The Transhumanism Revolution: Oppression Disguised as Liberation

https://quillette.com/2018/07/11/the-transhumanism-revolution-oppression-disguised-as-liberation/

by wellpast • 8 years ago

11 4 8 years ago

Somasis• 8 years ago

It's awesome to see that even Hacker News isn't immune to transphobia and falling into the lie that being transgender is ignoring biology. What a load of trash.

I looked up the author, and discovered that Libby Emmons is a transphobe (or more accurately a trans-exclusionary radical feminist), at least from reading this one in which she tries to posit that trans women are just in it because we're objectifying misogynistic parodies of women. Great. http://thefederalist.com/2015/06/03/how-the-hypersexual-tran... (check out that weak attempt to reference Kant's thing in itself near the end and how it completely misses the point that it is non-physical- which is exactly what gender is insisted to be by many trans people)

wellpast2• 8 years ago

It’s awesome to see that a mere post of an article is enough to conclude that the whole of Hacker News is transphobic, let alone the poster. Mia culpa—I will delete the post soon; I will also burn the article if I can by some means find it in book form.

dragonwriter• 8 years ago

removing reproduction from our bodily purview does not only liberate us from the body, it also subjects us to the tyranny of the mind.

The “tyranny of the mind”? Being completely subject to one's mind without outside constraints (or, realistically, bring subject to one's mind with fewer outside constraints than in the status quo ante) is not reasonably described as tyranny. And there is no argument advanced for this description, it's just tossed out as if tossing out the word tyranny is sufficient to establish the claim.

Liberation from reproduction is liberation from sex,

While obviously reproduction is a central (though arguably not the sole: it's social role cannot be ignored) evolutionary function of the sex drive, the human sex drive isn't restricted to a reproductive context on a way that even the total elimination of a bodily role in reproduction would eliminate the drive or function of the sex act, so the implication claimed her I'd not justified.

At which point, gender truly becomes fashion with no remaining foundations in the story of human origins.

Ascribed gender and gender identity are already separate things from sex (well, ascribed gender is, there is actually a strong reason to believe that gender identity is in part an element of the complex of sex-related inborn biological traits that come in a wide variety of combinations but two dominant clusters which have been labelled as typically male and typically female.)

wellpast2• 8 years ago

the human sex drive isn't restricted to a reproductive context on a way that even the total elimination of a bodily role in reproduction would eliminate the drive or function of the sex act, so the implication claimed her I'd not justified.

This is counterfactual, of course, and very “tossed out” and suspect; it seems reasonable that if we can cleave the body from the mind, then we could ablate the sex drive from the mind. But all of this is moot; the liberation she speaks of us there regardless. We don’t have to have sex to reproduce anymore; that’s certainly liberation.

The Transhumanism Revolution: Oppression Disguised as Liberation

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