Chambers wrote a future where the body stops being destiny, and she was right about the destination.

Sissix exists in her Aanat form without apology or explanation — her scales, her mating biology, her otherness require zero justification to the crew, and Ohan's non-binary embodiment isn't debated but accommodated as naturally as requesting tea.

The Ressk subplot doesn't hinge on whether transition is valid but on the emotional cost of choosing it. This is the book's actual prediction: that consciousness and choice would eventually trump biology as the basis of identity.

But watch where resistance appears in the actual text — it doesn't come from religious conservatives or biological essentialists but from economic systems and institutional inertia. Kizzy's body modifications, the illegal ones and the risky ones, exist in a system where enhancement is commodified and gatekept, and the crew's casual acceptance of embodied difference doesn't protect them from a universe where some bodies are still worth less. Lovelace's consciousness trapped in a ship's hardware is the book's coldest moment not because consciousness-in-silicon is morally wrong but because a corporation owns her.

The freedom to modify, to be, to choose — it's not stopped by ideology. It's stopped by who controls the technology and who profits from restriction.