sigmaleph:

you are offered a choice:

1. You get to open a video-game style character creation screen and customise your body at will, to anything within range of human variation (no cat ears, sorry). This includes letting you set a new biological age, get rid of any physical health issues, and so on. Your new appearance seems unremarkable to anyone who knows you, all government databases with your picture are adjusted, etc.
2. You get 150 000 USD every year for the rest of your life without having to do anything for it. You don’t pay taxes on this money, it adjusts with inflation automatically, it appears entirely legitimate to any authorities, etc.

what do you choose, and also, are you trans or cis (if you’re tempted to answer ‘it’s complicated’, round off to trans)?

Choose:

My tag ramble was so long that Tumblr cut it off (apparently the current limit is 30 tags), so I’m dumping it into the main post body:

#I’ve been wavering on whether to reblog this for ages

#I felt kind of bad about piling on to Sofi’s notespam like that

#but it being context for the next post has pushed me over into “yes”

#I didn’t realise until after voting that the character creation is one-time-only rather than ongoing access

#which makes the correct answer less *obvious*

#but I stand by my vote of cis | character creation

#(as it happens I *am* considering doing a second puberty through this‚ but they’d both be estrogenic)

#(honestly I’d barely even need the magic ID updating)

#(29-year-old me in 12-year-old me’s body could pass for 29 about as well as I could in 29-year-old body)

#(the two mes look pretty much the same: it’s all a matter of how you act)

#((well‚ 12-year-old me was a little smaller‚ but within the adult range and her face was already more or less stable))

#(((ooh‚ I bet I could tweak it so that I *stay* five-foot-one this time around)))

#(((during my first puberty my body map never updated for my final growth spurt‚ and

#I’m not *dysphoric* about being two inches too tall‚ but it does get a bit disorienting sometimes)))

#anyway my point there is that…a lot of people in the notes are going “money can be exchanged for goods and services”

#but I think in this case that’s actually backwards

#while money and health do both feed into each other

#health can be exchanged for money to a much greater degree than money can be exchanged for health

#money can *maybe* buy you the *appearance* of 9 – 17

#–(depending on how much puberty I can get away with doing again without fucking up my brain)–

#more years of youth‚ but it won’t buy you the lifespan nor the functionality of it

#money can buy you the ability to *breathe* your homeworld’s atmosphere even during pollen season

#and enough of it can buy you the ability to *talk* while breathing it

#but it can’t really buy you the ability to eat and drink while breathing it‚ and that’s a significant handicap in itself

#(not to mention the street harassment you get wearing a prosthetic immune system (to keep your built-in immune system from freaking out))

#likewise‚ money can buy disease *prevention*‚ but not the ability to shrug it off once you’ve caught it

#the ability of money to buy more robust bones is extremely limited

#(have I ever broken a bone? no! but why settle for merely *adequate* bone strength when I can have *optimal* bone strength?)

#((…god‚ why is anyone who is not *actively dying* for want of resources taking the money over the health))

#((I was so very aware‚ that time last year that a ventilation floor grate broke beneath me‚ that if I’d been 80 I would have *died*))

#((but I was 28‚ and I got away without even a broken bone))

#((why would you give that up any more than you have to))

#the list goes on

#meanwhile‚ health can buy you a nice steady low-non-physical-barrier-to-entry job as a farmhand or dockworker

#(not *as* steady as magic income‚ yes‚ and I *do* care a great deal about that‚ but I care about health *more*)

#and I’m not altruistic enough to take more money than I need so that I can give the rest away‚ not given what else is on offer

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Tags:

#reply via reblog #tag rambles #surveys #transhumanism #gender #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #adventures in human capitalism #aging cw #death tw #poison cw? #injury cw #illness tw?

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