From Transgender to Transhuman: A Manifesto On the Freedom Of Form

by Martine Rothblatt, Harold Brackman (Foreword)

A Manifesto
On the Freedom
Of Form

The Newly Titled and Expanded
Second Edition of
The Apartheid of Sex

Genres: Philosophy, Transgender

156 pages, Kindle Edition

First published May 19, 2011

About the author

Martine Aliana Rothblatt is an American lawyer, author, and entrepreneur. She graduated from UCLA with a MBA/JD degree in 1981, then began work in Washington, D.C. in the field of communication satellite law, and eventually in life sciences projects like the Human Genome Project. She holds a Ph.D. and is currently the founder and CEO of United Therapeutics Corp.

Reviews

[Thaïs Marques · Rating 3 out of 5]

This books helps us to understand what is behind the gender ideology (queer movement) which is all over the media 24/7.
Martine openly says that the transhumanist moviment is supporting the transgender/queer movement in order to make it as the bridge to the creation of a new human/cyborg species: Persona Creatus.
It looks like science fiction, but that’s totally matching what is coming up with the 4th industrial revolution.

[Dan · Rating 1 out of 5]

Definitely an important document of how and why we find ourselves in the world we currently occupy (for better or worse). But, as with all manifestos, this book is essentially a self-serving diatribe filled with logical errors and conceptual inconsistencies that are impossible to overlook if a reader intends to fully comprehend the author's thesis.

[Kristin Harley · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book is valuable to read because it simultaneously elucidates the difficulties in actually narrowing down what we colloquially mean when we say "men/boys and women/girls," but also contradicts itself in making the outrageous claim that there are no men/boys and women/girls.
For example: the author's decimation of the dubious arguments against women participating in sports, math or science, or the silly prohibitions against same sex-marriage, while claiming both parents are equal contributors to their offspring, get no argument from me! These are supported by sound, science-based facts.
However, the author argues against any kind of binary (even on a bell curve) and posits an absolute, straight-line gender continuum that has no reality. Male and female Venn diagrams that overlap do not overlap absolutely (as they would with an absolute gender continuum), and the author seems completely unaware of the contradictions made: while it's true that XX chromosomes don't always line up with having a vagina, for most women it does - that's a bell curve, not a straight-line continuum. Then the author denies her own continuum with statements such as "Nothing in biology requires people with vaginas to behave in one manner and people with penises in another," then says, "people with vaginas are generally saints [due to less propensity for violence]." After claiming no absolute test for determining male versus female humans, the author laments, "millions of fetuses with vaginas are aborted each year [in China]" and "during the past decade an estimated 50,000,000 embryos were aborted, mostly in Asia, simply because they had a very obvious marker—a vagina...Based on a population of 1.17 billion, that adds up to more than 1.7 million missing girls each year." But I thought having a vagina wasn't a marker for being a woman?
It's incoherent. There is a grain of sense wrapped in layers of nonsense. Most egregious are the great leaps of faith needed to equate the once-common disbelief by men that women had the brains and humanity to vote and hold public office, to the supposed equivalent bigotry of flesh-based people that "software avatars" can likewise be as human. Just because women experienced discrimination doesn't mean "virtual people" without a flesh body will ever be human and experience anything - discrimination, self-awareness, or emotions! It doesn't logically follow.
Knowing computer programming, I can tell you that it highly unlikely we will ever write binary code that mimics the human propensity for association and emotional thinking and experiencing. And even if we did, and we "uploaded our minds" into some sort of eternal "cloud," what would we have created but a virtual clone of ourselves? OUR SELVES would still die and cease experiencing ourselves! (Not to mention the fact that our most powerful computers still need whole IT Departments, casting doubt on the "eternity" of that "cloud" in which we enjoy genderless lives as non-flesh people.)
I try to be a tolerant person, and I believe in "live and let live" and widening the definitions of "men and women," but this book was instructive for all the wrong reasons. It's really a reducio ad absurdum and a myopic call for humans to write themselves out of existence in a way that probably cannot be done, nor sounds desireable. I never expected the next installment of Intelligent Design/creationism to come from the left, but this really reads like a denial, rather than an embrace, of nature and evolution, and ultimately of humanity.

[Jonny Kelvey-Brown · Rating 5 out of 5]

Some really innovative thinking from Martine and pushing a transgender agenda for the decades to come.. Starting from a concise analogy of how the world sees transgender in the past, in the now, and projecting that beyond into what could be a promising future for a transgendered incorporated world. Spellbinding.

[Melissa]

When we are real substack

[Vincent Niek · Rating 5 out of 5]

heel erg interessant

[Forsythbb · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some incredibly inspiring ideas hidden in dense and sometimes repetitive text.

[Autumn · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is such an aggressive read - but you never get what you want from being docile, so I can respect it. I didn't read all of it, rather I skimmed the book (it's incredibly dense). This is what I do with almost all of my assigned readings (shh). I base my interpretation of the book generally on the class discussions my class has on the book. If you're interested in the mix of human nature and technology, this might be worth a read.