Last Updated on August 31, 2021 by sensation-experience
It’s been a month since my previous post, but during that time I’ve been working on my story and that has been going well. I am going to spend more time here writing it as I curl up on the couch in the den with a pair of headphones hooked up to my TV, with earbuds underneath so I can listen to my computer at the same time. You know, ever since I started losing hearing, I wondered why I can sometimes hear better when voices are coming out of the speaker. Does it have to do with the ratio of bass to trebble? I need to research wireless audio amplification devices from major companies like Serene Innovations, ClearWire, and more. I Can Connect will only cover these if they are telecommunications-related.
So, the groundhog must have known that spring would not yet come for a while. Coincidentally, Superbowl XLVIII fell on this very same day. Of course, Phil, as the groundhog is sometimes called, made this prediction at seven in the morning. This means that we’ll have six or more weeks of winter. I’m not sure how many of you are superstitious, but it’s kind of interesting nonetheless. Anyhow, I digress, so I’ll go ahead and get down to business.
While I was writing my story and collecting resources to cight, I noticed that a lot of people, especially teenagers and tweenagers were coming out as transgender. The number of these folx have been rising, and it is believed that there are some cultural influences behind it. Is it due to prevalence in the media? This has led me to fancy that many say they are transgender, but when they begin the actual treatment, they would regret their changes or any irreversible effects that were caused by medical interventions. As an optimist in the science of transhumanism, I believe the day will come when nothing will be permanent any more. There’s been advances in speculative stories about using nano, pico, and femtotechnology that would physically change your body, so that stem cells would not be needed to regrow the organs and transplant them. In some stories, the stem cells only work with male-to-females, all the way down to the chromosomes, but if it were to be applied to female-to-males, the procedure would kill them because the Y-chromosomes would not be able to be converted from one of the X’s. But, why not get a donor chromosome, similar to a third biologically female parent donating healthy mitochondria? Still, many of these stories do not have bibliographical references to back them up. I have been looking at these things whilst writing my own. I also learned about medically-induced comas that could be used if the body changes too fast, so the patient would not be in great pain. That would be like Rip Van Winkle or giving humans the ability of hibernation. While the brain is deeply unconscious, the body changes. When they wake up, they would feel as if they were reborn, which, in some cases, is true. In other circumstances, the body changes while the patient is conscious and alert. In these situations, the patient’s mind and thinking patterns have time to synchronise with the body, but a comatosed patient would have to wait until after they changed. The question then becomes, are they really sure they want to be the person they dreamed of being?
Let’s think about the kinds of motivations that make people want to change. Crossdressers who say that they want to change from male to female say that their bodies sexualise females before their minds do, and they end up giving into these arousals. Some feel that females are dominating their society, and if they feel like they are more dominant in certain areas, they feel that they would be one of those people to break the stereotype associated with masculism. A person who has prolonged persistence that they are in the wrong body has the proper thinking patterns as a female, so the changes will usually have little or no consequence on the patient than if it were done with crossdressers. For these reasons, the Harry Benjamin Standards of Care state that a prospective postoperative transsexual should take a certain amount of time taking the real-life experience. This is where the person must live full time as their preferred gender role and learn how to deal with experiences as they start to build their self-assurance. It won’t always mean that they will magically become a new person. If you were afraid of spiders before, you’d most likely still be afraid of spiders afterword. Likewise, if you were shy before, you’d still be shy afterwards, unles you found the cause and reason for your shyness, as in my case when I started writing my memoir. A lot of parents feel that their children are making a big mistake because they fear that if they change their mind, there would be no turning back. As stated in a story I read recently Living Transgender has lots of costs, not just in finance, but in many other things, so a determined person would certainly need to be hellbent. There are a lot of problems in being the person they are inside. For instance, do women who want to be men feel like they want to change just because they want to avoid rape and abuse, or do they feel that way ever since their infantile personalities have been developed? I know several people who have successfully transitioned without plastic surgery, an example being my story. In fact, people implant technology just to treat diseased tissue, but looking at the bioethics, do we change healthy tissue just for aesthetic and cosmetic purposes? What if we had future technology that could use the healthy tissue as a host to change the structure without actually having it removed and replaced with a facsimile?
Let’s look at what someone has written about what they feel is not necessary about a real-life experience. I have been giving this some thought. In my story, I used the concept of oneirology (the study of dreams) and memory implantation as a way to help the protagonist decide if they really wanted to be female before they got there. As you all know, living in the body of a different sex has a completely different, if not similar, set of sensations related to skin sensitivity and other things, as well as brain structure to allow more emotions to flow through. What if we could interveen by using technology to help influence a person’s dream, give them a virtual reality experience that uses the person’s memories, sort of as an age regression technique to build the foundations to a memory that the person will never forget. Would it help a prospective transsexual say, ‘No, I don’t want to change. It’s too overwhelming and confusing for me’? If that were the case, everyone would undoubtedly save a lot of time and money rather than if they have said that after their sex-reassignment surgery. Here’s a perfect example of that. In Oregon, for instance, teens as early as age 15 can get hormones that can drastically change their bodies without parental consent. Most conservatives would say that this particular move is not only too liberal, but it might cause more problems long-term because it will cause irreversable changes before they really understood what they were getting into. Here’s an article about some detransition individuals who recently sued a medical provider for not having taken the necessary steps to ensure that they really and truly wanted to change.
Although I may be jumping too far ahead into the future, there is no doubt that this could benefit thousands of people, but still, there is a strong opposition and controversy over these things. The question is, why is there such dispute? It’s mainly because of religion that dominates society, and the ignorance people have about science, and things people see in science-fiction media in popular culture, which much of it is untrue. In Parrotfish, written by Ellen Witlinger, the character wonders why gender was the only thing that society did not want you to change about yourself, and who made that rule. People changed every other part about themselves for a wide variety of reasons, but gender was not one of them. Maybe because the cisgender people surrounding them might feel deserted, or that they’re encroaching on things that person never grew up with. For example, a trans-femme person may make a cisgender female more uncomfortable talking about menstruation or pregnancy problems because the transgender person never had to deal with it. Still, I like the fact that the author added a note about how gender diversity was more common in sea life, and that having a better understanding of this would allow us to deepen our understanding of how our brain classifies our own identities and personality in alignment with our assigned sex at birth.
As fascinating as it seems, a lot of it remains questionable. What would we use to control what a person dreams? Do we use mind-uploading and mind-reading technology to manipulate someone’s memories using light-sensitive proteins, or do we use hypnosis and our brains’ ability to recreate sensations based on similar sensations it has recorded?
Having said that, I hope that we can get there sooner than later, as I know there are people anxious to transition in a natural and biological method so that they can continue reproducing as before. Let’s continue to help educate the people we talk to in hopes of eliminating stigma surrounding these issues.