Is Feminism a Transhumanist Ideology and a Forebearer of Transgenderism?

My name is Jennifer Bilek, and I am a recovering radical feminist. Having been ensconced in the madness of radical feminist ideology, lured by its promise of liberation, and gobsmacked by its contradictions for most of my adult life, I am now free. I’ll get back to that in a minute.

Over the past decade-plus, I’ve written reams of material about the connections between transhumanist and transgender ideologies. What I haven’t yet publicly explored is the connection between these ideologies and feminist ideology. I have been ambivalent about addressing this because there are many women still attached to feminism who, ironically enough, are doing excellent work calling attention to the social harms of gender ideology. I haven’t wanted to harm that work.

It is also my belief that much (not all) feminist ideology has impeded the public’s understanding of what transgenderism actually is: an advertisement for the technological deconstruction of the sex binary, moving us toward transhumanist, technological reproduction. One reason is the increasing obsession within strains of feminism with sexual perversion. Their incessant, unfair, über-focus on male sexual perversion stands between many men and their willingness to engage gender ideology seriously. Another reason is harder for feminists to confront: aspects of feminist ideology are part of the problem. Feminism precedes the popularization of dismantling the sex binary and the social roles that have historically been expressive of, and useful to, reproduction.

Stage 1: Educate women for strength and independence rather than artificially cultivating weakness and dependence through exaggerated social sex roles.

Early feminists such as Mary Wollstonecraft, Susan B. Anthony, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton understood that female biology, including pregnancy, lactation, menstruation, childbirth, and childcare, could limit women’s participation in social life, historically a largely male domain. Their fight was to ameliorate this imbalance socially, giving women greater freedom to express their personhood within the social sphere. In A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), Wollstonecraft explicitly acknowledged women’s lesser average physical strength:

“Their apparent inferiority with respect to bodily strength, must render them, in some degree, dependent on men.”

Stage 2: Prevent biological vulnerability from becoming legal dependency.

Nineteenth-century feminism fought for property and custody rights, divorce reform, education, employment, and political participation. By the mid-1800s, Stanton, Anthony, and other feminists were increasingly confronting the ways marriage and motherhood could translate women’s physical and reproductive vulnerability into legal and economic dependence.

Stage 3: Control reproductive biology.

Voluntary motherhood, contraception, birth control, and eventually abortion politics advanced another proposition: women could not be fully independent if pregnancy remained substantially outside their control.

By the early twentieth century, Margaret Sanger made this argument explicit. In Woman and the New Race (1920), Sanger, an American birth-control activist, writer, nurse, eugenecist, and sex educator, described women’s reproductive powers as a source of “bondage” and contraception as a means by which women could free themselves. Sanger later helped initiate the effort that produced the birth-control pill, bringing biologist Gregory Pincus together with the project and helping secure the support of Katharine McCormick, whose funding made much of the research possible.

Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (1949) pushed the argument further, challenging the idea that reproductive biology should prescribe women’s social destiny. The feminist problem increasingly became not merely male domination, but the conversion of female biological difference into a predetermined social existence.

Stage 4: Technologically transcend reproductive asymmetry.

Shulamith Firestone radicalized that proposition almost beyond recognition. In The Dialectic of Sex (1970), she explicitly located women’s oppression in sexual reproduction itself, arguing that women had historically been “at the continual mercy of their biology.”

For Firestone, pregnancy itself helped create sex-class inequality; artificial reproduction offered a means of eliminating that inequality at its biological root.

The political objective was still purportedly equality. But one means of obtaining that equality had become technological control over the biological asymmetry between the sexes.

Firestone revised Marxism: the primordial class division wasn’t capitalist versus worker. It was male versus female, created by the unequal biological burden of reproduction.

Consequently, political reform wasn’t enough.

Neither was contraception.

Neither was equal employment.

The technological transformation of reproduction became part of liberation.

As technologies such as reliable contraception and abortion advanced, feminists sought greater power to bring what they saw as their physical limitations under their own control and reduce their dependence on men. Men had historically dominated the social sphere. Yet ironically, the liberation of women from some constraints imposed by reproductive biology came not simply through feminist politics, but through technologies developed largely by male scientists and physicians.

Enter The Sexual Revolution

The sexual revolution not only unhooked sexual intercourse between men and women from reproduction, but increasingly from the expectation of lasting intimacy, love, and bonding. Men and women could have sex more freely and with less expectation of responsibility. Women could seek sexual pleasure with something approaching the freedom historically afforded men, but that has not necessarily translated into a healthier society.

The more sexual activity was released from intimacy and responsibility for child-rearing, the more sex could be understood as another pleasurable activity to consume rather than a holistic experience encompassing intimacy, reproduction, pair-bonding, and potentially the creation and raising of the next generation.

The physical mechanics of sexual activity alone cannot sate the human desire to be known by another, physically and spiritually, and, for most (not all), to potentially create life from that bonding. Once you strip sex of intimacy- really knowing someone and trusting them enough to accept the extraordinary vulnerability of sexual connection- all you have are mechanics.

And mechanics have to be continually “improved” upon, taboos continually created and violated, to produce new sensations, many of them marketable. In a truly intimate connection, the exposure of a bare ankle could set off a five-alarm fire of desire.

Sexual gymnastics are exhausting, with very little reward and considerable potential for social damage. That may even be one factor in why so many young people today appear less interested in sex and partnership.

Many feminists see men as the primary cause of this escalation of sex stripped of intimacy, hence their obsessive focus on male sexuality and its maladaptations. Yet feminist ideology’s own project of disconnecting female sexuality from reproduction has also been at play as a deep and powerful undercurrent.

Firestone proposed that reproduction “by one sex for the benefit of both” could eventually be replaced by artificial reproduction, thereby breaking what she called the “tyranny of the biological family.”

Here the connection to gender ideology becomes difficult to ignore. Both can converge with a transhumanist project in which technology increasingly mediates reproduction, while the biological significance of the sex binary is culturally diminished.

Most feminist ideology today isn’t simply about social equality between the sexes anymore. It has jumped the shark. Too often, it is about punishing men for the sexual trauma the ideology insists defines women’s experience. No doubt many women experience sexual trauma. But feminism also helped advance the idea of casual sex as equality without adequately reckoning with its social repercussions, while physical differences between men and women and the possible consequences of sexual bonding are not merely ignored but sometimes treated as obstacles to liberation.

Quitting Feminism

I love the freedoms technology has afforded women in the social sphere. I love that women fought for female participation in that sphere, and that many are still fighting. But by examining the roots of the gender industry as a transhumanist effort to control our reproductive nature through attempts to erode the significance of the sex binary, I ran straight into feminism.

Social sex roles, fluid as they may be across different times and cultures, remain strongly influenced by our physical roles in reproduction and the ways human beings bond through sexual intimacy. They are not simply there “to oppress women,” or to thwart individual expression.

I left feminism because I no longer believe it adequately acknowledges these inconsistencies. It wants freedom without sufficiently examining responsibility while simultaneously accusing men of irresponsibility. It refuses too often to self-reflect and make adjustments.

As technological reproduction advances rapidly, perhaps toward the mechanical parenthood of Firestone’s vision, we have to ask ourselves how much of our humanity we are willing to part with. Is there a middle ground between the sexual repression of the 1950s and a culture in which surgically altering sexed body parts, creating new synthetic sexual categories, and an increasingly bacchanalian pursuit of sexual novelty are presented as liberation?

And while we are assessing these questions, feminists will also have to confront their own role in the cultural trajectory toward technological reproduction increasingly detached from women’s bodies. Because feminism has not, as yet, adequately confronted this history. It’s one reason I left it.

I am free now to see its inconsistencies and misplaced rage more readily, perhaps precisely because I spent so much time behind the lens of feminist analysis, and to see the ways they are no longer serving humanity.

Oddly enough, at the end of my relationship with feminism, I find myself liberated. Finally.

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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 author 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 Spectator World, The Federalist, The American Mind, and in the anthology Female Erasure. She is the author of Transsexual Transgender Transhuman: Dispatches From the 11th Hour Now, also available in Portuguese