[extropy-chat] Spain has become the third country in Europe tolegalise gay marriage

[nvitamore at austin.rr.com]

Who is arguing that this will happen in the late transhuman - posthuman
times?  That is not the point.  The point is that gender and sex is a
political/social/technological issue today and in our near transhuman
future.  It is quite easy to suggest that in the years to come we will shed
all the restraints that are emotionally turbulent today and look back
mockingly at the silliness of those humans so preoccupied with their sex,
gender, holidays, rituals, worries, uncertainties, etc. et al., but isn't
it interesting to look at the pivitol transition points, the ups and downs
of the S-curve, in the behavior over time?

While we obviously have been forecasting the posthuman future for decades
with the conclusion that it these issues will be non issues; the transition
period is important to recognize and give some attention to. Transhumanism
is inclusive of the transition period.  That is what it is about.  :-)

Best,

Natasha


Original Message:
-----------------
From: Joseph Bloch jbloch at humanenhancement.com
Date: Fri, 22 Apr 2005 09:15:13 -0400
To: dirk at neopax.com, extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org
Subject: Re: [extropy-chat] Spain has become the third country in	Europe
tolegalise gay marriage


Dirk Bruere wrote:

> I would think the whole thing would become a non issue.
> On one hand we will have groups of 'people' who band together for 
> various quite logical reasons.
> On the other, why bother with gender and 'needing people' from an 
> emotional POV at all?
> All this talk about swapping gender etc seems to be a contemporary 
> pre-occupation that will become utterly irelevent by the time it is 
> practical.
>
> I see PostHumanity moving in two major directions.
> They are total individualism and hive minds.
> And sex/gender has no major place in either IMO.


I fully agree with Dirk here. While gender reassignability is something 
of significance as an intermediate step, in the longer term it is 
irrelevant. Gender roles for reproduction will disappear with the advent 
of alternative methods of reproduction (either physically through 
biological cloning, asexual budding, etc. or on an entirely mental plane 
through creation of uploaded (and possibly deliberately reprogrammed to 
assure diversity) copies of people which are then set loose as 
completely discrete individuals themselves.

On a psychological level, gender assignment becomes even less 
significant. When truly effective methods of psychological 
re-programming become available (both on a pharmaceutical and 
methodological level) gender roles will cease to exist. Biological males 
could adapt the nurturing aspects of the "feminine" mindset, biological 
females could deliberately become more aggressive, etc. We've already 
seen this psychological effect taking place "in the wild" as it were, as 
a consequence of the reduction of socially-induced gender roles. As we 
increasingly have the ability to perform such changes deliberately and 
on an individual level, yet another vestage of our hominid past will 
fall into obscurity.

Joseph

Enhance your body "beyond well" and your mind "beyond normal": 
http://www.humanenhancement.com
New Jersey Transhumanist Association: http://www.goldenfuture.net/njta
PostHumanity Rising: http://transhumanist.blogspot.com/ (updated 
yesterday!)
_______________________________________________
extropy-chat mailing list
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org
http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo/extropy-chat

--------------------------------------------------------------------
mail2web - Check your email from the web at
http://mail2web.com/ .