Quote from: DianaP on January 12, 2013, 07:15:08 PM
That may be true, but who would make those kids? Trans people often become sterile, and gays can't reproduce because of, well... biology.
You're assuming, in a world where transfolk were more predominant, that there would still be the same desire for chemical and surgical alterations that exists under present conditions. I can't say that it wouldn't still be that way, but I have to wonder whether the pressures to transform would be the same? We now live in a culture where expensive and risky procedures feel like they are necessities to people like us, yet there are cases in the historical record of societies where gender is not coercively assigned at birth, where the adaptations probably would not have been nearly as attractive, had they been available, since the cultures already supported their trans sisters and brothers by acknowledging them as their perceived gender from the time they declared it themselves.
There might be a lot more pressure for devising surgical procedures to make transwomen able to bear children, or perhaps transmen might feel less dysphoric about volunteering for pregnancy if they did not feel as embattled about identity. Maybe not. This is all hypothetical.
I think the discussion about costs and effectiveness might change a lot under these circumstances. And assuming there were still separate nations, those that developed cultures that encouraged the creation of stable families, education and nurture of children, would probably have a long term competitive advantage over others with different priorities and values. Coercive heterosexuality in Euro-Christian culture is probably not irrellevant to the development and success of modern industrialized societies, and a lot of that innovation came from minority religious groups that were marginalized, but also very heavily dedicated to "being fruitful and multiplying." In case anyone has forgotten, we just had a presidential candidate from one of those marginal subcultures, one that definitely pushes reproduction a lot harder than the mainstream culture does.
