The passage of a bill banning abortion past twenty weeks and imposing difficult regulations of abortion clinics - in the context of a governer who wants to make all abortion "a thing of the past" - recently put Texas in the headlines. Here in the neighboring state of New Mexico, a movement to enact a similiar bill in the city Albuquerque has sprung up, catching many of us by surprise. It's part of the national campaign against abortion driven by Operation Rescue.

While I've only been tangentially involved in organizing against the proposed ban, various of my comrades here are taking more prominent roles. The coalition Respect ABQ Women brings together a number of notable local progressive and social-justice groups.

As important resisting such specific restriction on reproductive healthcare is, I also endeavor to keep the bigger picture and expanisive aspirations in mind. Motivations for opposing abortion bans of course do and should differ. Alongside love for and solidarity with female-bodied friends directly affect by access to reproductive healthcare, I take my inspiration from feminist theory and chiefly Shulamith Firestone's vision. Firestone's 1970 manifesto The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution lays out a plan to fundamentally remake family life along communal and egalitarian lines in which artificial reproduction play a central role.

Far from being just another individual liberty compatible with the (neo)liberal status quo, reproductive freedom as Firestone imagined it entails overturning the establish domestic, economic, and sexual orders.

Not only does this feminist revolution terminate the tyranny of compulsory pregnancy and childcare by making reproduction a technological community affair that commandeers no individual bodies for nine months, but heterosexuality, homosexuality, monogamy, "non-sexual friendship," and the the gender distinction all disappear as the species returns to "a more natural polymorphous sexuality." (Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex, 215) The age hierarchy - including, most controversially and outlandishly, sexual taboos based on age - similarly goes the way of the dodo.

Combined with Firestone's cybernetic communism, which assumes intelligent machines, in the end you have something that approximates an endless queer lovefest while robots do the work - but it won't much like contemporary pornography because it's about "total physical/emotional relationships" and reduced concentration on "genital sex and orgasmic pleasure." (Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex, 215)

As the above indicates, Firestone's future society resonates remarkably with various transhumanist dreams, albeit with a different inflection. I argue The Dialectic of Sex offers valuable guidance for transhumanist body politics and utopian ideals. Reading Firestone in part reaffirms and in part challenges stereotypical futurist yearning for material abundance, social freedom, and sexual pleasure.

The challenge occurs over the matters of individualism, capitalism, and masculinity. For better or worse - worse - the iconic transhumanist subject remains the masculine entrepreneurial individual, destined to be an eternally youthful, eternally potent playboy and/or family man. Better and better porn, sexbots, and virtual reality promise to give this subject a cornucopia of sexual gratification - "the longevity orgasm," as Hank puts it - increasingly divorced from the difficulties and uncertainties of human relationships.

In contrast with Firestone's vision, such instrumental and atomistic renderings of future sexual fulfillment lend themselves to the maintenance of the existing unequal social and economic system. The resonances between even stereotypical transhumanism and The Dialectic of Sex's plan show how the desire for ease, plenty, and pleasure can come from countless angles. Situating Firestone as a basis for transhumanist conceptions of reproductive and sexual freedom usefully displaces the primacy of the masculine subject and highlights the importance of revolutionary political organization rather expecting paradise to emerge from innovation the present status quo.

Firestone already occupies a position in some transhumanist canons. In "Postgenderism: Beyond the Gender Binary," George Dvorsky and James Hughes identify Firestone as one of the few feminists who had "suggested that reproductive technologies could liberate women from biology" and thus place eir thought in the genealogy of technological postgenderism. (Dvorsky and Hughes, "Postgenderism," 5) Dvorsky and Hughes laud Firestone's "materialist critique and liberatory technological praxis." Dvorksy and Hughes, "Postgenderism," 7; emphasis original) In addition to materialism and a belief in the ability of technology to transform society, The Dialectic of Sex aligns with transhumanist goals via the aforementioned visions of automated abundance and sexual freedom.

Firestone considered "machines that may soon equal or surpass man in original thinking and problem-solving" a likely near-future development and based eir revolutionary plan on the prospect. (Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex, 182) The most telling absence - admittedly a crucial one - in transhumanist terms is Firestone's assumption of continued human mortality and lack of interest in increasing longevity.

As a key element of morphological freedom, alongside access to reproductive healthcare comes access to hormones, gender confirmation surgury, and other such things that allow trans* folks in general and especially transsexual people to better tolerate life in this heteropatriarchal society. (Note how the U.S. government is refusing hormone therapy to Chelsea Manning.) For both reproductive and trans* healthcare, access means more than just absence of prohibitions and entails altering the existing economic system that makes access a hardship or impossibility for many. Poverty amounts to a sort of healthcare ban in and of itself.

With my enthusiasm for Firestone's and transhumanist objectives travels a critical caveat: the totalizing discourses and projects involved in each threaten to produce the opposite of the freedom they claim to desire. As I've previously written but of course merits further inquiry, technological mass alone poses grave problems and uncertainities to the revolutionary looking to better the human condition.

The valorization of science over nature, exaltation of civilization over so-called primitive or barbaric life, the abjection of the body, the teleological timeline of progress, and like narratives rightfully arouse fear and revulsion because of how they can and have operated to justify the worst sort of horrors as well because of their conceptual shortcomings. Transhumanists would do well to become familiar with the feminist critiques of Firestone, because many of these apply wholly or partially to transhumanism too. Humility, skepticism, tolerance, and pluralism strike me as essential intellectual tools for the task of transformation.

To conclude, what I want to see are transhumanist theories, aesthetics, and above all practices that promote and push for morphological freedom in a grounded social context. At the moment, this means support for numerous and disparate movements against abortion restriction and for justice for trans* people. It simultaneously means figuring out - collectively and individually - what we're working toward in the long term. I optimistically suspect we can retain our sanguine dreams - and that they will retain their appeal - minus the oppressive and totalitarian elements.

Much love to everyone in the struggle and all y'all dreamers out there!

Further Reading

Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution

Mandy Merck and Stella Sandford, Further Adventures of The Dialectic of Sex: Critical Essays on Shulamith Firestone