This is an adapted excerpt from: Feminism Against Progress by Mary Harrington. It can be purchased here.
In this vision, our bodies cease to be interdependent, sexed and sentient, and are instead re-imagined as a kind of Meat Lego, built of parts that can be reassembled at will…
What I’ve called the real singularity, which is to say the now-normal experience of disembodied online sociality, is doubtless a factor in widespread youth support for Meat Lego Gnosticism. And yet terminally online teenagers hardly wield the political clout needed to rewrite international legal systems. What else is in the mix? Gender-critical feminists sometimes point the finger at ‘patriarchy’, while from a different vantage point, others note the relatively small number of ultra-rich individuals and foundations that supply much of the funding, not to mention the NGOs working – as noted above – pre-politically to entrench it. Baffled conservatives, meanwhile, may be tempted to blame it all on Marxism in universities, or progressive activists with asymmetrical haircuts…
A 2016 survey conducted across 23 countries revealed that support for transgender rights is stronger among those with higher earnings and education levels, just as it’s strikingly higher among women. We can reasonably infer from these findings that high-earning graduate women, which in the contemporary world means knowledge workers, are the group most likely to support the idea that individuals should be free to live as their preferred gender regardless of physiology.
This makes sense, when you consider that female knowledge workers are unlikely to be confronted, in the course of working life, with any stark contrasts between their ability to perform professionally and that of their male peers. There is, after all, no obvious reason why a clever and ambitious woman should not be as effective a barrister as her male colleague. Many feminists have pointed out that this doesn’t work in anything like the same way for enslaved, agrarian, developing-world or otherwise less privileged women. Nor does it even necessarily apply in manual work, which is usually to say more working-class occupations.
But it doesn’t matter how often the class politics of sex dimorphism and work is pointed out. The critique never sticks, because for a minority of women the idea that we really can detach self-realization from biology remains both plausible and compelling. This class of female knowledge professionals is also, as we saw in the last chapter, the subset of women liberated to fly high by the tech-enabled detachment of sex from reproduction, and motherhood from care, that now comprises the bulk of mainstream ‘feminism’. And from the perspective of a woman who understands feminism in this way, there are few upsides to disturbing the idealist vision of men and women as interchangeable.
For the moment we acknowledge that sexed differences ‘below the neck’ have political or economic salience, this increases the risk that someone might resurrect the discussion of such differences ‘above the neck’ too. And in turn, this poses a clear threat to my right to be treated in the workplace as indistinguishable from male colleagues. The fact that this is true only for knowledge workers, and stops being true even in this case when women have babies, will likely concern such women less than pursuing professional parity for themselves and other women of the same social class.
The group of international lobbyists whose main focus is institutionalizing cyborg theology in the guise of ‘trans rights’ is not, in truth, very large. But this lobby has had such a widespread impact, in such a short period of time, because its priest class is drawn from that far larger group of women who benefit from its doctrines – and who predominate within the wider ecosystem of institutions that shapes the modern moral universe.
The elite of the United States today is increasingly female dominated: women outnumber men at undergraduate level in most universities, 60 percent to 40 percent in some elite colleges. Even in the once heavily male-dominated military–industrial complex, as of 2019 four of the five biggest defense contractors – Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics and the defense arm of Boeing – had female CEOs. And the institutions that set and manage social and cultural norms – such as education, media, law and HR – are all increasingly female dominated. Female law students outnumber male ones two to one. Women outnumber men in journalism. Seventy-five percent of nonprofit workers in the United States are female, and the UK proportion is nearly as high, at 68 percent.
Such workers are chiefly graduates, notably from the arts and social sciences – subjects where women outnumber men two to one in the UK and which lean strongly towards a progressive worldview. And if the disproportionately female graduates of disproportionately progressive elite liberal arts courses, who then disproportionately make up the nonprofit sector, have seized enthusiastically on a set of moral principles and institutional changes that downplay the role of biological sex in a way that benefits elite women overall, so a second key terrain for the contest over the political salience of sex dimorphism is corporate HR. This is the division of the business world tasked with managing the acceptable social (and, by extension, moral) parameters of everyday working life. Sixty-three percent of UK HR workers and over 70 percent of those in the United States are women.
And if elite progressive graduate women are in charge of shaping public morals via nonprofits and HR departments, they’re also busy doing so for the next generation in schools: here, too, 85 percent of UK primary school teachers are women, and around 65 percent of secondary school teachers. In the United States, 76 percent of teachers are women. And as all US states require teachers to hold at least a bachelor’s degree, these are also uniformly drawn from the female demographic most likely to be enthusiastic about trans rights. And as is increasingly evident, the moral and institutional power this class is able to mobilize to shore up its interests is considerable.
These are the priestesses of cyborg theocracy. And they have the pulpit. But if they reap the benefits of their vision, its costs are borne elsewhere.