…
Happened to me twice last week.
high five to lieu
Well… I had a post, but my keyboard is fucked up.
if a man was was magically given a woman’s body, would he eventually become entirely female?
Same question applies to women, rephrased.
I wonder how much distinction there is between a man and a woman in the first place. How much is is determined purely by what we physically?
… he would never leave the house.
Nope. This is basically what’s happened to transsexuals, and look at how many of them get sex reassignment surgery.
He couldn’t reach anything.
Hey! Do we have to go down the short people route??
For whatever it’s worth, nobody is as good at retrieving ping-pong balls from under the sofa as we shorties. So there.
I think the OP is trying to ask something closer to “if the memories and consciousness of a normal man/woman who had no particular desire to be a woman/man was suddenly placed into a body of the opposite sex, what would happen? Would the brain structure and chemistry make that person in to a real man/woman? Or would that person remain forever like a financially-challenged pre-op transsexual, trapped in the wrong body?”
If he didn’t suck so much when it comes to writing female characters, I’d advise you to read Robert Heinlein’s I Will fear No Evil. The plot of that book is the question I think you are posing.
Forget the house, he’d never leave the bedroom!
Hilarity would ensue, wouldn’t it?
No penis would ensue, at the very least.
We are nothing more than our physical selves. If the man’s brain was changed into a female brain (minor differences, bigger corpus callosum and the like) then he would be in every respect female.
This is only true for people in comas.
Interesting question…
In my case, I’d first take about a week of leave just to test-drive the naughty bits. And since it’s my mind in a female body, I’d have to become a lesbian and would therefore lose my job.
If you could rewire a man’s brain to be female, the result would not be the same person you started with.
Well, let me tell you what I would do.
I’d start by going “HOLY FUCK, I’M A CHICK!” Next, I would say, “awesome, I’ve boobs… and a vagina! Awesome!” I would then experiment by putting things into the aformentioned vagina. After that, I’d just do what I normally do: pick up chicks, drink whisky*, go on the SDMB.
*I’m not sure how’d I’d like the decreased ability to hold my liquor, though.
IIRC there’s a stage during pregnancy where fetal brain development is strongly influenced by the hormones in the fetus, which are dictated by its gender.
During the 70’s this was not appreciated and there were a few sex-reassignment surgeries performed on very small children who had injuries or birth defects damaging their original genitals. A fairly popular book called something like “The Boy Who Grew Up as a Girl” describes one of these cases, in which a circumcision accident destroyed the penis of one of two male twins, who was then raised as a female - including hormone shots at the appropriate age. The reassignment was a failure.
Before the changeover, be sure to loosen all the lids on the pickle jars.
Tell me about it. I had to ask a man at work to open a bottle of Stewart’s Key Lime for me.