Protecting the accessibility of gender affirming surgery is BY FAR the most important aspect of this but tbh I think body modification as a whole should be a legally protected right. Aw, you don't like looking at tattoos, piercings, or unnaturally colored hair? You think it looks "unprofessional?" Well suck it up Karen it's not your body or life

anarcho-sophontism

anarcho-sophontism is a far left political ideology that aims to eradicate hierarchies between humans and nonhuman beings in cognition, ability, and status. it maintains that consent is the right of all conscious beings and that all conscious beings should be granted sophonce and the ability to safely reason and consent to anything done to their bodies. it advocates for cognitive and morphological freedom for all species who are conscious. it attempts to amend the cruel aspects of natural ecosystems that ultimately leaves wild animals suffering without their consent from predation, diseases, starvation and violations on their bodies. it is a movement that rejects speciesism and carnism as "natural ways of the ecosystem" and aims to create an ecosystem of cooperation amongst all cognitive beings. anarcho-sophontism rejects the separation between society and wilderness and ultimately sees them as intertwined. by utilizing technologies to enhance cognition and bridge the communication gap between species, we can incorporate them into larger anarchist ecosociety and share the benefits of technology with them. the movement does not advocate for cruelty when modifying beings, but careful and ethical experimentation and testing with respect for the entity's wellbeing. it recognizes that consent should not be manufactured or bent to exploit children and that beings should reach maturity before consenting to relationships. it advocates for an ecology of care rather than an ecology of fear.

"I am not trapped in my body, I am trapped in other people's perceptions of my body" is not true for everyone.

if it was possible, i would like to change my form in all kinds of ways – that optimistic, utopian vision of full morphological freedom. but i can't even do something that's medically possible now. i can't remove a part of my body that i feel completely alienated from. and it should be enough that i don't want it! yes, i do feel an inescapable mental torment and i think there's probably something wrong with how my brain recognizes that limb...but that doesn't matter! it's part of me and i don't want it to be. that should be enough.

The concept of morphological freedom entrances me so. I want that to become our reality. Please please PLEASE let humanity grow up enough for us to have the freedom to change our embodiment as we see fit. The body is a vessel and the captain ought be free to modify or even replace it. I want to be a biological ship of Theseus. Maybe not even biological. Let me gradually replace every component of my meatsuit until it's replaced by modular machine.

Hi Sophie! I would like to mention that people who do not want a disability or illness are also apart of the TransID community! TransID overlaps heavily with Transhumanism and morphological freedom that argues that people should have the choice to have whatever bodies they want and science should be working towards that.

This is really interesting! I suppose it makes sense that there would be a lot of overlap between the two groups.

I hadn't researched a lot about transhumanism, but this quickly led me down a rabbit hole where I found Neil Harbisson, the guy who hears color, and it's just absolutely amazing!

This is probably going to be old news to anyone already in that community, but I wanted to share it here!

Also, who would attack this guy!?

(Although I do think you could accomplish the same thing with a smartphone camera, an earbud and an app... but you do you and rock that antenna! 😁)

Tell us more about your moth wings! What colors / pattern would they be? What size and shape?

Um um um. They would be blue, obviously, multiple blues in some kind of radialish-symmetric-in-from-the-wings pattern? Possibly? Idk. I can't visualize things sorry that makes this hard.

Want wings big enough to fly and also hug people with? and, um. Moth-wing-shaped?

...Possibly I don't want wings all the time they'd be inconvenient in as many as several situations. Unless I could, like. fold them up?

You should admit that you're a liberal because socialist liberalism is correct and good

I mean, I am a liberal in the sense that I think human rights and rule of law and democracy and free speech and freedom of religion and all that are good. Which is an idea I think a lot of leftists at least pay nominal lip service to! I'm not a liberal in that I don't think extending those ideas to the commercial sphere implies that laissez-faire capitalism is the best mode of production, or the most morally correct. I definitely am not a liberal in that I do not think capitalist parliamentary democracy is the only way to achieve these things, or that the best we can aspire to is to bolt on a thin layer of social democracy. Liberalism-as-she-is-practiced has a lot of ad-hoc exceptions and failures that make it incredibly frustrating you actually care about the values claimed to be central to liberalism, and the struggle to repair those issues seems to me to lead in an inexorably leftist direction.

Favoring workplace democracy and worker's ownership of the means of production (especially through structures like cooperates and nationalizing key industries like healthcare that are either public goods or an awkward fit for markets) certainly firmly puts me outside classical liberalism. I think market socialism is probably the most viable form of socialism given the whole calculation debate? There are also important critiques of the state specifically and of hierarchy generally that means a lot of anarchist writing really resonates with me. It's hard to be a dogmatic anarchist because we have so few examples of anarchist experiments in history (and most flourished only briefly under chaotic wartime conditions). But if I could choose what kind of society to live in and wave a magic wand so that it sprang into existence fully formed, an anarchist one would be very attractive!

Why can't I have beautiful plumage?

sci-fi story where science is unlocking full morphological freedom with religious bioconservatives arguing you should not abandon the human form that is a gift from God. but, and this is crucial, the kinds of body modifications that everyone agrees are fine and uncontroversial include transing your gender into any combination of primary and secondary sexual characteristics and even the most regressive antitranshumanist would think not allowing people to transition is an absurd strawman of their position obviously nobody is saying that.

what's up with the entrenched gender binary in "among the beautiful creatures"? that sure was an unexpected turn after all the morphological freedom that came before it.

(With reference to this post here.)

The implicit premise of Among the Beautiful Creatures is that the setting was once some sort of amorphous flesh hell, to which human children – the oft-mentioned Innocents – are periodically transported. Those children somehow imparted individuated sapience to the mindless flesh, which then patterned itself after their preconceptions.

That's why the whole setting is basically a Muppet Show version of Moorcockian sword and sorcery fantasy: it's beholden to how a young child who's watched The Dark Crystal too many times thinks it ought to operate. The weird emphasis on gender as the immutable root of identity is part of that. You don't need to include it in your game if you're going to run it, of course, but it pays to put some thought into why it's there, and what other ways you could achieve the same vibe.

https://twitter.com/rechelon/status/1257874986435477504

Transhumanism isn’t “we’ll be robots like in a movie” it’s “we’re already cyborgs: the dichotomy between nature and artifice is bullshit, there is no stable human nature to fetishize, freedom means expanding how much choice we have in our bodies and physical conditions.”

“But isn’t the notion that we should have more options pretty normal?”

Sure, in the same way “the environment is good and we shouldn’t destroy it” is pretty normal. There are nevertheless implications and particulars to be considered of both perspectives, as well as opponents.

The point here is about what our core or ultimate values should be. Do you value having and expanding agency in our bodies and physical conditions? Or by “freedom” do you mean something more abstract like the psychological release of not having to think about shit?

If you value freedom in the sense of expanding our physical options and our understanding to better evaluate those options then it really doesn’t matter whether achieving that is hard or whether there are some social and technical challenges to be overcome.

Transhumanism is a value set, not a fixed blueprint of a distant world. Its values of morphological freedom are actionable and relevant here and now, in hormone therapy, in birth control, etc, etc. And one of the oldest anarcho-transhumanist slogans is “not one future but many.”

https://twitter.com/fullfringal/status/1257901835999940608

One of my friends told me that “your gender is all the body mods that you would get if you lived in a transhumanist utopia”

I don’t care if it would still be physically impossible for me to fly, I want bigass angel wings and glowing purple eyes

morphological freedom and cognitive freedom also applies to animals and nonhumans by the way. all beings should have autonomy over their forms and should be giving the ability to consent to anything done to their bodies. I currently do not think that animals are capable of consent due to their biology currently, but uplifting them is justified given that we can improve their wellbeing and quality of life.

Autistic Anime Girls Group 2 Match 5

SUBMISSION PROPAGANDA:

Cibo -

"she's basically a techpriestess on steroids, nihei-style who swaps bodies like 6 times and at one point exists twice at the same time; (she basically has full morphological freedom and my brain just kind of decided she *had* to be trans early on). her first functional body (<that we see her in there were like at east 2 before it) is also like 250cm tall and she's just... very autistic coded. tech-nerd autistic to the point she really has trouble talking about anything else, and also completely okay with her travel companion (killy) basically being completely non-verbal for 95% of the time. she's vibing as long as she has tech to mess with and learn from and in the City, that's basically everywhere."

Kuriko -

"she is the girl version of world's most autistic guy, kusuo saiki. enough said."

i feel like the kernel of truth of fat tumblr posting is like, if you genuinely don't snack or drink and have three square meals and are fat you probably aren't gonna lose that weight, take a slice of sad genetic pie

but for everyone else there are things that can be done, c'mon

Nah, I think that's still cope. It's known that fat people underestimate their intake and skinny people overestimate their intake, and everyone assumes that what they consume is "normal" but we can be quantitative about this. If you track your intake and output and measure your weight over a month or so, you can calculate your basal metabolic rate and make gradual lifestyle changes from there, you will be able to lose about a pound a week. Nobody who does this and sticks with it finds it impossible, this is thermodynamics.

But fatlogic refuses to do this, fatlogic hates the idea of even counting calories, even if it doesn't involve restricting them, because if they had to face up to the enormous amount of food they put into their body they might have to admit that it was actually their decision to weigh that much, which they definitely don't want to do! And it's sort of a weird argument if you think about it? The desire to believe that losing weight is impossible is necessary tangled up in an "ought implies can" way with the idea that if losing weight was possible, it would be desirable to do that. These people who claim it's impossible to lose weight, most of whom are fat themselves, have a core belief that it can't be possible, because if it were, that might imply something unpleasant about themselves, as choosing to continue to be fat rather than being cursed with it. It's an attempt to deny themselves agency in the face of self-disgust, and once you dissect it a few times it's fairly transparently so in nearly every case.

But don't get me wrong, this is a morphological freedom blog, I don't hate fat people or want to make them illegal, and I think people have a right to make whatever changes to their bodyweight they would like, regardless of whether they're healthy or not. I don't happen to find obesity sexually appealing, but there are some people who only find obesity sexually appealing, and neither group should be lionized or condemned, regardless of the impact on a person's health; it's much the same in my view with the 90's "heroin chic" bodytype, though that one is deadlier. But informed consent requires not spreading misinformation about what's possible or what those potential health effects are, this shit can kill you fast once you get older. So "socialist" medical doctors without any actual degree claiming to be experts stroke my ire more than a little bit.

Real talk, Im trans and also have a complex about aging and to me there is no functional difference between gender dysphoria and age dysphoria. To me any natural order that would violate people's right to exist in a body they're comfortable in is evil. Going through the wrong puberty against your will is evil; by the same logic aging against your will is also evil. Ergo nature is evil and the only path to justice is complete morphological freedom via transhumanism.

So finally answering this because if I took one more day it would literally have been sitting in my inbox for a full month. Have long since lost track of what it was in response to, sorry.

Anyway I had vague ambitions of writing an actual substantive response here but that didn't happen so yeah cosigned and endorsed.