Question
How to describe attraction with changeable bodies?
Imagine that a person can change the morphology of their body while keeping their memory and their own sense of themselves. Attraction to a person, to an appearance, to bodily features and to a social role can then be considered separately. Which of our usual concepts would remain useful in such a scenario?
What we know
- Attraction, behaviour and self-definition are different aspects of describing sexuality; their coincidence should not be assumed in every case.
- Philosophical analysis of social categories studies both their content and the functions they perform.
- The scenario of a freely changeable body is a thought experiment. It does not establish how real people would behave under such conditions.
What we do not know
- Which dimensions of attraction are needed to explain choice once morphology and personal identity vary independently.
- What in the existing categories serves to describe experience, and what serves communication, self-identification or social recognition.
- Which conclusions from the scenario can be tied to testable questions about experience as it is now.
Our position
The answer is still taking shape. Further arguments and sources should help ground it.
Why this matters to synchronism
This is one of the cleanest instances of our method. Two people with a mutual attraction exchange their bodies for ones of the opposite sex: in each configuration the pair formally looks different-sex, while the attraction runs continuously through the change in the object’s sex. The paradox arises not in reality but in language — the category was holding several independent parameters together. One side observation worth testing properly: in an informal poll of roughly fifteen hundred people, mostly men, about 77% said they would choose a female body in a changeable-body scenario. That is not representative data and not a study, but as an intuition probe it shows how quickly attitudes to one’s own sex shift along with the conditions. Answers to an imagined scenario give no grounds for generalising about the orientation or identity of a population.
Sources
- Sally Haslanger. Gender and Race: (What) Are They? (2000) — an analysis of social categories, not an empirical study of attraction