Transsexual, transgender, and transhuman are interconnected systems of power that adapt our perceptions of ourselves as a species to the advancing technologies in human reproduction. When we analyze the social changes that accommodate individuals attempting to transcend their sexed reality—and thereby their humanity—through this framework, we can begin to understand the unfolding transformations that are often obscured from our view.
These systems, intertwined with technology, are not merely about individual choices; they are about reshaping societal and species-wide perceptions. They promote the dissolution of the sex binary and the transcendence of humanity through technology.
The term “transsexual,” once used to describe a man who sought to assume womanhood for sexual gratification through mimicry and attire, was redefined as “transgenderism” by psychiatrist Dr. Robert Stoller in 1965. This shift marked a transition from men desiring to mimic womanhood to those appropriating synthetic modifications of their sexed anatomy to better pass as women. Transgenderism, as a system, seeks to bridge to transhumanism and the technological usurpation of human reproduction. This process transforms transsexualism from a fetish that objectifies womanhood into a colonization of human reproduction, for which women bear the lion's share of responsibility.
The political, social, and corporate normalization of this fetish grants men who possess it legal, political, and social power to drive policies that undermine womanhood and women's rights, grooming children to view their sexed anatomy as commoditized entities within the tech reproductive market.
Petra DeSutter, a politician and professor of gynecology at Ghent University, has discussed the future of technological reproduction without women. Figures like Assistant Health Secretary Rachel Levine and billionaire-oligarch, Jennifer Pritzker, men who have appropriated female biology through medical technology, have contributed to a corporate effort to usurp female reproduction under the guise of a human right to express oneself by technologically altering one’s sex characteristics. This engineering of human reproduction also alters our understanding of ourselves as a sexually dimorphic species, propelling us toward post-humanism.