November 15, 2007

  • Changes

    I'm reading Neil Gaiman's first collection of short stories, Smoke and Mirrors.  I'd read his second collection (Fragile Things) first, and had no idea why I hadn't gotten his first one yet.  It's been out for years.

    This morning on the shuttle to work, I read a story called "Changes."  It is, itself, sort of a compilation of smaller shorts or vignettes, loosely based around a man who develops the cure to cancer.  However, the drug, called Reboot, has the unintended side-effect of flipping your gender.  Males become females, females become males.  The story is more science fiction, rather than his usual fantasy/horror genre.  He explores, briefly, the ramifications of this drug -- the religions that are against it, the underground drug culture that resulted, Chinese families changing their daughters to sons, Islamic women in repressive societies flipping to male to avoid being second class citizens, the end of gender reassignment surgery, even a linguistic taint on the word "change" which comes to be associated with the drug and considered vulgar in everyday speech.  Woven through these explorations is the story of the life of the drug's developer, with the sense that he's a bit horrified at what the side effects have done to the entire world.

    It's a damn good story, and of course, the question lingers on the mind: if you had a terminal illness that could be cured but the side effect is that you'd change genders, would you take the cure?

    For the record, in the story, the drug becomes recreationally used by kinky folk as well as the persecuted or discriminatory.  You can take it again at a later time and, Tireseus-like, revert back to your original gender.  Some people flip back and forth on a regular basis.

    But for the purposes of this question, let's say the change is permanent.  So, would you?

Comments (10)

  • You know I own that book and read a few stories, then forgot about it. I'll have to pull it out again and take a look at that story.

    And would I...
    Maybe. Depends on the details. If I could live my life over again, I would probably like to be a woman. Not that I'm terribly unhappy as a man, and I'm heterosexual, so it's not a sexual orientation thing. It's just that so much of my personality tends toward what gets defined as feminine, that I suspect I might be happier. Perhaps not, but I'd be curious to find out.

    On the other hand, if it were a choice I had to make at my current age, I'd stay male. Men may die younger, but we seem to have an easier time with growing older as it relates to our sex. Our sex appeal isn't as hinged to our bodies, and our confidence, experience and earnings are all at their best in our middle years. Becoming a thirty seven year old woman who has to learn everything about taking care of her new body, and then how to relate to society all over again just doesn't sound like a good time.

    But temporary swaps, woo hoo! Male on Mondays, female on Saturday, etc. etc....

  • yep...at my age with all that I think I know I would love to

    be a male, even for a short time.  You think so totally

    different!  Men surely are from Mars, and women from

    Venus.

  • I think I'm from Neptune, but that might just be me.

  • I'm from Earth. Halfway between Mars and Venus. Granted, most people assure me it's obviously a parallel version that at best intersects at right angles with the one most people know and inhabit, but what can you do.

  • Wait, I might be from the Kuiper Belt . . . let me check, I'll be right back . . .

  • Well, it would all depend on the transition after taking the drug. If it is not painful and happens like Samantha wrinkling her nose on "Bewitched" -- that would be a no-brainer. But if it is accompanied by the pain of growing and shrinking organs, internal reconfiguration, your body rerouting neurons to accommodate the scientifically verified sex differences, and resulted in stretch marks where once things went out that now go flat -- forget it. I would only take it to prevent dying painfully from cancer.

    The human body, I would imagine, could only take so much of such a process before it would just wear out and start mixing up the signals or just give out.

    I used to love sci-fi ... I just over-analyze, I guess.

  • For the record, according to the story, you apparently enter a coma-like state while it happens.  So, in theory, you're not really feeling anything in the 8-12 hours it changes your body.  Recreational users (i.e. those who did it just for the gender switching) took it before they went to sleep, and the process happens while you're unconscious.

  • Ahhh - that makes a lot of sense. Well, just because you're in a coma doesn't mean you aren't feeling it... I remember music played during surgery while I was supposedly unconscious.

  • wow. I get to give "minis" - they require 2 credits and I have over 2,500 credits... ummm... watch out! here I come with the minis!

  • You gave me a duck.  Huh.

    Should ducks smile like that?

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