Transhuman Transsex

This is another post adapted from an exchange in the thread over at Accelerating Future:

A more lefty than the average futurologist intervenes in my endless elaboration of rhetorical and practical and organizational ties between the Futurological Complex and right-wing politics, intervenes by pointing out "transhumanism also connects with and supports the transgender/transsexual movement."

About this, I say:

This is a good point, and one I contributed to the elaboration of myself quite early on when I published Technology Is Making Queers of Us All way back when I was a more sympathetic critic of the futurological as a vector for radicalism.

I do think it is worthwhile to point out, however, that only a vanishingly small minority of people who champion transsex interests (and I hope you would also include intersex interests) are superlative futurologists and at the same time that only a vanishingly small minority of superlative futurologists devote more than negligible attention to these interests. The gender theory of Donna Haraway, Judith Halberstam, and Judith Butler (my mentor) all skirt up to the edge of post-human discourse but every one of them also explicitly repudiates futurological appropriations of their work, something to bear in mind.

This may be an unkind overgeneralization, but I really do think that self-consciously lefty transhumanists rather like to trumpet what remains at best a faint connection of the transhuman with the transsexual in order to compensate for the "Bell Curve" apologists, neo-feudal "free marketeers" and corporate-military cheerleaders who remain so conspicuously among them. It's not exactly tokenism, since the connection is more interesting than that, but it often functions tokenistically as well.