The Question Concerning Gender Technology

The question that presses upon us is not whether children should be permitted to alter their bodies, but what kind of being we have already become such that this question could arise at all.

We stand within a technological clearing where the human body appears as raw material awaiting optimization, where suffering presents itself as a problem to be engineered away rather than a mystery to be endured and understood, where the child’s confused utterance “I am not what I appear to be” is heard as a specification for industrial intervention.

This is the enframing Heidegger warned of: a destining, a way the world increasingly shows up for us, such that expressive individualism, biomedical technique, venture capital and genuine adolescent distress all flow together in the same current, each amplifying the others, none fully visible to itself.

The transhumanist project does not cause gender ideology so much as gender ideology reveals the transhumanist assumptions we have already absorbed: the quiet conviction that nature is merely what has not yet been corrected, that the given is always inferior to the chosen, that liberation means escape from every unchosen constraint including the flesh we did not select.

To resist the medicalization of childhood dysphoria while accepting this deeper enframing is to bail water while ignoring the hole in the hull.

What remains to be thought is ontology itself: what understanding of human existence might resist the reduction of persons to projects, might hold open a space where a child’s distress could be met with something other than the surgeon’s knife or the endocrinologist’s needle, might recover the dignity of limits and the strange gift of the body we did not choose.

The question that presses upon us is not whether children should be permitted to alter their bodies, but what kind of being we must become again to even see them clearly.

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Jeff Younger knows what it means to lose everything and keep going.After a public legal battle that made national headlines, Jeff was forbidden by court order from contact with his own sons. What the courts intended as silence became something else: a mission. If he could not speak to his boys directly, he would write down everything a father owes his sons—and offer it to a new generation of young men who have no one to tell them the truth. Find Jeff on X and Facebook @JeffyoungerShow and at www.Jeffyounger.show.

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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.

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License details on title image. Creator: Ted Eytan. Copyright: This material is licensed to the public under the Creative Commons Attribution.