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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 8, 2025

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I would find it difficult to imagine a comprehensive transhumanism that doesn't implicitly include transgenderism. From some years back I remember "morphological freedom" as a transhumanist talking point, and there's no particular way to cash that out that doesn't validate transgenderism. If one of one's goals is complete personal and bodily autonomy, well, you get transgenderism thrown in for free.

I don't think I agree with this position as a normative good, but it is an intellectually consistent one, in a way that I think some of the transgenderism arguments today are not. Morphological freedom also includes, for instance, transracialism for free, even though progressive orthodoxy validates transgenderism but not transracialism.

Perhaps a transhumanist might argue that morphological freedom and individual autonomy extends to the right to make your physical body anything you desire, including everything from sexual organs to skin colour to species, but does not confer a right to be included in any particular community you desire? So an elective community of people identifying as natal-woman or natal-black or what have you might still have the right to constitute itself as such, and forbid transgender or transracial people from joining it. If I imagine a transhumanist utopia, I could imagine a group like that existing in something like the Culture; though I also suspect that in a realistic liberal-transhumanist context, that group would be a tiny minority of weird people, tolerated but largely ignored by most of society, in which transhumanism and radical morphological freedom has dissolved most such concerns or identities.

there's no particular way to cash that out that doesn't validate transgenderism

Yes and no. You get one of the material objects that the trans advocates want for free but they make wider ontological claims. i.e. "men should be allowed to have gender reassignment surgery and be feminine men" is something morphological freedom would endorse but trans activists may not.

Wouldn't they? Isn't that a textbook example of queering the gender binary?

There are a lot of different mutually exclusive factions that make up the trans coalition. You might have transwomen who demand to be considered ontologically categorized the same as natal females support a cisman wearing a dress to queer the gender binary but would strongly object to any insinuation that they were doing basically the same thing. Morphological freedom alone can't explain this conflict, you need additional axioms.

To be sure there are people who call themselves trans who might fully endorse and live by this maximally vague morphological framework, but I'd argue they are a vast minority, especially among vocal activists.

I'd argue that vocal activists themselves are a tiny minority. My anecdotal experience has been that most trans people on the street find this academic language strange and alienating, and do not themselves have a very well-developed concept of gender identity. Like most people, they kludge it together out of a slurry of experiences and half-remembered concepts received from others.