+If we _actually had_ magical perfect transformation technology or something close to it—if you could grow a female body in a vat, and transfer my brain into it, and had a proven solution to the motor-mapping and skull-size issues—if it cost $250,000, I would take out a bank loan and _do it_, and live happily ever after.
+
+Since we _don't_ have that ... the existing approximations don't really seem like a good idea for me, all things considered?
+
+As a computer programmer, I have learned to fear complexity and dependencies. If you've ever wondered why it seems like [all software is buggy and terrible](https://danluu.com/everything-is-broken/), it's because _no one knows what they're doing_. Each individual programmer and engineer understands their _piece_ of the system well enough that companies can ship products that mostly do what they claim, but there's a lot of chaos and despair where the pieces don't quite fit, and no one knows why. (Maybe _someone_ could figure it out in a reasonable amount of time, but the user who is suffering and in pain has no way of buying their attention.)
+
+But computing is the _easy_ case, a universe entirely of human design, of worlds that can be made and unmade on a whim (when that whim is specified in sufficient detail). Contrast that to the unfathomable messiness of _biology_, and I think I have reason to be wary of signing up to be a _lifelong medical patient_. Not out of any particular distrust of doctors and biomedical engineers, but out of respect that their jobs—not necessarily the set of tasks they do to stay employed at actually existing hospitals and corporations, but the idealized Platonic forms of _their jobs_—are _much harder_ than almost anyone realizes.
+
+_All_ drugs have side-effects; _all_ surgeries have the potential for complications. Through centuries of trial and error (where "error" means suffering and disfigurement and death), our civilization has accumulated a suite of hacks for which the benefits seem to exceed the costs (given circumstances you would prefer not to face in the first place).
+
+In a miracle of science, someone made the observations to notice that human females have higher levels of [(8R,9S,13S,14S,17S)-13-Methyl-6,7,8,9,11,12,14,15,16,17-decahydrocyclopenta[a]phenanthrene-3,17-diol](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estradiol) than human males. In a glorious exhibition of mad science, someone did the experiments to notice that artificially synthesizing that ...-iol and administering it to males successfully pushes some aspects of their phenotype in the female direction: [breast growth and fat redistribution and agreeableness—at the cost of increased risk of venous thromboembolism and osteoporosis](https://srconstantin.github.io/2016/10/06/cross-sex-hormone-therapy.html).
+
+For all that my body is disappointingly male and therefore ugly, it _works_. It makes the hormones that it needs to function without me needing to dissolve a pill under my tongue every day—without saddling me with extra dependencies on the supply chains that make the pills, or the professional apparatus to draw my blood and tell me what pills to take—without me needing to know what "hormones" _are_.
+
+For all that my penis is boring at best and annoying at worst, it _works_. The organ does the things that it's designed to do; it lets me pee while standing up, and reward myself while pretending that it isn't there.