kikon9 said:
What would you do if you met a clone of yourself except they are the opposite gender?
Probably inquire as to why someone would want to clone me to begin with. I'm a pretty big mess, and enough of my problems are inherant, I will never have kids for fear of passing those problems on.
Other than that basic question, the idea doesn't bother me all that much. One wierd thing I learned about decades ago is how everyone already has the genetic programming for gender reversal, pretty much every living thing that has genders does. It's apparently been documented that in cases where an animal population has been in danger, animals will mutate to the opposite gender in limited numbers in order to preserve the species. This little oddity (which made me go WTF at first) was integral to the whole plotline of "Jurassic Park", and was even in the movie where they pointed out that there should not have been any female dinosaurs, never mind any pregnant ones, and how "nature always finds a way".
I've always had the idea of writing a story at some point about someone tinkered with by aliens and given powers and such as a "thank you" for their expermentation (or as an apology for hurting them badly enough where they needed to be cloned or whatever) and then messing up with the gender chrmosones while setting it and leaving the person as a hermaphrodite. One of those odd "tortured hero" type concepts, based on the fact that I could see something like this getting messed up with genetic tampering. Never did work on it because of concerns that people would think I have some kind of wierd fetish or something. Oddly I first starting thinking of that as being an interesting and (to my knowlege) unused drawback before I realized there were people who have fetishes for that kind of thing.
Sort of like the old "Girdle Of The Amazons" or "Belt Of Giantess Strength" cursed items in some obscure AD&D supplements. What would you be willing to give up for a stat boost? Except in this case what if you wound up in between. That would really mess up the mind, and if you kept getting put into situations where you had to step up due to super powers and responsibility or whatever, and couldn't just opt to cloister yourself quietly somewhere and deal...
Ah well, enough rambling about my strange thoughts. The bottom line is that I'd imagine with cloning, or genetic engineering, the gender bit might be tricky, especially given that it's apparently mutable even if it only happens in very rare, and not well understood situations.