What Is A Human?'What is a woman?' is not the real question. Transgenderism is a gateway to transhumanism
By Rod Dreher
July 14, 2022
As ever, Paul Kingsnorth’s Substack is one of the most important Substacks in the world, and it’s not even close. In his latest essay, Kingsnorth talks about how the public controversy over transgenderism is not really about male and female. It’s about human nature itself. The beginning of the essay is a reminder about how insane — honestly, insane — the public dialogue is around trans today, and how fast it got there. Five years ago, if you had said that a Berkeley law professor would have testified contentiously before Congress that women aren’t the only people who give birth, people would have thought you were bonkers. But it happened this week. Excerpts from Kingsnorth’s latest:
Back in America – now ground-zero for the abolition of biology – thousands of girls are undergoing double mastectomies, and teenage boys are being given ‘puberty-blocking’ drugs designed to chemically castrate rapists. Eleven year old girls are taught that ‘if you feel uncomfortable in your body, it means you are transgender’ – which may explain why, in some classrooms, a quarter of the children identify as precisely that. The concept of ‘trans kids’ – a notion that would have been inconceivably baffling to most people even a few years back, and for many still is – is now being pushed so hard that it starts to look less like the liberation of an oppressed minority than an agenda to reprogramme society with an entirely new conception of the human body – and thus of nature itself.
Kingsnorth gets into The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, Carl Trueman’s invaluable book (now out in an abridged, reader-friendly version) about the roots of the West’s falling apart, which, as PK points out, began with Trueman trying to answer the question of how it is the phrase “I am a woman trapped in a man’s body” came to be meaningful. Kingsnorth:
Meanwhile Nietzsche and Darwin both helped, wittingly or unwittingly, to undermine the foundational assumptions of Western Christianity, thus unmooring the culture from its spiritual roots. Finally, figures such as Herbert Marcuse and Wilhelm Reich provided the justification for the removal of sexual taboos which exploded in the sixties counterculture and brought us into the pornified present.
It is this latter development, suggests Trueman, that may prove to be most significant. Identity in the contemporary West is now cored around sex and sexuality – a situation which he believes ‘is arguably unprecedented in history.’ Trueman identifies Wilhelm Reich and his countercultural successors as prime movers in this culture shift. Sexual liberation, to Reich, represented the latest stage of the ongoing liberation of the individual from both nature and culture.
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It doesn’t take much to move from that point to accepting that one’s “true self” is not a self that is given, or a self that is shaped by limits, but a self that is fully chosen, against the bounds presented by nature or society. Transgenderism is just the next phase in humankind’s revolt against nature, says Kingsnorth. More:
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Source:
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/what-is-a-human/
