I know someone who thinks that marriage is completely outdated (an attorney; attorneys have a 65% divorce rate or so) and he plans to use one of these new services like hellobaby.com where you can choose a sperm and egg donor online, and even arrange for a surrogate mother. One merely requires the money to pay for this. But he's convinced that this is the wave of the future (not for infertile couples but more as a *positive* brave new world type scenario in the future, and apparently a number of clinics are making money this way already.
In the field I work/study in, there is this very prominent professor at Stanford who just had a sex change this year and went from being Jonathan Roughgarden to Joan Roughgarden. In her picture, it looks pretty convincing too. She's published so much and is the leader in her field, and I heard she may even be a dean?? Anyway... she's probably the most high level person I've ever heard of who has done this. But other than this news initially making the rounds, people haven't been really commenting or bothering her about it at all, so far as I can tell. I suppose in order to be really free you have to rise to a position of power. In my department, it's like, people are very civilized in terms of tolerance issues but are out in another dimension in terms of class issues or current politics. There is a woman with a lot of long facial hair on her chin, and nobody would ever consider commenting behind her back, and I never hear racial or homophobic jokes (altho, despite this being the bay area, there are still a lot of really homophobic people around in general - I was surprised when I moved here), but only 2 out of something like 55 of the TAs in the department participated in the recent strike and my perception was that most people had never even considered or thought about the larger picture issues involved in their lives.
christine p.