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zwnow a day ago

[flagged]

Stratoscope a day ago | parent | next [-]

> did this future also eliminate being straight?

Of course not. No one was forced or expected to have a Change.

It was just an option available to anyone with the curiosity to wonder what it would be like to be the opposite sex - and experience that fully - and then switch back again if they preferred where they started.

But you raise an interesting point. In the stories I read, all of the characters were "straight" in the way we think of that word today. This may be my poor memory, but I don't recall stories involving men who enjoy sex with men, or women who enjoy sex with women.

When a man had his brain transplanted into a woman's body made just for him, then she was attracted to men.

When a woman had her brain transplanted into a man's body made just for her, then he was attracted to women.

The characters were straight, from the point of view of their current body. It's just that they could change that body whenever they wanted.

zwnow a day ago | parent [-]

I put my explanation in my earlier comment. Thats interesting, so their sexuality came from the bodies their brain was put into? So the brain essentially transforms too after that surgery. Like I know male and female brains have structural differences (which obviously doesnt have implications on anything else but the brains structure), but the experience people gather throughout their lifetime are heavily influenced by their gender.

Stratoscope a day ago | parent [-]

> their sexuality came from the bodies their brain was put into? So the brain essentially transforms too after that surgery.

Yes! And of course it's a mix of their previous memories and experiences, and their new bodies with all the hormones flooding into their brains. They don't stop being who they were, but they also become someone new.

Some of the stories deal with this very question. One in particular I'm trying to remember involves two guys who are best friends and buddies. One of them has a Change, and then they go camping in an inflatable bubble on the Moon... And things get awkward and interesting!

(If anyone remembers this specific story, please do tell.)

Since you are someone who has thought about these issues, I have a feeling you will enjoy these stories.

zwnow a day ago | parent [-]

I most likely will. I'm bad at expressing myself so I can see why I get down voted as this is a sensitive topic for many. Just know I have trans aquintances and I have zero issues with people transitioning to live their life however they prefer.

Stratoscope a day ago | parent [-]

> I'm bad at expressing myself so I can see why I get down voted

Don't beat yourself up over it!

If it helps any, one thing I noticed is that you got some quick downvotes on your first short comment. But then you edited it to add some insightful thoughts, the kind that should be welcome here and indeed led to an interesting conversation.

If I could suggest one thing, it would be to wait until you have that insightful thought and then post it.

(Yes, I realize that the guidelines say "Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading." That's a good general principle, but I hope we can make an exception when someone is genuinely looking to improve their way of interaction, as you are. We can all learn from that, myself included.)

dragonwriter a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> Men are born without a understanding of how the female body works, same with women who are born with no understanding of how the male body works.

Men are also born without an undertanding of how the male body works and the same is true, mutatis mutandis, with women.

> Just placing ur brain in a new body wont magically unlearn all the things you know about the other body.

I mean, absent knowledge of what it takes to make a brain work with a new body, putting it in one is also magic and what other magical (from our perspective) effects do or do not come along with that is... highly speculative. It might be that accessing some of those as anything different than the memories of counterfactual dreams isn’t possible without connections, or biochemical conditions, that don’t exist without intentional intervention in a body configured differently.

> So regardless of the body your brain was put into, you now have both genders because you experienced both sides.

No, gender (either ascribed gender or gender identity) is not inherently tied to “what combination of anatomical and hormonal sex traits have I experienced”. It might be that having this kind of experience affects gender identity, but (even assuming initial gender identity was in one or the other position on the traditional binary, whether or not the side stereotypically associated with gross anatomy of the original body) it doesn't automatically make it encompass both sides of the gender binary. And what it does or doesn't do for ascribed gender is dependent on the viewss of the society in which it occurs, not an outside observer in our society.

> Personally, I am not attracted to men in the slightest regardless of their body now having female features. So while I am not against people swapping genders how they please, it would be a dystopia for me personally in my subjective view, because I wouldn't magically become bisexual.

It would be a dystopia becuase people would be free to engage in one more choice than they are in our current society that, because of your quirky views about the relation of gender to biological history of the individual, would render them sexually uninteresting to you?

That seems more than a little narcissistic.

zwnow a day ago | parent [-]

[flagged]

mirabilis a day ago | parent | next [-]

So in the context of this story, if a woman Changes into a man’s body for a day and then goes back, your interest is killed due to her exposure to penis-having? And if a man Changes into a woman with a impregnatable uterus, still no dice? It seems more reasonable to me for you to claim that “even the ghost of a penis is icky to me and kills my interest” than “this person will never be female.”

zwnow a day ago | parent [-]

No I meant it as in "will never be female".

mirabilis a day ago | parent [-]

Still, in the context of the story: body transplant? Womb transplant? some kind of far-off mass-CRISPR chromosomal rewriting? Alien raygun that turns you into Farrah Fawcett? If any of the biological rules could someday be edited at will, then this insistence upon definitional, immutable, and perhaps spiritual femaleness comes across as more of a matter of your own preference.

dragonwriter a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> Sorry but a living being that either had or has a penis will never be female and therefore is automatically uninteresting to me as a straight man.

I don't know why you think your sexual preference is of anyone else's concern except for people who would, before considering it, look at you as a potential sexual partner.

> Gender identity is a buzz word without meaning.

It (like both sex and ascribed gender) is a name for a very real phenomenon, whether or not that phenomenon is important in your world in which, apparently, the only thing that matters about other people is whether they fall in or out of your preferred set of sexual targets.

Like, I get that your identity as "straight" and your particular definition of what that entails is important to you, but I don't see why you get so intensely upset about a fictional concept of a society where people (whose self-image must not be as caught up in genital anatomy as yours for the existence of this choice to matter) have a choice that they don't in our present reality which would, if exercised, put them outside of your sexual preference (I mean, I would assume that the vast majority of those whou would choose it would, either because of their starting sex, or other reasons, already be outside of that set, anyway.)

n4r9 a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> automatically uninteresting to me as a straight man

Why are you so sure you can extrapolate your personal preferences to all men across all time? Is it inherently impossible that a society could develop to become more open-minded about such things?

zwnow 21 hours ago | parent [-]

Open minded? My sexuality isn't about being open minded, I'm simply not attracted to people who either have or had a penis. Simple as that.

a day ago | parent | prev [-]
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baxtr a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Wait so you’re aggravated about a fictional story?

jrflowers a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> I wouldn't magically become bisexual.

Of course not. This is a sci fi story so you wouldn’t magically become bisexual you would scientifically become bisexual. The flavor and style of bisexual that you become, however, would be pretty different from and less troublesome than what irks you in the 21st century by the simple fact of a completely different set of societal mores having been in place long before your birth (ie your bisexuality would not be thrust upon you, your bisexuality would be what you were born and grew up with)

yieldcrv a day ago | parent | prev [-]

gender identity and sexual orientation are different concepts, that have been married by European Christian dogma. harmonization in missionary work included harmonizing into a binary gender paradigm alongside a binary sex. many cultures across the Americas and Oceania had and have non-binary systems, before the swell of representation seen in the last decade or so.

although gender and sex is used interchangeably - even in the most progressive circles - gender is a reference to a set of cultural behaviors and roles, a form of expression, while sex is functional and 99.9999% chromosomal and binary in humans

you are familiar with this, for example, when someone says "be a man" in response to someone's lack of assertiveness, this has nothing to do with whether they have a penis and the binary male contributions to reproduction, it is referring to a behavior expression that is indeed arbitrary but shared

swapping genders therefore has nothing to do with what sex you are attracted to, when adopting that paradigm, especially when adding genders outside of the binary cultural behaviors

hence being "straight" doesn't change and is only a problem for someone else

bebb a day ago | parent | next [-]

> many cultures across the Americas and Oceania had and have non-binary systems,

As I understand it, this is because these cultures had deeply sexist ideas about how women and men should behave, so they created additional categories to shovel everyone who didn't conform into. In practice this tended to mean that gay men would be placed in some sort of "non-man" male category. So while sexuality and gender are different things, in practice they end up linked through this mechanism of othering.

yieldcrv a day ago | parent [-]

Right, so then the missionaries with deeply sexist ideas about how women and men should behave came and shoved nonconformers in a binary system.

zwnow a day ago | parent | prev [-]

You cant ignore sexuality in a fictional story about people changing their biological bodies.

yieldcrv a day ago | parent [-]

Not in that fictional story