Oh-miles-WHAT

[jmtorres]

I er, realized that there's a volume I've reread less often even than Mirror Dance--that being Borders of Infinity.

Here we have this gem in Bel's introduction in Labyrinth: Bel Thorne, the Ariel's commander, was a Betan hermaphrodite, man/woman descendant of a centuries-past genetic-social experiment every bit as bizarre, in Miles's private opinion, as anything rumored to be done for money by House Ryoval's ethics-free surgeons.

Ryoval. What.

Comments

[flourish]

I've always read that as Miles' Barrayaran prejudice speaking - in its own way just as bad as the sexism, only more invisible to Miles because he doesn't have a herm mother.

But of course it's never fully called out...

[jmtorres]

I'm not even sure it's his peculiarly Barrayaran prejudice speaking, I suspect Betans aren't as totally cool with everything as they'd like to claim. To wit: Grandma Naismith's opinion that the herms are a people pathologically incapable of making up their minds. Er? Only if hermaphroditism was a happy accident from a tweak that was supposed to give kids the ability to choose their sex at puberty or something? Which would be an interesting story but it's never presented that way in the books, in fact the kid-cube in Diplomatic Immunity pretty specifically nails it down otherwise.

[flourish]

Yeah, you're right. I wasn't even thinking about that. Hmmmmmm.

[ambyr]

:wince:.

I don't remember what the last Vorkosigan volume I read was; it might have been Border of Infinity. Every now and then all the squeeing I see on my flist accumulates in my head and I find myself asking, "self, why did you abandon this series?" And then something like this reminds me why.

[jmtorres]

I love vast tracts of these books but I do not love them unequivocally.

[grey_bard]

Well, arguably, while it's perfectly normal to be a herm if you were born a herm and raised in a world where you are not alone, to deliberately mess with a baby's sex when you have no idea what psychological impact it might have on the kid in the name of a social experiment is kind of unethical.

The herms turned out okay, but it could just as easily have produced a generation of very, very unhappy trans kids. The scientists who first created them had no way of knowing, unlike the later-era parents of herms.

[carmarthen]

What if the first herms were adults who chose it, and subsequent herms were their children? Surgical technology seems to make sex alterations pretty easy in this 'verse, so presumably any herm who wanted to be another sex could do so (and if this was Beta, there would probably be all kinds of childhood monitoring so any issues could be caught and addressed early).

We don't know that Miles has accurate knowledge of genetic engineering history (he probably doesn't).

[grey_bard]

It's still really unethical. It's totally ethical to let adults bodymod themselves, but a completely different thing to screw around with an unborn kid's DNA for social experiment purposes when you aren't 100% sure that it will be okay. And you couldn't be, before the first herms grew up and turned out okay.

Being able to physically body-mod could help some things, eventually*, but when you're messing with something like sex, which is intimately tied up with gender and lots of stuff in the brain, they could have really screwed up those kids a lot. They didn't, but at the time they couldn't know it.

Making herm children once you already know they turn out okay is a different thing, of course.

(*Not to mention if you ask trans people "Would you have preferred to be born into the physical sex that feels natural to you, or to be born as you are and get a magical perfect sex change when you grow up", the trans-people I personally know would look at you like you're crazy. Growing up in the wrong body can be hell.)

[carmarthen]

True, but.

How do you ever find out herm children will be okay if you don't make herm children in the first place? I'm not sure I agree that modding the parents so that they will produce offspring like themselves is just like modding babies. Wouldn't it be just as risky (or perhaps even more so) for herm parents to have non-herm children, who might develop issues because they're different from their parents? Wouldn't it be just as unethical to say "Fine, then anyone who wants to be a herm (or is naturally born herm) can't reproduce?" Forbidding herm surgery entirely to sidestep the reproduction issue isn't exactly ethical, either.

I'm not sure there are any good ethical answers here, much less ones that will fit into Bujold's world, since Bujold has...odd and often problematic takes on gender and sexuality.

[jmtorres]

I'm not sure I agree that modding the parents so that they will produce offspring like themselves is just like modding babies.

I suspect the dividing point in the logic is: as we're shown it, Betan sex change surgery does NOT give every cell a genetic sex change, it only grafts (mostly) cloned sex organs onto your original body, and even if they did do a full genetic change on the adults, that's still after they're adults, not when they're undergoing puberty. Whereas: first-generation *genetic* hermaphrodite babies (whether with herm or monosexual parents) would experience physiologically different, not entirely predictable childhood and puberty with possible physical health consequences. Regardless of how those kids mapped into social construct gender funtimes, even. So yeah. Would it be ethical to do genetic modification of that kind? It would really depend on how sure you could be of the results.

Wouldn't it be just as unethical to say "Fine, then anyone who wants to be a herm (or is naturally born herm) can't reproduce?"

I would also like to put that in the context of Beta's attitude about reproduction in general, which is that you have to be licensed for it.

[carmarthen]

I would also like to put that in the context of Beta's attitude about reproduction in general, which is that you have to be licensed for it.

It might make sense in that context, but that wouldn't make saying an entire group of people is unlicensable for reproduction ethical. (And I'm not convinced the Betan licensing system is ethical in the first place.)

[grey_bard]

YES it is always unethical to perform dangerous experiments on babies just to see if you can get them to come out a new and different way, if there was nothing wrong with them in the first place.

Do you know how many "culls" come out when they're doing genetic experiments on animals? A lot. And yeah. Some of those culls live. For a while. How is that somehow an okay thing to do to children just because you want children just like you?

People handle having children of other genders than their own all the time. Those kids that wanted to could become herms themselves someday.

Yes "We want babies like us!" is a far more laudable intention then "Tee hee wonder what happens", but it's still unethical as hell and potentially really unfair to the children.

Yes, there never would have been any born herms, and yes, now that it did turn out okay, born herms are awesome, but the original scientists? STILL WRONG.

[carmarthen]

I'm not arguing that what the original scientists did was ethical, more that I can't see an ethical path through the situation of creating herms (or not creating herms if the technology is available and people want it) at all. There are pitfalls everywhere.

[grey_bard]

Sometimes there just isn't one. Sometimes there isn't an ethical way to get something to happen which, if successful, would be great. Sometimes good people just have to shrug and go "Then I guess we shouldn't do it" even if the goal itself is worthy.

Besides, you'd still have herms. Just adult herms-by-choice, not born herms.

[carmarthen]

Agreed.

Besides, you'd still have herms. Just adult herms-by-choice, not born herms.

True, I had forgotten how Betan surgery (did not) affect reproductive DNA.

[niqaeli]

Well, yes, it was probably unethical as all shit. They did it on a genetic level, since herms breed true with each other and require intervention to breed with monosexuals, and god only knows what all could have gone wrong, trans could've been the LEAST of their issues.

Given the ease of body modification, though, I actually often have wondered if the point was to make the herms choose which they want to be when they hit adulthood and some did and some said you know what, fuck that, I am who I am kthx.

Anyway, yes, it was unethical as shit and there's a reason Bel was so willing to cover Mark and go in to Jackson's Whole, but all the same that is not even remotely the point when Miles is calling Bel and Bel's people as bizarre as fucking Ryoval's creations. Regardless of their history, herms actually have well-adjusted happy fucking lives and have choices and aren't SLAVES. The same cannot be said of Ryoval's creations.

[jmtorres]

Given the ease of body modification, though, I actually often have wondered if the point was to make the herms choose which they want to be when they hit adulthood and some did and some said you know what, fuck that, I am who I am kthx.

Ha! Braintwin.

It comes in Labyrinth re the quaddies (Bel gives a very brief lecture on the history of genetics) that when the uterine replicator first became practical ~200 years ago there was a fair amount of playing with the human genome. And then everybody legislated against it so there is not anymore. Meanwhile Taura is apparently the FIRST, EVER (uh, really? I call lack of creativity there) to be a human with animal genes mixed in (versus they had put human genes in non-human organisms for things like generating insulin, etc). It was an ethical barrier none had crossed! Except Dr. Canaba. I find that one unlikely, but then by and large I think humans ARE animals. *wry*

[niqaeli]

I might have lifted that one off you outright, honestly I don't remember.

I am going to guess Taura was not the first, I cannot believe that no on else had ever done it, ever. She might, possibly, have been the first to live and get out into the wider galaxy. Or, she might only have been the first to live and out into the wider galaxy and cop to what the hell she is. She's not the firstest, though.

[jmtorres]

It happened in my brain like ten minutes ago, so if you did, yay telepathy? I can't recall us discussing it previously.

[niqaeli]

I'm pretty sure the concept's come up before. But, as you will, dear. *g*

[grey_bard]

I am wagering less on the simple "Oh noes, ethics!" and more on the "This is hard to make work right!".

I suspect little tweaks here or there that produce a "normal-looking" human being don't "count". And the really damn obvious changes like Taura's would probably be damn hard. And without being able to carry on their work for several generations with the full scientific community behind them, it would, you know. Take a while to make one that lived and worked well. But I could be really cynical.

[jmtorres]

Mostly my objection is that it never feels as if Miles is complaining about Betans of two centuries ago doing things to babies without knowing what will happen, it always sounds like he'd judging modern hermaphrodites by saying it was a terrible idea, they shouldn't exist in the first place!

Also: while the Betan experiment may have been unethical I am willing to bet Betan dollars to Imperial marks that it was well-intentioned, whereas House Ryoval specializes in fetishized torture slave crap most vile.

[grey_bard]

I see where you could get that. I just really want to thwap the "well-intentioned" idiots who made the herms and the quaddies.

I'm not saying there's anything wrong with herms or quaddies, but so, so unethical. And yeah, "normal" society didn't really do them any favors either. Hiiiii Falling Free.

[branchandroot]

*dry* Yeah, these are the moments when I really stop even trying to rationalize from inside the story and just want to smack Lois a little. Cordelia's early comment about Aral, that he used to be bisexual but is now monogamous, makes me howl kind of the same way.

[niqaeli]

I always chose to see that as Cordelia responding to the insinuation that Aral would cheat on her with a man against her knowledge. Although the insinuation sets my teeth on edge every damn time, so I can see how you'd want to howl.

Sometimes, though, yeah. There's things that are just so WHAT that you can't find the time to find the in-universe explanation, you just are stuck on WHAT. Oh, Lois

[branchandroot]

It's the explicit equation of "bisexual" with "swinger/slut/fucks anything that moves" or, alternatively, the bizarre notion that bisexuality only lasts until you pick one that outrages me, because that's something I /still/ have to deal with crap over and there's just no excuse for perpetuating it.

[niqaeli]

It happens not to be my rage issue re: bisexuality (mine is the related but not identical issue of the invisibility of bisexuals in heterosexual marriages and having to beat people over the head *repeatedly* to get them to remember that I'm queer), but I definitely get it. :/

[jmtorres]

Hah. Oh God. Match that up to Grandma Naismith's comment about the herms being a people pathologically incapable of making up their minds... wow. *facepalm*

[grey_bard]

Oh dude. That comment makes so much sense if the male and female scientists that created them expected the grown herms to choose one of the two original genders and a lot of the herms were like "Screw you I am keeping booooooth!"

That could cause long-running snide prejudice of which such a remark would only be the tip of the iceberg.

Ow ow ow.

Beta colony... not paradise! More like Planet Berkley.

[niqaeli]

Planet Berkley is a good comparison. And not, I think, unintentional. I've never read the books as in any way attempting to portray Beta Colony as a true paradise. A better place for many, than Barrayar -- but not without its idiocies and prejudices and horrors.

To wit, the methods of forcible therapy that Cordelia escapes. That little notion of post facto consent being considered acceptable for drugging people against their will to obtain purer observational data. Well, of course you can obtain consent if you keep at that sort of therapy...

[azurelunatic]

Yeah -- I believe she said more than once that Beta Colony was California on crack. In an arcology under a desert.

Given that reproduction is controlled by the state, that they've got an amazing jerkwad of a president, and how they treat their PTSD veterans, I think I stopped viewing it as a paradise before I finished reading Shards of Honor.

[niqaeli]

Their treatment of veterans with trauma seems to be to dump them all into therapy whether they want it or not. While they might sensibly be said to have a right to insist that service personnel be entirely balanced, they should damn well be able to resign and be as unbalanced as they want to be in private life if they're not harming anyone else or suicidal. Instead of, well, railroading them into it via their family as civilians, should they resign -- and the fact that Cordelia's mother's reaction to her trauma was to be worried and, oh, want her in therapy (and to hell with what Cordelia wants).

Beta Colony's a special, special place: couldn't pay *me* to live there. I suspect, personally, if I had to live in that universe, I'd rather live on Escobar. Or perhaps Komarr.

[grey_bard]

Yep. Oh, I think Beta Colony's similarities and creepy issues were entirely intentional. Beta Colony: Awesome vacation spot, wouldn't want to live there.

[azurelunatic]

I think it's possible that the absolute zeal with which they pursued Cordelia related to her proximity to Aral; I'd wager that if a mildly traumatized veteran with absolutely known cause of trauma wanted to take a break from it all, there might be no trouble, with noise about the "therapeutic value of solitude" and so forth. But the retroactive consent thing says that Cordelia was not a one-off.