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.)
no subject
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.)