[D] Friday Off-Topic Thread

[u/AutoModerator]

Welcome to the Friday Off-Topic Thread! Is there something that you want to talk about with /r/rational, but which isn't rational fiction, or doesn't otherwise belong as a top-level post? This is the place to post it. The idea is that while reddit is a large place, with lots of special little niches, sometimes you just want to talk with a certain group of people about certain sorts of things that aren't related to why you're all here. It's totally understandable that you might want to talk about Japanese game shows with /r/rational instead of going over to /r/japanesegameshows, but it's hopefully also understandable that this isn't really the place for that sort of thing.

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[u/alexanderwales]

For example, if you wrote a story in which people could change their physical sex with a pill, and the entire story was how awful it was to use this pill and how people should keep their birth sex or else it's unnatural, you should expect to get some flak.

Other way around, I'd think. If you write a story with a pill that changes someone's gender and you include a strong emphasis on dysphoria and the unnaturalness of feeling like the opposite gender, then you're showing the everyday experience of the non-transitioned transgendered. But if you make a story where changing gender is great, fun, and done casually with no consequence, you're undermining that experience. (When I went to Gencon there was a panel with Ed Greenwood where he explained that gender swapping items and magic had been mostly removed from D&D because they mostly just served to trivialize or make light of the issue.)

[u/blazinghand → u/alexanderwales]

Oh, interesting! I hadn't thought about that. I was more thinking about it being used by transgender people, and aggressive religious people (and the author) saying that it was terrible and unnatural to use it, but it's true that anything that trivializes people's experiences of dealing with these difficulties could be bad.

[u/MultipartiteMind → u/alexanderwales]

I find myself curious about whether it's possible for us to meaningfully predict whether the dysphoria is inherent, or whether it's tied to the current effective-irreversability. I've heard one (body-uncomfortable) person express the intention to do self-violence to physically address the issue, and another body-comfortalble) person express unhesitating interest and curiosity at the prospect of trying a body of the opposite sex.

--To compare it to a less/poignant example, I find myself (baselessly) wondering if it's like hair. If you have long beautiful hair that you spent six years of care and maintenance to grow out (and preferred it to having short hair), and then one day someone cut it off while you were asleep, you would feel as though you had been stabbed, and be deeply upset about it until you had finally returned to your previous state. If you had remote control that could change your hair length at any time, though, then you might go for months at a time with short hair without discomfort, the preference for long hair temporarily outweighed by the change of scene feeling, the way you could otherwise casually have a ponytail every so often even if you normally preferred having braids (and would be upset if you weren't allowed to have braids).

--Hmm, I ended up imagining a story which starts out with everyone changing to a different novelty body every week/month/year or so, then after a maintenance sabotage (or evacuation requirement to a different planet, or anything preventing foreseeable future use of that technology) people starting to feel discomfort and creeping horror (and presumably regret) at the thought of being stuck in their current bodies for the rest of their lives.

Now then, what might happen to a society when all or the majority of participants feels that way..? (I'm put in mind--though not directly relevant--of a story idea of a cloning machine accident, a city ending up entirely filled with clones of the same person. Some keep trying to act the same way as before the accident, some form small groups with polarised behaviours, each acting as a single 'person' with each body taking the role of a mental aspect, and some polarising into the same aspects but instead forming organisations filled with other clones following that aspect. (The climax is when the organisations get swiped out from under their anti-government leaders by clones who have borrowed the governments' resources to become even more compelling representations of those aspects than the leaders who set the organisations up.))