Carleas, there’s a difference between what treatment I offer you and what treatment I owe you.
I’m morally obligated to treat you with a certain degree of civility… and you have the same moral obligations toward me.
I’m not obligated to agree with you… nor are you obligated to agree with me… we’re merely obligated to be civil in our disagreement.
Gender is a description of you… even the people that deeply care about your subjectivity have to describe you as you are OR ELSE be lying about you.
So you might well feel like you’re a non-gendered, 1437 years old, alien from another planet or any number of other things.
But I am not obligated to address you as such, agree with that description of you, nor even respect your opinions in that regard.
Asking me to do any of that against my own judgement IS an imposition… demanding it IS tyrannical.
Yet, it might make for a good store policy to choose the path of least resistance when dealing with someone like that to get their money and get them out the store asap.
“Hello ancient zer, martian, how may I help you t’day?”
The social situations you bring up are better informed by other factors that you keep using to confuse the topic.
Teenagers bunking together according to gender might be best informed by their parents fear of their sexuality.
So what if you feel more like one of the boys? If you have the body of a girl and the parents don’t want the their boys exposed to a female body… then you’re shit out of luck.
You and I might well reach an agreement on how best to tackle such social circumstances, completely separate from whether or not a person qualifies as male or female.
Many of our social conventions regarding gender maybe are founded on previous or even current misapprehensions of what all we can determine from person’s gender alone.
We used to have or perhaps still do have a common perception of women, that indicates they make bad drivers. We might well socially act out this perception resulting in a “social treatment”
And assuming we can agree there’s something wrong with that, the solution isn’t to “pretend women are men when driving” but to drop that misapprehension that gender is deterministic with regard to driving.
Where gender isn’t largely or entirely deterministic, we might well agree that participation should be elected rather than enforced or restricted by gender.
We could find a great deal more agreement between us, i imagine, if you stopped confusing our classification of gender with the social conventions we have around gender.
I do agree… but again I would caution against confusing the issue.
I suspect our moral concern grows and scales with any creatures capacity for cognition as it becomes relatable to us, killing a dog is far more worrying than killing an ant.
killing an ant capable of human cognition is about equivalent to killing a human… irrespective of whether or not it used to be human.
Same is true of AI, aliens etc.
What’s more interesting is that I would probably say it’s a “human” mind inside that ant… If I had to boil that impulse down to the root of it, I think I would do that to indicate the history of that mind.
If it were merely an ant with a human-like mind, I don’t think I would do that…
I suppose in comparing to gender-dysphoria that would translate equally… It’s much harder to say “it’s a male brain/mind” when it neither naturally nor historically has belonged in a male body.
But now finally, we get to the heart of the issue
No… there’s a very clear dimension on which we disagree.
It’s not a spectrum where we’re quibbling over where to draw the line… it’s that you think there’s a dimension to gender that I reject.
My entire post was about how in the body-swap scenario you would become fully female… irrespective of your subjectivity.
THAT is the core of our disagreement… the relevance of subjectivity.
I don’t think subjectivity is at all relevant to gender, though your gender might well be relevant to your subjectivity.
I hold that gender is an entirely biological phenomenon and that confusing it with subjectivity is a costly mistake, precisely due to the social ramifications.
If we could alter people so as to give them a fully biologically male or female body, I would argue that would make them fully male or female, by definition (as that’s all gender addresses).
A more interesting question to ask is: would that be a cure for gender-dysphoria, or might it turn out that “gender dysphoria” is merely the manifestation of some neurological issue, not addressed by body modifications?
Besides, if or when we can alter ourselves to that degree we’ve arguably, at that point, transcended the dimorphism of our species which could eradicate the social and linguistic need for binary gender distinctions, and probably many more things we take for granted like the implications of age and possibly even species.
There are a lot of cyberpunk and sci-fi works of fiction that explore the possible social consequences of such a breakthrough.
What you’re talking about seems more like playing pretend we already did all that and socially act it out… which comes across as fucking delusional.
It’s like trying to organize some grand scale societal LARP where we pretend people’s wishes about who or what they are, were actually realized.
But then for the fear of anyone breaking character in this play we redefine words and concepts so as to maintain it indefinitely… i.e. it’s not about what you are, but what you feel.
Most of the time these things develop naturally and take hold organically because of need, comfort or utility…
It’s quite rare outsides cults, religions and extreme political ideologies, to impose such idiosyncratic nonsense on others, though.
Using language to establishing in-group, out-group from within such ideological frameworks, otoh is quite common… gotta make the right propitiations… or else.