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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?
Wow. Talk about assuming their conclusions. That article is miserable, partly for the reasons you note, partly for the wild lack of charity, but also because of its determination to concentrate all agency in the hands of nebulous elites. In doing so, they ignore the single most important link between transgenderism and liberalism.
There exists some small fraction of the population which feels dysphoria. They can’t prove such an internal phenomenon, and it’s quite hard for those of us who don’t feel anything similar to empathize. Liberalism answers: it’s not our problem. If they want to dismantle the gender binary, so be it. The rest of us can, in theory, go on our merry way.
This leads to obvious criticisms! Chesterton’s fence, externalities, false positives, and so on. I’m frustrated that the article doesn’t address any of them, instead blaming a cabal of autogynephilic billionaires. It just skips over any actual reasoning to argue that a potential to benefit the wealthy poisons the whole concept.
It’s particularly bizarre to see reproductive medical technology branded as the transhumanist devil. One wonders if the author has experienced our current peak of assistive reproduction, the C-section.
Then again, I’m pretty broadly transhumanist, in the aspirational sense. We aren’t there, yet, but some day, I can only hope that humans can shed our features like an old coat. Couple that philosophy with trans people’s self-described feelings about gender, and I started to find it much easier to cooperate.
Is this hypothetical "real Liberalism" or "actual liberalism we're dealing with in real life"? Cause I can see how ideological liberalism may say that. But not how the one in our world actually does. The one in our world has taken the stance - as of now, it is being rolled back in some places - is basically that the liberal state throws its immense power into coercing all of the rest of us into abandoning the gender binary.
In fact, if anything, what separates the trans movement from the transhumanist movement is that Ray Kurzeweil-disciples can't actually compel you to validate their ideology right now. That's where trans has all of the worst elements of too-early transhumanism combined with the endless moral busy-bodying of rights discourse.
Arguably it is a perverse outcome due to trans being early: if transhumanism actually was viable, there would be no need for this sort of coercion and tyranny in order to be "validated". We don't have heated debates about "validating" that people with cochlear implants can hear.
To be fair: this is a substack that has a clear and strong stance on the issue and has basically already laid out its canonical counter-arguments so I think part of it is just not retreading old ground for the choir.
Even in the trans-human future trans people would still be personality and interest wise more like their birth sex than what they transitioned into. Unless we are also changing our brains now. That is the biggest lie of the transgender movement, that trans people are psychologically more like their preferred gender on psychometric traits than their biological sex. Programmer socks are a meme for a reason.
Or, why not just preemptively use our magical transhuman technology to erase the existence of people who are transgender.
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