Why Transgenderism is Transhumanism

The dark truth underlying gender ideology

In this essay, I want to discuss the destructive ideology of transhumanism, particularly in the context of transgender ideology. In my experience, many transgender activists who promote transgender ideology also advocate for transhumanism. Indeed, transhumanism is part and parcel of the underlying ethos that shapes transgender ideology.

Defining Transhumanism: The Cyborg Concept

First, what do I mean by transhumanism? My understanding—once a belief I held—is exemplified by Donna Haraway’s influential Cyborg Manifesto and embraced by transgender activists and transfeminists in a “monster politics” that glorifies Frankstein’s monster as model of how to “queer” and “deconstruct” the normativity of the body.

Essentially, transhumanism is a technocratic philosophy asserting that technology can enhance and thereby change the human being and human nature. On this view, there is no essential, eternal, God-given human nature. We are just machines. Just as you can bolt a rocket engine onto a car to turn it into a rocket car or add a flamethrower, you can manipulate a machine in any way by attaching different types of technology. According to this vision, the human body is nothing but a Mr. Potatohead that we can assemble and reassembly according to the plasticity of our wills.

Technology’s Power to Redefine Humanity

Through technological enhancement, we can change what it means to be human. For example, humans are limited to five senses and cannot naturally detect infrared. But if we implanted a chip in our brain to enable detection of the infrared spectrum, we would have enhanced and altered what it means to be human. In principle, if done for a good reason, there’s nothing inherently wrong with using technology to make human lives better. However, the danger of this technocratic transhumanist vision lies in treating human beings merely as machines, reducing humanity to an object.

It’s one thing to use technology and modern medicine to restore health or enhance our natural abilities. The great danger of transhumanism is that it risks stripping away the recognition that we are not just objects or machines. We are subjects with infinite dignity—the dignity of the human soul—which cannot be fully reduced to the level of a pure biological machine, a mere assemblage of materialistic mechanisms with no soul.

Humanity Beyond the Machine

Humans differ from animals because we are rational beings. Our identity is rational and ensouled, elevating us above the status of mere biomachines. We are more than our wetware. The transhumanist vision sees the human body as infinitely malleable. With enough technological mastery, we can manipulate the body into anything we desire. This philosophy appeals strongly to trans activists because the core vision of transgenderism holds that a man can become a woman, or someone born male can be considered truly female.

Transgenderism’s Reliance on Technology

What does it mean to “truly be” something? Part of it is grounded in the claim of gender identity—an innate identity that determines whether you’re a man or a woman. On other formulations of transgenderism, it’s not necessarily about being born with an innate identity but rather a desire to be the opposite sex. The process of transition, therefore, becomes a transmogrification, transforming into the opposite sex using technology.

Even though trans people can’t change their chromosomes (yet) or change their ability to produce opposite-sex gametes (yet), they can change their endocrinological sex. Trans activists therefore tend to refine sex away from the gametic binary of eggs and sperm into distinct “layers” of sex: secondary sex characteristics, gametic sex, hormonal sex, morphological sex, chromosomal sex, psychological sex, etc. We can manipulate some of these with current technology. We can alter your endocrinological sex so your body runs on estrogen instead of testosterone, changing gene expression. I often hear trans women fantasize about editing the genome with CRISPR to infinitely manipulate the body or fantasize about growing wombs in a lab and implanting them into their bodies, fulfilling their transhumanist, autogynephilic fantasies.

Even if it’s not technically possible now to change all immutable sex characteristics present at birth, they argue we can alter enough of them using technology to move toward becoming the opposite sex—or to possess enough opposite-sex characteristics to be properly classified as such. This idea is baked into the basic nomenclature of transgenderism. When we say “transgender male-to-female (MTF),” it presupposes the possibility of going from male to female.

All of this is fundamentally dependent on reducing humanity to that of a mere object. We become objects manipulating ourselves as objects, losing our dignity in the process.

The Cyborg Philosophy in Action

This is why transhumanism is popular among trans activists. It’s a cyborg philosophy where surgical interventions—removing parts, enhancing things, digging a hole, building a pole, slicing off body parts—enable transformation. This has led to extreme body modifications. Some trans people now request non-binary surgeries, like penis-preserving vaginoplasty, to have both a penis and a vagina. In Canada, a recent case deemed this procedure medically necessary, life-saving healthcare, covered by national insurance—taxpayers funded it.

There are online Reddit forums like r/salmacian dedicated to this “altersex” identity, where people identify as having both sets of genitals, now conceived as a legitimate gender identity in transgender ideology. Philosophically, though what’s the limit? What if you wanted two penises or a penis on your chest? Under the current insurance schema, there seems to be no philosophical limit to what would be considered “medically necessary healthcare.” But where do we draw the line?

The Limitless Body and Loss of Telos

The problem with transhumanism is that there is no theoretical limit. The body is just a machine, and why would a mere machine have limits of transmogrification? Furthermore, transhumanism implies there’s no telos—no inherent design or purpose—to the body. You can’t read purpose from nature because transhumanism is a fundamentally atheistic, materialistic, nihilistic worldview. The human body is an evolved consequence of random mutations, cosmic dust, we are but mere star stuff—pure biological machines with no ultimate purpose or design. We are mere meat machines. The purpose of our body is whatever we want it to be.

On this conception, there’s no normative system of health. We can’t say it’s healthy to have only one vagina or only one penis because it could be healthy to have both, so long as it satisfies an individual’s desire to alter their body. Normativity, health, and telos reduce to individual preference—whatever makes you feel good becomes the truth of teleology or normativity.

The Danger of Reducing Humanity to Meat Machines

If chopping off a leg makes someone feel good, it becomes healthy for them because health now reduces to the satisfaction of desire. This is the ultimate logic and entailment of transgender ideology’s underlying transhumanist vision. When you reduce human dignity to that of a mere object or machine—mindless, random meat machines evolved with no purpose—nothing is off limits. We can infinitely manipulate the human body in any way we want. The body becomes an object, and when reduced to an object, any offense against it can be justified as long as subjective preferences are satisfied.

This aligns with utilitarianism, maximizing subjective desire, which can justify any horror under consequentialist ethics. It removes the eternal law—the idea that there is a way things ought to be. Health is replaced with the notion that we are just machines with no inherent purpose. All meaning comes from our subjective, relative, arbitrary preferences. As Nietzsche described, we’re in a Darwinian arms race of competing subjectivities, battling it out, red in tooth and claw, in a will to power.

A Nihilistic Worldview I Once Embraced

To me, this is a depressing and nihilistic philosophy of life—one I held for over a decade. As a trans activist, I defended transhumanism in my activist writing because it’s the logical entailment of transgender ideology. Many trans activists might hear this and say, “That sounds wonderful. You just explained my philosophy perfectly.” That’s what happens when you kill God in the Nietzschean sense. When God is dead, you kill the source of normativity, the design, the telos, the intrinsic purpose directed toward our ultimate ends.

We become mere meat machines with no rulebook in the universe to dictate how many penises, vaginas, or legs we ought to have—or whether it’s good to amputate a leg because it feels right. Many trans activists just bite the bullet and call this progress in human evolution. But how do you define progress? It’s just the maximization of subjective happiness, which begs the question: Why is that good? If a misanthrope desires fewer happy people, how do we say they’re wrong? It reduces to might makes right—whoever imposes their subjective preferences wins. This is Nietzsche’s master morality.

Finding Purpose Beyond Transhumanism

Nietzsche was the prophet of the modern transgender transhumanist vision. He saw this clearly and embraced it as the logical outcome of God’s death. Some atheists bite this bullet, but many cling to the hope of rescuing normativity, health, and objectivity from this nihilistic, materialistic system where we’re random meat machines evolving from dust to dust in a universe doomed to heat death. It’s a bleak existence.

I moved away from this philosophy because I found a higher purpose in believing in God. Only from God can you derive objective normativity—a perfectly fine argument for His existence. Many intuitively think objective morality exists; to have a moral law, you need a moral lawgiver. I used to find such an idea incoherent, but now I see not only its truth but also its necessity in our technocratic society gone awry.