12.06.2012

I support helping Intersexed people (for Dale Carrico)

Transhumanist "critic" Dale Carrico over at his blog Amor Mundi is still trying to get away with pretending he is a critic of Transhumanism and not a fellow traveller. He responded to my question with accusations that I don't support healthcare for intersexed people, and then said he would delete any follow-up comments I leave, so I will leave my comment here in case he deletes it there. (And when he says he's "been around the track" with me, no, Dale has always just gone around the corner, spewing ten thousand words of baseless accusations and diversions, and then when it seems far enough away, he scurries back to his comfy starting line refusing to print my follow up comments. Pretty low, but if you are a deceitful fraud, you have to do stuff like that I guess.)
Intersexed people should certianly be allowed to use medicine to enable them to be fertile and have children, but only as the sex which their doctors believe is their most likely chance of success, without genetic engineering of their gametes to be the other sex. The sex which someone most likely would be able to conceive children using their own gametes is usually abundantly clear, even when there is ambiguous genitalia, and when it isn't, the lab can figure it out very quickly. As for application of the law to intersexed people, we'd go by their public, legal sex for public legal recognition and marriage purposes, and the assumption would be that it matches the most likely to conceive sex so they would have the public approval to conceive offspring together (but not a guarantee, just like every other marriage). So some privately same-sex couples would wind up married. But a lab would notice after some preliminary lab work that they were both more likely to be fertile as the same sex, and thus it would be illegal to help them conceive offspring with each other. Their marriage would remain intact, because publicly they would still be a man and a woman, and the information about their true sexes would never leave the doctor's office. But the law is intended to stop unethical experiments in same-sex reproduction and genetic engineering, so of course it has to apply to the private actual sex, not the public sex. It's health care to help an intersexed person reproduce as the sex most likely able to help them, not the sex they most desire to reproduce as, or as the other sex of the person they want to reproduce with. That is transhumanism.

2 comments:

Dale Carrico said...

I welcome your readers, if you have any, to follow the link you provide to discover for themselves your many mischaracterizations of my positions and my treatment of you in this post. For instance, I pointed out that the existence of intersex people complicates your facile understanding human sex/gender, I didn't accuse you of refusing intersex people healthcare (although I must say I don't think what you are calling "helping" would seem "helpful" at all to many intersex folks). It is rather flabbergasting that you complain of serial mistreatment by me, given how many times I -- a gay man -- have engaged with what seems to me your profoundly misguided and frankly bigoted anti-gay positions, endlessly reiterating your never-changing obsession with the "threat" to heterosexual reproduction posed by non-existing techniques. If you dislike my responses to you, all you have to do is stop reading me or stop commenting on my blog. You will not be missed. Best of luck to you.

John Howard said...

t sure seemed to me like he was accusing me of denying people healthcare, underneath all the insults. He seems to think that people should be allowed to try to reproduce as whatever sex they want to reproduce as, provided its wanted, consensual, safe etc. Dale is against superlative transhumanism bullshitters, but he is one himself. Dale doesn't consider the ability to reproduce with someone of the same sex a "sooper" ability, or an enhancement or transhumanism, it's just standard old medicine to allow people to change sex and reproduce either way.