I’m a gay man, a man who likes men, you know, that antiquated thing.
I can’t stand all of this.
It was bad enough with all the bitchy me-me-me right-on types, especially in the last few years (thanks, social media) but all of this narcissistic nonsense has really opened the floodgates. How do they have so much time twat about on Twitter anyway?
Who do we blame? Do we blame?
Or do we, as man loving gay men and women loving lesbians leave them to cannibalise everything and wear ludicrous-looking curtains as dresses and make our own spaces again?
It was all becoming horribly commercialised anyway. I don't want your corporate pride flags, you were never there when pride actually meant something.
We need to take it back underground and rebuild a LGB subculture. Nothing important happens on social media.
That's why we now have the LGB Alliance. I hope more and more gay men and lesbians join it (as well as heteros like myself) to buck that obnoxious trend
I'm figuring out who has time to live on Twitter. I met a youngish woman yesterday (30s?) who is covered in tattoos and piercings and has the huge holes in her ears. And when I brought up Joseph McCarthy (for anyone who doesn't know, the senator from Wisconsin whose name is associated with persecution of leftists beginning after WWII), she had no idea who he was. I could understand her partner who is Colombian not knowing who McCarthy was, but this young woman is American and knows ZERO about her country's history. So when you spend your time tattooing or tweeting you have no time left to learn anything apparently, and I'm guessing this sums up a large proportion of young/ish people.
I think that’s exactly what should happen. My 23 year old daughter is gay and in a happy relationship - with a woman - how radical! Stonewall does not represent her. She was pro trans until peaked by someone calling her a bigot for saying she would not be attracted to a transwoman. LGB Alliance is the way forward. The alphabet soup is so diluted it seems to include everyone BUT same sex attracted people!
I suspect making our own spaces again is probably the way forward, sadly. This narcissistic, alphabet soup nonsense and associated gender bullshit is so pervasive that I can't see what else to do.
Thanks for opening my eyes Graham. This month I subscribed to your newsletter and have watched about 40 hours of your videos on YouTube. I’d previously stayed away from the topic as I don’t have children and am a straight female. I am also a Guardian reader and of the “liberal left” and follow a lot of the people you mention from time to time on your videos. I do agree with them on most topics. EXCEPT this. You’ve opened my eyes to the unpleasant misogynists from Stonewall influencing the wider agenda. I can see how decades of hard work from feminists are being rapidly eroded. Those who genuinely have gender dysphoria should be helped and you seem to say that consistently in your videos. However autogynephilia is something else. I used to report a lot of hate speech on Twitter (neo Nazis). Not all of it was taken down and many of the accounts were allowed to continue to operate. Yet your Twitter account was taken down. I wish more celebrities would speak out with you.
I refer to those parents as ayatollahs - after the rules in Iran where to avoid the death penalty for homosexuality, you are allowed to have a sex change. And people think parents like these are liberal?
There's a great series of articles at Quillette called 'When Sons Become Daughters' by a gay journalist (having to write anonymously, of course). He interviewed lots of parents at length, writes very perceptively. These are overwhelmingly not homophobic or conservative parents. But then these are the ones who don't buy their kids identifying as trans, and they can't speak out or be publicly interviewed because their loving scepticism gets framed as transphobic. So people don't hear from them, don't realise how many are out there.
The ones who featured in the media as proud parents of trans kids seem to be where the homophobes are – disproportionately heard.
Actually it DOES also happen to parents who celebrate their lesbian daughter or gay son. And sometimes also to gay parents. I know several families in both categories. Their kids get groomed on the internet and by virtue signalling peers to believe they're something more special/brave&stunning/worthy-of-oppression-points than ordinary L or G.
People need to know this sh*tstorm is happening to great parents, too. The homophobic/Munchhausens ones are there (*cough* Susie Green), but the online world is a cesspit of grooming, indoctrination, culty influencers, trans porn.... and even schools have become grooming enablers behind parents' backs, like Stonewall coaches them to be.
Never have parents had less influence over their kids, because the internet has such a massively disproportionate influence now. I don't know a single family who thinks their kid would have found, let alone jumped on, the trans train if the internet hadn't existed.
Last night I was reading about (in preparation to read) Martine Rothblatt’s “Transgender to Transhumanism.” After reading about transhumanism, a movement that seems to have looked at science fiction from the cyberpunk genre- everything from Philip K. Dick’s early “Do Androids Dreams of Electric Sheep?” to the modern “Black Mirror”- as an instruction manual rather than a warning, I wondered if there had been any critiques of transhumanism.
(To clarify, among the beliefs of this movement are: the recognition of biological sex- not oppression based on it, but simply the recognition, and the unequal roles of male and female themselves, reproductively (and I suspect Martine Rothblatt really means that man can’t, rather than that women have to), is an apartheid akin to the racial apartheid in South Africa; consequently, we must engineer the human race to enable anyone who wants to reproduce to reproduce, and anyone who doesn’t to be able to digest themselves of all reproductive capacity (there is a combination of mechanical wombs and surgeries/implantation, etc), thereby eliminating all inequality based on sex (how this follows logically is anyone’s guess; however, it’s an interesting self-own in that Rothblatt is implying that indeed, as feminists say, sex is the basis upon which women are oppressed); this is the tamest belief though so keep with me- next they believe in the project of immortality (naturally), and that they will make people immortal through the use of nanobots, becoming part machine, or, in the end, uploading everyone’s consciousness into the cloud, to become one might Heaven until the end of time. According to this Utopian vision, we can engineer people to be smarter, stronger, faster, have no diseases, commit no violence, feel no hate or prejudice; we can build the tools to clean up our environment; we can build robots to take care of our needs and replace all menial positions, thus being liberated from capitalism to achieve the fabled Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism of yore (I’m not sure what luxury gay is exactly, but it sounds wonderful).
There seems to be an assumption that some people will want to keep their human bodies, but disease-free and immortal; that others will want to augment with machines; and that still others (the implication is everyone, in the end) will want to fully merge with machines.
We will take energy from a process of breaking down water into its molecules to harvest hydrogen. There’s a lot of talk of an early 20th-century scientist’s proposals in this vein.
In order to house the resulting hundreds of billions- or more!- of humans, we will terraform as many planets as we need, sending envoys back to Earth for any essentials not found elsewhere (how this will end up being sustainable is beyond me; seems like there are a lot of unaccounted for variables in this plan).
I see lot of potential problems with this plan, even if achievable.
I searched for some criticisms of it, expecting to find a lot. I only found one professor of bioethics- Francis Fukuyama- who wrote a single article about trans humanism, calling it the most “dangerous ideology on the planet” (or something to that effect).
I wish he’d written more, as his short critique made only a single (if obvious) argument: we would be manufacturing inequality on a grand scale if the wealthiest people on the planet transformed themselves and their offspring into an augmented master race, while everyone else in the developing world got left behind.
I searched for rebuttals, and found several saying that this was a silly idea of “conservative critic” Fukuyama’s (“conservative critic Fukuyama’s” entire article was deeply concerned with human equality), because we understand that humans are “moral agents regardless of augmentation,” and persons under the law, and thus there would be no discrimination of the trans humanists to the regular ol’ humans.
On a forum somewhere (there was so little discussion of criticism of trans humanism in academia or mainstream media that I really dived into the weeds), someone mentioned animals, and said if we believe humans to have an essence (known as “bemes,” which will replace genes; humans have an indefinable essence of humanity in their character which supersedes genetics, and can be uploaded into a machine, achieving “disembodiment”), then what happens to animals? Will we recreate artificially intelligent robot pets and animal species roaming the Earth, and let the real ones die out?
Incredibly, Fukuyama tackled this idea of “human essence,” and argued that it is our imperfections which comprise our human essence; the people rebutting him (one in a scientific journal!) argued that he was being silly talking about human essence…no joke!!!
There are obviously MANY MORE possible criticisms of this ideology, and they all relate to the myriad ways this could go wrong: everything from the supposition that we can achieve human bliss in a hive mind and it won’t be not just shades but blinding rays of Jean Paul Sartre’s “No Exit” (“hell is other people”); that we know we can engineer morality!! (Because if we cannot, then what the augmented will do to the unaugmented is already a certainty- we just have to look around at the way humans treat each other now, which isn’t a whole lot better than we treated each other for all of “civilized” history, only the violence, which is mainly economic, is in that sense sanitized); that we could achieve all of us this no hiccups or major consequences of any kind (is foresee us achieving these things only partially, thus ushering in a techno-dystopia; spectacular short-sightedness is, after all, humanity’s Achilles heel, and our irresponsibility with technology has been borne out again and again).
When it comes to the idea of our engineering our brains, I have to wonder how the trans humanists plan to rush neuroscience. My brother is a systems neuroscientist (and as such, dubious about the reach of cognitive neuroscience at the moment); according to him, we know “next to nothing” about how the brain works, and not even just the human brain. We can make guesses about correlations and brain patterns, but trying to engineer based on those would be trying to navigate without a map: a human rights disaster in the making. My brother is actually a part of the human connectome project, in which a few thousands neuroscientists across the world are contributing to the building of a map of the human brain. He told me that unlike the human genome project, a project which turned out to proceed remarkably fast when the human genome proved to be relatively simple, the human connectome bears no such surprises: “it will take us hundreds of years to get anywhere close,” he told me.
So I’m wondering how, by tweaking targeted genes, such pioneering science and technology proposes to be certain of the effects on the human mind and moral centers of the brain.
Even *less,* in my opinion, is known about the human body and its powerful connection to the brain in the sense of the mind/body connection (how our psyches affect our physical state; how our physical state affects our psyches). And yet, the trans humanists propose we drop our bodies like a load of bricks before we ever even solve this ultimate of human mysteries.
That all of this is far out of reach doesn’t need stating; yet, billions of dollars have been poured into various arms of industry, to bring about some of these changes. Trans humanists right now are excited about pioneering surgeries (cough cough), manufacturing identity, increasing longevity, use of CRISPR and other genetic engineering technology, early machine augmentation and disease elimination, and nanobot technology; in time will come the Singularity (the reasoning goes).
Obviously, everyone- pharmaceutical and bioengineering corporations; the medical industrial complex; all the corporations and politicians and institutions affiliated- stands to make a lot of money from these advances.
As to how this relates to your comment: the Internet has clearly been an advance for us in some ways, yet has been tremendously deleterious to us in others. In terms of human life, pre-Internet we actually had many analog time-saving and entertainment devices, and a high quality of life. We’ve gained instant access to information and instant access to others across the world- at what price?
It’s clear the internet has been extremely deleterious to humanity in a number of ways, particularly socially, ironically intellectually (forget the information has; it’s the disinformation and misinformation age), and in terms of what I like to think of as “ease of influence.” I also believe that due to the flourishing of pornography and the proliferation of decentralized internet cults of grievance, it has also been deleterious morally, particularly to children and young people whose minds and worldview are still developing.
Most people over fifty today don’t have much inkling of this, as they were not raised with the internet in their lives from childhood or young adulthood. I was twelve when we got a dial-up internet connection in my house, and first found my way into AOL chat rooms; a young adult when I got my first iPhone. Things are so much more intense for young people growing up today; it’s as if they’ve grown up more online than in real life, for many kids, in many ways.
What’s happening now with regard to transgender ideation is one manifestation of that; the rise of gaming, VR, and the descent into fantasy life of many is another. There is an aspect of creativity on the one hand, and of daydreaming and infantilization on the other (I say this as a childish daydreamer myself).
We don’t yet have any long-running studies on the effects of internet on our cognitive function, either of adults or of children who have grown up online, since it’s all so new. It’s quite clear to most people who give any thought to this that a lot of what’s going on with young people as a group right now, and more broadly with all of society, has to do with growing up largely online or being online a lot of the time (in the case of adults who did not grow up with it).
And yet no is taking this into account. If we represent anything collectively at this point, it’s the frog in the pot. We are the frog in the pot, all as one now. (And have been for a while, if human-caused climate change is any indication).
And as the Dentons Document makes clear, that is exactly the way the trans humanists want it.
I strongly agree with every word, and feel real, proper gratitude that you have provided such clear-headed description and wide-ranging yet concise critical analyisis of these issues.
I've been worrying about all the things you describe for years, know many young people profoundly affected, see that we are ALL frogs in this damned pot, and wonder how the hell people might be awoken from obliviousness to what's being lost and destroyed. Voices are needed that are able to rise above the thought-limiting, clichéd modes of analysis, convey clearly what's happening, and stir others toward ideas of possible ways forward.
So yes please to your much-needed article! (Meanwhile I've resorted to 'Come, sweet asteroid.')
And I apologize for the many, many typos; I wrote this on my phone, which frequently changes words (and it’s hard to scroll up and find those in a long comment). I didn’t expect my comment to out quite so long when I set out to write about this!
I might go back and edit this, and properly write it up as an article sometime, critiquing trans humanism and showing the parallels to our current experiment in the Internet Age.
'I might... properly write it up as an article sometime...'
Please, please do. It seems to be largely there.
I can't see such analysis coming from other kinds of quarters. If not from a GC female (a subscriber to Glinner, of course), it would inevitably be unhelpfully blinkered. I hope you'll go for it.
This is an excellent, much-needed post. I need to jump in and say that before continuing to read your Part 2.
I've long been aware of trans-identified billionaire Rothblatt's massive funding of both transgenderism and transhumanism, wondered what the hell the latter is really about but didn't have the stomach to sink down into it, hoped somebody sanely alert would write something.... and waited..... wondered why there still hadn't appeared any analysis or critique of it. (Partly the usual 'mustn't criticise anything emanating from a trans-identified male, especially one with high social status' copout?).
Your explication here is terrific. You MUST write an article.
PS Your outline confirms all the visceral (yeah, gonna use that word) dread and scepticism I and surely many others less informed and articulate than you have felt in hearing of trans-humanism and transwoman Rothblatt's pioneering role in conceptualising and funding it.
Kind of like when you don't capitulate to the TWAW mantra and they tell you to suck/choke on their dick and threaten you with other acts of violence. Yeah, us girls say those things to each other ALL day long. If that's what it means to identify as a woman then I might identify as a can of pepper spray.
Very true. As a woman, I've had the odd serious row with other women but even at our bitterest, we've never threatened each other with rape or any form of sexual violence.
The guy who says terfs tell him they're glad trans people face discrimination? Where has he seen this? GC people (terfs to them) wouldn't say such a thing.
Must be one of the characteristics of narcissism to create false oppression so you can justify the attention-seeking ploys for sympathy. Man at bus stop is quite good at this too.
As we all wonder, where in hell do trans face discrimination? They demand everyone else kowtow to them and their fetishes, reinforce their shaky identities, have sex with them, etc, etc, etc. And Aaron in GL's interview with him, is the first TIF I've ever seen who passed.
One subscriber mentioned the other day that they thought the 'Q' word was supposed to be a slur. Well, here is the confirmation that it is indeed insulting. What sets 'Q' identifying people apart anyway?
Same with non binary, what a pile of crap. If you're gender non-conforming, this should be good enough. This, in my view is progressive, as long as it does not involve invading biological women's spaces.
It's no surprise those idiots usually are white heterosexual men who think women and minority groups should not enjoy the same rights they do.
before i was an ex-guardian reader, before i even knew how to piece together the gender critical argument (thanks to graham and radfems), i knew there was a strange silent 'queer complicity' inherent within the LGBTQ+ scene.
I’m a gay man, a man who likes men, you know, that antiquated thing.
I can’t stand all of this.
It was bad enough with all the bitchy me-me-me right-on types, especially in the last few years (thanks, social media) but all of this narcissistic nonsense has really opened the floodgates. How do they have so much time twat about on Twitter anyway?
Who do we blame? Do we blame?
Or do we, as man loving gay men and women loving lesbians leave them to cannibalise everything and wear ludicrous-looking curtains as dresses and make our own spaces again?
It was all becoming horribly commercialised anyway. I don't want your corporate pride flags, you were never there when pride actually meant something.
We need to take it back underground and rebuild a LGB subculture. Nothing important happens on social media.
It could be fun. You never know!
That's why we now have the LGB Alliance. I hope more and more gay men and lesbians join it (as well as heteros like myself) to buck that obnoxious trend
I'm figuring out who has time to live on Twitter. I met a youngish woman yesterday (30s?) who is covered in tattoos and piercings and has the huge holes in her ears. And when I brought up Joseph McCarthy (for anyone who doesn't know, the senator from Wisconsin whose name is associated with persecution of leftists beginning after WWII), she had no idea who he was. I could understand her partner who is Colombian not knowing who McCarthy was, but this young woman is American and knows ZERO about her country's history. So when you spend your time tattooing or tweeting you have no time left to learn anything apparently, and I'm guessing this sums up a large proportion of young/ish people.
I think that’s exactly what should happen. My 23 year old daughter is gay and in a happy relationship - with a woman - how radical! Stonewall does not represent her. She was pro trans until peaked by someone calling her a bigot for saying she would not be attracted to a transwoman. LGB Alliance is the way forward. The alphabet soup is so diluted it seems to include everyone BUT same sex attracted people!
I suspect making our own spaces again is probably the way forward, sadly. This narcissistic, alphabet soup nonsense and associated gender bullshit is so pervasive that I can't see what else to do.
Thanks for opening my eyes Graham. This month I subscribed to your newsletter and have watched about 40 hours of your videos on YouTube. I’d previously stayed away from the topic as I don’t have children and am a straight female. I am also a Guardian reader and of the “liberal left” and follow a lot of the people you mention from time to time on your videos. I do agree with them on most topics. EXCEPT this. You’ve opened my eyes to the unpleasant misogynists from Stonewall influencing the wider agenda. I can see how decades of hard work from feminists are being rapidly eroded. Those who genuinely have gender dysphoria should be helped and you seem to say that consistently in your videos. However autogynephilia is something else. I used to report a lot of hate speech on Twitter (neo Nazis). Not all of it was taken down and many of the accounts were allowed to continue to operate. Yet your Twitter account was taken down. I wish more celebrities would speak out with you.
There is no sense of proportion to these people. 'We should sack this woman for liking a tweet'.
I feel sick every time I see a head tilt now...
Girly smile here, too. Funny, none of the women athletes got the 'must wear girly smile' memo.
I have complained to The Times Glinner. Let’s see what they say.
I really cannot understand what the thinking is with those who don't want a gay child but think a boy saying he is a girl is ok!
If the boy who says he is female then goes of with another male he is gay.
I refer to those parents as ayatollahs - after the rules in Iran where to avoid the death penalty for homosexuality, you are allowed to have a sex change. And people think parents like these are liberal?
It's gay with extra steps to confound otherwise homophobic parents.
There's a great series of articles at Quillette called 'When Sons Become Daughters' by a gay journalist (having to write anonymously, of course). He interviewed lots of parents at length, writes very perceptively. These are overwhelmingly not homophobic or conservative parents. But then these are the ones who don't buy their kids identifying as trans, and they can't speak out or be publicly interviewed because their loving scepticism gets framed as transphobic. So people don't hear from them, don't realise how many are out there.
The ones who featured in the media as proud parents of trans kids seem to be where the homophobes are – disproportionately heard.
I will say this yet again:
Why have a gay son when you can have a straight daughter?
It's never parents who celebrate their gay/lesbian son or daughter.
Actually it DOES also happen to parents who celebrate their lesbian daughter or gay son. And sometimes also to gay parents. I know several families in both categories. Their kids get groomed on the internet and by virtue signalling peers to believe they're something more special/brave&stunning/worthy-of-oppression-points than ordinary L or G.
People need to know this sh*tstorm is happening to great parents, too. The homophobic/Munchhausens ones are there (*cough* Susie Green), but the online world is a cesspit of grooming, indoctrination, culty influencers, trans porn.... and even schools have become grooming enablers behind parents' backs, like Stonewall coaches them to be.
Never have parents had less influence over their kids, because the internet has such a massively disproportionate influence now. I don't know a single family who thinks their kid would have found, let alone jumped on, the trans train if the internet hadn't existed.
Part 1:
This is a long reply, but bear with me.
Last night I was reading about (in preparation to read) Martine Rothblatt’s “Transgender to Transhumanism.” After reading about transhumanism, a movement that seems to have looked at science fiction from the cyberpunk genre- everything from Philip K. Dick’s early “Do Androids Dreams of Electric Sheep?” to the modern “Black Mirror”- as an instruction manual rather than a warning, I wondered if there had been any critiques of transhumanism.
(To clarify, among the beliefs of this movement are: the recognition of biological sex- not oppression based on it, but simply the recognition, and the unequal roles of male and female themselves, reproductively (and I suspect Martine Rothblatt really means that man can’t, rather than that women have to), is an apartheid akin to the racial apartheid in South Africa; consequently, we must engineer the human race to enable anyone who wants to reproduce to reproduce, and anyone who doesn’t to be able to digest themselves of all reproductive capacity (there is a combination of mechanical wombs and surgeries/implantation, etc), thereby eliminating all inequality based on sex (how this follows logically is anyone’s guess; however, it’s an interesting self-own in that Rothblatt is implying that indeed, as feminists say, sex is the basis upon which women are oppressed); this is the tamest belief though so keep with me- next they believe in the project of immortality (naturally), and that they will make people immortal through the use of nanobots, becoming part machine, or, in the end, uploading everyone’s consciousness into the cloud, to become one might Heaven until the end of time. According to this Utopian vision, we can engineer people to be smarter, stronger, faster, have no diseases, commit no violence, feel no hate or prejudice; we can build the tools to clean up our environment; we can build robots to take care of our needs and replace all menial positions, thus being liberated from capitalism to achieve the fabled Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism of yore (I’m not sure what luxury gay is exactly, but it sounds wonderful).
There seems to be an assumption that some people will want to keep their human bodies, but disease-free and immortal; that others will want to augment with machines; and that still others (the implication is everyone, in the end) will want to fully merge with machines.
We will take energy from a process of breaking down water into its molecules to harvest hydrogen. There’s a lot of talk of an early 20th-century scientist’s proposals in this vein.
In order to house the resulting hundreds of billions- or more!- of humans, we will terraform as many planets as we need, sending envoys back to Earth for any essentials not found elsewhere (how this will end up being sustainable is beyond me; seems like there are a lot of unaccounted for variables in this plan).
I see lot of potential problems with this plan, even if achievable.
I searched for some criticisms of it, expecting to find a lot. I only found one professor of bioethics- Francis Fukuyama- who wrote a single article about trans humanism, calling it the most “dangerous ideology on the planet” (or something to that effect).
I wish he’d written more, as his short critique made only a single (if obvious) argument: we would be manufacturing inequality on a grand scale if the wealthiest people on the planet transformed themselves and their offspring into an augmented master race, while everyone else in the developing world got left behind.
I searched for rebuttals, and found several saying that this was a silly idea of “conservative critic” Fukuyama’s (“conservative critic Fukuyama’s” entire article was deeply concerned with human equality), because we understand that humans are “moral agents regardless of augmentation,” and persons under the law, and thus there would be no discrimination of the trans humanists to the regular ol’ humans.
On a forum somewhere (there was so little discussion of criticism of trans humanism in academia or mainstream media that I really dived into the weeds), someone mentioned animals, and said if we believe humans to have an essence (known as “bemes,” which will replace genes; humans have an indefinable essence of humanity in their character which supersedes genetics, and can be uploaded into a machine, achieving “disembodiment”), then what happens to animals? Will we recreate artificially intelligent robot pets and animal species roaming the Earth, and let the real ones die out?
Incredibly, Fukuyama tackled this idea of “human essence,” and argued that it is our imperfections which comprise our human essence; the people rebutting him (one in a scientific journal!) argued that he was being silly talking about human essence…no joke!!!
There are obviously MANY MORE possible criticisms of this ideology, and they all relate to the myriad ways this could go wrong: everything from the supposition that we can achieve human bliss in a hive mind and it won’t be not just shades but blinding rays of Jean Paul Sartre’s “No Exit” (“hell is other people”); that we know we can engineer morality!! (Because if we cannot, then what the augmented will do to the unaugmented is already a certainty- we just have to look around at the way humans treat each other now, which isn’t a whole lot better than we treated each other for all of “civilized” history, only the violence, which is mainly economic, is in that sense sanitized); that we could achieve all of us this no hiccups or major consequences of any kind (is foresee us achieving these things only partially, thus ushering in a techno-dystopia; spectacular short-sightedness is, after all, humanity’s Achilles heel, and our irresponsibility with technology has been borne out again and again).
Part 2:
When it comes to the idea of our engineering our brains, I have to wonder how the trans humanists plan to rush neuroscience. My brother is a systems neuroscientist (and as such, dubious about the reach of cognitive neuroscience at the moment); according to him, we know “next to nothing” about how the brain works, and not even just the human brain. We can make guesses about correlations and brain patterns, but trying to engineer based on those would be trying to navigate without a map: a human rights disaster in the making. My brother is actually a part of the human connectome project, in which a few thousands neuroscientists across the world are contributing to the building of a map of the human brain. He told me that unlike the human genome project, a project which turned out to proceed remarkably fast when the human genome proved to be relatively simple, the human connectome bears no such surprises: “it will take us hundreds of years to get anywhere close,” he told me.
So I’m wondering how, by tweaking targeted genes, such pioneering science and technology proposes to be certain of the effects on the human mind and moral centers of the brain.
Even *less,* in my opinion, is known about the human body and its powerful connection to the brain in the sense of the mind/body connection (how our psyches affect our physical state; how our physical state affects our psyches). And yet, the trans humanists propose we drop our bodies like a load of bricks before we ever even solve this ultimate of human mysteries.
That all of this is far out of reach doesn’t need stating; yet, billions of dollars have been poured into various arms of industry, to bring about some of these changes. Trans humanists right now are excited about pioneering surgeries (cough cough), manufacturing identity, increasing longevity, use of CRISPR and other genetic engineering technology, early machine augmentation and disease elimination, and nanobot technology; in time will come the Singularity (the reasoning goes).
Obviously, everyone- pharmaceutical and bioengineering corporations; the medical industrial complex; all the corporations and politicians and institutions affiliated- stands to make a lot of money from these advances.
As to how this relates to your comment: the Internet has clearly been an advance for us in some ways, yet has been tremendously deleterious to us in others. In terms of human life, pre-Internet we actually had many analog time-saving and entertainment devices, and a high quality of life. We’ve gained instant access to information and instant access to others across the world- at what price?
It’s clear the internet has been extremely deleterious to humanity in a number of ways, particularly socially, ironically intellectually (forget the information has; it’s the disinformation and misinformation age), and in terms of what I like to think of as “ease of influence.” I also believe that due to the flourishing of pornography and the proliferation of decentralized internet cults of grievance, it has also been deleterious morally, particularly to children and young people whose minds and worldview are still developing.
Most people over fifty today don’t have much inkling of this, as they were not raised with the internet in their lives from childhood or young adulthood. I was twelve when we got a dial-up internet connection in my house, and first found my way into AOL chat rooms; a young adult when I got my first iPhone. Things are so much more intense for young people growing up today; it’s as if they’ve grown up more online than in real life, for many kids, in many ways.
What’s happening now with regard to transgender ideation is one manifestation of that; the rise of gaming, VR, and the descent into fantasy life of many is another. There is an aspect of creativity on the one hand, and of daydreaming and infantilization on the other (I say this as a childish daydreamer myself).
We don’t yet have any long-running studies on the effects of internet on our cognitive function, either of adults or of children who have grown up online, since it’s all so new. It’s quite clear to most people who give any thought to this that a lot of what’s going on with young people as a group right now, and more broadly with all of society, has to do with growing up largely online or being online a lot of the time (in the case of adults who did not grow up with it).
And yet no is taking this into account. If we represent anything collectively at this point, it’s the frog in the pot. We are the frog in the pot, all as one now. (And have been for a while, if human-caused climate change is any indication).
And as the Dentons Document makes clear, that is exactly the way the trans humanists want it.
I strongly agree with every word, and feel real, proper gratitude that you have provided such clear-headed description and wide-ranging yet concise critical analyisis of these issues.
I've been worrying about all the things you describe for years, know many young people profoundly affected, see that we are ALL frogs in this damned pot, and wonder how the hell people might be awoken from obliviousness to what's being lost and destroyed. Voices are needed that are able to rise above the thought-limiting, clichéd modes of analysis, convey clearly what's happening, and stir others toward ideas of possible ways forward.
So yes please to your much-needed article! (Meanwhile I've resorted to 'Come, sweet asteroid.')
And I apologize for the many, many typos; I wrote this on my phone, which frequently changes words (and it’s hard to scroll up and find those in a long comment). I didn’t expect my comment to out quite so long when I set out to write about this!
I might go back and edit this, and properly write it up as an article sometime, critiquing trans humanism and showing the parallels to our current experiment in the Internet Age.
'I might... properly write it up as an article sometime...'
Please, please do. It seems to be largely there.
I can't see such analysis coming from other kinds of quarters. If not from a GC female (a subscriber to Glinner, of course), it would inevitably be unhelpfully blinkered. I hope you'll go for it.
This is an excellent, much-needed post. I need to jump in and say that before continuing to read your Part 2.
I've long been aware of trans-identified billionaire Rothblatt's massive funding of both transgenderism and transhumanism, wondered what the hell the latter is really about but didn't have the stomach to sink down into it, hoped somebody sanely alert would write something.... and waited..... wondered why there still hadn't appeared any analysis or critique of it. (Partly the usual 'mustn't criticise anything emanating from a trans-identified male, especially one with high social status' copout?).
Your explication here is terrific. You MUST write an article.
Now to Part 2.
PS Your outline confirms all the visceral (yeah, gonna use that word) dread and scepticism I and surely many others less informed and articulate than you have felt in hearing of trans-humanism and transwoman Rothblatt's pioneering role in conceptualising and funding it.
Two ladies talking about lady things... 😆
Kind of like when you don't capitulate to the TWAW mantra and they tell you to suck/choke on their dick and threaten you with other acts of violence. Yeah, us girls say those things to each other ALL day long. If that's what it means to identify as a woman then I might identify as a can of pepper spray.
Very true. As a woman, I've had the odd serious row with other women but even at our bitterest, we've never threatened each other with rape or any form of sexual violence.
The guy who says terfs tell him they're glad trans people face discrimination? Where has he seen this? GC people (terfs to them) wouldn't say such a thing.
Must be one of the characteristics of narcissism to create false oppression so you can justify the attention-seeking ploys for sympathy. Man at bus stop is quite good at this too.
As we all wonder, where in hell do trans face discrimination? They demand everyone else kowtow to them and their fetishes, reinforce their shaky identities, have sex with them, etc, etc, etc. And Aaron in GL's interview with him, is the first TIF I've ever seen who passed.
One subscriber mentioned the other day that they thought the 'Q' word was supposed to be a slur. Well, here is the confirmation that it is indeed insulting. What sets 'Q' identifying people apart anyway?
Same with non binary, what a pile of crap. If you're gender non-conforming, this should be good enough. This, in my view is progressive, as long as it does not involve invading biological women's spaces.
It's no surprise those idiots usually are white heterosexual men who think women and minority groups should not enjoy the same rights they do.
before i was an ex-guardian reader, before i even knew how to piece together the gender critical argument (thanks to graham and radfems), i knew there was a strange silent 'queer complicity' inherent within the LGBTQ+ scene.
I looked up 'leaf gf' on twitter …. hehe. In your pervy dreams sonny.
TikTok really says a lot about the state of western 'culture'. Ironically, all making money for the far smarter Chinese.