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> People change gender on a whim. This is one of the more fascinating things about Varley's world. Unlike today's primitive surgical and hormone treatments, t

> People change gender on a whim. This is one of the more fascinating things about Varley's world. Unlike today's primitive surgical and hormone treatments, they had a much more elegant solution. You would have a new body of the opposite sex grown in a tank, and when it was ready, a medico would remove your brain from your old body and place it into your new body. So instead of being in a medical approximation of your new gender, you really were that gender, with your old brain and all your memories intact. It was so commonplace that people may change back and forth many times. You might ask a friend in casual conversation, "When did you have your first Change?" A "medico" was something like what we would call a "doctor" today, but they were not considered nearly as highly skilled and highly paid. Basically a mechanic for your brain and body.

zwnow 10mo ago
[flagged]
- Stratoscope 10mo ago
  > did this future also eliminate being straight? Of course not. No one was forced or expected to have a Change. It was just an option available to anyone with the curiosity to wonder what it would be like to be the opposite sex - and experience that fully - and then switch back again if they preferred where they started. But you raise an interesting point. In the stories I read, all of the characters were "straight" in the way we think of that word today. This may be my poor memory, but I don't recall stories involving men who enjoy sex with men, or women who enjoy sex with women. When a man had his brain transplanted into a woman's body made just for him, then she was attracted to men. When a woman had her brain transplanted into a man's body made just for her, then he was attracted to women. The characters were straight, from the point of view of their current body. It's just that they could change that body whenever they wanted.
  - zwnow 10mo ago
    I put my explanation in my earlier comment. Thats interesting, so their sexuality came from the bodies their brain was put into? So the brain essentially transforms too after that surgery. Like I know male and female brains have structural differences (which obviously doesnt have implications on anything else but the brains structure), but the experience people gather throughout their lifetime are heavily influenced by their gender.
    - Stratoscope 10mo ago
      > their sexuality came from the bodies their brain was put into? So the brain essentially transforms too after that surgery. Yes! And of course it's a mix of their previous memories and experiences, and their new bodies with all the hormones flooding into their brains. They don't stop being who they were, but they also become someone new. Some of the stories deal with this very question. One in particular I'm trying to remember involves two guys who are best friends and buddies. One of them has a Change, and then they go camping in an inflatable bubble on the Moon... And things get awkward and interesting! (If anyone remembers this specific story, please do tell.) Since you are someone who has thought about these issues, I have a feeling you will enjoy these stories.
      - zwnow 10mo ago
        I most likely will. I'm bad at expressing myself so I can see why I get down voted as this is a sensitive topic for many. Just know I have trans aquintances and I have zero issues with people transitioning to live their life however they prefer.
        Stratoscope 10mo ago
        > I'm bad at expressing myself so I can see why I get down voted Don't beat yourself up over it! If it helps any, one thing I noticed is that you got some quick downvotes on your first short comment. But then you edited it to add some insightful thoughts, the kind that should be welcome here and indeed led to an interesting conversation. If I could suggest one thing, it would be to wait until you have that insightful thought and then post it. (Yes, I realize that the guidelines say "Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading." That's a good general principle, but I hope we can make an exception when someone is genuinely looking to improve their way of interaction, as you are. We can all learn from that, myself included.)
- yieldcrv 10mo ago
  gender identity and sexual orientation are different concepts, that have been married by European Christian dogma. harmonization in missionary work included harmonizing into a binary gender paradigm alongside a binary sex. many cultures across the Americas and Oceania had and have non-binary systems, before the swell of representation seen in the last decade or so. although gender and sex is used interchangeably - even in the most progressive circles - gender is a reference to a set of cultural behaviors and roles, a form of expression, while sex is functional and 99.9999% chromosomal and binary in humans you are familiar with this, for example, when someone says "be a man" in response to someone's lack of assertiveness, this has nothing to do with whether they have a penis and the binary male contributions to reproduction, it is referring to a behavior expression that is indeed arbitrary but shared swapping genders therefore has nothing to do with what sex you are attracted to, when adopting that paradigm, especially when adding genders outside of the binary cultural behaviors hence being "straight" doesn't change and is only a problem for someone else
  - zwnow 10mo ago
    You cant ignore sexuality in a fictional story about people changing their biological bodies.
    - yieldcrv 10mo ago
      Not in that fictional story
  - bebb 10mo ago
    > many cultures across the Americas and Oceania had and have non-binary systems, As I understand it, this is because these cultures had deeply sexist ideas about how women and men should behave, so they created additional categories to shovel everyone who didn't conform into. In practice this tended to mean that gay men would be placed in some sort of "non-man" male category. So while sexuality and gender are different things, in practice they end up linked through this mechanism of othering.
    - yieldcrv 10mo ago
- baxtr 10mo ago
  Wait so you’re aggravated about a fictional story?
- dragonwriter 10mo ago
  > Men are born without a understanding of how the female body works, same with women who are born with no understanding of how the male body works. Men are also born without an undertanding of how the male body works and the same is true, mutatis mutandis, with women. > Just placing ur brain in a new body wont magically unlearn all the things you know about the other body. I mean, absent knowledge of what it takes to make a brain work with a new body, putting it in one is also magic and what other magical (from our perspective) effects do or do not come along with that is... highly speculative. It might be that accessing some of those as anything different than the memories of counterfactual dreams isn’t possible without connections, or biochemical conditions, that don’t exist without intentional intervention in a body configured differently. > So regardless of the body your brain was put into, you now have both genders because you experienced both sides. No, gender (either ascribed gender or gender identity) is not inherently tied to “what combination of anatomical and hormonal sex traits have I experienced”. It might be that having this kind of experience affects gender identity, but (even assuming initial gender identity was in one or the other position on the traditional binary, whether or not the side stereotypically associated with gross anatomy of the original body) it doesn't automatically make it encompass both sides of the gender binary. And what it does or doesn't do for ascribed gender is dependent on the viewss of the society in which it occurs, not an outside observer in our society. > Personally, I am not attracted to men in the slightest regardless of their body now having female features. So while I am not against people swapping genders how they please, it would be a dystopia for me personally in my subjective view, because I wouldn't magically become bisexual. It would be a dystopia becuase people would be free to engage in one more choice than they are in our current society that, because of your quirky views about the relation of gender to biological history of the individual, would render them sexually uninteresting to you? That seems more than a little narcissistic.
  - zwnow 10mo ago
    [flagged]
    - mirabilis 10mo ago
      So in the context of this story, if a woman Changes into a man’s body for a day and then goes back, your interest is killed due to her exposure to penis-having? And if a man Changes into a woman with a impregnatable uterus, still no dice? It seems more reasonable to me for you to claim that “even the ghost of a penis is icky to me and kills my interest” than “this person will never be female.”
- jrflowers 10mo ago
  > I wouldn't magically become bisexual. Of course not. This is a sci fi story so you wouldn’t magically become bisexual you would scientifically become bisexual. The flavor and style of bisexual that you become, however, would be pretty different from and less troublesome than what irks you in the 21st century by the simple fact of a completely different set of societal mores having been in place long before your birth (ie your bisexuality would not be thrust upon you, your bisexuality would be what you were born and grew up with)
thrw868755 10mo ago
> So instead of being in a medical approximation of your new gender, you really were that gender, with your old brain and all your memories intact. A contradiction in terms.
Freak_NL 10mo ago
This is one of the things I like most about his writing. In the scifi-whodunnit The Barbie Murders the concept of changing your body without too much trouble is used by a cult of people who all look exactly the same — lack of genitalia (i.e., 'Barbie'-like) included. Varley wrote very much like Heinlein, but with the edgier parts of libertarianism shaved off. Anyone looking for recommendations for reading Varley would do well to pick up some short story collections like The Persistence of Vision, The Barbie Murders, or Blue Champagne. For a solid trilogy I can recommend the Gaea Trilogy (Titan, Wizard, and Demon), but that includes a lot of (fun!) cultural references which may be a tad harder on readers under 40. His Eight Worlds books are great fun to read too. Pick up The Ophiuchi Hotline and see what you think to get a feel for those. These can be read independently of each other. For young adults and anyone looking to read some scifi not quite as heavy and more reminiscent of Heinlein's juveniles, the Thunder and Lightning four book series is quite entertaining. One prescient social development he predicted there is that for an event you weren't present at to be believable (like something shown in a news broadcast or viral video) you would want a friend or a friend-of-a-friend to confirm it. If nobody was actually there, it was probably fake.
- anon_cow1111 10mo ago
  >For a solid trilogy I can recommend the Gaea Trilogy (Titan, Wizard, and Demon), I only read Wizard, how much am I missing out on the other two?
  - Freak_NL 10mo ago
    Strictly speaking, the beginning and the end of the whole saga. :) I found the whole trilogy enjoyable, and quite unique. If you enjoyed Wizard, pick up the other two and (re)read the whole trilogy.
    - anon_cow1111 10mo ago
      I found it pretty good as a standalone book, but what stuck me the most was this random interaction: I picked it up at a library discount sale, where they give you shopping bags and you can fill them up for a flat 10USD each. I was browsing and some old guy just walked by me and commented "oh YOU FOUND WIZARD! That's a good one" me- "I haven't read it before" him- "Oh if you like scifi you're in for a treat." ...But yes if the other two books are along the same lines, I might try going through the whole trilogy again, just... in order this time.
PurpleRamen 10mo ago
> So instead of being in a medical approximation of your new gender, you really were that gender, with your old brain and all your memories intact. This implicates the brain and experience being genderless, which does not really seem to pass by today's understanding of it. But then again, the brain would probably also experience a very traumatic phase of body-adaption. There are many syndromes with people having strange feelings about the body they were born in, or missing parts of it; how awful would be to switch the whole body overnight and not having a long phase of adapting to it. Not sure if I would really call this elegant. But then again, body switching is quite common in SciFi, and those aspects are usually completely ignored.
- Freak_NL 10mo ago
  Not explaining something is not the same as ignoring it. You can't really explain technology which doesn't exist without risking getting it completely wrong as actual science moves along, or just harming the narrative by focusing on irrelevant details. If a society has advanced medical technology where changing your body is not just possible but broadly available, then it follows that they have solved any issues with rejection and adaptation. Nanobots constantly tweaking hormones? Your mind and memories simply layered over a virgin clone brain with everything set for whichever sex that body has? If the writer set out to explore that theme they might delve into it, otherwise all that matters is that it works and sounds plausible from within the context of the story. Scifi is about 'what if?' and how that affects people. 'What if money could buy a body of the opposite gender?' is all that is relevant. Similarly, we don't need to know how the huge space station capable of destroying a whole planet in a single shot works (unless you are a rebel princess), just that it does.
  - PurpleRamen 10mo ago
    > Not explaining something is not the same as ignoring it. No, that's pretty much the definition of it. > If a society has advanced medical technology where changing your body is not just possible but broadly available, then it follows that they have solved any issues with rejection and adaptation. No, that is just explaining away poor writing. Explaining necessary details makes the difference between good or bad storytelling. > Scifi is about 'what if?' and how that affects people. Starting with ignoring the first obvious consequences is not exploring how something affects people, it's just wishful thinking. > Similarly, we don't need to know how the huge space station capable of destroying a whole planet in a single shot works (unless you are a rebel princess), just that it does. If Star Wars would be SciFi, then we should get some good enough explanation for this. People are disputing about those details to great lengths for good reasons.
GeekyBear 10mo ago
The notion that the same individual could both father children as a male and bear children as a female was indeed trippy in the 70's. Also the concept of being able to back up your mind and restore it into a clone of yourself (as an adult or a child), or even into the body of an animal as a sort of tourist experience. Mind-computer interfaces that connected you to the AI that ran the planet, or could be used as a phone... There were quite a few interesting ideas in his works that would change societies.
n4r9 10mo ago
I wonder if that was some inspiration for Iain M Banks' Culture series, in which citizens are able to change their sex at will over the course of about a year. Banks wrote specifically about what this signified for civilisation: > A society in which it is so easy to change sex will rapidly find out if it is treating one gender better than the other; within the population, over time, there will gradually be greater and greater numbers of the sex it is more rewarding to be, and so pressure for change - within society rather than the individuals - will presumably therefore build up until some form of sexual equality and hence numerical parity is established. http://www.vavatch.co.uk/books/banks/cultnote.htm http://www.vavatch.co.uk/books/banks/cultnote.htm
- GeekyBear 10mo ago
  I imagine so. The Culture books started being published in the 80's and Varley was writing short stories about how sex changes that were fast, cheap and easy would effect societal gender roles in the 70's.

zwnow 10mo ago

[flagged]

Stratoscope 10mo ago
> did this future also eliminate being straight? Of course not. No one was forced or expected to have a Change. It was just an option available to anyone with the curiosity to wonder what it would be like to be the opposite sex - and experience that fully - and then switch back again if they preferred where they started. But you raise an interesting point. In the stories I read, all of the characters were "straight" in the way we think of that word today. This may be my poor memory, but I don't recall stories involving men who enjoy sex with men, or women who enjoy sex with women. When a man had his brain transplanted into a woman's body made just for him, then she was attracted to men. When a woman had her brain transplanted into a man's body made just for her, then he was attracted to women. The characters were straight, from the point of view of their current body. It's just that they could change that body whenever they wanted.
- zwnow 10mo ago
  I put my explanation in my earlier comment. Thats interesting, so their sexuality came from the bodies their brain was put into? So the brain essentially transforms too after that surgery. Like I know male and female brains have structural differences (which obviously doesnt have implications on anything else but the brains structure), but the experience people gather throughout their lifetime are heavily influenced by their gender.
  - Stratoscope 10mo ago
    > their sexuality came from the bodies their brain was put into? So the brain essentially transforms too after that surgery. Yes! And of course it's a mix of their previous memories and experiences, and their new bodies with all the hormones flooding into their brains. They don't stop being who they were, but they also become someone new. Some of the stories deal with this very question. One in particular I'm trying to remember involves two guys who are best friends and buddies. One of them has a Change, and then they go camping in an inflatable bubble on the Moon... And things get awkward and interesting! (If anyone remembers this specific story, please do tell.) Since you are someone who has thought about these issues, I have a feeling you will enjoy these stories.
    - zwnow 10mo ago
      I most likely will. I'm bad at expressing myself so I can see why I get down voted as this is a sensitive topic for many. Just know I have trans aquintances and I have zero issues with people transitioning to live their life however they prefer.
      - Stratoscope 10mo ago
        > I'm bad at expressing myself so I can see why I get down voted Don't beat yourself up over it! If it helps any, one thing I noticed is that you got some quick downvotes on your first short comment. But then you edited it to add some insightful thoughts, the kind that should be welcome here and indeed led to an interesting conversation. If I could suggest one thing, it would be to wait until you have that insightful thought and then post it. (Yes, I realize that the guidelines say "Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading." That's a good general principle, but I hope we can make an exception when someone is genuinely looking to improve their way of interaction, as you are. We can all learn from that, myself included.)
yieldcrv 10mo ago
gender identity and sexual orientation are different concepts, that have been married by European Christian dogma. harmonization in missionary work included harmonizing into a binary gender paradigm alongside a binary sex. many cultures across the Americas and Oceania had and have non-binary systems, before the swell of representation seen in the last decade or so. although gender and sex is used interchangeably - even in the most progressive circles - gender is a reference to a set of cultural behaviors and roles, a form of expression, while sex is functional and 99.9999% chromosomal and binary in humans you are familiar with this, for example, when someone says "be a man" in response to someone's lack of assertiveness, this has nothing to do with whether they have a penis and the binary male contributions to reproduction, it is referring to a behavior expression that is indeed arbitrary but shared swapping genders therefore has nothing to do with what sex you are attracted to, when adopting that paradigm, especially when adding genders outside of the binary cultural behaviors hence being "straight" doesn't change and is only a problem for someone else
- zwnow 10mo ago
  You cant ignore sexuality in a fictional story about people changing their biological bodies.
  - yieldcrv 10mo ago
    Not in that fictional story
- bebb 10mo ago
  > many cultures across the Americas and Oceania had and have non-binary systems, As I understand it, this is because these cultures had deeply sexist ideas about how women and men should behave, so they created additional categories to shovel everyone who didn't conform into. In practice this tended to mean that gay men would be placed in some sort of "non-man" male category. So while sexuality and gender are different things, in practice they end up linked through this mechanism of othering.
  - yieldcrv 10mo ago
baxtr 10mo ago
Wait so you’re aggravated about a fictional story?
dragonwriter 10mo ago
> Men are born without a understanding of how the female body works, same with women who are born with no understanding of how the male body works. Men are also born without an undertanding of how the male body works and the same is true, mutatis mutandis, with women. > Just placing ur brain in a new body wont magically unlearn all the things you know about the other body. I mean, absent knowledge of what it takes to make a brain work with a new body, putting it in one is also magic and what other magical (from our perspective) effects do or do not come along with that is... highly speculative. It might be that accessing some of those as anything different than the memories of counterfactual dreams isn’t possible without connections, or biochemical conditions, that don’t exist without intentional intervention in a body configured differently. > So regardless of the body your brain was put into, you now have both genders because you experienced both sides. No, gender (either ascribed gender or gender identity) is not inherently tied to “what combination of anatomical and hormonal sex traits have I experienced”. It might be that having this kind of experience affects gender identity, but (even assuming initial gender identity was in one or the other position on the traditional binary, whether or not the side stereotypically associated with gross anatomy of the original body) it doesn't automatically make it encompass both sides of the gender binary. And what it does or doesn't do for ascribed gender is dependent on the viewss of the society in which it occurs, not an outside observer in our society. > Personally, I am not attracted to men in the slightest regardless of their body now having female features. So while I am not against people swapping genders how they please, it would be a dystopia for me personally in my subjective view, because I wouldn't magically become bisexual. It would be a dystopia becuase people would be free to engage in one more choice than they are in our current society that, because of your quirky views about the relation of gender to biological history of the individual, would render them sexually uninteresting to you? That seems more than a little narcissistic.
- zwnow 10mo ago
  [flagged]
  - mirabilis 10mo ago
    So in the context of this story, if a woman Changes into a man’s body for a day and then goes back, your interest is killed due to her exposure to penis-having? And if a man Changes into a woman with a impregnatable uterus, still no dice? It seems more reasonable to me for you to claim that “even the ghost of a penis is icky to me and kills my interest” than “this person will never be female.”
jrflowers 10mo ago
> I wouldn't magically become bisexual. Of course not. This is a sci fi story so you wouldn’t magically become bisexual you would scientifically become bisexual. The flavor and style of bisexual that you become, however, would be pretty different from and less troublesome than what irks you in the 21st century by the simple fact of a completely different set of societal mores having been in place long before your birth (ie your bisexuality would not be thrust upon you, your bisexuality would be what you were born and grew up with)

thrw868755 10mo ago

> So instead of being in a medical approximation of your new gender, you really were that gender, with your old brain and all your memories intact. A contradiction in terms.

Freak_NL 10mo ago

This is one of the things I like most about his writing. In the scifi-whodunnit The Barbie Murders the concept of changing your body without too much trouble is used by a cult of people who all look exactly the same — lack of genitalia (i.e., 'Barbie'-like) included. Varley wrote very much like Heinlein, but with the edgier parts of libertarianism shaved off. Anyone looking for recommendations for reading Varley would do well to pick up some short story collections like The Persistence of Vision, The Barbie Murders, or Blue Champagne. For a solid trilogy I can recommend the Gaea Trilogy (Titan, Wizard, and Demon), but that includes a lot of (fun!) cultural references which may be a tad harder on readers under 40. His Eight Worlds books are great fun to read too. Pick up The Ophiuchi Hotline and see what you think to get a feel for those. These can be read independently of each other. For young adults and anyone looking to read some scifi not quite as heavy and more reminiscent of Heinlein's juveniles, the Thunder and Lightning four book series is quite entertaining. One prescient social development he predicted there is that for an event you weren't present at to be believable (like something shown in a news broadcast or viral video) you would want a friend or a friend-of-a-friend to confirm it. If nobody was actually there, it was probably fake.

anon_cow1111 10mo ago
>For a solid trilogy I can recommend the Gaea Trilogy (Titan, Wizard, and Demon), I only read Wizard, how much am I missing out on the other two?
- Freak_NL 10mo ago
  Strictly speaking, the beginning and the end of the whole saga. :) I found the whole trilogy enjoyable, and quite unique. If you enjoyed Wizard, pick up the other two and (re)read the whole trilogy.
  - anon_cow1111 10mo ago
    I found it pretty good as a standalone book, but what stuck me the most was this random interaction: I picked it up at a library discount sale, where they give you shopping bags and you can fill them up for a flat 10USD each. I was browsing and some old guy just walked by me and commented "oh YOU FOUND WIZARD! That's a good one" me- "I haven't read it before" him- "Oh if you like scifi you're in for a treat." ...But yes if the other two books are along the same lines, I might try going through the whole trilogy again, just... in order this time.

PurpleRamen 10mo ago

> So instead of being in a medical approximation of your new gender, you really were that gender, with your old brain and all your memories intact. This implicates the brain and experience being genderless, which does not really seem to pass by today's understanding of it. But then again, the brain would probably also experience a very traumatic phase of body-adaption. There are many syndromes with people having strange feelings about the body they were born in, or missing parts of it; how awful would be to switch the whole body overnight and not having a long phase of adapting to it. Not sure if I would really call this elegant. But then again, body switching is quite common in SciFi, and those aspects are usually completely ignored.

Freak_NL 10mo ago
Not explaining something is not the same as ignoring it. You can't really explain technology which doesn't exist without risking getting it completely wrong as actual science moves along, or just harming the narrative by focusing on irrelevant details. If a society has advanced medical technology where changing your body is not just possible but broadly available, then it follows that they have solved any issues with rejection and adaptation. Nanobots constantly tweaking hormones? Your mind and memories simply layered over a virgin clone brain with everything set for whichever sex that body has? If the writer set out to explore that theme they might delve into it, otherwise all that matters is that it works and sounds plausible from within the context of the story. Scifi is about 'what if?' and how that affects people. 'What if money could buy a body of the opposite gender?' is all that is relevant. Similarly, we don't need to know how the huge space station capable of destroying a whole planet in a single shot works (unless you are a rebel princess), just that it does.
- PurpleRamen 10mo ago
  > Not explaining something is not the same as ignoring it. No, that's pretty much the definition of it. > If a society has advanced medical technology where changing your body is not just possible but broadly available, then it follows that they have solved any issues with rejection and adaptation. No, that is just explaining away poor writing. Explaining necessary details makes the difference between good or bad storytelling. > Scifi is about 'what if?' and how that affects people. Starting with ignoring the first obvious consequences is not exploring how something affects people, it's just wishful thinking. > Similarly, we don't need to know how the huge space station capable of destroying a whole planet in a single shot works (unless you are a rebel princess), just that it does. If Star Wars would be SciFi, then we should get some good enough explanation for this. People are disputing about those details to great lengths for good reasons.

GeekyBear 10mo ago

The notion that the same individual could both father children as a male and bear children as a female was indeed trippy in the 70's. Also the concept of being able to back up your mind and restore it into a clone of yourself (as an adult or a child), or even into the body of an animal as a sort of tourist experience. Mind-computer interfaces that connected you to the AI that ran the planet, or could be used as a phone... There were quite a few interesting ideas in his works that would change societies.

n4r9 10mo ago

I wonder if that was some inspiration for Iain M Banks' Culture series, in which citizens are able to change their sex at will over the course of about a year. Banks wrote specifically about what this signified for civilisation: > A society in which it is so easy to change sex will rapidly find out if it is treating one gender better than the other; within the population, over time, there will gradually be greater and greater numbers of the sex it is more rewarding to be, and so pressure for change - within society rather than the individuals - will presumably therefore build up until some form of sexual equality and hence numerical parity is established. http://www.vavatch.co.uk/books/banks/cultnote.htm http://www.vavatch.co.uk/books/banks/cultnote.htm

GeekyBear 10mo ago
I imagine so. The Culture books started being published in the 80's and Varley was writing short stories about how sex changes that were fast, cheap and easy would effect societal gender roles in the 70's.