[extropy-chat] Changing sex is difficult (was: identity and copies)

[MB]

Eliezer, I believe you are correct. I asked a transexual friend for
an opinion on your post. Here is the response:

> I can tell you from my own experience that your
> sexuality is hardwired in your brain. All that
> time I spent being something I KNEW I was not,
> I sectioned off the real me and played a part.
> I did the things I thought were appropriate (and
> I did a lot of reading to find out just exactly
> what they were). I never felt comfortable and
> resented the hell out of having to sublimate my
> feelings to act "normal" (or supposedly normal
> at the time).  No matter how much you try to
> experience the workings of your opposite gender,
> no matter how much you read about the way the
> opposite gender acts and thinks, you can't
> actually be that because of how our brains are
> hardwired. And I firmly believe that wiring occurs
> while /in utero /as a reflection of genetics and
> hormonal influences.

Regards,
MB



On Sun, 19 Sep 2004, Eliezer Yudkowsky wrote:

>
> Want to spend a few days wearing a female body?  Even at this very shallow
> level, we're dealing with some fairly massive remappings of the somatic
> map, the motor map, the reflexes, the motor skills, the somatic connections
> to the pleasure centers... and when all of that was done you'd have a
> vagina-shaped penis.  You wouldn't *be* a woman.  You'd still be attracted
> to girls, and no, that would not make you a lesbian; you'd be a normal,
> masculine man wearing a female body.  Xox yourself, and the version of you
> wearing a female body will flee from the original body and pursue Cindy
> Crawford.  The xox certainly wouldn't have sex with *you*.  Bleah!
>
> Want to actually *be* a female?
>
> Swapping out your Y chromosome for your father's X chromosome doesn't make
> you a woman.  Your neurons are already wired in a male pattern; you
> developed from birth in the masculine pattern.  Maybe if you swapped the
> genes, your neurons would slowly start to rewire themselves under the
> influence of the new genetic instructions.  Maybe you'd end up epileptic.
> At best you'd end up as a half-assed cross between male brain and female
> brain.  Your brain wouldn't look anything like it would look if you'd
> developed as a female from the beginning.
>
> Leave aside, for the moment, the question of childhood memories and
> experiences you don't have; the fact that you'll have never been a little
> girl and won't know how to apply makeup.  If you want to be female, we need
> to give you a female brain; female emotions, female psychology.  We need to
> do this while preserving your memories and skills that were patterned onto
> male brainware, male emotions and male psychology.  Imagine the task of
> taking an eighth-dan blackbelt in judo, and transforming his body to
> female, while preserving his martial arts skills in such a way that he is
> still a competitive eighth-dan blackbelt.  It's not just spinal reflexes;
> he has conscious, learned memories for how to fight as a man that don't
> apply to fighting as a woman.  As with motor skills, so with cognitive
> skills.  You know how to operate a male mind; do you know how to operate a
> female mind?
>
> We're talking about a *massive* transformation here, billions of neurons
> and trillions of synapses rearranged.  Large enough to disrupt personal
> continuity?  If I fell asleep and woke up as a true woman, not just in body
> alone, I don't think I'd call her "me" - the change is too sharp.  Will
> your brain transform gradually?  Hm, now we have the task of designing the
> intermediate stages and making sure the intermediate stages make
> self-consistent sense.
>
> What happens when, as a woman, you think back to your memory of looking at
> Cindy Crawford photos as a man?  How do you empathize with your own past
> self of the opposite gender?  Do you flee in horror from the person you
> were?  Are all your life's memories distant and alien things?  Or do we
> retain your old male brainware through the transformation and set up a dual
> male-female structure such that you are currently female but retain the
> ability to recall and empathise with your past memories as if they were
> running on the same male brainware that originally laid them down?  Sounds
> complicated, doesn't it?  It seems that to transform a male brain into a
> person who can be a real female, we can't just rewrite you as a female
> brain; we have to rewrite you as a more complex brain with an architecture
> that can cross-operate in realtime between male and female modes, so that a
> female can process male memories with a remembered context that includes
> the male brainware that laid them down.
>
> To make you female, yet still you, we must step outside the human space of
> mind designs in order to preserve continuity with your male self.
>
> And then when you go back to being a man, you need to keep the female
> brainware and dual architecture so that you don't throw up when you think
> back on all those wonderful sweaty men you had sex with during your
> feminine vacation.
>
> (Assuming you did have sex as a woman, rather than fending off all comers
> because they didn't look like they were interested in a long-term
> relationship.)
>
> So spending a week as a member of the opposite sex may be a common sexual
> fantasy, but I wouldn't count on being able to do this six seconds after
> the Singularity.  I would not be surprised to find that it took three
> subjective centuries before anyone had grown far enough to attempt a gender
> switch.
>
>