I support radical bodily autonomy. I support people's right to have full control over their own reproductive system. I support trans people's right to live in peace, comfort, and safety. I support universal, free, and effective healthcare. I support disabled people and their right to live in a society that works proactively to mitigate the impact of their disabilities.

Transhumanism is a rejection of the naturalist fallacy. No one needs to suffer. We can, and should, work to fix these horrible broken bodies we are shackled to. People should be free to do whatever they want with their bodies, and we should work towards increasing the control people have over their bodies as much as possible. We can, and should, find ways to mitigate human suffering.

A lot of transhumanists are cranks, eugenicists, libertarian freaks, effective altruist, or barely cryptofascists, etc. Fuck 'em.

A lot of them are obsessed with hypothetical technologies - Magical nanotech that totally ignores entropy, obsession with magic AI gods that will take them to secular heaven, digitizing their brains so they can be truly terminally online. That's all bullshit.

What matters is practical technologies and philosophies that are being developed and implemented right now. There are nerve stimulating implants that help people with spinal injuries poop better. There are nerve stimulating implants that help people with apnea sleep through the night. Biomedicine keeps kicking out drugs that mitigate a wide variety of illnesses and diseases, from heart problems to depression to mitigating some of the most horrific effects of aging.

Refusing to help people live better lives because 20th century fascists engaged in medical torture in an attempt to manufacture an ascientific "master race" is cowardice. People with endometriosis deserve a cure. People with bipolar disorder deserve a cure. People with nerve damage deserve to regain the full use of their entire nervous system. Amputees deserve a biologically cloned limb fully integrated in to their nervous system with no loss of motor control or sensation. People deserve to live as long as they want to without suffering the horrific, degrading effects of aging.

Communism isn't enough. A better economy isn't going to mitigate or relieve the symptoms of schizophrenia or IBS. It's not being to give visually impaired people the option to have their eyes or ocular nerve repaired or replaced. It's not going to repair traumatic brain injuries. Fixing these problems requires a radical rejection of the notion of a "natural" human and the acceptance of the human body as a machine that can be changed and manipulated to suit the needs of it's user.

And frankly, whatever you think of it, or however you conceptualize it, it's already here. Radical manipulation of the body is normal and widespread, whether it's replacing joints with mechanical components or installing pacemakers. Cloned organs are here - cloned skin is being used for skin grafts. We can connect cameras directly to the optic nerve and control computer cursors with brain implants. And the first genetically modified humans have already been born.. Pandora's bag is open.

The question around transhumanism isn't whether or not it will happen; It already has. The question is which ideologies will control the process, and whether it will be used to improve the human condition or enslave humanity in horrifying ways scarcely imaginable.

If you want to see a leftist exploration of a transhumanist future, dealing in depth with both the potential benefits and the potential horrors, you should go read the background materials for Eclipse Phase. (it's made by anarchists and released under Creative Commons. You can download the whole system online) Eclipse Phase is a TTRPG setting built entirely around a core of a transhumanist future where human minds can be uploaded as information, swapping bodies is essential to the function of the economy, genetic engineering is universal, and there is a solar-system wide cold war between leftists trying to democratize transhumanist technologies so everyone benefits from them and hyper-capitalists who want dictatorial control so they can rule over humanity forever. And it's explicitly a cosmic horror story - The setting does not pull any punches at all about how horrific this future will be if it's left in the hands of capitalists and fascists.

This is intensely personal to me. I have Bipolar disorder. It's a highly heritable, ie genetic, condition. Myself and many members of my family have suffered horribly for generations under the burden of this and related illnesses. I can't have children because there's a very high chance they would inherit Bipolar disorder. Bipolar people have an unemployment rate of 60%. 80% of our marriages fail. Our suicide rate is horrific. And even those of us who don't kill themselves have their life expectancy slashed by a decade as a result of the constant chronic stress this condition inflicts.

I want a cure. I want someone to dig around in my DNA and build some kind of magic bullshit nano-machine that will edit it out of my genome. I want to know what it's like to live life without the constant miserable agony of depression, cognitive impairment, chronic stress, and trauma. I want a choice about whether or not to have children, and I want to be able to make that choice knowing that my children would not be condemned to a life of misery and suffering due to the horror written in to my genes.

Rejecting a better future because you're afraid of the specter of Eugenics is cowardice. You've already accepted that the same mechanical technology can be oppressive or liberatory depending on whether society is run by capitalists or leftists. You need to accept that biotechnology asks the same question - Will we control it? or will the enemy?

I would like to argue against a mono thematic explanation and term history.

Transhumanism has many different influences. Those include people who were rebelling against church ideology, state doctrine and patriarchy: IUDs, trans rights, dysphoria fixing, medical self help, neurodivergent people, BDSM community member, tech people, people who used technology to function better, people who alter their bodies (previously against norms).

While the Cyborg Manifesto had quite a bit of impact I would like to go back before that. Having artificial limbs, or bone pieces is partially trans humanist and is something that was argued against for centuries. Transhumanism does have some aspects that make it so that people who are discriminated by society can be who they want to be again, wheelchairs, limbs, medication, etc. are relevant.

Of course there is a co optation of transhumanism by capitalist and reactionary elements, who like it primarily for the eugenic aspects. Often those that feel as if they are geniuses themselves and ought to be deserving of all (while lacking the social relations that make life nice).

Especially after more and more of the fruits of labour was given to IT and digital experts, lets say after 2000s and after, many mostly male people who did interact more with screens than people (as they often didn't use their screens to further human connection) do label themselves as trans humanist. Often without the critical reflection of the term or its history.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Cyborg_Manifesto

Haraway began writing the "Manifesto" in 1983 to address the Socialist Review request for American socialist feminists to ponder over the future of socialist feminism in the context of the early Reagan era and the decline of leftist politics.

The first versions of the essay had a strong socialist and European connection that the Socialist Review East Coast Collective found too controversial to publish.

The Berkeley Socialist Review Collective published the essay in 1985 under the editor Jeff Escoffier.[3] The essay was most widely read as part of Haraway's 1991 book Simians, Cyborgs and Women.[28] In 2006, a variorum edition of the Manifesto was published in The International Handbook of Virtual Learning Environments[29] integrating variations from the various versions and returning references and some of the scholarly apparatus that had become separated from the text.

Quotes:

One last image organisms and organismic, holistic politics depend on metaphors of rebirth and invariably call on the resources of reproductive sex.
I would suggest that cyborgs have more to do with regeneration and are suspicious of the reproductive matrix and of most birthing. For salamanders, regeneration after injury, such as the loss of a limb, involves regrowth of structure and restoration of function with the constant possibility of twinning or other odd topographical productions at the site of former injury. The regrown limb can be monstrous, duplicated, potent.
We have all been injured, profoundly. We require regeneration, not rebirth, and the possibilities for our reconstitution include the utopian dream of the hope for a monstrous world without gender.

or

[Materialist perspective on science and humans being evolutionary animals] Within this framework, teaching modern Christian creationism should be fought as a form of child abuse.

I would like to say a few more things.

We all are already cyborgs in some sense. All of us use the net and all of us use computers, phones, whatever as external memory banks, similar but slightly different to how we used books and notes before. We are using glasses to see better, we are using inlays for our shoes so that our body works better, we use chemicals to alter our mood (caffeine), to scrub our teeth and skin…

The aspects that are to be fought in transhumanisms are the regressive and capitalist ones, not the emancipatory ones.

The Empire Strikes Back: A Posttranssexual Manifesto

From Sandy Stone and the late 80s is one of the texts pretty much every trans gender study course will talk about. It is roughly in a similar space to Haraway's book. Concepts and terms like "passing" were worked out and the practice of demanding people to pass critiqued in that text some 40 years ago. Stone was also target of TERFs some 40 years ago.

Ideas of moving robots or animals, beings, stuff animated by spirits is old, too. Aspects and rejections of that find their part in transhumanism.

They call themselves transbumanists because it sounds cooler and more socially acceptable than calling themselves eugenicists.

It's a vague label that means little more than that someone subscribes to some strain of body mod fetishism. It can be anything from "it is a moral imperative that we become literal vampires and microdose LSD and nootropics," to a desperate hope that medical science will solve all the problems of human frailty within the next few decades, to literal "the flesh is weak and abhorrent" 40K admech larping. Basically if you take the problematic and weird "ooooh nooo, they're defiling the sacred flesh with machinery! this will eat their soul and make them monsters!" shit from early cyberpunk and completely invert it, transhumanism is anything that could be reasonably described as that inversion.

A lot of prominent transhumanists are unhinged reactionary freaks with fantasies of becoming immortal ubermensch warlords, but IIRC there was also a big Soviet strain of transhumanism that came at it from the exact opposite angle and pushed the idea that socialist science could make everyone great no matter the circumstances of their birth.

Stupid rich people wanting to become robosapians even though computers wear out faster than the human body.

Personally I find the transhumanist movement to eugenicsy for my taste

some stuf here is being described as transhumanist that I would call medicine and is not an example of someone no longer being human. If someone loses a hand they don't become less human because humanity is not stored in your body parts. If you get a transplant from a pig heart you remain a human.

Transhumanism is a capitalist movement.

I hate it.

It's literally just from the History Channel (aka the "Aliens" channel on TV).

It means you think it's neat

😊

Aren't they just a bunch of stemlords who subscribes to a weird offshoot of liberal solutionism that involves fixing the world by putting scifi brain chips in people?

I want to replace my knees with ones that suck less and eyes with ones that can see all the extra colors birds and shit see, but i guess that's more just plain cybernetics?

i used to think it would be cool if there was a gender or cat ear booth you could step into depending on how you are feeling that day. or that it would be cool to have some kind of Culture-like neural lace interface to access control of one's biological processes. but that is bio-liberatory commie transhumanism i don't want anything to do with the capitalist version

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How about transhumanism but I just want every human to be trans.

I feel like there could be a positive transhumanist, but functionally it seems like every one I encounter is extremely afraid of dying and wants (Peter Thiel) to live forever

If we exclude sci-fantasy bullshit like uploading your mind onto a mech or submerging yourself into a pool of nanobots to rebuild your entire body on a molecular level, I mostly take transhumanism to mean having a general optimistic view of technology and believing technology will reach a point where people will proactively replace most of their natural body with artificial equivalents. In general, we either use technology as a means of augmenting our natural bodies or reactively replacing parts of our natural bodies that's deficient. A cane is a basic form of augmenting our arms, in this case how far our arms can reach. A prosthetic limb is a replacement for a deficiency, in this case the lack of an arm. A wheelchair augments our bodies by enabling us to quickly travel on flat surfaces with our arms. The fact that it's mostly used by disabled people who have difficulty moving with their legs doesn't change the fact that it's mostly a form of augmentation rather than replacement. The arms are augmented in order to compensate for the legs' deficiency. An actual replacement would be prosthetic legs because prosthetic legs don't make sense if you still have natural legs.

But I don't consider this transhumanism. Transhumanism would be when people start surgically removing their natural limbs in order to get better cyborg limbs or replacing their natural eyes with cybernetic eyes that can see infrared and ultraviolet. The reason why I wouldn't consider myself a transhumanist is I'm far more pessimistic in the tech actually being able to reach a point where people would knowingly consent to do this. So far, actually existing transhumanism is essentially just cosmetic surgery. But that's the thing. It's all mostly skin-deep. Once you're talking about replacing natural hearts with better synthetic ones or replacing your legs with metal spider legs, you start running into issues. Take phantom limb pain. Phantom limb pain occurs when someone lost a limb but still has pain as if the limb were still there. With this in mind, how many abled people would actually sign up to replace their natural arms with cybernetic ones? I could see amputees signing up since they already don't have the limb and already feel phantom limb pain anyways. If anything, the fact that their cybernetic limbs outperform their natural limbs is just compensation for the fact that they traumatically lost their limbs and have to feel phantom limb pain.

Ultimately, I personally don't think we'll reach a point where those replacements won't come with various side effects, meaning the only people who would actually take those replacements are people who need the replacements anyways.