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I think the reason the logic of this article seems so strained is probably that there's a segment of the conspiracy-theorist community which has latched onto "transhumanism" as a buzzword and have a distorted idea of what it is. This allows them to equate stuff like "X once gave money to some sort of group with ties to self-described transhumanists" with stuff like "X wants to inject you with a chip to control your brain". Search 4plebs for transhumanism to see some examples, or conspiracy-theory sites like Transhumanism.news. The author seems to have picked up some of those ideas about transhumanism.
Except it's not "whatever you say" - transracialism is largely taboo and otherkin had more success but still failed to become a mainstream part of social justice ideology. Rather there is a whole ideological framework for how people not only can but should transition if they "are transgender". Then there is a social environment in the social justice community (and often among professionals in trans healthcare) with a heavy bias towards encouraging people to think they're transgender at any supposed sign and then "affirming" those who think they are. Like Scott's old post about conceptual superweapons that talks about medical testing, except that was supposed to be an analogy.
The Eighth Meditation on Superweapons and Bingo
Part of allowing only one side of the argument might be that you sometimes see arguments like "Even if you're worried you aren't 'really transgender' (and if you're wondering you almost certainly are!) there's no harm in having the body you want.", ignoring the serious and lifelong negative effects. But this isn't part of any broader commitment to transhumanism. If anything the mandate towards affirmation of "legitimate" identities means things tends to get squeezed into a dichotomy, where something like transracialism must be not just "weird" and "probably a bad idea" but problematic and racist. Because if it wasn't there would be pressure to apply the same sort of logic used for "misgendering".
Finally, remember the main emphasis of transhumanism is not on people satisfying arbitrary preferences about their bodies to begin with, it's on making people better. Transhumanist fiction might have the occasional person who decides to be downloaded into an octopus body or something, but that's an irrelevant sideshow compared to intelligence-enhancement and immortality, especially outside the realm of fiction where real-life transhumanists are less concerned with imagining exotic visuals than authors are. Needless to say, the social justice community is often intensely hostile to such improvements, being more concerned with the idea that improvements to longevity or intelligence might be used by the rich than with the enormous benefits they would bring. They are also very hostile to anything that can be interpreted as "eugenics", which a lot of the easier transhumanist technologies could be classified as. Unlike the general public they are sometimes even hostile to the idea of curing disabilities and with the idea that being disabled is indeed objectively worse for reasons beside society's "ableism". Those deaf parents who deliberately choose to have deaf children (to be part of the deaf community) through embryo selection might use similar technologies to transhumanists, but doing so is pretty much the polar opposite of transhumanism.
That blog's a better scott-post than most of recent ACX tbh
It was the post that ultimately brought me in this sphere to begin with.
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