“Micha Cardenas is a 31-year-old man taking hormones to become a woman. So, it’s not surprising perhaps that Cardenas views the boundaries of gender as being somewhat fluid and has questions about what it means to be male and/or female.

But what if the question isn’t merely gender identity, but an issue of species? What if one felt wrongly trapped inside their human body, preferring instead to be a cat? Or a lizard? Or some sort of unknown alien life form?

“People are now undergoing all sorts of extreme body modifications,” said Cardenas, a visual arts student at UC San Diego. “They’re getting scales tattooed all over their bodies, horns implanted on their heads, tongues forked. It seems crazy right now, but I wonder how far we are from actually being able to change species. And if we could, what would that be like?”

To find out, Cardenas recently spent 365 consecutive hours in Second Life, an Internet-based, three-dimensional virtual world where human users assume digitized alter egos called avatars of any gender or species, real and unreal…” Continue reading Online-world immersion probes ‘possibilities of transformation’ - Immersion conversion by Scott LaFee, The San Diego Union-Tribune.