Is America going transhumanist? The Washington Post has reported on the broader gold rush to provide genetic screening for embryos. Calling this a “push to breed super-babies”, the Post linked the phenomenon to Right-wing pronatalists and investors such as Peter Thiel, warning that these enterprises stray perilously close to smuggling eugenics back into the mainstream.

So does embryonic DNA editing presage the human species re-engineering ourselves — or at least some of us — into a new super-race, perhaps even relegating regular humans to sub-humanity by comparison? This is the dystopian future imagined by the 1997 sci-fi thriller Gattaca, and warned against by philosopher Paul Virilio in his 2002 book Crepuscular Dawn. But while the apparent promise of these developments for transhumanist re-engineering is clear, the contrast between transhumanism in theory and practice to date suggests that those who push beyond optimization to re-engineering may come to regret doing so — even if this has already come too late for many.

I’ve argued that contemporary advances in gene technology don’t herald the advent of transhumanism so much as its maturation, on a foundation inaugurated more than 50 years ago by the legalization of the Pill. This was the first mainstream medical technology that set out not to heal something physiologically broken, in the name of normal health, but instead to break something normally healthy — female fertility — in the name of personal freedom. Every subsequent attempt at “improving” on the widely accepted Gestalt understanding of healthy human nature, from commercial surrogacy to transgender surgery, has occupied this uneasy cultural space opened by the Pill, between restoring health and re-engineering ourselves.

Cosmetic surgery is one now-mainstream example: millions of people use Botox and other “tweakments” to preserve a slightly more youthful appearance. Such technologies are invasive and artificial, but there’s arguably little difference in kind between moderate Botox and dyeing your hair, except the “ick” factor of hypodermic needles. Yet what begins with seeking a subtly smoother forehead can slide into the uncanny-valley appearance characteristic of those who overuse cosmetic surgery, in pursuit not just of being one’s best self but transforming it.

The same will likely hold for these much-vaunted new gene-editing technologies. In secular circles, at least, there is a compelling case for enabling prospective parents who carry rare genetic disorders to lower the risk of passing these conditions on to their children. For most, even embryos born from the merger of three gametes might seem a tolerable intervention in the name of restoring and supporting normal health. But where this slides beyond restoration toward engineering super-babies, we simply don’t understand enough about the interaction of different genes and environment to experiment in this vein without a grave risk of causing severe, lifelong harm to the resulting children.

Tech-optimists are certain to push the envelope regardless, because they can. But rather than Paul Virilio’s feared super-race, the result is more likely to involve the production of unexpected harms — the biological equivalent of going beyond an unlined forehead, to plastic surgery cat-face. Except the subjects won’t be adults who chose the procedure for themselves; it’ll be babies who did not.

We should take the flagship Left-wing transhumanist cause, gender identity, as a cautionary tale. Here, with the best of intentions and in the name of individual self-actualization, a generation of children has been sometimes horribly mutilated, with their parents’ consent and the wide applause of progressive society. Many are now detransitioning, or suffer lifelong sterility and other harms. Bans and restrictions are growing increasingly common, as the developmental damage caused by transhumanist pediatric “gender medicine” becomes harder to deny. But this already comes too late for the children who served as guinea pigs for this biotechnological Wild West.

Now, the likelihood is that — again with the best of intentions, and simply a different ideological gloss — the Right will lean just as recklessly into a new kind of experimentation on children. We must hope these innovators prove more willing than those of the Left to respect the enduring importance of ordinary human health as a baseline for intervention. If not, the temptation to improve on that nature risks creating another generation of damaged children.

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Mary Harrington is a contributing editor at UnHerd.

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