Transhumanism resolves questions of gender and of race by submerging them into the next stage of evolution: the cyborg. Man becomes machine and can be tailor-made to the requirements of production. This is being zealously advocated among both high-powered think tanks and by socialists and feminists as the means by which the long-desired aim of a high-functioning nebulous entity can be created without recourse to the odious business of child-bearing and child-rearing. It is referred to as cyberfeminism and postgenderism.
Kyle Munkittrick, programme director for the influential transhumanist think tank the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies (IEET), writes in the transhumanist magazine Humanity Plus of the importance of transhumanism for feminism and transgenderism. Munkittrick links transhumanism to ‘modernism and critical theory’, such as the philosophers Michel Foucault and Jürgen Habermas.
IEET defines its philosophy as technoprogressive, and traces its origins to Enlightenment doctrine, converging ‘technological progress and democratic social change’. IEET places technoprogress within the sphere of leftist intersectionality, aligning with:
• The movement for reproductive rights, around access to contraception, abortion, assisted reproduction and genomic choice
• The movement for drug law reform around the defense of cognitive liberty
• Sexual and gender minorities around the right to bodily self-determination1278
In a scenario straight from Brave New World, where the masses were kept docile and contended by the mass use of a narcotic called soma, IEET advocates ‘Decarceration and Decriminalization of Psychoactive Drugs, including cognitive enhancement’. To paraphrase Marx, this would literally be ‘the opiate of the people’. Postgenderism is another IEET ideal.1279
Munkittrick refers to Dr. Donna Haraway’s A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century (1985) as ‘the locus classicus of cyberfeminism’, in which Haraway writes :
The cyborg is a creature in a post-gender world; it has no truck with bisexuality, pre-oedipal symbiosis, unalienated labour, or other seductions to organic wholeness through a final appropriation of all the powers of the parts into a higher unity. In a sense, the cyborg has no origin story in the Western sense — a ‘final’ irony since the cyborg is also the awful apocalyptic telos of the ‘West’s’ escalating dominations of abstract individuation, an ultimate self untied at last from all dependency, a man in space.
Unlike the hopes of Frankenstein’s monster, the cyborg does not expect its father to save it through a restoration of the garden; that is, through the fabrication of a heterosexual mate, through its completion in a finished whole, a city and cosmos. The cyborg does not dream of community on the model of the organic family, this time without the oedipal project.1280
Becoming a cyborg eliminates the need for any ‘identity’. ‘There is nothing about teeing “female” that naturally binds women’. There is no gender.
Munkittrick promotes transhumannism and cyberfeminism on the premise that it will liberate the outsider, and create a new normal.
Transhumanists point to the pinnacle of what it believes humanity could become; where it might be going, and asks, ‘why not?’ and ‘how do we get there?’ Cyberfeminists (and postmodernists in general) look at the abject, the debased, the grotesque and the marginalized and ask ‘why is it so? How did this become the fringe?’ Transhumanism needs cyberfeminism because it functions to expose the way in which defining the ‘human,’ and in turn, the ‘transhuman,’ can repress, reject, and otherize those it claims to help.1281
In claiming to be for the benefit of humanity, and indeed for the benefit of our relationship with the animal world, Munkittrick, like Huxley, and Charles Merriam a century previously, holds out the prospect of a post-human form that is better than human. Organisations such as IEET, with the word ethics in the title, insist that this utopia, unlike all previous humanist utopias, will operate for the benefit of everyone: enhancing life expectancy, providing limbs for the limbless, and brains for the brainless, liberating man from work, providing opportunities for creative leisure (or narcotic stupor) and wide, open and clear spaces for animals. This in a world that no longer acknowledges humans as organic beings, so bereft of an organic consciousness that children can be laboratory-manufactured, and raised without the need for the ‘restrictions’ of the parental bond.
‘Postmodernists in general look at the abject, the debased, the grotesque and the marginalized and ask ‘why is it so? How did this become the fringe?’ So here is the aim beyond ‘progress’; to elevate the ‘abject, the debased, the grotesque and the marginalized’ as the new normal, and that is a process that has been long in the making, with those who object or resist being the real ‘marginalised’. Drawing on Foucault, who in his History Of Sexuality, rationalising his own homosexuality, drew a historical genealogy of morals, Munkittrick appeals to a new morality that is without an axial point of reference; moral relativity: ‘The implications for transhumanism are clear: if Foucault’s method of historical genealogy can be used to deconstruct what is seen as “natural” sexuality, then what other “natural” aspects of the human subject can be shown to be equally constructed and open for change, perhaps in the form of augmentation (of body, mind) or elimination (of suffering and death)’.1282 Here we see the familiar theme of everything as a ‘social construct’ that can be deconstructed and rebuilt according to a new design. The question is: who does the designing and for what purpose?
Munkittrick assures us that because ‘critical theorists’ and feminist theorists have contemplated such matters, technoprogress will be taken out of the hands of elitists and placed in the safe hands of some other, unnamed (perhaps ‘cyberfeminist’?) body where benevolence and wisdom are certain.
The transhumanist project, like any technological advancement, will place new tools into the hands of authorities to control and regulate life. Feminist and critical theorists have done immense amounts of work exposing these systems of control and demonstrating the methodology for changing them. The transhumanist model of political change should, unquestionably, be built upon the cyberfeminist model of political change.1283
Does this then mean that the technoprogessive cyborgising of humans will not be in the hands of the techno-giants, but instead be under the direction of a public body? Who will comprise this public body? How will members be chosen? Will it be international, such as being an organ of the U.N.O.? Will the guardians of the brave new world be scientists such as those on the Board of IEET? Munkittrick provides an example of how issues would be resolved through the wisdom of cyberfeminism:
For a specific example, we turn to reproductive technology. Be it birth-control, STD prevention, assisted reproductive technologies, abortion methods, ultrasounds, neo-natal care, or a myriad of other technologies that are involved in birth, the politics and ethics around these debates are classic arenas of feminist thought and action. The main reason for this tight coupling is that despite pregnancy’s obvious impact on women, women’s voices are often silenced or manipulated in the heated political arguments. Transhumanists are liberal/progressive almost by definition, supporting as many options for the human body as possible, and tend to support many feminist issues, such as abortion rights, safe-sex education, and birth-control options. Politically, feminists and transhumanists are often in complete agreement. Why then, you might ask, should transhumanists make a concerted effort to embrace feminism when both philosophies seem to work together so well as it is? … Cyberfeminism matters for transhumanism because we cannot overcome the limits of biology without overcoming the limits of society: the latter will always inhibit the former, not the other way around.1284
Nature is a burden that needs to be overcome. It is the old quandary of the Critical Theorists in stating that the organic ‘primary ties’ are a burden which must be eliminated before humanity is free. Again, one might ask how animal-friendly would this brave new world really be?
Munkittrick concludes with an appeal to intersectionality as essential to the success of the project, with a focus on ‘transsexuals and intersexuals’:
For transsexuals and intersexuals, transhumanism is a real, visceral, day-to-day lived philosophy. Yet the technology, while liberating in that it allows better transitions every year and provides better medical support for those who have transitioned and those born in-between, has not changed the social norms that entrap and restrict trans and intersex individuals. Because of that failure, we need a philosophy of social change, one that is built upon the discourse of dissolving cultural norms, of countering social standards and undermining hegemonic power.1285 Transhumanism can articulate the technologies, the potential selves, the unlimited beings we can be, but it needs cyberfeminism to prepare the way, to alter the politics and deconstruct the norms of culture and society that would bind technoscience to mindsets of the past. Transhumanism and cyberfeminism are complimentary philosophies that, when united, are capable of driving the technological development, political change, and societal progress necessary for both to be successful.1286
Drs. George Dvorsky and James Hughes, directors of the IEET, write that the future rests with the transcendence of gender through the imposition of technology:
Postgenderism is an extrapolation of ways that technology is eroding the biological, psychological and social role of gender, and an argument for why the erosion of binary gender will be liberatory. Postgenderists argue that gender is an arbitrary and unnecessary limitation on human potential, and foresee the elimination of involuntary biological and psychological gendering in the human species through the application of neurotechnology, biotechnology and reproductive technologies. Postgenderists contend that dyadic gender roles and sexual dimorphisms are generally to the detriment of individuals and society. Assisted reproduction will make it possible for individuals of any sex to reproduce in any combinations they choose, with or without ‘mothers’ and ‘fathers,’ and artificial wombs will make biological wombs unnecessary for reproduction. Greater biological fluidity and psychological androgyny will allow future persons to explore both masculine and feminine aspects of personality….1287
In the name of ‘equality’ the transhumanists go beyond class, race, age and gender conflicts, in proclaiming that All is One, that the future post-human is so amorphous that there will be the peace and unity of the amoeba, and that even reproduction of the species, if it can be called that, will proceed from the transhuman equivalent of cell division. This overcoming of biology is heralded as the epitome of evolution. In such a world there will be no ‘male coercion’, and patriarchy would be obliterated. The advancements of capitalism and science have already set the process in motion: ‘Post-industrial production, contraception and abortion have eliminated most of the rationale for gendered social roles in work and the family, reducing the burden of patriarchal oppression on women’.1288 Technology enables the social doctrines of global uniformity to proceed to completion:
Postgenderism confronts the limits of a social constructionist account of gender and sexuality, and proposes that the transcending of gender by social and political means is now being complemented and completed by technological means.1289
The authors get to the crux of the issue; the theme we have been considering here throughout:
Gendered occupational achievement is a case in point. Patriarchal culture contributes to differences in boys’ and girls’ educational access, career aspirations, and the wage and social status advantage that men enjoy in employment in most (if not all) industrialized nations. But some degree of gendered occupational stratification is also the inevitable result of the greater burden of childbearing on women, and the different abilities and aspirations coded in the gendered brain. Women are more impaired in the workforce by pregnancy and childbirth, even with the best child care support. Men also perform better on some intellectual tasks, such as spatial visualization, while women outperform men on verbal acuity and some forms of symbol manipulation tests. Technological progress is ameliorating these gender differences, but only the blurring and erosion of biological sex, of the gendering of the brain, and of binary social roles by emerging technologies will enable individuals to access all human potentials and experiences regardless of their born sex or assumed gender.1290
Technology can destroy the gender binary roles that burden women with childbirth, thus restraining their full integration into the economic process. Technology allowing for the laboratory conception and presumably childrearing by state or corporate institutions will achieve what socialism of even the most extreme types could not. Women will not differ from men in the production process because such entities will no longer exist.
George Dvorsky and James Hughes draw on the transsexual cults of Cybele and others, which we have considered previously, where the rite of castration was regarded as holy, and when eunuchs fulfilled state functions, to give historical justification to transgenderism. They refer to Magnus Hirschfeld and Alfred Kinsey for pioneering scientific justification.1291 Postgenderism proceeds therefrom. Drawing on radical feminist academics, the androgyn was discovered as the entity of the future:
The goal of a completely postgender society, instead of just gender equality and tolerance of gender diversity, emerged among some of the social constructionist feminists and sex radicals of the 1970s. For instance radical psychologists such as Sandra Bem, the developer of the Bem Sex Role Inventory, began to reconceptualize gender traits as a continuum, along which it was healthiest to be in the androgynous range. The androgynous had the highest self-esteem, psychological well-being and emotional intelligence, while those at the psychological extremes of gender were re-cast as constrained and disabled.1292
Again, normality was flipped on its head and the previously abnormal became the new normal, while the traditionally normal, like the subjects scoring high on the Critical Theorists’ ‘F’ several decades previously, have been designated ‘constrained and disabled’.
However, transgendered under transhumanism might be regarded as maintaining gender stereotypes. From the 1980s, ‘[g]radually a new “genderqueer” politics emerged which challenged all gender binaries’.
Today’s transgender movement is a roiling, radical critique of the limits of gender roles, with folks living in totally new categories, such as non-op transsexual, TG butch, femme queen, cross-dresser, third gender, drag king or queen and transboi. These genderqueer activists and theorists advocate postgender attitudes, such as promoting the use of gender-neutral pronouns such as “ze”, “per”, and “zir”, or the terms pansexual or omnisexual instead of the binary “bisexual.”1293
Transhumanist scientists can complete the process, ‘to deconstruct the gender binary that Shulamith Firestone1294 articulated in 1971 in favor of artificial wombs as a means to deconstruct the biological basis of patriarchy’.
At the beginning of the 21st century, however, posthumanist and transhumanist discourses about using technologies to intentionally transcend the limitations of the human body began to address the transcending of gender. Trans- or post-humans would at least be able to transcend the limitations of biological sex, and would eventually be able to transcend the biological altogether into cybernetic or virtual form. … A post-biological species would by definition — although perhaps not completely in the male transhumanist imaginary — be a post-gendered entity. …1295
Here we see the introduction of a new term, post-biological species, and becoming a ‘cybernetic or virtual form’.
In a type of transhumanist dialectics, Dvorsky and Hughes state that the next phase of post-industrial society will proceed from the equalisation process began by post-agricultural, capitalist industrial society. The redefining of marriage, such as ‘civil unions’ and ‘gay marriages’ started a process that eliminates traditional marriage. The transhumanist vision is that, ‘[e]ventually co-housing and co-parenting “civil union” contracts should replace civil marriage. Those contracts would recognize the bonds between small groups of people who have made commitments of some duration. The erosion of dyadic marriage will, in turn, help to erode the gender binary’.1296 As with so much else, the broadening of the legal definition of marriage was promoted as just a small measure in the name of ‘human rights’, which would do no harm; but has opened up the path to the elimination of marriage and family by contractual group arrangements.
The normal male-female pair bond that is hard-wired in the brain will be eliminated by chemical therapy: ‘But the final liberation from dyadic, gendered, heteronormative relationships will likely come about through use of drugs that suppress pair-bonding impulses’.1297
Postgenderism shows precisely how all identities are being obliterated dialectically in the name of ‘identity’. From Hirschfeld’s and Kinsey’s scales of sexuality to dozens of contrived ‘genders’, the way was opened for the ultimate ‘liberation’: gender obliteration, and from there into an amorphous mass that will be barely human: post-human.