{"id":872,"date":"2003-02-08T00:59:00","date_gmt":"2003-02-08T08:59:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/jed\/2003\/02\/08\/872.html"},"modified":"2003-02-08T00:59:00","modified_gmt":"2003-02-08T08:59:00","slug":"genderless-future","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/2003\/02\/08\/genderless-future\/","title":{"rendered":"Genderless future?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>I'm reading Iain M. Banks again.  I'll probably have some comments about the book in general at some point (but I suspect this one will be almost as hard to comment on without spoilers as <cite>Use of Weapons<\/cite> was; I'm three-quarters through it and the back-cover blurb still contains information that hasn't come up yet), but for now I just wanted to throw open a question:<\/p>\n<p>If at some point in the future we become capable of easily and cheaply changing physical sex in both directions, will we continue to have gender roles?<\/p>\n<p>Yeah, yeah, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.chaparraltree.com\/raq\/whatis.shtml\">gender is socially constructed<\/a>.  I've noted at some point (journal? email? SWAPA? too sleepy to go look it up) that that shouldn't be used to dismiss its importance; the phrase can easily become one of those conversation-ending phrases rather than a conversation-opening phrase.  (CEP vs COP?)  Its basis in social construction doesn't change the fact that it tends to be immensely important in our society\/ies.<\/p>\n<p>But if individuals stop being tied to one physical sex or another, what happens to that social construction?  Does it wither away, like a vestigial Communist state, or does it continue with new and interesting variations?<\/p>\n<p>(I'm approaching the primary-process (I know I'm stretching the meaning of that phrase) portion of the evening; my brain is trying to transmute the phrase \"wither away\" into the question \"whither away?\", but I'm not letting it.)<\/p>\n<p>Of course, part of the answer to that depends on whether gender is in fact innate; if you're born with a hardwired gender, then that probably continues to be true in an easy-sex-change society.  But I have a hard time believing that's all there is to it.<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;m reading Iain M. Banks again. I&#8217;ll probably have some comments about the book in general at some point (but&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-872","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/872","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=872"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/872\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=872"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=872"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=872"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}