Blogger Najm Al-Din looks at the links between the LGBT movement and transhumanism and asks if these movements aim to irreversibly change what it means to be human.
With Pride month in full swing, the LGBT movement continues to induce seismic cultural changes in the West, with rainbow parades and festivals now marquee attractions in several parts of the world.
From politicians and NGOs to academics and corporations, support for the LGBT community has permeated almost every aspect of society and its sponsors represent some of the most powerful Fortune 500 companies.
In this article I want to examine the links between the LGBT movement and trans humanism – a movement or idea that suggests humans can enhance themselves using technology.
Transhumanists believe that humans can go beyond their current physical and mental limitations by using science and technology to improve their bodies and minds. They envision a future where people can use things like genetic engineering, artificial intelligence, and advanced prosthetics to become smarter, stronger, and healthier.
The goal is to push the boundaries of human capabilities and achieve a kind of “post-human” state where we are no longer limited by our biological nature. Some transhumanists even imagine a future where humans merge with machines, creating a new kind of hybrid species.
But before unpacking the broader intellectual context underpinning the LGBT movement’s popularity, let us identify the juggernaut behind the agenda to deconstruct the traditional gender paradigm.
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Pritzkers
Some of the world’s wealthiest families with important connections in the corridors of power are using their networks to normalise the idea that humans are not a sexually dimorphic species.
Investigative journalist Jennifer Bilek describes this as synthetic sex identities (SSI) and shines a light on the tremendous influence of the Pritzkers – a billionaire entrepreneurial family who are leveraging their philanthropic foundations to disseminate an ideology of disembodiment across America’s medical, legal and educational institutions.
It is no secret that former U.S. President Barack Obama, who initiated The Affordable Care Act which provides health insurance to the transgender population, was bankrolled by Penny Pritzker during his Senate campaign.
Meanwhile, her brother J.B. Pritzker issued an executive order in support of non-binary children and introduced a transgender friendly sex education bill for K-12 schools in his capacity as Governor of Illinois.
Furthermore, Penny’s cousin Jennifer Pritzker is a transgender woman who founded the Tawani Foundation which provides grants to clinics and University Departments across the U.S. to promote gender-affirming care through medical interventions designed to affirm an individual’s gender identity when it conflicts with the gender assigned at birth.
As major donors to higher education institutes specialising in “queer studies,” the Pritzkers have made massive inroads into politics, law and academia, which they view as integral to instituting language reforms relating to legal definitions of womanhood and gender dysphoria.
Stryker
Furthermore, Jon Stryker, who is the heir to the multibillion dollar Stryker Medical Corporation and a leading global patron of LGBT initiatives, has played an instrumental role in building the political infrastructure for gay marriage.
He is now re-directing the organisation’s focus to depathologising body dissociation in a booming gender industry, where plastic phalluses, synthetic vaginas, cross-sex hormones and gender reassignment surgeries are expected to net a market share of tens of billions of dollars.
Through company-owned sales subsidiaries, Stryker has marketed implants and puberty blockers to healthcare facilities which perform surgeries on young people’s sex organs and has set up offices in 36 countries, including epicentres of trans activism such as the UK, which is the second largest market for Stryker Medical supplies.
ESG/SRI Investing
Under the banner of inclusivity and diversity, investment management firms have also championed the LGBT movement as part of their commitment to human capital, including JP Morgan Chase which was the first major bank to provide staff and partners coverage for gender-reassignment surgeries.
Until recently, the viability of the LGBT movement rested primarily on a peer-to-peer financial structure. However, many transgender projects are today being earmarked by global hedge funds for socially responsible investing (SRI) and environmental, social and governance standards (ESG) investing which are tied to the UN SDGs (Sustainable Development Goals).
In practical terms, SRI investors may exclude companies from investment if they were deemed discriminatory toward the queer community, despite performing well on other ESG criteria. Attracting investment from ESG and SRI investors partly explains why many businesses have jumped on the woke bandwagon.
Fourth Industrial Revolution
Influential actors aside, we must explore the movement’s traction against the backdrop of radical systemic changes taking root in the western world.
We are passing through a stage in history known as The Great Reset, where groundbreaking technological and scientific innovations will no longer be relegated to the physical world around us but become extensions of ourselves.
Also dubbed The Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR), its architects consist of powerful stakeholders across business, technology and science who envisage a future where Artificial Intelligence (AI), CRISPR gene-editing technologies, the Internet of Things and the Internet of Bodies will shift the calculus of what it means to be human.
One of the foremost advocates of this 4IR is Klaus Schwab, founder and executive Chairman of the WEF (World Economic Forum). A recurring theme in Schwab’s works is that innovations in the biological realm will pioneer a scientific breakthrough, enabling the alteration of humans at a fundamental genomic level to herald a fresh chapter in the evolution of species.
So how does this tie in with the LGBT agenda?
Transhumanism
It is no secret that the long list of WEF supporters from Big Pharma to Big Tech (including the Pritzkers) are instrumentalising gender ideology to re-engineer human biology, as per the hubristic aspiration of the 4IR.
The Prtizkers join a long list of oligarchs, technocrats and power-brokers who perceive an inevitable progression towards transhumanism as a natural process in human evolution.
Although an ambiguous concept, transhumanism refers to the enhancement of the human condition via computer science, biotechnologies and medicine and is marked by an underlying conviction that fundamental human problems have technological solutions.
Prominent transhumanists such as WEF adviser Yuval Noah Harari opine that the trifecta of technology, science and reason will redefine nature and transform humans into hackable animals.
His thoughts are echoed by Dr Anders Sandberg, a Senior Research Fellow and transhumanist at Oxford University who claims human liberty cannot be actualised unless we engineer ourselves by pursuing morphological freedom.
This means tapping into our boundless potential through the modification of our bodies and minds by integrating artificial components from molecular nanotechnology and neurotechnology to help us achieve mental states which would otherwise be beyond our grasp.
In their quest to create a hybrid species, transhumanists argue that ignoring biological realities by expanding the definition of gender, normalising a spectrum of sexes and reinventing the concept of embodiedness through body dissociation can transition man towards homo technicus.
Techno-medical complex
Given the synergy between the 4IR and LGBT ideology, it would be short-sighted to perceive the cultural mania surrounding LGBT rights as mere virtue-signalling, seeing as the pioneers of the 4IR have a significant stake in championing the social justice movement to tempt populations to buy into a worldview which can broadly be defined as transhumanism.
Under the umbrella of human rights, the LGBT movement has found a natural ally in a powerful cadre of transhumanists who share the same belief in elevating subjective desires over objective reality, by freeing individuals from externally imposed constraints foisted on them by the inhibiting categories of “gender” and “humanness.”
The sacred cow of individual autonomy lends itself easily to other freedoms which notable transsexuals invested in biogenetics like Martine Rothblatt view as an onramp to transhumanism and a logical extension of other commonly perceived rights, such as paraphilias which deny our biological realities for synthetic realities.
In the dystopian transhuman future, natural procreation will no longer be functionally necessary and obsoleted by human-machine interfacing, cybersex and in vitro gametogenesis in an AI-powered social contract where humans co-exist in a virtual reality.
Therefore, the convergence between the transhumanist and LGBT movements cannot be ignored, with both poised to gain momentum from one another as emerging technologies are deployed to refashion our biological constitutions, usurp female reproduction and control the human genome.
In light of this, it is imperative to note that powerful interest groups intersecting the world of science, technology, finance and politics are using a rights-based framework to secure our consent for radical changes to human biology.
By reshaping dominant cultural narratives surrounding reproduction, personhood and sexuality to align with an ideology which is bent on subverting natural life forms, it’s not long before the optional human follows the optional gender.
