No one can change genders/sex. It's a biological impossibility. DNA determines if you're male or female, and that can't be altered any more than you can alter the color of your eyes or how tall you are.
But people can alter the color of their eyes and how tall they are -- either temporarily, with contacts and heel lifts, or permanently, with surgery. Likewise, people have changed their "visible" sex temporarily (with makeup and cross-dressing) for thousands of years, and permanently (with surgery and hormones) for decades.
One can reasonably argue that those aren't real sex changes, because they don't change the chromosomes. That implies defining sex in terms of chromosomes, not in terms of external genitalia or clothing or occupation or social roles or checkboxes on birth certificates. Which is fine with me -- but if you define it that way, and acknowledge that the other things may not match cleanly, then you lose the justification for most rules that treat males and females differently. (And of course it doesn't tell you what to do with people whose chromosomes are neither XY nor XX, or chimeras whose chromosomes are different from one part of the body to another -- but those are fairly rare conditions.)
People who claim to be or wish to be the opposite of what biology and reality says they are are deeply mentally ill. They need help to get their thinking in alignment with reality.
People who claim tomatoes are not a fruit, in contradiction to what biology and reality say, are deeply mentally ill, and need help to get their thinking in alignment with reality.
In both cases, why does it matter? If I have XY chromosomes and call myself "female", or if I call tomatoes a vegetable, what harm does it do to me or anyone else, other than perhaps losing a few points on a biology test?
The reason it matters which gender pigeonhole I say I'm in is that society associates lots of other things with that choice: if I tell you my gender, you can guess at my clothing, my aggressive and nurturing qualities, my occupation, etc., thus saving you the trouble of checking which of those attributes I really have. In the Feminist Paradise, those associations wouldn't exist, so there would be no need to put myself in one category or the other. My doctor and I would care about my chromosomal sex, for purposes of predicting what medical problems I'm likely to have, but nobody else would.
no subject
But people can alter the color of their eyes and how tall they are -- either temporarily, with contacts and heel lifts, or permanently, with surgery. Likewise, people have changed their "visible" sex temporarily (with makeup and cross-dressing) for thousands of years, and permanently (with surgery and hormones) for decades.
One can reasonably argue that those aren't real sex changes, because they don't change the chromosomes. That implies defining sex in terms of chromosomes, not in terms of external genitalia or clothing or occupation or social roles or checkboxes on birth certificates. Which is fine with me -- but if you define it that way, and acknowledge that the other things may not match cleanly, then you lose the justification for most rules that treat males and females differently. (And of course it doesn't tell you what to do with people whose chromosomes are neither XY nor XX, or chimeras whose chromosomes are different from one part of the body to another -- but those are fairly rare conditions.)
People who claim tomatoes are not a fruit, in contradiction to what biology and reality say, are deeply mentally ill, and need help to get their thinking in alignment with reality.
In both cases, why does it matter? If I have XY chromosomes and call myself "female", or if I call tomatoes a vegetable, what harm does it do to me or anyone else, other than perhaps losing a few points on a biology test?
The reason it matters which gender pigeonhole I say I'm in is that society associates lots of other things with that choice: if I tell you my gender, you can guess at my clothing, my aggressive and nurturing qualities, my occupation, etc., thus saving you the trouble of checking which of those attributes I really have. In the Feminist Paradise, those associations wouldn't exist, so there would be no need to put myself in one category or the other. My doctor and I would care about my chromosomal sex, for purposes of predicting what medical problems I'm likely to have, but nobody else would.