John Varley has died

If a society has advanced medical technology where changing your body is not just possible but broadly available, then it follows that they have solved any issues with rejection and adaptation. Nanobots constantly tweaking hormones? Your mind and memories simply layered over a virgin clone brain with everything set for whichever sex that body has?

If the writer set out to explore that theme they might delve into it, otherwise all that matters is that it works and sounds plausible from within the context of the story.

Scifi is about 'what if?' and how that affects people. 'What if money could buy a body of the opposite gender?' is all that is relevant.

Similarly, we don't need to know how the huge space station capable of destroying a whole planet in a single shot works (unless you are a rebel princess), just that it does.

I only read Wizard, how much am I missing out on the other two?

Did you see the Barbie movie? I bet you will enjoy it.

There is a scene where Ken and Barbie are rollerblading in Venice Beach, and some rude people are harassing them. They each announce, "I don't have a ..." (You can fill in the blank.)

And without giving too much away, there is another scene near the end that involves... Birkenstocks!

Of course not. No one was forced or expected to have a Change.

It was just an option available to anyone with the curiosity to wonder what it would be like to be the opposite sex - and experience that fully - and then switch back again if they preferred where they started.

But you raise an interesting point. In the stories I read, all of the characters were "straight" in the way we think of that word today. This may be my poor memory, but I don't recall stories involving men who enjoy sex with men, or women who enjoy sex with women.

When a man had his brain transplanted into a woman's body made just for him, then she was attracted to men.

When a woman had her brain transplanted into a man's body made just for her, then he was attracted to women.

The characters were straight, from the point of view of their current body. It's just that they could change that body whenever they wanted.

Men are also born without an undertanding of how the male body works and the same is true, mutatis mutandis, with women.

> Just placing ur brain in a new body wont magically unlearn all the things you know about the other body.

I mean, absent knowledge of what it takes to make a brain work with a new body, putting it in one is also magic and what other magical (from our perspective) effects do or do not come along with that is... highly speculative. It might be that accessing some of those as anything different than the memories of counterfactual dreams isn’t possible without connections, or biochemical conditions, that don’t exist without intentional intervention in a body configured differently.

> So regardless of the body your brain was put into, you now have both genders because you experienced both sides.

No, gender (either ascribed gender or gender identity) is not inherently tied to “what combination of anatomical and hormonal sex traits have I experienced”. It might be that having this kind of experience affects gender identity, but (even assuming initial gender identity was in one or the other position on the traditional binary, whether or not the side stereotypically associated with gross anatomy of the original body) it doesn't automatically make it encompass both sides of the gender binary. And what it does or doesn't do for ascribed gender is dependent on the viewss of the society in which it occurs, not an outside observer in our society.

> Personally, I am not attracted to men in the slightest regardless of their body now having female features. So while I am not against people swapping genders how they please, it would be a dystopia for me personally in my subjective view, because I wouldn't magically become bisexual.

It would be a dystopia becuase people would be free to engage in one more choice than they are in our current society that, because of your quirky views about the relation of gender to biological history of the individual, would render them sexually uninteresting to you?

That seems more than a little narcissistic.

Of course not. This is a sci fi story so you wouldn’t magically become bisexual you would scientifically become bisexual. The flavor and style of bisexual that you become, however, would be pretty different from and less troublesome than what irks you in the 21st century by the simple fact of a completely different set of societal mores having been in place long before your birth (ie your bisexuality would not be thrust upon you, your bisexuality would be what you were born and grew up with)

although gender and sex is used interchangeably - even in the most progressive circles - gender is a reference to a set of cultural behaviors and roles, a form of expression, while sex is functional and 99.9999% chromosomal and binary in humans

you are familiar with this, for example, when someone says "be a man" in response to someone's lack of assertiveness, this has nothing to do with whether they have a penis and the binary male contributions to reproduction, it is referring to a behavior expression that is indeed arbitrary but shared

swapping genders therefore has nothing to do with what sex you are attracted to, when adopting that paradigm, especially when adding genders outside of the binary cultural behaviors

hence being "straight" doesn't change and is only a problem for someone else