Trans - ??? Martine Rothblatt and Transhumanism *title edited by MNHQ at OP's request*

[adultingforever]

I came across this today, and wonder what you all make of it?
uncommongroundmedia.com/martine-rothblatt-a-founding-father-of-the-transgender-empire/

The link works for me, so I hope you can read it, too. Is this just a conspiracy theory and we should not give it any time? Or is this a real concern?

I am not a posting Feminism regular, but I read it every day, and I am a MN member of at least 10 years, recently changed username as I posted something personal a few months back. I posted here because I have learned so much from you all! And these two articles, which were linked, really took me by surprise; so I thought I'd see what everyone thinks. That's all. The idea of a body as a "flesh Lego" seems about right, and I am concerned by links to pharmaceutical suppliers. It seems to me that sex cannot be changed; not really; but sometimes there are players at work behind the scenes that I do not think about.

I think that men in particular have for s long time been interested in ideas around living forever, creating 'life', creating things that are 'in their own image'.

Frankenstein is about this I think?
All the sci fi where babies are grown in ways that don't involve women.
And the real life efforts to find a way to do this.
I watched a aliens film recently, one of the new ones, and creating life was key to the story.
I'm sure there's loads more examples.

There's also often a side helping of misogyny in things that reference this.

In sci fi stories loads of the time.
If it's a dystopian story, the women are usually prostitutes. Or eg the new mad Max, imprisoned and used to breed.

In utopian ones women tend to be sexually forward, happy to have lots of casual sexual encounters, that sort of thing.

Female sex slaves come up often.

When it comes to building robots etc.

Along with military uses, and replacing people in manufacturing. That sort of thing. Making a life-like sex robot always seems to be something that's worked on and something of great interest to men. (More tv and news about them then other robots!).

The transhuman stuff also seems to be a particularly male thing from what I've seen.

In the end most of it shows the resentment that men have that they need us because we are the ones who can make babies. This has been true for an awful awful long time.

The sex stuff comes from a similar place- resentment that we can say no. That even if we can't say no we are still not 100% compliant, we don't behave as they want etc.

That's my view s bit out there but it's what I think!

Maybe that's going to called a conspiracy theory now as well!

I haven't read all of the articles and I'm completely lost in the accusations of antisemitism. It strikes me, however, that if we are looking at enhancing human capacities there is plenty of work to do on ourselves, our behaviour and attitudes, and personally I would rather see investment in supporting people to become decent, happy humans before we try to extend our abilities in other areas. I'm quite sure most people are not at all psychologically equipped to cope with everlasting, or even significantly extended, life at present. We have plenty of room for growth, in ourselves, as a species, and in how we organise before we go down this route. It's like doing an attic conversion before addressing the subsidence.

NiceGerbil and guinnessguzzler excellent posts!

gerbil I’m a huge scifi fan and struggle with the concepts and ideas you’ve outlined - both real world tech and the genre of scifi struggle to incorporate women in positive ways. That’s why I avoid post-apocalyptic and dystopian scifi as much as possible, it’s not an interesting thought experiment for me to see the supposed future of female-style sex robots, or genetically enhanced prostitutes, or slave harems. Those are things I fear or that disgust me rather than getting a kick out of reading/watching. And, yes, male scientists and technologists have always been keen on replacing women, or the abilities that women possess that men want to control, so people like Rothblatt and Kurzweil etc are no different to earlier versions of the patriarchy. Powerful, rich men spread their money around to create a world that suits them and their predilections - that’s why I don’t trust the motivations behind a lot of the ‘philanthropy’ from Silicon Valley and big pharma owners. A lot of Liberals and Progressives (especially in the US) seem to support that type of philanthropist while disagreeing with more conservative philanthropy - I have a problem with anyone being rich enough to alter laws and social behaviour to suit themselves and I don’t care where on the political spectrum they sit.

guinness I agree with you, I’d rather the human race improved as people and societies rather than as modified bodies. That’s one aspect of dystopian fiction that I think works, it shows how bolting the power of technology and genetics onto a flawed person or society actually makes life worse rather than improving anything.

I totally agree with your analysis, Nicegerbil and it's something I wanted to articulate myself. We see a lot of this need to control or replace women in sci-fi and this kind of speculative thinking from tranhumanists. It is sometimes dressed up in more progressive language eg. to give a greater variety of ways in which we can reproduce as a species etc. but either intentionally or by omission, women are often either reduced to sex objects or our reproductive capabilities are in some way being controlled or tampered with. A movement so lacking in female representation is in any case going to be skewed in it's objectives to a male perspective - Silicone valley scares me in terms of how male dominated it is and how much power it holds.

It has to be said as well that a higher proportion than average of men on the autistic spectrum work in Silicon Valley. These are men who don't have theory of mind and struggle to empathise with women whose lives and experiences are so different to their own. Struggling with social interactions, they may also not have very many different kinds of relationships with a variety of women. I see this kind of autistic thinking in the trans rights movement - very rigid thinking about what a 'c*s' woman is and the stereotypes they consider women adhere to. Very black and white thinking and a lack of understanding that there is more to a woman than a dress and some lipstick, more going on than what's on the surface. I'm not saying that to tarnish autistic people at all, obviously a lot of autistic people are gender critical and regular contributors here too, but I understand that way of thinking very well from personal experience and can see how it could influence these movements.

@yeahbutnaw

This is next level tin-foil hat nonsense.

It's another anti-semitic conspiracy - just like QAnon - that speaks of a fictional world where a handful of Jewish people wield incredible influence to steer public policy for nefarious purposes.

That "gender critical" people buy into this garbage is pretty revealing.

Have you not come across transhumanism before?

merrymouse quite, I don't think the person posting that knows what a conspiracy theory is. Transhumanism is a movement that has well-known figures and advocates who publish books on the subject, give talks and conferences, it's all out in the open, not hidden.

@Novelusername

I totally agree with your analysis, Nicegerbil and it's something I wanted to articulate myself. We see a lot of this need to control or replace women in sci-fi and this kind of speculative thinking from tranhumanists. It is sometimes dressed up in more progressive language eg. to give a greater variety of ways in which we can reproduce as a species etc. but either intentionally or by omission, women are often either reduced to sex objects or our reproductive capabilities are in some way being controlled or tampered with. A movement so lacking in female representation is in any case going to be skewed in it's objectives to a male perspective - Silicone valley scares me in terms of how male dominated it is and how much power it holds.

I'm a female geek, possibly autistic and definitely fond of sci fi in my youth.

I still find it both tragic and comic that the sci-fi greats of the mid twentieth century could posit the most amazing possibilities yet it never occurred to them that a female person might be the one driving the spaceship or building the time machine, or even just doing her thing in her own right rather than as a consequence of her interactions with males.

Female agency truly is the final frontier, the undiscovered country!

I still find it both tragic and comic that the sci-fi greats of the mid twentieth century could posit the most amazing possibilities yet it never occurred to them that a female person might be the one driving the spaceship or building the time machine, or even just doing her thing in her own right rather than as a consequence of her interactions with males.

But they don’t ever ever think of women as people. Men are people. Women pop into existence when a man has a use for one.

I wonder if men actually think they can out smart biology by nutrition, fitness, swapping parts. Are men mentally more detached from the biological reality of being a mammal because their bodies don’t have monthly cycles, sexual impulse is not linked with pregnancy consequences? They don’t gestate, give birth or lactate.

I don't think the person posting that knows what a conspiracy theory is.

To be fair to PP, I think they do and are just throwing accusations in bad faith.

Conspiracies often link to real events. I'm sure the likes of Icke mention things like MR, Jessica Yaniv transhumanism and self ID because objecting to real world craziness and malice provides cover for the totally batshit elements of their beliefs.

What's silly is claiming that everyone from a particular group is part of something because of one post tangentially touching on it. It is, ironically, the same approach that Icke et al use.