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Is the future trans? The Gay Rights Movement Has Been Hijacked by a Radical Transhumanist Agenda
I don't think the average person in support of transgenderism thinks of themselves as a transhumanist or reads transhumanist literature, they seem to have come to it by way of a strange version of liberalism; not just that you're free to act as you like but are free to be whatever you say, even against the veto of biology, society and basic sense. Combined with a runaway social constructionist impulse and Rousseau-like mindset where the individual is always prior and it's society that corrupts them and you get to the situation where a tiny fraction of people can overthrow the most basic assumptions of a society. Transhumanism by way of rampant individualism .
I also think it's..dubious to frame transgenderism as-such as merely autogynephilic men. Even Blanchard has a two-part typology with homosexual males and autogynephilic males. Even if we want to reduce transgenderism to a mental illness or fetish in men, the article -by playing the traditional leftist game of trying to "solve"' problems by insisting they're caused by male issues - ignores the fastest growing "'transgender" population: young girls.
This would fit well with the trans-as-transhumanism position: girls who would usually go through puberty (a messy time) and the difficult adult life are instead offered a solution to their life's problems via transhumanist surgeries and procedures. Don't like your life? Go be anyone else you want. Never mind that we aren't actually the Culture and you can't mold yourself at will.
Interestingly: this argument actually makes me less anti-trans. I personally see no reason to validate any of the attempts to problematize the sex binary and plenty of reason not to. But clearly the march of progress won't be stopped by me or anyone. Medical technology will improve and people will have the ability to mold themselves more and more.
So really, is the only sin of "transpeople" being early?
I think the sin of the trans movement is having no coherent ideology, other than to be against anything "traditional", against any prescriptive categories, and against anyone telling anyone "no". Yes, there are some aspects of the modern trans movement that can seem somewhat like a transhumanist end-goal. But they're bedfellows with other people who seem to just want to cause chaos. People who want to take away some of the logic we have in our society, and divorce ideas from where they were traditionally associated.
For example, it's a common trans-adjacent complaint nowadays that when you're referring to reproductive health, you shouldn't say "women", you should say "people with uteruses", because there are trans-men who have uteruses who are affected, too. I see this sort of warring all the time all over my facebook, for example, after the SCOTUS issue this year, people saying "don't erase trans-men from the reproductive rights issue! trans men will suffer as well" as if that even matters, relatively speaking, or is at the forefront of anyone's mind.
Let's say we did have completely perfect transhumanist technology that would allow women to perfectly and in all regards become men. Do you think that these activists I mentioned above would be okay with us going back to the more traditional usage of language? No, I don't expect they would. They want anyone to be able to be called anything, even if they don't choose to fit the biological bill. They want to change the categories to be entirely "you're just whatever you want to be", not just "you're just whatever your current biology supports". They're making up new categories that never existed before, all sorts of in-between, or not related, genders, and then they're also taking all preexisting categories and saying none of the previous definitions matter at all for it. In-effect, they don't want transhumanism, they just want to disrupt the system and anyone who wants to have coherent categorization.
I think this is dangerous underestimation modern "transgender" movement. To large extent it is an on the ground application of ideas from Queer Theory, most importantly a revolt against "normativity" such as fight against cisheteronormative society. All you have to do is just to write down the vocabulary used and check where it originated. It is exactly how it sounds, it is not even fight for making queer people accepted as "normal" in society - similar to how early gay right movements wanted to get some rights and then be done with that. It is revolt against the very concept of normalcy, even to say that something potentially can be considered as normal or abnormal is oppressive and needs to be opposed.
And I agree that this is very much in line with transhumanism. Want to live as a cat person littering in sandbox toilet with somebody who transplanted his lower body into titanium appendage with extra ultraviolet sensor hanging from his left ear in polyamorous polycule with a literal lizzard? Nothing to see here, there are literally no valid philosophical or moral grounds to challenge this lifestyle in any way. In fact any criticism or pushback is (paraodoxically) something that is abnormal and needs to be squashed and this lifestyle needs to be accepted and supported exactly in order to fight against normativity.
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