this post was submitted on 31 Mar 2024
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No, the two went together for a very long time.
Because if the nature of your reality is that physical embodiment is an illusion and that all which really matters is what's inside you, then gender conformity isn't an important issue at all.
For example, this was a saying from an early 'heretical' tradition of Christianity which claimed that we are in a non-physical copy of an original physical world as created by an intelligence the original humanity brought forth (quite simulation hypothesis-y):
The idea here was that this realm is the copy of an original that we don't enter in some transition but are literally born into at birth (a rather radically different notion of "born again"). But this would necessarily mean that we are only in the image of the past, but are not foundationally male or female at all, as it's a temporary embodiment recreating the past.
The tradition's key point was to understand the nature of reality and in so understanding to realize that there will be an afterlife, but very close behind that point was pushing the importance of self-knowledge and self-truth:
So while yes, the notion of reality being simulated is a very big idea objectively, the subjective implications of that being the case are certainly tied to personal identity and in shedding the constraints of physical embodiment on how we define that identity.