Stoetzler: Imagining a sexuality that is free to recreate itself

Marcel Stoetzler has published a fascinating article in Mute Magazine: When Nothing is Produced.

The article is largely about the ways in which gender, sex and sexuality have been co-opted and reframed since the times of the industrial revolution. Stoetzler argues that bourgeois society has reduced sexuality to the logic of (re)production, resulting in a series of rigid dichotomies. In the end, he rejects this sexual dimorphism and the gay/straight split to imagine a sexuality that is free to recreate itself.

Stoetzler writes:

It appears that thinking about sexuality has always been fundamentally shaped by the obvious but perplexing way in which the sexual act confounds, or burdens, lust with procreation. It is easy to see that lust would, certainly in the minds of philosophers, tend to inhabit the realm of freedom and spirit, procreation that of necessity and matter. This cannot but reverberate with the social fact that the concepts ‘man’ and ‘woman’ are similarly charged. The conceptual dichotomy of nature and spirit, matter and form is rooted in ‘the wish to escape nature on which though, one’s life depends’. The crucial contribution of homosexuality to the history of human emancipation lies in its unequivocal assertion of the purposelessness of sexuality...the homosexual becomes ‘the portent of a sexuality alienated from its proper purpose’. To ‘alienate’ sexuality from its alleged purpose – procreation – is, however, the whole point of its emancipation...If, however, the emancipation of sexuality can only mean its alienation from what society claims is its purpose, gender dimorphism, too, loses in the process its real basis. ‘Woman as an alleged natural being is a product of history which denaturizes her’. ‘Male logic’...refers to women only as representatives of a species that in turn is alleged to represent ‘nature’. Therewith it denies the ‘naturalness’ of any particular woman which consists – to the extent that meaningful use of the term ‘naturalness’ is possible at all – in her individuality, in the sense that individuality is any individual’s identity against his or her identification.

Read the entire article.

Equalizer or Terminator?

Athena Andreadis is guest-blogging this month.

Years ago, I saw a short in an animation festival. It showed earth inhabited by men who happily bopped each other and propagated by laying eggs. A starship crash interrupted the idyll. Presaging Battlestar Galactica, the newcomers proved miraculously interfertile with the men who handed them the job of propagation along with all other disagreeable chores. Things went swimmingly, at least for the men, until a rescue ship arrived. After the women left, the men were once again free to pursue manly things – until they realized they had forgotten how to lay eggs.

The short was a wry, science-fictional version of the animal wife tale. But it's interesting that we can program starships to ricochet from planet to planet and routinely use in vitro fertilization – yet if women want direct genetic descendants, they still have no alternative to pregnancy unless they are rich enough to hire a surrogate, an option burdened with ethical baggage.

Of course, a womb is much more than a warm sac of nutrients. The endocrine inputs alone would tax a medium-size factory, leaving aside those from the immune system. The complexities of its function have made an artificial womb remain a distant glimpse and attempts with mammalian embryos still fail at early stages. Yet cultural politics have been as decisive in this delay as biological challenges: think of the lightning speed with which Japanese officials approved Viagra versus their decades-long ban on oral contraceptives and you get the picture. And the upheaval brought about by contraception will be a mild breeze compared to the hurricane that will be unleashed if we ever succeed in creating an artificial uterus. Its repercussions may equal (and possibly reverse) those that accompanied the invention of agriculture.

Prior to agriculture, gatherer-hunters lived semi-nomadic lives in small groups of relatively flat hierarchies. Family configurations were fluid and quasi-egalitarian and children were few, spaced far apart and collectively raised. This persisted when the nomads first settled. The earliest agricultural communities show little social stratification: there are no ostentatious palaces or tombs. But with the ability to hoard food reserves, dynamics changed – and so did the status of women, now burdened with multiple children and deprived of mobility and the gathering skills and knowledge of their foremothers. Wombs became commodities and have remained so, with minor fluctuations, ever since.

If we succeed in creating functioning artificial wombs, they will remain luxury options (like surrogate motherhood) until/unless they become relatively cheap. At that point, it’s virtually certain that they’ll be heavily used for reasons outlined in many analyses elsewhere – primarily the sparing of both mother and child from the health problems associated with pregnancy and birth (1, 2). And if they’re used, they will have a predictable outcome: all parents will become fathers, biologically, psychologically and, possibly, culturally.

Women will be able to have as many children as men, even multiplets without the severe problems of extreme prematurity now inherent in such a choice. Additionally, women will not undergo the hormonal changes of pregnancy, which means they will be as much (or as little) emotionally invested in their offspring as men. And of course cheap working artificial wombs will also mean that women will become biologically redundant.

Having equally invested parents is standard in other species whose offspring have long periods of helplessness – birds are an obvious “nuclear” example, social insects an “extended” one. Adoptions in humans show that biological connections are not a prerequisite in forming kinship bonds, although adopted and step-children are often treated less well than biological ones.

If we go the friendly route, ending pregnancy may finally usher in true equality between the genders since women will no longer be penalized physically, psychologically, financially and socially for having children: many problems, from autism to bed wetting, will cease being automatically the mother’s responsibility or fault. Such a change may perhaps allow us to play with alternative family arrangements, from Ursula Le Guin’s Ki’O sedoretu to Poul Anderson’s Rogaviki polyandry.

If we go the other route, women could become extinct as soon as a decade after artificial wombs become widely available, except as trophies or zoo specimens. Those who think this is unlikely need only to be reminded that there are now regions of China and India where the ratio of boys to girls is two to one, courtesy of sex-selective abortion and infanticide. People may bemoan a potential world without women, but such pious thoughts didn’t stop us from extinguishing countless other species. Personally, I think that never getting born is preferable to a devalued life.

An all-male culture need not resemble a prison or an army barracks. Nevertheless, I suspect that such a society will have either slavery or indentured service even if it has advanced technology, as humans seem unable to avoid rank demarcations (although their natural ranking system is not the fixed rigid pyramid of canine bands). Their romantic Others may be transgendered men, or Wraeththu-like bishōnen boys in a revival of the erastes/eromenos scheme of Periclean Athens. But like the men in the cartoon short I described earlier, even with artificial wombs these guys will eventually bump into another wall: ovarian stocks.

Like wombs, ova are not passive nurturing chambers. For one, they select which sperm to let in when the hordes come knocking. Additionally, beyond transmitting half the nuclear and all the mitochondrial genes, eggs also contain organized spacetime gradients that direct correct formation and epigenetic imprinting of the embryo. Re-creating this kind of organized cytoplasm makes an artificial womb seem simple by comparison and if there are any trophy women left at that point their fate may be grim.

Wanting to hear another person’s views on this matter, I asked my partner, without any preamble or explanation, “What do you think will happen to women if we create working artificial wombs?” And he, proving yet again how much he deserves the title of snacho, replied without missing a beat, “Nothing. Women are the reason men want to get out of bed in the morning.” I couldn’t help smiling… and I reflected that, as long as even tiny pockets of such people continue to exist, we may get to travel to the stars, after all.


Athena
Starship Reckless

The Shifgrethor of Changelings

Athena Andreadis is guest blogging this month.

A slightly different version of this essay appeared in her blog on April 17, 2008. Since then, Thomas Beatie and Nancy Roberts had a daughter and they are expecting a second child.

“Maybe there are only two sexes: men and mothers.”
Alice Sheldon, writing as James Tiptree Jr. to Joanna Russ

A year ago, I caught sight of a headline exclaiming “Pregnant Man!” Intrigued, I read on, only to become more puzzled. I couldn’t figure out the novelty: the future parent, Thomas Beatie, identified and was legally classified as male. However, s/he was chromosomally and somatically female, modified by breast surgery and testosterone injections. So Beatie’s fallopian tubes, ovaries and uterus were intact, making this a conventional pregnancy (and not the first of its kind, either).

For me, the real surprise was how reactions split. With few exceptions, women were positive, whether hetero- or homo-sexual. Most men (again, regardless of sexual orientation) were negative, many virulently so, resorting to utterances that could have emanated from fundamentalist tracts. The transgender community was ambivalent — and amazingly there, too, the division was along lines of gender identification. In essence, the men — born or made — were saying: Why would anyone calling himself a man go through this? That’s what women are for! Could this ever happen to me?? Some said this more or less verbatim. Beatie’s pregnancy pushed the buttons of this issue as forcefully as if the coming child had burst, Alien-like, from a male torso.

While I was pondering this, it dawned on me that unconventional biological and social human genders seem to be predominantly the domain of women in speculative fiction, from singletons (Le Guin’s androgynous Gethenians, Constantine’s hermaphroditic Wraeththu, Slonczewski’s parthenogenetic Sharers) to multiples (Scott’s five-gendered post-FTL humans) to bona fide male pregnancy (in Butler’s Bloodchild). Men tend to stick to dyadic genders and traditional family patterns, even when depicting otherwise exotic aliens.

Biologically, the two gametes of terrestrial lifeforms are a result of evolution once it went down the path of sexual reproduction. There is nothing pre-ordained about this outcome, nor does phenotype mirror genotype: many plants and several animals are unisexual or hermaphroditic, while other animals can switch sexes. Too, biomorphic and behavioral outcomes are not invariably binary. Humans are capable of an enormous repertoire of responses, and I cannot think of one that is completely gender-specific. The troubles start with the relative value assigned to the two genders — and to their behavior, conditioned and enforced by edicts throughout the ages that are as arbitrary as they are punitive.

I can understand the worries of the trans community, whose members are trying to gain acceptance as gay people did before them by adopting rigidly orthodox gender roles. Such stereotyped assignations also occurred in cultures that tolerated intersexes: the North American two-spirited, the Indian hijra. However, the men’s objections reminded me of the “eew” reaction of boys to girls, before the hormonal rise (or is it fall?) of puberty overcomes social conditioning. They highlight a profound and visceral male unease over blurred identities or breached boundaries — in bodies, gender roles, power; a wish to make an absolute, immovable distinction between penetrator and penetrated, implanter and implanted.

In most cultures, men are trained to compartmentalize and make a virtue out of this necessity. Additionally, surgery that accentuates sexual dimorphism draws surprisingly little criticism. Beatie’s biggest transgression was becoming a changeling, someone who cannot be easily pigeonholed. Shapeshifters, from Raven to Loki to Star Trek’s Odo, are never trusted even though all mythologies found it necessary to invent them. What set off the fuses was the perception that Beatie is claiming the perks of both genders — if pregnancy can be viewed as such, considering how dangerous it could be (both physically and socially) before the advent of reliable contraception.

In the last few decades, medical advances have made it possible for people to conceive and bear children by assisted reproduction: sperm banks, artificial insemination, in vitro fertilization, surrogate motherhood. Yet all these procedures kept one condition intact: women’s involvement and hence traditional gender roles. Schwarzenegger in Junior notwithstanding, there is no concerted effort to create artificial wombs, which would make childbearing optional for women and possible for men. With the continuing furor over embryonic stem cells, it is unlikely that such an endeavor will be pursued any time soon.

Childbearing and childrearing, even when greatly desired and welcome, take a toll on women individually and collectively, since their investment is much greater. As long as this dichotomy remains, all discussions of true equality (to say nothing of radical social engineering) will remain just vaporous talk. It is possible, of course, that once in vitro pregnancy becomes possible, women will disappear except for a few kept as trophies or specimens — and that humans will designate another group as the perpetual Other. However, I prefer to hope that this will bring true equality, and make everyone able to adopt fluid, flexible identities that, at their best, combine the gentle strength of the Gethenians with the passionate flair of the Wraeththu.

Shifgrethor: to cast a long shadow; prestige, face, social authority (language of Karhide; Ursula Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness).

Credits: Top, Shaman by Susan Seddon Boulet;
Bottom, Tilda Swinton as Gabriel in Constantine.

Athena

Starship Reckless

And Ain't I a Human?

Sorry ladies, the male birth control pill is not about you

There's been considerable media attention surrounding a recent breakthrough in the development of a male birth-control pill (MBCP).

Fact of the matter is that it's still about 5 to 10 years away. It's taking forever for a men's pill to come to market.

What's taking so long?

Well, the issue is not as simple as it might first appear. Sure, there are still some technical hurdles to overcome, but the delay in developing a MBCP has definite political, economic and even discriminatory aspects to it.

Barriers to entry do in fact exist for the male pill—disempowering barriers that men should most certainly be aware of—including those set up by sexist women who belittle male reproductive accountability, unfair gender biases, self-serving feminists who refuse to relinquish reproductive power, and a risk averse Big Pharma.

And men themselves are also to blame. Far too many guys have gotten comfortable over the idea that birth-control pills are exclusive to women. Most men have not yet realized the implications of having access to a pill of their own.

Consequently (and quite disturbingly), conversations about the male pill have migrated outside the sphere of male interests. Women tend to frame the issue as it pertains to their concerns and their needs, while politicians and pharmaceutical companies neglect the issue, unsure as to what it means to them.

Ultimately, however, this is about men. It's about men gaining fair and equal access to a powerful contraceptive that will finally allow them to have the same control over their reproductive processes as women—an outcome that will greatly benefit male interests.

How the male pill works

An international consortium of physicians recently revealed a formula for "safe, effective and reversible" hormonal contraception for males.

The breakthrough involves progestin, which is found in women's birth-control pills and the male sex hormone testosterone. Progestin helps suppress ovulation when used in an oral contraceptive and it appears to function in the same way for men, suppressing the rate and extent of sperm production. The developers claim that this contraceptive will be as effective as a vasectomy.

Men will have to take the pill for about 2 to 3 months to deplete their sperm. It will take a similar amount of time to restore normal levels of fertility once off the pill.

Bring it

For the most part, both men and women appear to be in favor of the MBCP.

Trouble is, most men and women don't truly understand why it's so important. Particularly women.

Now, I don't mean to begrudge women their reasons for welcoming the male pill. It's all good.

I think it's great that couples will finally be able to share the burden of birth control.

And it will undoubtedly be a welcome alternative for those women who cannot take the pill or other contraceptives (of which there are many).

There's also the issue of accessibility. A 2004 report from the Reproductive Health Technologies Project calls contraceptive availability an "unfinished revolution." Indeed, we need more contraception and more options.

But this is fundamentally an issue of male reproductive control

This is a male issue about male reproduction.

And all that it entails.

The pill will resolve a number problems that men typically face.

It will be dramatically less invasive and severe than a vasectomy—a procedure that can be reversed, but one that's quite involved and not always possible.

The male pill will also prove to be much more reliable than condoms or withdrawal which can have worst-case failure rates of 15 and 27 percent respectively (!!!).

Also, the male pill will have a profound sociological impact similar to what happened after the advent of the female birth-control pill. This will prove to be a seminal event as far as the men's movement is concerned.

In fact, a strong case can be made that the delay in the male pill has been caused by an underdeveloped male social movement. The sense of urgency to develop a MBCP has been quelled by the dissenters and the disconnected. Men need to be aware of those forces that work to prevent the advent of not just the male pill, but a cohesive and powerful men's rights movement itself.

Negative male stereotyping

The possibility of a male pill has caused a number of women to pause and reflect on the implications.

Should a woman believe a guy who says, "Trust me, baby, I'm on the pill."?

Most women would likely say no. It's doubtful that women would put faith in men to stick to a strict schedule of birth-control pill popping. Men are supposed to be untrustworthy and irresponsible, right? After all, they're not the ones who would have to deal with a pregnancy.

Aside from what this says about negative male stereotyping, this complaint neglects three fundamental issues.

First, people must take control over their own reproductive processes and not rely on the other person. This goes for both men and women. The MBCP will finally help men know for certain that they have virtually no chance of impregnating a partner.

Which immediately brings to mind the problem of trust that many men are confronted with today. Should men trust women when they make the same claim? How many times has a man been duped into fatherhood by an opportunistic woman?

Well, according to a Cornell University study, over a million American births each year result from pregnancies which men did not intend. What does this say about female reproductive accountability?

The male pill, will at the very least, help men avoid this risk.

Second, the MBCP strictly deals with contraception. It will do nothing to prevent the spread of sexually transmitted diseases. The advent of a male pill will not eliminate the need to wear a condom as far as STDs are concerned.

And third, most men do in fact deal with a pregnancy and the introduction of an unexpected child -- be it parental or fiscal responsibilities. There are more accountable single dads who have joint custody of their children than ever before in history.

An unwelcome power shift

As Glenn Sacks has said, "Power is the reward which comes with responsibility."

Indeed, because women have had to bear the burden of contraception, they have gained control over an integral component of human life, namely reproduction. The MBCP threatens to wrest that control from women to men.

Quite understandably, some feminists are concerned about this possibility.

And, I'm sorry to say, that's too bad.

Men are currently at a distinct disadvantage when it comes to the choice of reproduction -- but this is now set to change.

As an example, according to the 2004 National Scruples and Lies Survey (which polled 5,000 women in the United Kingdom), 42% of women claimed they would lie about contraception in order to get pregnant, regardless of the wishes of their partners.

Wow.

Other evidence suggests that over 10% of children turn out not to be the offspring of the expected father when DNA tests are done, suggesting that many men obliviously help in the raising of children who are not actually theirs.

This is no laughing matter. Child support rates are increasing, with some fathers giving their ex's as much as 15 to 25% of their take home pay per child. And it's widely known that fathers are second class citizens in the courts. For example, in some U.S. states a father cannot present DNA evidence to disprove paternity.

For those men who truly don't want to have children—something that is completely within their rights—the MBCP will help them achieve that level of control.

And again, female claims that this will allow men to forever shirk their paternal responsibilities and live in perpetual adolescence are not just gross generalizations, but sexist statements of the highest order.

The Man is holding men down

Quite surprisingly, Big Pharma has dragged their feet in developing the MBCP. Despite over 20 years of research, they claim that there's little money to be made.

In fact, that's one of the main reasons that the pharmaceutical firms Bayer and Organon abandoned their male pill programs last year.

This is because men are not demanding it

Men are clearly not showing Big Pharma that they want a male pill.

Research shows that most males are not ready for personal birth control. A recent MSN-Zogby poll revealed that only 14% of Americans would definitely take it or insist that their partner take it. And tellingly, the study indicated that women are slightly more excited about the prospect than men.

While at the same time other studies show that men do in fact want alternative contraception options.

What's going on here, guys?

Perhaps confusion has something to do with it. There's a very underdeveloped sense of a male collective consciousness. It appears that men, for the most part, don't yet realize the importance of reproductive control—something women have, for obvious reasons, been very aware of for quite some time now.

Some men, for example, dismiss the male pill on account of their fear that it would transgress their masculinity.

This is exactly the mentality that has to be abandoned and replaced by some more forward thinking ideas that will work help equalize not just reproductive options, but other gender issues that set men at a disadvantage or limit biological potential.

Times they are a changin'

Perhaps I'm understating the fact that 14% of men are ready to use the pill. That's a significant number unto itself. Maybe it's a positive sign that attitudes are changing and that broader acceptance is on its way.

In all likelihood, demand will probably increase once the pill is finally made available. It will become real for men once it becomes a real option.

And hopefully it will wake men up to the possibilities. Issues of gender, sexuality and reproduction are not just women's issues. They're a vital element of the collective human condition.

Postgenderism: Beyond the Gender Binary

A number of years ago I became frustrated with both modern feminism and the utter dearth of a sensical male approach to gender issues. I began to speculate about how transhumanism could contribute to the discussion and offer a perspective that could meet the needs of both genders.

And given the prospect of a posthuman condition, I also wondered what relevance 'gender' would continue to have for a technologically advanced species.

I was inspired by Donna Haraway's Cyborg Manifesto, but felt that it was incomplete, unimaginative and far too female-centric. That's when I started to think of 'postgenderism,' the idea that both men and women should use advanced biotechnologies to reduce the gender gap and create entirely new opportunities for sexual expression.

I've never fully articulated these ideas into anything formal, aside from an early Wikipedia article and the odd blog posting.

This has finally changed. James Hughes and I have collaborated on an essay that is set to appear in a forthcoming book on gender and reproductive technologies. Dr. J has released a shorter version of the essay on the IEET site and we're hoping to get some feedback so that we may improve the final version for the book.

Here's the abstract:

Postgenderism is an extrapolation of ways that technology is eroding the biological, psychological and social role of gender, and an argument for why the erosion of binary gender will be liberatory. Postgenderists argue that gender is an arbitrary and unnecessary limitation on human potential, and foresee the elimination of involuntary biological and psychological gendering in the human species through the application of neurotechnology, biotechnology and reproductive technologies. Postgenderists contend that dyadic gender roles and sexual dimorphisms are generally to the detriment of individuals and society. Assisted reproduction will make it possible for individuals of any sex to reproduce in any combinations they choose, with or without “mothers” and “fathers,” and artificial wombs will make biological wombs unnecessary for reproduction. Greater biological fluidity and psychological androgyny will allow future persons to explore both masculine and feminine aspects of personality. Postgenderists do not call for the end of all gender traits, or universal androgyny, but rather that those traits become a matter of choice. Bodies and personalities in our postgender future will no longer be constrained and circumscribed by gendered traits, but enriched by their use in the palette of diverse self-expression.

Download the Complete Document (PDF)

Latest podcast posted: 2008.03.11

The latest episode of the Sentient Developments Podcast is now available. Alternative audio formats are also available.

In this episode I discuss seven ways to control the Galaxy with self-replicating probes, the problem with 99.9 % of so-called 'solutions' to the Fermi Paradox, and why we should work to overcome gender.

Overcoming gender

Your gender is a constraint. This is an inalienable truism, regardless of whether you’re a man or a woman.

We can no longer deny that males and females are profoundly different. The hallucination is over. Scientists and behaviorists are discovering that men and women differ not just physically, but cognitively and emotionally as well. These differences are not merely the result of gender-specific socialization; they are innate—the result of thousands of years of sexual competition and selection.

Your gender assignment and sense of sexual identity is an imposition. Like many of your other characteristics, you are largely the result of a genetic lottery that happened beyond your control. Consequently, you are in no small way predetermined. Your physical and psychological capabilities are very much constrained and dictated by your genetic constitution.

Sure, the environments that we find ourselves in and the ways in which we are socialized play a contributing factor to our health, personalities and broader perspectives. But let’s not fool ourselves, each and every one of us has characteristics that are forever limited by our genetic code.

Barring the application of enhancement biotechnologies, I will never be able to conceptualize music as profoundly as Beethoven, nor will I ever be able to visualize numbers like Pierre de Fermat. No amount of studying, hard work or dedication will ever change this. I am physiologically incapable of acquiring these capacities.

Similarly, my gender plays an integral role in determining who I am, what my preferences are, and ultimately what I’m capable of.

And that bothers me.

Gender is a disease

Like the work being done to bring about a radical life extension revolution, and whose proponents argue that aging is a disease, we likewise need to change our perceptions about gender. There are a number of areas where we can see how our genders work to our disadvantage and why we would want to do something about it.

Men have the double-edged sword of being, in general, physically advantaged. While this tends to contribute to male dominance over women, it has also placed men in dangerous situations and environments. Males are conventionally the members of society who are sent into combat and are expected to perform hazardous—and sometimes sacrificial—work.

Aside from the overtly obvious physical dimorphism that separates men from women, there are also a number of cognitive and behavioral differences that work to stratify humans along gender lines.

Threats, physical assaults and homicides are an indelible male feature across all cultures and typically the result of male-male competition over resources that work to increase reproductive fitness. Males tend to have more accidents than females across their entire life spans. For every girl that is injured on a playground, four boys are likewise injured. Boys burn themselves more than girls. Roughly twice as many females across all ages suffer from significant levels of anxiety and depression than their male counterparts; women are more prone to suffer from eating disorders and post-traumatic stress disorder.

Looking at latent cognitive abilities, boys and men have slightly higher average IQ scores than girls and women. Females across all ages consistently outperform boys and men on tests that assess the speed of matching arbitrary symbols to numbers. In measures of sensitivity to verbal cues, females almost always outperform males.

Needless to say, these gender differences are general tendencies. Men and women do not all fall within these parameters. But what these statistics reveal is that across the entire population males and females are stratified in a non-trivial way.

Sex differences also impact on occupational interests and achievement—differences that contribute greatly to the wage and social status advantage that men enjoy in most (if not all) industrialized nations. The acquisition of the educational credentials required for a lucrative career in a field such as engineering – a math intensive field – is made easier for men by virtue of cognitive factors that are less pronounced for women.

And of course, as long as women carry, give birth, and nurture their offspring, they will be set at a social disadvantage and even face subjugation. As cyberfeminist Donna Haraway noted in her Cyborg Manifesto,

"...control strategies applied to women's capacities to give birth to new human beings will be developed in the languages of population control and maximization of goal achievement for individual decision-makers. Control strategies will be formulated in terms of rates, costs of constraints, degrees of freedom. Human beings, like any other component or subsystem, must be localized in a system architecture whose basic modes of operation are probabilistic, statistical."

Consequently, Haraway saw true female liberation occurring through the application of cybernetics and the subsequent alleviation of biological pressures on women. As Haraway famously noted, "I'd rather be a cyborg than a goddess."

The end of immutable sexual characteristics

While reproductively necessary, the ongoing presence of gender has proven problematic over time. Humanity is far removed from its evolutionary heritage and environment. Moreover, evolution makes for a poor moral compass. We value fairness, non-arbitrariness and egalitarianism -- even in the genetic sphere; the ongoing presence of gender should therefore trouble us. We should strive for a post-Darwinian condition.

We are, often at a subconscious level, working to become postbiological. Most of us are in denial about or in opposition to this, but the level of control that we seek over our minds and bodies is in tune with this goal. We are perpetually working to transcend our biological vulnerabilities and constraints. This will eventually get us to the oft spoken and quasi-mythological posthuman condition.

Most efforts to achieve a postgendered state have largely focused on non-biological solutions, namely through social, educational, political and economic reform. While environmental strategies can be effective and important in their own right, they will continue to experience limited results on account of their inability to address the root of the problem: human biology.

Transhumanist postgenderism, as differentiated and further elucidated from mainstream feminism and postmodern/deconstructionist cyberfeminism, calls for a more equitable distribution of gendered traits across the two sexes and the elimination of those gendered characteristics that are deemed disadvantageous. Postgenderism in this form calls for actual reproductive and medical interventions for the achievement of these ends.

People deserve access to biotechnologies that will help them control their morphological, cognitive and reproductive characteristics. In a postgendered world, individuals will have the option to remain gendered, to experiment with their sex and sexuality, to mix and match gendered characteristics, or to reject gender altogether. The idea is to exact control over our bodies and minds. A postgendered condition does not necessarily imply the end of all gendered characteristics, it merely signifies the end of fixed and traditional gender assignments wrought by evolutionary processes. In this sense, persons who have undergone sexual reassignment surgery are humanity's first postgenderists.

There are other postgender biotechnologies in existence today. Birth control pills are a well established method that thwarts our reproductive natures, and menstruation suppression has all but arrived. Other physiological factors, such as hormonal influences and neurotransmitters, will soon be addressable.

Looking ahead to the future, there's the possibility for male pregnancy and neurological interventions to normalize male and female cognitive functioning. More radical solutions to help persons become truly postgendered include the advent of artificial wombs, virtual reality and whole brain emulation.

At the social level, the broader suppressive and controlling social megastructure that exists and thrives on gender differences will be undermined by the postgenderist agenda. It will mark the end of sexual politics.

Thus, it is through the application of substantive and real biological interventions that the problem that is gender will most meaningfully be addressed. Postgender-tech will be an integral component to the larger collaborative struggle to achieve a genetically egalitarian, posthuman, and postbiological condition that works to the betterment of both individuals and society in general.