I’m just imagining the scene in a sci fi comedy.
“I thought you said we were getting mechanical tails? Why the Hell is this attached to my front?”
“Experiments determined that this was actually the more effective and cheaper option. Don’t worry, a front tail works just fine for balance!”
Won’t someone think of the poor working class furries? A fur suit can already cost 10 or 20 grand. Now they’re going to have to add cyborg body parts to the mix as well? Talk about gentrification!
Improve it by covering it in fake skin, the same used on limb prosthesis! /s
No shit. We’re used to having to be our own doctors. Most trans people who medically transition have to educate their own doctors. Hell, even well-meaning medical staff often have very dangerous and ill-informed ideas about how trans bodies actually work.
For example, there are some medications that require different dosing between sexes. But many medical providers, like the general public, are morons. They latch onto the phrase “biological sex,” as defined by chromosomes. They think that it’s fundamentally not possible to change a person’s sex, and that trans medical treatments are just cosmetic.
This attitude can kill patients. With the exception of issues with reproductive organs, most of the sex differences in medical treatments or reactions to medical treatments are due to hormones, not chromosomes. HRT changes you body at a fundamental, cellular level. It’s very common for trans people to experience for example changes in alcohol tolerance after a period on HRT. Trans women tend to experience decreased alcohol tolerance, while trans men tend to experience an increase in alcohol tolerance. Think about what kind of deep biological changes must be occurring on a cellular level for that to occur. And it’s not just alcohol that is affected. HRT changes the metabolism of many medications. If you are a doctor prescribing medications that have sex differences in the prescription rules, by default you should prescribe based on hormonal sex, not chromosomes.
But what portion of the general public actually knows that? What portion of doctors actually know that? At least with a human doctor I can talk to them and actually show them the medical studies that show profound differences in medication metabolism that are induced by trans HRT. But you fundamentally cannot convince an LLM of anything. It’s trained how it’s trained. You can’t provide it new evidence and ask it to change its mind. It’s just going to keep doing what it’s doing. At best it will apologize, tell you it will consider your request, and then proceed to make the exact same mistake again.
Trans people view AI negatively because it’s likely to get us killed. It’s trained on the lowest common denominator. And trans folks often have go to great lengths to find the few doctors that have two brain cells to rub together when it comes to trans healthcare. As the general standard for medical care for trans people is so poor, any automated system that is simply the averaging of the state of medical care is going to produce a tool that is profoundly detrimental to the health of trans patients.
A Perfect Circle tried to warn us.
I’m not in that community myself, but from what I hear a high quality for suit can cost $10-20k. Not sure what differences in construction may exist between those and what you made. But some artists definitely make decent livings making them.