LGBTQ.A.I.? Venus Valley gets conspiratorial!

Have a seat and a snack, Gentles and Lady-Men: This one’s a LONG READ, as it’s somewhere I’ve been leading up to, so it’s full of sum-ups of where we’ve come from to get here! If you’ve not been with me on the journey, let me catch you up: You’re at the tail end of a chapter-by-chapter release of the first draft of my LGBTQIA-centric philosophy-exploring book-in-progress - in which you’re invited to debate, discuss, question, contribute, and your inputs become my edits, so the finished book will speak for more people than just me. Welcome for almost the last time, queerly beloveds, to VENUS VALLEY: Queer Philosophers’ Forum!

This one gets complex, so let’s do a couple of thought experiments to introduce some of the ideas.

Really simple one first: Take the hand you write/draw with - or most dominant if you’re ambidextrous, we’re a queer space let’s not be binary! Lift it to your face; look at it. That’s, obviously, an example of an object, right? It has substance; sensation; physical fact. It’s there. Now, I’m raising my left hand: Because I’m left-handed. That, though it’s psychological, not physical like my actual hand, is still real; still fact; still true. That’s an easy example of a concept. Now, let’s blur the boundaries a bit. Twist your hand around on your wrist as much as you can, so you see every side of it. Turn it a few directions a few times, until you think you’ve seen it all. Now, think: Did you see your whole hand? The quick answer springs to mind, Yes, obviously I did. But you didn’t. Couldn’t have. Vision doesn’t work like that. What you really saw was each different part of your hand while the rest was hidden; then, your brain collected images into a single memory of a single moment of seeing your whole hand, that’s held in your mind. We could argue for days like internet chatrooms when The Matrix came out: is this thing in your mind “real”? What’s “real”, here, is your experience. You experienced a real hand, experienced real eyesight, experienced real function of your real brain. Now we’ve swum a few strokes towards the deep end of the philosophy pool, into the waters of PHENOMENOLOGY: Understanding things where the thing itself can’t be understood except by our experience of it. Light has wavelengths, but what’s “Colour”? Nerves have impulses, but what’s “Pleasure”? Photons and neurons are real objects, but mental/emotional meanings/experiences are real concepts. But they’re such part of the same thing we can’t separate them. One more warm-up exercise before we really get going: Phenomenology Question One: When I described and defined “experience” just now, I switched - to see if you’d spot it - between the words Brain and Mind. Are they the same, or are they separate?

Now you’re thinking like a philosopher!

So let’s begin…

When religious believers can’t/won’t accept scientific proof of something, like evolution, one of the big things they’ve come up with to make sense of that viewpoint is: Why can’t we see it happening now? I mean, we can, if we look all over nature with objective perspective; but from a certain subjective human point of view, they’ve kind of got a point. Evolution’s about who’s best adapted to our environment. Fish and mammals can only survive and thrive in water or on land, each more than the other; amphibians can do both. Now, humans’ adaptation that sets us apart is our big bright brains. But ever since we could do things with our brains - mix medicines, light fires, wear clothes, grow crops, domesticate animals, write words, make tools, bury bodies - this process, of adapting to environments, turned a corner: now we can stay as we are; adapt the environment to ourselves. And for every step on that journey, there’s someone who thinks it’s a step too far. Mixing medicinal potions was “witchcraft”; women taking painkillers during pregnancy and childbirth - it was supposed to hurt, it was the judgement on daughters of Eve! The printing press was devil’s work, who knows what ideas could spread? Birth control, IVF, abortion, surrogacy, puberty blockers, HRT (and in a way, even cosmetic surgery and sex toys) all “interfere” with “natural” sexual reproduction. We’re - stop me if you’ve heard this before - “playing god”. Guess what these kinds of thinkers feel about gender affirming hormones, surgeries, and changing sex?

As we adapt our environment, we also adapt our own bodies’ adaptations to it - we actually adapt psychologically to the adaptations we made physically. Think of how amputees sometimes still feel “phantom limbs”. In the same way, when we get so used to using a tool that we don’t even notice it in our hands, we find our brain sending signals when things get near the tool - let’s say, a hammer - that they should only be sending if things get near to touching our skin. Our brain is experiencing our body as if it’s a combination of man and hammer: Hammer Man! Drag queens know their hair, nails, boobs, heels, aren’t “real” body parts, but look how naturally they adapt walking and talking as if they are! When I wore a huge headdress as a Donna Summer tribute at a Body Art festival, it took me most of a day to stop ducking through doorways even when I wasn’t wearing it anymore. When I worked in healthcare and social work, one service user’s wheelchair was shaped so he couldn’t see it in his peripheral vision if he looked straight forward as he went along; and he always used to say, when he dreamed at night, he just felt himself moving forward; the wheelchair wasn’t there. We’re not “always looking at our phones”; we’re using our phones to look at something else - looking, listening, learning, living through the screen - hence why people say we’re not just “on”, but also “in” our phones. When I wear glasses, I’m not looking at the glasses; I’m relaxing my eyes, not thinking about it, and looking at the world through the glasses. How many times do you think I’ve lost them, looked for them all around the house, but they’re on my head the whole time?

So any conservative (usually older, but not always) thinkers, despairing at progressive (usually younger, but not always) thinking, are looking through a different lens. Every generation has a “new normal”. Regardless of your perspective on specific politics like economy or ecology, doesn’t it make more sense to be progressive than conservative? Everything will always progress, and nothing can ever really be conserved. Technology doesn’t just make the world physically different; it makes it phenomenologically different.

The extreme end of what professional worriers think is happening, especially with transgender and nonbinary medical care and social change, is a futuristic philosophy that, if you started your philosophy study at the very bottom like me, you’ll have heard about through conspiracy theory thriller writers like Dan Brown:

TRANSHUMANISM.

“It’s as if man had been suddenly appointed managing director of the biggest business of all, the business of evolution - appointed without being asked if he wanted it, and without proper warning and preparation. What’s more, he can’t refuse the job. Whether he wants to or not, whether he’s conscious of what he’s doing or not, he’s in point of fact determining the future direction of evolution on this earth. That’s his inescapable destiny, and the sooner he realises it and starts believing in it, the better for all concerned.” Julian Huxley, who popularised the term in the 1950s - British biologist and brother of Aldous Huxley, author of Brave New World - a book that will leave you with a lot of questions about whether transhumanism makes us more than human, or less than!

Now we know we can adapt the environment to ourselves, and we know we can adapt our minds to the adaptations, just how far could we, or should we, take it? Can we actually start making decisions about what the limits of human experience might be, or if we need accept any limitations as unchangeable? Utopian ideals abound, of Supermen and Star Trek futures where we go on beyond death by transferring our consciousness into clones, androids and holograms.

Unfortunately, we live in a world where more education and healthcare go to the privileged than the poor; and those who want to keep it that way, can corrupt these ideas into things like EUGENICS - selective breeding of desirable “superhuman” traits into the species, by selective breeding of undesirable “sub-human” traits out of the species; with the people in power, getting to decide what exactly are “undesirable traits”: Disabled people? Autistic? Queer? Black? Jewish? Economically unproductive people? ASPERGER’S became the name of part of the AUTISM SPECTRUM because patients of Dr. Hans Asperger were judged on their ability or inability to be useful members of the workforce, and so deserving to be kept alive by its resources. Martin Heidegger, who came up with the Hammer-Man example, joined the Nasty Party. Whether willingly or unwillingly, is a debate for another day.

So, how did we get from there to transphobic conspiracy theories?

Heidegger , in between reporting his Jewish students and academic fellows to the Gazpacho, wrote Being And Time: in which Religion loses its sway over society, and new technology DEHUMANISES people - makes you see them as animals, or machines, so you’re more willing to do things to them that you wouldn’t normally do to a fellow human. And his new vision of how to live in the modern age required a new Germany to take over Europe, eliminate democracy and kill all the bad people, including queer people, but especially Jews; as the dehumanising progress of technology against religion was part of a worldwide Jewish conspiracy, apparently.

I can’t spend long on Twitter or TikTok without seeing someone still saying the decline of religion and rise of technology dehumanises us. Because, here’s the thing about conspiracy theories and their immunity to scientific proof: They’re an emotional reaction, dressed up as a logical ethical one. When photos of “fairies” went public in the English village Cottingley in 1917, experts were asked to verify them as authentic unaltered photos. They hesitated to even try, as it wasn’t a meaningless mechanical task - spiritual and metaphysical beliefs, and reputations of people who held them, were at stake. And it’s the same with a lot of conspiracy theories coming from conservative evangelicals: If they accept the world is round, the Big Bang, evolution, the Moon landing, climate change, nonbinary gender, and vaccines, are real, then they might have to accept that the planet Earth’s and the human race’s special place in the divine plan might not be real - and that’s scary! So, conspiracy theories abound. And they haven’t changed much since Heidegger.

When Martine Rothblatt, trans rights advocate lawyer and supporter of the HUMAN GENOME PROJECT, wrote “Mind Is Deeper Than Matter: Transgenderism, Transhumanism And The Freedom Of Form” in The Transhumanist Reader; blogger Jennifer Bilek wrote “Martine Rothblatt: A Founding Father Of The Transgender Empire” in Uncommon Ground. In March 2024 she tweeted:

“Gender identity” rights are A.I. rights in the embryonic stage. Countries around the world are already preparing neuro rights for A.I. and human melding. Gender rights construct a legal framework for augmented humanity - that goes beyond what we recognise as human.

She was responding to this tweet:

Transgenderism is the rebranding of a sexual fetish and the on-ramp to transhumanism. Transhumanism is a techno-religion that rejects the human condition. Introducing the Founding Father of Transgenderism, renowned Transhumanist Martine Rothblatt. #WRONGBODIES.

And yes, they’re deliberately calling Martine Rothblatt a man. Add a spicy dose of Jewish billionaire George Soros being the money behind the movement, and it’s just a short hop in the time machine a century back in the past to Heidegger’s antisemitism. Now, think back a moment, to the way I was saying some body-enhancing technologies also affect our brain’s way of processing things. If you just jump into Twitter feeds or mainstream newspapers saying “Jewish secret societies recruit mad scientists to turn us all into demonic sex robots of the apocalypse”, you’ll get laughed out of… well, at least half of them, depending which billionaire is CEO this week. But if you can get people to look at advances in technology, declines in religious numbers, and progressive attitudes to sexuality (things that are definitely real) from your point of view - through the lens of transphobia and antisemitism - they become more adaptable to those kinds of ideas, and those whole ways of thinking, and that becomes their lens to see the world through, without even realising they’re doing it. It’s as easy as removing a space between words: “Trans Women” (two words) refers to them as Women, just adding the word Trans to describe an extra detail about them. But “Transwomen” (one word) subtly and sneakily invites us to think of them as some invented thing that’s not the same as women. Once we start looking at queer, Jewish, black, autistic or disabled people, as something other than the same level of human as we are, then we’ve taken a step towards treating them the same way as we treat other things that aren’t quite human, like animals or machines.

So, what do we need, to make sure that on the one hand, the conspiracy theorists don’t convince us to treat either transgender or Transhumanist people as sub-human; and on the other hand, that transhumanism doesn’t end up with the super-human potential just going to the people in power? One answer goes all the way back to my left-handedness, and to a favourite fact conspiracy theorists love to trot out to try and prove their point. Let me finish by introducing you to the SOCIAL MODEL OF DISABILITY.

“Transgenderism” must be a “social contagion”, they say, because look at the pattern of the rise in people self-identifying… Except, it’s exactly the same as the pattern of the rise in people openly being left-handed, after it stopped being a punishable offence in children!

What we need isn’t just “progress”, it’s ProgressivISM.

ASTROBIOLOGIST (the study of potential forms of life and evolution on other planets) David Grinspoon tweeted in 2021:

If you want a Star Trek future, it’s not just going to space in cool machines. It’s building a society with respect for all life, sentient and otherwise, applying science wisely, & pursuing principles of justice, fairness & reason. Let’s build that and ride it to the stars.

And Isaac Asimov, in his story Stranger In Paradise, compared autistic people’s brains with a robot who appeared to be malfunctioning, because he was trying to walk in an environment different than the one where he was programmed to function. The word ROBOT originally just meant “slave”; but Asimov captured people’s imaginations with stories where men learned just as much about life, and how to live it, from machines, as machines did from men (although, yes, true to his time, it was mostly about men).

When I worked in healthcare and social work, like I said before, we worked with THE SOCIAL MODEL OF DISABILITY: People weren’t “disabled” by whatever physical medical condition they had; they were “disabled” by the fact no arrangements or accommodations were made around them. If one person can use their legs and another can’t, they’re both equally able to enter a building with a high-up front door, provided there’s a wheelchair and a ramp as well as a staircase and a handrail. Achieving that for them, means we need to change our attitudes and actions to suit them, not the other way round. Way back in the era of human evolution I talked about earlier, we survived and thrived by gathering into societies. We survived by surviving together. Christian writer and teacher C.S. LEWIS even once suggested our keeping pets was a kind of moral progress, as we’d begun extending our affection beyond our fellow humans and treating animals like family.

(Quick side note, that’s got nothing to do with this, but I just thought it was a fun footnote for a Queer philosophy forum: C.S. Lewis also once got so hooked on reading about sexual sadism, he started signing spicy letters as Philomastix - “Whip-lover”!)

And I happen to think, optimistically, that this way of thinking (the one about pets, I mean, not the one about whips!) comes more naturally to us than transphobia, conspiracy theory or Nasty Party ideology does. How easily were you able to absorb and accept the sentence, just now, when I called the robot “He” instead of “It”? Would you even have noticed if I hadn’t pointed it out?

I grew up on stories like Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia, plus Winnie The Pooh and The Wind In The Willows. So, transphobes, conspiracy theorists, and Nasty Partyists - good luck trying to get me to mistreat or disregard other people by “treating them like animals”; I’ve been treating animals like they were people since I was six!

And, although it’s just as dangerous in the wrong hands as any other tool, that’s the optimistic concept at the core of transhumanism: If we can make animals and machines something more than just sub-human objects, then what might we make ourselves? We’re already at a point where gender is more than just sex, and sex is more than just reproduction - what’s next?

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