley, which postulated a future society in which the magic technology for perfect sex changes actually existed. It was completely normal for anyone to change sex whenever they felt like it, and in fact population stability was achieved through a "One Person, One Child" law, such that if two people wanted to have two children together, they had to take turns having pregnancies. Of course, Varley never explained how this technology worked, because he couldn't. But considering how many technologies we have today that would have seemed like wild flights of fantasy a century or two ago, I would not be so sure that we won't someday have much better sex change technology than we do now. That's my one, admittedly rather theoretical, objection to your comments about "reality" being the issue here. Today, and for the foreseeable future, yes; but who knows what might be achievable in the future?

Once again I have improvised a response that would be better expressed as a more detailed essay. But there is hope at hand, for I am starting my own Substack at eggman.substack.com. At the moment there's only a brief introductory post stating my goals, but I hope to post more soon.

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