Gamers are Trans and so are Your Smiling Emoji
Trans consciousness is your body on technology.
Let’s put it like this: Transgenderism isn’t the only Trans experience that exists. Transgender is a starting point of something much bigger.
Transgenderism is an experience of feeling different on the inside, than on the outside, and using the existing technology to reconcile those two experiences. As exotic and new as it might seem, transgender is only a glimmer of a horizon starting to take shape, one that requires us to decide — whose body, whose choice?
Can’t relate? Then think about your games. Do you get sad when you lose or happy when you win? Do you ever play in XR situations where it all feels so real? Do you feel that you emerge from the game somehow different but still you? That’s an evolving trans self if ever there was one, and it doesn’t have anything necessarily or at all to do with your gender.
Soon we will realize that the technologist’s playground of AI, robotics, and other innovations will enable us to do things with ourselves we never could do. Game play with haptics so you feel it more? How about games with haptics with bots that will continue to chat after its over? What about AI hologram concerts? All of it exists and is growing. This is your body on technology.
This emerging technologically enhanced body will allow us to be ourselves, and a little more. It will allow us to hack our bodies and to hack the system in a way that few if any of us are actually discussing. Will that teaspoon of microplastics currently in your brain be put to good use through innovation? It sure could.
Today’s bodies are starting points for creativity in a way that is both exciting and bit overwhelming. We see it with trans bodies but also with plastic surgery, with CRISPR and so on the litany of technology involving the body goes. Is it a little or sometimes a lot scary? Sure it can be. Does censoring it or not discussing it make any of this go away?
For some uploading their minds to a human made neural network is their desired transhuman flavor, just as the father of reductive transhumanism, Raymon Kurzweil. For others, implanting their body with robotic enhancements will be their trans entry-point like it was for Neil Harbisson, who used an implant to get over his inborn colorblindness.
Today’s pacemaker might come after a stent, while tomorrow’s might come while training for a marathon. Sounds far fetched? Aren’t your airpods turning into hearing aids? What happens when that technology jumps by leaps and bounds?
Maybe plastic surgery will soon confound aging, through tiny implants that stimulate the body to defy the existing timelines through nano bots and self-replicating emergency proteins. I barely understand the picture I painted, but I know it’s true. You know it’s true too.
Does it sound like science fiction? Well, it does. But maybe that’s why the person who coined the term of a transreality, Rudy Rucker, is both a mathematician and a science fiction writer.
The transreality is the name that we borrow from Rucker to identify the new horizon where we write our own stories with greater autonomy. To do this correctly we need more freedom not less. We need more discussions that dial down the woke and dial down the greatness of old ways of being to meet at a productive conversation that we sorely need. The technology won’t stop accelerating even if we aren’t willing to have these crucial conversations.
The key thing to consider about a general age of transhuman existence is not will we be able to use the cutting-edge of medicine, science and technology to augment ourselves or redesign parts of us, but who will determine our freedom to do this?
I know we have to have the bathroom talk, since we are collectively like babies in terms of transhumanism, so poop conversations come first. But what comes after those conversations?
Computing makes our bodies a starting point for different identities. Some of these identities are our simple email avatars and some are our gaming bodies. Do you play Fortnite or World of Warcraft? How about SIMS or Animal Crossing? Let’s go way back, did you ever cross the Oregon Trail? Increasingly as humans interact with computing based experiences, our sense of self is changing. We are multiple versions of ourselves just based on these everyday experiences. We remember wins and what they looked like in places that are cyber. We are not who our pre-Internet ancestors were.
Right now transhumanism is discussed by a small group of elites. These same elites hide out when we discuss the bodily rights of women or of the population wanting to opt out of a pandemic vaccine, but that is because elites don’t want you to think about this critically.
They would rather direct your transhumanism from their privileged positions than give you a say in any of this. So the issue isn’t, do Trans people or does Trans consciousness exist, but who gets the right to control it for you and for me. Elites want to criminalize words and thoughts and to censor people’s public records, but that never works. They want to control your body because they have gotten a taste of it through existing data they’ve mined.
Look, I don’t want a 40 year old man declaring he’s a woman tomorrow and then hopping into a female sports competition. I don’t want abuses of the biological feminine or to make each transgender person into some kind of guru, but I also don’t want them turned into a scapegoat. We need a middle way to deal with this and legislating some people out of existence isn’t it.
If anything these trans gender people are canaries in the coal mine of changes brought on by a corporate investment landscape that drives innovation faster than humans can grasp. They are the result of a changed biosphere and a changed civilization, one that can only return to common sense by revising its application in new settings, not by willing it out of existence, stubbornly.
These days are a precursor to more subtle understandings of Self, where the body is a biological base, one that can be hacked and changed through technology consumption as clearly as through daily diets of food and drink; of patterns of thought.
The biological triumvirate of mind, body and spirit might seem outdated in this context, but in fact it forms the strongest basis for a healthy emergence of a new kind of being alive. To have healthy innovation we need less reactionary dogma and way more wisdom. We need to slow down enough to reframe and listen to what is really at stake. Do you want your body to have an earthly overlord? Or do you want to use your body to explore your relationship with the Lord. There’s a difference.
Our bodies are transiting realities as we speak, even if we don’t want to admit it. From quantum to computing we are dynamics more than static identities. Did you smile at the emoji sent to you now? There is transhumanism in that smile, since your brain thinks that is real. It would not have thought that a hundred years ago or even at birth.
The capacity of smiling emoticons to trigger the occipitotemporal sites of the brain, exactly like real smiles, were published in 2014 by scientists at the University of Flinders, and yet we are not discussing these truths. We are thumping books with ever more ludicrous attempts at restraining personal thought and autonomy.
I am not saying you have to change your pronouns or let people you don’t know or trust into your bathroom. I am also saying it is very dangerous to let people who don’t know you into this personal space of deciding who you are. The DNA sequences exist, the wet and hardware interfaces and links are growing. Devices and cameras are scanning you often. You have few of the rights that a Network Citizen deserves.
We may want to defend the rights of trans people not because we get them exactly and all the time, but because something bigger is here inside their aliveness, and this bigger item is the right to dignity and bodily autonomy for all human beings at all stages of life. Now is a very good time to spread the word, that denying trans rights sets us all up to have less rights in the future.
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