In its tech-optimist, right-libertarian form, this premise underpins Elon Musk’s experimental Neuralink technology, which Musk says will eventually be like “a FitBit in your skull”. Similarly, it underpins the US Government’s recent decision to funnel $2bn toward biotech research that will be able to “write circuitry for cells and predictably program biology in the same way in which we write software and program computers”.
In its progressive, radical blank-slatist form, overcoming the human (sexed) bioplan is a core premise of transgender rights, as, for example, where advocates talk about children undergoing “the wrong puberty”. And it also underpins social justice arguments for “fertility equality”, in which surrogacy is viewed as a legitimate use of technology to overcome unjust limits imposed by normal human physiology.
What both the tech utopians and the social-justice kind overlook (or choose to ignore) is that viewing the normal human organism as a set of medical challenges comes with a hierarchy of money and power baked in. Cutting-edge experimental medicine comes at a cost — both to its prospective customers, and also sometimes for its test subjects, as with the young person who died of necrotising fasciitis after an experimental surgery to craft him a neovagina out of his own colon.
Specifically in the case of surrogacy, this means rich men and women, such as Briskin and Maggipinto (or indeed Elon Musk’s baby-momma, the singer Grimes) can take advantage of the potential opened up by limitless, transhumanist medicine, to evade their own physiological constraints or simply (as in Grimes’ case) outsource the gruelling and risky aspects of “normal” maternity to someone else. Meanwhile the “work” of gestation, along with its non-trivial risk of invasive surgery, lifelong subsequent complications, or even death, gets outsourced — usually to poorer women, and often under exploitative conditions in developing countries.
These asymmetries aren’t exclusive to same-sex commissioning parents, of course. Surrogacy is always at risk of propagating such abuses, even where the commissioning parents include a woman. But if surrogacy combines commerce and medicine in ways that are fraught with ethical issues and highly vulnerable to exploitation, its transhumanist re-founding structurally presupposes the existence of surrogacy. Within the transhumanist frame, where there’s an all-male couple that longs for genetic children, the “cure” necessitates a fertile uterus – and how women feel about this is largely beside the point.
But surely we just need safeguards so only consenting women are involved? Briskin and Maggipinto draw an analogy from prostitution to make this argument. Against this, though, 50 years of the sexual revolution should have taught us how flimsy a defence “consent” is, against power asymmetries. There’s no shortage of testimony out there from survivors of the sex industry, on the horrors many have endured in the course of ostensibly “consensual” activities. And a glance back over the recent outpouring of MeToo should remind us that where vast disparities in wealth and power exist, “consent” is often a rogues’ charter even outside commercial transactions.
It doesn’t take much thought to extend the MeToo dynamic to fertility “services”. Nor does it take much more to see how it applies to “consensual” commodification of other body parts. Women already sell their eggs to the fertility industry; why shouldn’t we sell a kidney or part of their liver, provided everyone has consented?
If we accept the basic justice of transcending biophysical limits, there are no theoretical boundaries at all on what we can do. We can’t object to the Brazilian surgeon constructing neovaginas for trans women out of fish skin – for we’ve already accepted that “unnatural” is merely a stalking-horse for bigotry. And from here we have very little ground for objecting to “upgrades” that far more radically alter the human “normal”.
You may scoff that this is all just hysteria. Recall, though, that the “slippery slope” argument on euthanasia was once dismissed as hyperbole. And yet based on cases from Belgium and Canada, those arguments weren’t just accurate but not nearly hyperbolic enough.
Surely, though, it’s worth the risk, for the sake of equality and family life in same-sex couples? On the contrary, we should beware transhumanist arguments that seem to be grounded in gay rights. For the abolition of “nature” at the root of this worldview is already coming back to bite those gay men and women who first cheered on the change.
Gay rights is grounded in the claim that same-sex attraction is natural and innate. But if there’s no such thing as “natural”, this justification is abruptly eliminated, leaving gay men and women once again vulnerable to pressure to change their behaviour. And indeed, this is already happening, via trans activism: there, gay and lesbian people are now routinely accused of bigotry if they reject “gay” partners of the opposite sex, while their (natural, normal) same-sex orientation is reclassified as a “genital fetish“.
Most people, gay or straight, who resort to surrogacy do so to satisfy their longing to love and care for a child. We should recognise that this is at root a deeply human desire. But if love is the glue that holds human communities together, it can also drive choices with wider negative impacts. Surrogacy, and particularly surrogacy as a “cure” for normal biological limitations, is such a choice.
It opens the door to a limitless, profit-driven drive to deregulate the human organism — a drive that will, in the last count, mostly benefit Big Biotech. And this pathway only stays in the warm light of love and normalcy for a few steps. After that, we’re into the realm of monsters: mutilated children, human/animal chimeras, gamete and organ harvesting and medical experimentation, to name but a few already-existing examples.
If we continue down this road, gay men and women will end up losing the (only recently acquired) right to be naturally gay. And if this is bad enough, it will come to seem trivial next to the triumph of commercial biomedicine, and the swarm of protean horrors that comes slithering in its wake.
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