Emerging From the Ooze: Sex Identities Driven by Capital and Technology

By Ian David

A proposal: ‘Evolution no longer means the slow grind of mutation and selection, but a directed sprint fueled by venture capital, viral ideologies and human & machinic desire. Techno-capital, AI, and human evolution have thus become synonymous at this point.’

An obviously provisional assertion, but I don’t think a hyperbolic one.

Let’s start with the crux of the matter, though: a couple of questions whose answers will determine what kind of world becomes physically and legally possible.

Yes, it’s as serious as that.

The first question: Is the natural human body - sexed, mortal, and biologically bounded - something that must be protected as the final limit on political, technological, and economic power? Or is it simply the first outdated substrate, raw material to be optimized, commodified, and replaced?’

Second (and supplementary to the first): Do we accept that there exists a sacred order in the givenness of the human body, especially its binary, reproductive sex and mortal limits, that must be held inviolable by every regime, every market and ideology? Or do we declare there is no such order, only matter to be re-engineered without end?

I’ll return to these momentarily, but before that, let’s look at the last couple of weeks.

The Webberley Media Storm

Over the last two weeks, what we might loosely describe as ‘the trans issue’ has raised its roaring head once more on X, trending daily alongside ‘puberty blockers,’ ‘gender debate,’ ‘child abuse,’ and ‘demonic.’

Two issues in particular set this cycle of hysteria in motion.

The first was an extraordinarily effective media and PR blitz by Dr Helen Webberley, the former GP behind the telemedicine clinic ‘GenderGP’, which presents itself as offering ‘gender-affirming care’ - puberty blockers foremost among them - to ‘trans-identifying children’ (Critics would frame this cohort in starker terms - vulnerable young people encouraged to disavow their real sex).

Webberley is no stranger to regulatory turbulence. In 2022, she was suspended by the UK’s Medical Tribunal for what it called ‘serious misconduct,’ only to have the ruling overturned on appeal a year later. Her licence to practice was later withdrawn in 2024, not as a disciplinary measure, but because she herself chose not to revalidate it. Her husband and colleague, Dr Michael Webberley, wasn’t so fortunate; he was struck off the medical register entirely.

None of this, however, has prevented ‘GenderGP’ from expanding internationally, most recently launching into the US, nor has it cooled Webberley’s willingness to stand unapologetically under the spotlight. In the span of a single week, she surfaced on GB News, debated gender critical lesbian feminist Julie Bindel, then writer and activist Helen Joyce on Times Radio, and sat for long-form interviews with podcaster Andrew Gold and US commentator Robbie Starbuck. The effect was instantaneous and electrical. Webberley became, at least for a few days, the gravitational centre of the entire online conversation around ‘trans healthcare’.

As you’d expect, reactions were polarised, but the overwhelming responses toward her were of revulsion, fury, and a sense she was irredeemably evil or dangerously insane, likely both. But even high-profile gender-critical lawyer Sarah Phillimore admitted to ‘a strange kind of respect’ for the medic as ‘the only trans activist I think in the history of the world who has been willing to offer themselves up for these kinds of exchanges,’ before adding that she – Phillimore - remained utterly ‘baffled’ as to Webberley’s endgame.

I, among others, suggested an answer….neither Phillimore and her comrades nor the public at large were Webberley’s target; the cohort of distressed girls and boys seeking to escape their sexed bodies were, and even scattergun visibility on this scale is worth millions. The data bore it out, too. GenderGP’s web traffic reputedly spiked massively. And with the service’s already roughly 10,000-strong customer base, even a modest visitor-to-booking conversion rate of 2–5% (with sector medians around 3–4%, according to Grok) could translate into a substantial influx of new clients. ‘Niche services (such as this one) often perform at the higher end due to high-intent traffic,’ Grok noted, ‘but they face challenges like trust-building and regulatory hurdles.’

And paradoxically, the bruising was part of the trust-building. While critics perceived her as repeatedly eviscerated, her intended audience cast her as a warrior-queen under siege. So there followed a cascade of endorsements: India Willoughby, Munroe Bergdorf, Shon Faye, Elliot Page, Laverne Cox, Stonewall UK, Mermaids, TransActual, Chase Strangio, Alok Vaid-Menon - all praising her interviews, her composure, her ‘courage,’ as well as the GenderGP model itself.

All in all, then, she pulled off a brilliant strategic influence operation wrapped in an (albeit unsettling) moral narrative - a persecuted doctor offering life-saving services and a noble cause under attack. Whether one regards her as heroic, reckless, or something in between, the outcome itself was inarguable.

Webberley Is Not an Aberration – She Is the Establishment

But when considering this, let’s not forget another very real situation, too: Webberley, far from being an aberration, is actually representative of the ‘Establishment’ and institutional view. Here’s just a sample (and it is just a sample) of organisations that remain fully supportive of ‘trans rights’ - positions that are now so deeply entrenched one is left wondering if they can ever realistically be undone. The stature and importance of these bodies are worth noting too, so please do read the list below in full:

UK

British Medical Association (BMA)

General Medical Council (GMC)

Royal College of Psychiatrists

Royal College of General Practitioners (RCGP)

National Education Union (NEU)

Australia

Australian Medical Association (AMA)

Royal Australasian College of Physicians (RACP)

Royal Australian College of General Practitioners (RACGP)

Australian Psychological Society (APS)

Australian Education Union (AEU)

US

American Medical Association (AMA)

American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP)

American Psychological Association (APA)

American Academy of Family Physicians (AAFP)

National Education Association (NEA)

With all this in mind, then, for nearly a week, Webberley completely dominated the discourse.

That, at least, was until the second event I’ve alluded to - the eruption, almost overnight, of a mass gender-critical meltdown over the newly announced puberty-blocker trial in the UK for children as young as ten.

Selective Amnesia and the Cass Review

What struck me about this was the selective amnesia. The very same people now screaming had, for the past eighteen months, treated the Cass Review of “gender identity services” for children and young people in the UK as Holy Writ. However, the trial was literally Cass Recommendation 6.

There are undoubtedly others, but the only person I could immediately find who’d criticized the proposal before it became a reality was conservative influencer Connor Tomlinson, who wrote a thoughtful piece back in March. Beyond that? Silence. So, it’s a little hard to square the circle. How do you coronate a report as a ‘gold standard’ and then set your hair on fire the moment it’s implemented?

But that’s by no means the main issue.

The bigger mistake, I think, is the fantasy that Cass - or any of the so-called ‘victories’ won by ‘gender criticals’ (or ‘realists’) in recent months function as kill-switches that will somehow rewind us to a pre-2015 normality.

I don’t believe that for a second - that ship sailed years ago. The combination of things like the Yogyakarta Principles, the (some would say noisome) pursuits and campaigning of oligarchical ideologues, and others so well documented by Jennifer Bilek on this website, together with an entire generation raised on social media, means ‘identity’ has become performative, modular, and infinitely editable. This drift has been underway for two decades.

Nor do I buy the recently reported dip in rates of American kids attempting to disown their sex as evidence of a reversal. It looks to me much more like a wave cresting and resettling at a higher baseline than before. The map has already been redrawn. ‘Normal’ shifted while many of us were busy doing other things.

You only need to look at COVID. Whether you were for or against any particular policy, we have never truly ‘returned to normal,’ have we? Masks, lockdowns, mRNA platforms, remote work, bio-surveillance, public-health expectations, institutional behaviours - all these rewired the social fabric at speed. A whole new reality asserted itself. I think the same thing is happening with the gender re-engineering project, except the layer isn’t one of virology but identity.

None of this, however, is stable or predictable. Puberty and sex are not incidental features of the organism. They’re core governors of the human developmental operating system. Begin hot-patching those governors at scale, and you’re injecting instability into a complex system already running at the edge of chaos.

This Is No Longer Just a Culture War

This is why the ‘culture war’ isn’t really about culture anymore. It’s become a stress test on every human boundary - biological, symbolic, reproductive, and economic. All these fronts are now interconnected, each one flowing into the others through feedback loops no one has charted and no one realistically could. Nothing happens in isolation anymore.

Meanwhile - and this is where most gender-critical discourse seems fatally behind the curve - the categories they claim to be fighting so hard to defend are being liquefied in real time. CRISPR-derived gametes, uterine transplants, brain-organoid puberty models, LLM-driven identity simulators, neurofeedback ‘gender journey’ apps. None of this is sci-fi; all of it is funded, peer-reviewed, and accelerating.

Ignore the techno-science layer - Haraway, Plant, Preciado, even Firestone, plus the whole xenofeminist/biohacking stack -, and you cede the actual battlefield to those explicitly aligned with queer/trans ontology. You can yell at clouds all you like, but the real struggle over bodies, data, and reproductive futures is happening in clean rooms and server farms. Almost nobody is talking about that.

Which is why Cass and the puberty-blocker trials it gave birth to should be seen as mere skirmishes. The real contest - over who defines the next iteration of the human - is unfolding upstream, in biotechnology, computation, and the philosophical frameworks that legitimise them. Treating brief moments as equilibrium-restoring ‘wins’ is precisely how you get blindsided.

Which brings us back to the opening questions - concepts ‘gender criticals’ rarely if ever confront, but which some feminist theorists and certain philosophy departments focus on very seriously indeed. For them, the issue isn’t about drawing clear and hard ethical lines as described in those earlier questions, it’s whether there’s a version of feminism that can avoid turning human beings into commercial products through ectogenesis, surrogacy markets, and biohacking, while still supporting ideas like (in their words) ‘abolition,’ ‘abstraction,’ and ‘insurrection.’

What do they mean by these terms? Well, in turn, what they’re calling for is an end to compulsory gender, the traditional biological family, and even natural sexual dimorphism via technology. That’s ‘abolition’. By ‘abstraction’, they mean treating biology as something reprogrammable, separating reproduction, desire, and thought from their natural roots and seeing them as essentially substrate-independent. And ‘insurrection’ means embracing and using technological tools like hormones and surgery in radical, transformative, and revolutionary ways rather than completely rejecting them. All this, they argue, fits within a feminism ‘not afraid of technological augmentation and the re-evaluation of nature itself,’ and provides many of the transgender/transhumanist movement’s intellectual underpinnings.

And I’d argue these questions matter - even for those who’d reject this kind of feminism/philosophy immediately. Why? Because the technologies and concepts that go with them aren’t just theoretical anymore; they’re shaping medicine, policy, education, and culture right now. So if we ignore the deeper philosophical debates, we risk letting the most radical visions of the future move forward without public understanding, consent, or resistance.

That’s just one of the many debates happening upstream, and almost no one seems to care or be prepared to engage with them.

Is the Trajectory Inexorable?

A final question worth asking takes us back to my opening point: is the trajectory we’re on inexorable? Is evolution itself now powering the flight toward whatever technology deems ‘optimal’? Whatever the answer, if left unchecked, on our current path, the human body becomes fair game for infinite revisions - puberty blockers today, gamete factories tomorrow. And if we answer those other questions from the beginning with anything less than fierce protection of our ‘givenness’, we could awaken not to transcendence, but to a world where the sacred is obsolete, and the only limit is the market’s imagination. So, we need those conversations, like, yesterday.

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Ian David is a former journalist & business founder with an interest in Kairos Shock and the ontological rupture humanity is currently undergoing. He was Editorial & Policy Director at a news, information & knowledge pooling service to the UK public sector, focusing on technology, service delivery, and processes.

You can find more of Ian’s work at his X feed.

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Jennifer Bilek is an investigative journalist who has tracked the funding of the gender industry for over a decade. She is creator of the The 11th Hour, a platform highlighting the connections between technology, transsexualism, and transhumanism. Her research into the philanthropic backers of the gender industry has been utilized for legal briefs, and platformed in myriad publications, films, and other media in the US and internationally. She has appeared on The Megyn Kelly Show, Steven Bannon’s War Room, and James Patrick’s Big Picture, and on various other platforms and podcasts. She has been featured in films such as No Way Back (2023), Gender Transformation (2023), and The Gender Delusion (2023). Her work has been published in numerous books and magazines, among which: First Things, Tablet, Human Events, The Federalist, The Spectator World, The American Mind, and in the anthology Female Erasure. She is the author of Transsexual Transgender Transhuman: Dispatches From the 11th Hour.