Transhumanist but Transphobic?

Why are some people excited about brain implants and life extension but freaked out by transgender therapies?

Right-wing authoritarians broadly hate all the changes that modernity has wrought on traditional sex/gender relations, from women's equality and gay rights to voluntary childlessness and nonbinary identities. As historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat has detailed in Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present, authoritarianism for the last century has been closely tied to the defense of eroding patriarchal power and gender roles.

Transgender people, in particular, seem to be on the Right's mind a lot however, from Putin's bans on gender-affirming therapies to the 900-page policy manual for a second Trump administration, Project 2025, composed by a network of far-right think tanks in Washington DC. Project 2025 proposes to ban media promoting "transgender ideology," forbid federal defense of transgender civil liberties, and ban transgender people from military service.

What needs more explanation is why prominent people in futurist circles have been suckered into transphobia while otherwise embracing the radical possibilities of emerging technologies. The hateful behavior of Elon Musk towards his transgender daughter is a recent shocking example.

In 2008, George Dvorsky and I published an IEET white paper, "Postgenderism:  Beyond the Gender Binary." We were inspired by postgender feminist writers like Judith Butler but felt that an entirely social constructionist approach was inadequate. We argued that insofar as the persistence of biological sexual attributes are obstacles to complete fluidity in sexuality and gender presentation (a still open question), then emerging technologies will help complete our liberation from the two billion-year accident of sexual dimorphism. I added some historical materialism by noting that changes in the means of production from agriculture and manufacturing to knowledge work had helped make the gendered division of labor irrelevant. Artificial wombs will likewise free us from a gendered division of labor in reproduction, as Shulamith Firestone argued in her 1970 The Dialectic of Sex.  

"Biotechnologies, neurotechnologies, and information technologies make it possible to complete the project of freeing ourselves from patriarchy and the constraints of binary gender. Postgender technologies will put an end to static biological and sexual self-identification, allowing individuals to decide for themselves which biological and psychological gender traits they wish to keep or reject."

We would be a lot more careful stepping into this debate today. Understanding all the nuances of the subsequent debates about autogynephilia, TERFs, medicalization, therapies for minors, or participation in sports is daunting and treacherous. But we were trying to point out the apparent trajectory that we saw for a technoprogressive approach to freedom from gender.

These ideas had already been percolating in our futurist circles for decades. Science fiction authors had begun to imagine futures where we could easily modify our biological gender, at least as far back as John Varley's gender-fluid protagonist in his 1992 Steel Beach. The Extropians embraced gender modification in the early 1990s, and transhumanists like Anders Sandberg included transgender therapies in their definition of morphological freedom in the 2000s. For Sandberg, "the freedom to modify one's body is essential not just to transhumanism, but also to any future democratic society." The transhumanist movement attracted a disproportionate number of transgender people, most prominently transgender writer Martine Rothblatt, who published her manifesto The Apartheid of Sex: A Manifesto on the Freedom of Gender in 1995, followed by From Transgender to Transhuman: A Manifesto on the Freedom of Form in 2011. Similarly, Villaca, Dias, and de Oliveira have recently proposed that transgender rights should be fought for as part of the broader struggle for transhuman rights.

The connections we were making were amplified by the connections made by the Christian Right between sex/gender non-conformity and transhumanism. Souls, for those who believe in them, are often gendered. Choosing a different gender or not conforming to sex/gender expectations is a violation of God's will. Transgenderism is just a stalking horse for the Satanic agenda of the transhumanist conspiracy. For Christian critics, "behind the train of the transgender movement, this train of transhumanism is rolling right on down the tracks."

Conservative Christian rejection of gender-affirming therapy is hard to argue with. You either believe God doesn't make mistakes with the Y chromosome (unlike all the other congenital mistakes Christians readily acknowledge should be fixed), or you don't. What is more challenging to understand is the growing visibility of anti-transgender ideology in the futurist and transhumanist milieu.

"Tech bro" transphobia can partly be attributed to the fact that techno-utopian futurism is still disproportionately male, and many men feel a visceral threat from "wokeness," from distaste to being asked for pronouns to incel attacks on feminism. Although LGBTQ identities are growing quickly in the U.S., only 10% of Gen Z men identify as queer or trans, compared to almost 30% of Gen Z women. The role of a small set of right-wing tech billionaires has been less visible. In the last decade, gay Christian tech billionaire Peter Thiel, a prominent funder of transhumanist endeavors such as life extension and brain-computer interfaces, took a sharp turn into MAGA and the far right, along with sometime transhumanist Elon Musk. This small but giga-wealthy clique was influenced by authoritarian futurist bloggers like Curtis Yarvin, whose "dark enlightenment" calls for rejecting Enlightenment egalitarianism, liberal democracy, gender equality, and a return to "natural hierarchies." These ties have come under sharper scrutiny with Trump's pick of Peter Thiel's acolyte J.D. Vance as Vice Presidential running mate.

When I posed the problem of transhumanist transphobes on r/transhumanism, most responses were along these lines:

They just want the anti-aging medicine. They just want the cybernetics / bionics, whatever. But they don't buy into the "morphological freedom" thing. It's too big of a leap. At the end of the day they're still conservative / nationalist / Muslim / Christian / Hindu that identify as the average joe in the place where they live.

Most of the rich and powerful people who call themselves transhumanists obviously aren't. They use it as a cover for their oligarch fantasies. They have a lot of simp fans who just copy them hoping that sempai will notice them.

Those are probably the correct sociological takes. There is some philosophical distance from being excited about life extension or brain implants to accepting the radical implications of morphological freedom. Many in the futurist milieu, including billionaires, are only at step one and may well never advance beyond it, especially if they are male and embedded in culturally conservative social networks.

I want to hear from you. What are the key ethical, political, and regulatory questions to be addressed by a technoprogressive framework for gender-modifying therapies? What are the technologies to keep an eye on, such as gene therapies or tissue engineering? Do you agree that religious beliefs about souls having genders or that God's will determines biological sex are the source of religious transphobia? The Right may move on to new boogeymen, but these issues are just going to be increasingly important.