By Nancy Robertson (with credit for the prolific research of Leon Donnelly)
William Bainbridge is an older male academic without outward signs of being "transgender." He's now in his eighties, but there's no record of him ever having a spouse or romantic relationship. He may have autism. Being autistic could explain his obsession with science fiction, his interest in building arcane and archaic musical instruments, his unbelievably prolific scholarly output, his interest in joining and creating cults, and his interest in merging humans and machines. It would also explain his eventual working relationship with another man suspected of having autism, the near-billionaire "transgender"/transhumanist "Martine" Rothblatt. Rothblatt's 2011 book "From Transgender to Transhumanism: A Manifesto on the Freedom of Form," outlined his battle plan to do away with the two human sexes, replace humans with machines, and remake the world. As Rothblatt famously stated, "transgender is the onramp to transhumanism." These are plans that Bainbridge undoubtedly supported, contributed to, and possibly even originated.
The all but inevitable association between Bainbridge and Rothblatt must have seemed to those two men like a match made in heaven.
I could find no record of when the two men first teamed up. Most likely, they had traveled in the same circles for years. In 2006, Rothblatt's first issue of the Journal of Personal Cyberconsciousness published Bainbridge's article Strategies for Personality Transfer. The article explained how a person might answer thousands of questions about their personality and life experiences and then upload their resulting "consciousness" to a computer." This activity became one of the essential rituals in Terasem's effort to merge humans and machines. Terasem is a technological movement/religion originated by 'Martine' Rothblatt and most likely vastly influenced by Bainbridge. One belief of Terasem is that not having a body makes you differently abled, not sub-human.
For Bainbridge, the proximity to a brilliant and staggeringly rich transhumanist like Rothblatt, who by then had a personal net worth of hundreds of millions of dollars from the 1992 sale of his first company, the space satellite-based Sirius XM Radio, was like a shot of adrenaline. To Rothblatt, Bainbridge's position at the NSF gave the imprimatur of respectability to even the most unbelievable plan to turn humans into cyborgs. Each man had what the other wanted and needed. But a fully informed citizenry would never consider the duo a match made in heaven. No. They would call it a match made in hell.
Let's look at some of the other central tenets and rituals of Terasem to see how they reflect the input of William Bainbridge. As with Scientology, the closer you look, the crazier it seems. The ultimate goal of Terasem is immortality, not of the soul, but of the mind and body. Practitioners of Terasem are told to have faith that their consciousness will eventually be revived and they will live forever. To achieve this immortality, people are instructed to complete a lengthy personal inventory, called a mind file, created by Bainbridge and described in Rothblatt's journal. It's not a coincidence that one other cult also requires its members to complete extensive personality testing, and that cult is Scientology. And there's another similarity between Terasem and Scientology. Like Scientology, Terasem contains a series of levels that members must progress to on their path through the Terasem Way of Life. An individual's personality test data are then combined with that individual's genetic code and beamed (spacecast) deep into space where after hundreds, thousands, or millions of years, the data will be intercepted by an advanced extraterrestrial civilization that will reassemble each long-dead earthling so that the individual can be reborn and live forever. Another method of achieving immortality that Terasem lobbies for is the development of self-replicating nanotechnology to seed the cosmos with everyone's mind files. Because why shouldn't we all send our digital doppelgangers to populate every corner of the visible universe?
Terasem never explicitly mentions "transgenderism." That would be unnecessary since the leader of the entire movement is the obviously "transgender" "Martine" Rothblatt. "Transgenderism" also gets in through the back door with Terasem's relentless emphasis on "diversity and inclusion." And then there's this odd statement promoting transhumanism: "Vitological station is irrelevant to romantic adoration," which means the faithful must be willing to fall in love with a being who exists only in a disembodied online state. This brings to mind the newly revived Catholic religious ritual in which consecrated virgins wear a long, white wedding dress and, in the eyes of the Church, become the bride of Jesus Christ.
During the past decade, Bainbridge continued to write and edit several books. Let's look at two recent books to get a sense of his later thoughts about transhumanism. In Dynamic Secularization (2017), he states that transhumanism seeks to replace traditional religion with a science and technology-based alternative. This new religion promises people that they can achieve immortality. So it's a natural replacement for conventional faiths. One method for gaining immortality is cryonic suspension, that is, freezing one's brain and body for eventual resuscitation. The leading cryonic suspension company, the Alcor Life Extension Foundation, is based in Scottsdale, Arizona,, and run by Max More and his wife, Natasha Vita-More. Alcor just completed its 50th-anniversary conference during the first weekend of June 2022. One speaker at this conference was the well-known and highly respected philosopher and cognitive scientist David Chalmers , who is best known for formulating the complex problem of consciousness. Chalmers presumably spoke about whether it's theoretically possible to revive a person's consciousness after they die and, if so, how that might conceivably be achieved.
Dynamic Secularization also discusses Terasem and describes its role as educating the public on the need for radically extending human life by preserving and downloading human consciousness. Bainbridge proposes the metaverse as the eventual substitute for real life. Back in 2009, Bainbridge organized an online meeting of Terasem in a virtual world called Second Life. His cartoon-like avatar presented himself as a handsome, young, muscular man. The Order of Cosmic Engineer, which eventually became the Turing Church, was formed to discuss ways to push the transhumanist envelope on the rest of society. Members included Bainbridge, Max More. Natasha Vita-More, and "Martine" Rothblatt. Naturally, the group met online in a particular room in the World of Warcraft. The cartoon avatars were dressed like time travelers from the 1400s. There was even a furry.
Curiously, Bainbridge never discusses "transgenderism" in his book other than to note in passing that "Martine" Rothblatt is "transgender." But given how "transgenderism" has been promoted as the on-ramp to transhumanism, and propaganda driving dissociation from the sexed body as progressive by western governments and powerful corporate interests have been relentless for a decade, "transgenderism" obviously figures prominently in the thinking of all the top transhumanists whether or not they consider themselves to be "transgender."
The second book, The Convergence of Knowledge, Technology, and Society: Beyond Convergence of Nano-Bio-Info-Cognitive Technologies (2013) is a dense 1,067-page tome, and Bainbridge served as only one of several editors. I skimmed the book very quickly, and my impression is that it sets forth an agenda for controlling scientific research and society from the top down. The book starts with the idea that the smartphone only came about after all the required discoveries from several vastly different scientific fields were combined and that science and technology should try to replicate that success intentionally. The authors pay lip service to improving lifelong wellness and human potential" and "securing a sustainable life for all." But the key here is coordination and control from on high. Experts will set the agenda, and the rest will meekly acquiesce to whatever edicts come down from the top because the powerful always have our best interests at heart. That's the primary assumption that drives the book.
Transhuman and transhumanist are each briefly mentioned only once in this book, and "transgender" never appears. But it's not hard to see that the top-down coordinated control touted in the book is flourishing through all American institutions less than a decade later. We now have universities, school systems, medical societies, healthcare institutions, corporations, mainstream media, and a federal government that each push an aggressive "transgender" agenda that many Americans find abhorrent. But few will object because they're terrified of being labeled "transphobic" and losing their careers, their livelihoods, their friends, and sometimes even their spouses and children.
I clearly remember a discussion that took place over half a century ago when my best friend's father, who was an ophthalmologist, told my friend and me that allowing pharmaceutical companies to advertise directly to consumers would be a grave mistake. I was just a kid in junior high school and had only the vaguest idea of what he was talking about. But there was something about the conviction with which he spoke that left a strong impression. Unfortunately, I later realized his prediction was correct.
Big money and "gender" medicine are a toxic combination. The gender industrial complex knows that each captured child is worth hundreds of thousands of dollars in increased healthcare revenues. With a price tag like that posted over each kid's head, is it any wonder that hospitals and medical societies all caved in and fell in line? Suddenly and silently, all institutions were captured. The day medical science hitched its wagon to late-stage capitalism; humanity became far more likely to lose the farm. And millions of children and young adults have now been set up to pay the awful price with their fertility, hopes and dreams, and immediate and long-term health status. These young people have been thrown under the bus just to increase the revenues in America's bloated healthcare system and to comply with the off-kilter wishes of a small gang of powerful men.
But the coming danger isn't limited to vulnerable children and young adults. We're all at risk from the aggressive push towards "transgenderism" and transhumanism, regardless of whether we're rich or poor, young or old, male or female. Every time we walk in the warm sunshine or out in the freezing rain. Every time we kiss our children good night or stub our toes on the refrigerator door. Every time we hit a tennis ball or eat a chocolate chip cookie. We are reminded that the rich experience of being alive doesn't come from thoughts, words, or images inside hermetically sealed brains. We experience the fullness of life because we are biological creatures with all the messiness that biochemistry entails. Take away our human biology, and what remains is as meaningless as an endless loop of prerecorded robocalls. As the late Christopher Hitchens once famously said, "I don't have a body. I am a body."
Read Part 1 here.
Nancy Robertson Bio: Graduated from Barnard College with a BA in psychology and then received a Ph.D. in educational psychology from Stanford University. Nancy is retired and has written articles for WoLF, and Women are Human. She grew up in New York City in the middle of the last century. In 2022, she learned that three daughters of a deceased, old college friend were trying to become men through they/them pronouns, wrong sex hormones, and mutilating surgeries. She realized a strange cult of "transgender" madness had sprung up, infecting the US and much of the world. Nancy began to research and write about the gender industry to stop it.
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