Take a Female Human. Note all the distinguishing features, breasts, wide hips, ect. Take a Human Male. Note all the distinguishing features, wider shoulders, narrower hips, masculine facial structure. Over the course of a week the features slowly change from one to the other. Genitalia slowly changes from one to the other, hormonal changes kick in. There might be a point half way through the change where the Morph appears androgynous. What part of that are you struggling with?

As I run it, there are two Sex Switch. One is bioware for biomorphs, running a biological program that causes accelerated cell division or apoptosis to make the right parts bulk up or thin, as well as somewhat trickier changes in connective tissue to shorten/lengthen the... ahem... hydraulics (there are some issues where you want to put the urethra during the transition). Medichines are probably heavily involved. The second one is for pods or synthmorphs, and is much more like the appearance switching Gigolo Joe does in "AI". This is just smart matter changing volume, distribution, texture and colour. As I see it, this one is very rapid, at most a minute. (In our last game session the pleasure pod tried to charm a suspect, and switched gender from kawaii mandarin-boy to voluptuous courtesan. Unfortunately he was only into infomorphs in multidimensional Kähler-manifold spaces...)

GreyBrother wrote:

Seriously, a friend of mine came up with this question and we pondered it together and couldn't quite get a grip on it. How does sex change work on a bio-mechanical level?

In today's tech the process is long and complicated (not resulting in a true transformation (the person can never have children for instance)). There is a surgery part (adding/removing the necessary parts) and then hormonal therapy which take months (if not years) before the person is functionally the other gender. Even still there are always lingering evidence that a sex change had occurred (deeper/higher voice, broader/curved frame, etc). I know this because my old boss went through the process (kinda creepy to see the transformation, but their choice). In EP I would say that Gene therapy would be induced and over the period of a month (max) the person would be fully and functionally (ie can have children) the other gender (or just resleeve into a new morph).

Arenamontanus wrote:

Well, some of them can. And as a pro-morphological freedom Swede I am happy to see the Swedish law mandating sterilization of transsexuals likely being canned.

I was talking more about the fact that a man that becomes a woman can't give birth, or a woman that becomes a man can't impregnate a woman.

nezumi.hebereke wrote:

what does 'en' mean? I assume it refers to standard, unmodified males/females. What is 'u' for? Ultimate? What is an 'extreme female'? I is for intersexual, so I guess imale is predominantly male, with female bits for fun, and ifern is primarily plant with male bits for fun.

Yes, I think en- versions are just the basic gender. U- is for ultimate or uber, taking the characteristics of a gender and going even further

Quote:

A grim young man strode by alone, heavily muscled and probably facially sculpted . . . but again, there was no way to be sure. Gina glanced at me, still angry, but unable to resist. "That-assuming he was umale - I understand even less. If someone wants a build like that . . . fine. But why the face, as well? It's not as if anyone would be likely to mistake him for anything but an en-male, without it." "No-but being mistaken for an en-male would be an insult, because he's migrated out of that gender as surely as any asex. The whole point of being umale is to distance yourself from the perceived weaknesses of contemporary natural males. To declare that their 'consensual identity'- stop laughing - is so much less masculine than your own that you effectively belong to another sex entirely. To say: no mere en-male can speak on my behalf, any more than a woman can."

Presumably the u-s look like Frank Frazetta or Boris Vallejo illustrations. Secondary sexual characteristics taken to max, perhaps some presumed gender personality traits equally maxed out (ramped up nurturing and openness for feeling for ufems, more assertiveness and openness for ideas for umales). I would expect the inter-genders to go for more androgynous roles and traits (not to mention the herms). Apropos sexual plants, we actually had a scene in another sf game where the door rang: outside there was a small buttercup flower that simply stated "Hello. I am here to rape you." Lets just say that it is a very bad idea to combine a globally nano-enhanced alien biosphere with insane AI. That system ended up classed as a "Species level threat".

When it comes to gender I prefer the original expansion of male, female, other (covering all the males that are females now, females that are males, males that are in the process of becoming females, females that are in the process of becoming males, and of course its).

nezumi.hebereke wrote:

GreyBrother wrote:

I love you all.

Erm... Not too much, I hope. At least not until your sex change is finished.

Well, the universal gender is still on Skinthetics' drawing board. But once they have fixed the bugs everybody will be able to love everybody (and everything) :-)

Quote:

I've been considering how to make additional genders, beyond the worn out 'pitcher' and 'catcher' roles. I feel pretty confident that humans would seize on anything new to spice up their sex lives. ... Beyond the 'more or less of A, more or less of B', are there any really original directions for this to go?

When it comes to actual plumbing and biology I think transhumans can do some interesting things. Erogenous zones can be remapped and could even be outside the body ("Ah baby, stroke my stock portfolio... oh, yes, those ExoTech feels sooo goood!"). Bodies can be made plastic and fluid. One could remap touch onto sensual drones - why keep to one body? Or the normal set of limbs and organs? Here I think there is plenty of inspirational material in the furry community, not to mention the tentacle sex community. Scott Westerfeldt's "Evolution's Darling" has some interesting sex scenes between an AI in an advanced synthmorph and a human. Let's just say that nanotech BDSM is slightly involved - one can use bush robots, nanofiliaments, medical nanoswarms and neural interfaces in bed, after all. Of course, it is different to have exotic sensual equipment and actually having a new sex, let alone a new gender. As the gender studies people love to point out, genders are more of social and cultural constructions than actual physiological states like sexes, but as far as I know they rarely try to demonstrate this by inventing new interesting genders. I think the talk about the new genders in the larp I linked to above to went much further than the professional gender studies usually do. Greg Egan's characters on the other hand are debating whether genders have a future or not - maybe they are just identity politics or habits. No wonder the Jovians are trying to censor newscasts from the rest of the system.

valen wrote:

Arenamontanus wrote:

When it comes to actual plumbing and biology I think transhumans can do some interesting things. Erogenous zones can be remapped and could even be outside the body ("Ah baby, stroke my stock portfolio... oh, yes, those ExoTech feels sooo goood!"). Bodies can be made plastic and fluid. One could remap touch onto sensual drones - why keep to one body? Or the normal set of limbs and organs? Here I think there is plenty of inspirational material in the furry community, not to mention the tentacle sex community. Scott Westerfeldt's "Evolution's Darling" has some interesting sex scenes between an AI in an advanced synthmorph and a human. Let's just say that nanotech BDSM is slightly involved - one can use bush robots, nanofiliaments, medical nanoswarms and neural interfaces in bed, after all.

There is a section in Peter F Hamilton's [i]The Dreaming Void[/i] where a point-of-view character, who is relatively normal, hooks up with a "multi" (many morphs all controlled by one ego). He goes into some detail on the implications of dating and bedding. Its basically the only time Hamilton's kink produced an interesting segment in one of his books.

...I keep thinking of the Doctor Manhattan sex scene from The Watchmen. -.-

Well if we are talking about the Sex Switch in Pleasure Pods, I figure, since they're pods, they already have a full set of both sexual organs installed. The switch would just trigger a metabolic change to, er, "develop" or "undevelop" the equipment -- which is why it takes a week.

Arenamontanus wrote:

Just came across this and had to post it to this thread: http://www.sputniko.com/works/sputniko/penis-cybernetique http://io9.com/5619731/cybernetic-penis-allows-everyone-to-pack-a-packag... It is an open source cubist penis. I am strongly reminded of the scene in John Varley's "Ophiuchi Hotline" where somebody at a bar tries to hit on the protagonist, she looks at his equipment and laughs about them being incompatible, and his comeback is "It's OK, I have an adapter!"

Finally! This is great news! As a man, I must say that I can't wait for this technology to bud into functional cybernetic dongs with full sensitivity and everything. Not necessarily for female use... but to finally fulfill my dream of plural genetalia, and becoming porn's first "live action tentacle rape monster".

Quote:

Why are you looking at me like that?! Don't you know good hardware requires equally good device drivers?!

Ah, a man after my own little perverted heart!

Arenamontanus wrote:

Why are you looking at me like that?! Don't you know good hardware requires equally good device drivers?!

Now that is a dialect of assembly language I am not familiar with. Wow. When the coders maintaining the drivers of that implant talk about bit banging in the revision control system, they really do mean bit banging. :)

root wrote:

Is it just my data search skills, or does the neurological literature sort of skirt past the neurological structures involved with sex? Not sexuality, or perceptions of gender, but the parts involved when study subjects are fucking? I'm guessing there is still no way to get funding for projects like this, so Kinsey is the last time anything similar to data was collected.

No, funding for sexology exists. But I think you are right about the lack of good data on the neuroscience of sex. A lot of it has to do with the general lack of good data on a lot of positive emotions and complex behaviour - it is hard to standardize sex for the lab. Until the mid-90's even the idea of investigating things like pleasure seemed frivolous and nonscientific. Things have changed, but it takes a while to get good science. Still, there are a bunch of studies such as http://rsl.stanford.edu/glover/papers//Arnow_et_al_Brain_02.pdf reviews like http://www.genderinscience.org/downloads/BM1_references/Cahill%202006.pdf and classic, deeply creepy, papers like http://nurturing.us/prescott/heath/jnmd/1972paper.pdf (I am not a fan of ethics boards, but some of Dr Heath's experiments demonstrate why they sometimes are needed)

root@How does Sex Change work? [hr]

Arenamontanus wrote:

http://nurturing.us/prescott/heath/jnmd/1972paper.pdf

Eek. I didn't used to know where to begin when describing how much 70's psychology scares the hell out of me, but now I think I do.

On the other hand, that *was* a very early experiment in psychosurgery in the EP sense. Fortunately these days psychosurgeons can do things much more reliably and cleanly. "Doctor, I would like to change sexual preferences." "Sure. What would you like this week?" "I'm going off to Ukko Jylinä. So I was thinking of suryas." "Ah... male or female suryas? Or both?"

Heh, you're messing in my domain now... yes they probably would have to be injected directly to the brain to mimic the hormones because injections like that tend to not make it past the blood/brain barrier. But even funnier is that you don't really need drugs at all! All you need is a tiny implant and the push of a button. http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2001/02/41682 and this was about 10 years back.. wonder what's happened to the project since.

Arenamontanus wrote:

root wrote:

Is it just my data search skills, or does the neurological literature sort of skirt past the neurological structures involved with sex? Not sexuality, or perceptions of gender, but the parts involved when study subjects are fucking? I'm guessing there is still no way to get funding for projects like this, so Kinsey is the last time anything similar to data was collected.

No, funding for sexology exists. But I think you are right about the lack of good data on the neuroscience of sex. A lot of it has to do with the general lack of good data on a lot of positive emotions and complex behaviour - it is hard to standardize sex for the lab. Until the mid-90's even the idea of investigating things like pleasure seemed frivolous and nonscientific. Things have changed, but it takes a while to get good science.

The biggest question is how they collect the data for research like this on a physical level? Sensors attached to the skin? I'd imagine that being a big barrier to sex and science. I know it would throw me off my game if I had to tell my wife to wait a moment while I attach these little sensor disks THEN the sex can commence. Plus i'm not even sure how many sensor disks would make it all the way through attached. -.- While I agree that sex does funny things to the brain and that researching what goes on in the brain during sex would be awesome for a lot of things, the problem I'm sure at this point is trying to collect enough data of the right kind. You have to find enough people of the right groups to, well, boink on command.

I always wondered why sexologists don't use more exhibitionists in their experiments. They would actually be aroused by all the attention and the test could have better ...errrmm... resolution without resorting to sildenafil. Either that or a psychological fetishisation of the scientific process :D.

Rhyx wrote:

I always wondered why sexologists don't use more exhibitionists in their experiments. They would actually be aroused by all the attention and the test could have better ...errrmm... resolution without resorting to sildenafil. Either that or a psychological fetishisation of the scientific process :D.

I wonder what an ethics review board would say to a project proposal that includes something to the effect of "..we will gather a population of test subjects by advertising a preference for exhibitionists..."

Rhyx wrote:

Or you can turn that around and say: We are performing psychosexual experiments regarding the sub group of exhibitionist as it pertains to (state the real purpose of the experiment here.)

But then, the argument could be made that the data gathered from the subgroup might not apply to the general population of country X, culture Y.

Rhyx wrote:

Absolutely! But the data is still gathered and we can leave that debate to another generation. FOR SCIENCE! :P

Boinking...FOR SCIENCE! This is an idea I can get behind. :p

nezumi.hebereke wrote:

GreyBrother wrote:

I love you all.

Erm... Not too much, I hope. At least not until your sex change is finished.

Makes me think that the world needs a simple word for these kinds of situations. Having to specify that the love is non-sexual is just cumbersome.

Thunderwave wrote:

Rhyx wrote:

Absolutely! But the data is still gathered and we can leave that debate to another generation. FOR SCIENCE! :P

Boinking...FOR SCIENCE! This is an idea I can get behind. :p

him or her?

750 wrote:

Arenamontanus wrote:

Scott Westerfeldt's "Evolution's Darling" has some interesting sex scenes between an AI in an advanced synthmorph and a human. Let's just say that nanotech BDSM is slightly involved - one can use bush robots, nanofiliaments, medical nanoswarms and neural interfaces in bed, after all.

Heh, there is a interesting scene in the first ghost in the shell manga (drawn partially becase he wanted to draw some 3-way lesbian sex i suspect) related to VR sex.

Actually, IIRC, it was because he wanted to draw a sex scene, but he didn't want to draw a man's ass. ;)