Essay #3: Eloquent Savages

Babel rises in New York.

This month, New York magazine’s Intelligencer ran a 7,500-word essay by Pulitzer prize-winner Andrea Long Chu, who asserts that “everyone should have access to sex-changing medical care, regardless of age, gender identity, social environment, or psychiatric history.” From this one sentence we can draw some grim but accurate conclusions about New York, the state of what passes there for intelligence, and the Pulitzer prize.

While civilized nations like England are Following the Science as it flees headlong from the witch doctors who think puberty can be “blocked,” America’s learned barbarians are solemnly advancing the proposition that 12-year-olds in the throes of psychosis should be given estrogen pills if they ask for them alongside their Lucky Charms. Maybe they should mix them in with the rainbow marshmallows.

Mom and dad may have some reservations about the wisdom of, say, letting their toddlers play dress-up using drugs most physicians wouldn’t prescribe to treat prostate cancer except as a desperate measure. That parents still have a say in the matter at all is a state of affairs we will have to tolerate, says Chu in a menacing aside, “for now.”

But doubtless there’s a Pulitzer in it for anyone shameless enough to propose ripping babies from their mothers’ arms at birth because freedom, and then it’ll be open season on double mastectomies for tomboys. After all, the philosophers who ruled over Plato’s Republic lived in gender-neutral polycules, and they too wanted to cram human nature into the deforming restraints of a utopian theory. What could go wrong?

In fact what Chu’s essay underscores is that America is in the grips of a philosophical, even a religious crisis. It’s not really about declining church attendance, except incidentally. It goes deeper than that. It’s about our disorientation in the face of cosmic questions that Americans, of all people, cannot function without answering. We’re a country whose reason for being depends on ideas about God and human nature—rights that attach to “all men” by decree of their “creator.” And we don’t know what to believe about either anymore.

When a nation in search of ultimate truth finds its ancestral faith draining away, it becomes uniquely vulnerable to sham religion and false gods. Without the solid foundations they were built on, our noble aspirations to liberty and justice start buckling and melting into sick parodies of themselves. And then you really start to understand why the tower-builders of Babel were cursed to watch their lucid words dissolve into mad gibberish.

Because when vast material abundance and grand political ambitions get unmoored from their spiritual origins, then the most supposedly erudite minds of the world’s most advanced country start uttering what amounts to naked savagery. Hence the particular flavor of Chu’s essay, which is at once eloquent, arch, and utterly deranged.

At its heart, it’s an attempt to face the metaphysical question raised by feelings of discomfort about being male or female: how can we handle the divide between our inner longings and the realities of the physical world? Chu’s answer is that the physical world is raw material for us to bend to our wills, without restraint and without limit. Genitals and endocrine systems are “no less of a material resource than water or wheat.”

So, Chu argues, there’s no essential difference between a boy taking estrogen to keep his voice from changing, and a woman taking estrogen to ease the discomfort of menopause. It all amounts to management of one “biological resource”—namely, human flesh.

It’s clarifying that Chu is so forthright about this idea. Other trans maximalists hedge around it or try to disguise it behind impenetrable academic language. Plenty of well-intentioned sympathizers don’t even realize this is a necessary implication when activists demand easy access to hormones and surgery. But it is: if you want to say that the human body is a canvas for expressing your felt sense of self, then the canvas has to be made blank to start with, at least in principle.

The fact that it’s never blank in practice—that we start somewhere, that we’re born with one type of body and not another—is taken as an inconvenient accident, a random product of meaningless chance. You can only be truly free to transform yourself if you were just a formless heap of sinew and fluids to start with. 

So Chu calls for a “redistribution of sex.” The image evoked is that of a Marxist commune where hormones, skin grafts, and so forth are distributed equitably among the people like interchangeable loaves of bread. Your allotment of mammary tissue has arrived, citizen. This is freedom! Do with it what you will.

What Chu wants to do with his allotment of flesh is make it female, an adjective he associates elsewhere with a state in which “the self is sacrificed to make room for the desires of another.” This is important. His defining picture of a woman—expressly borrowed from pornography—is a body splayed flat on its back. When all is said and done, what Chu wants the right to do is physically enact his own psychic self-annihilation.

If that all sounds grotesque, at least it’s unoriginal. It’s probably one of the oldest ideas about women there is: that their nature is one of ever-increasing diminishment. That’s why the people who jeered at Caesar for sleeping around called him “every man’s woman, and every woman’s man.” So long as he let a male ravish him, he became female.

This principle is easy to come by because it requires absolutely no thought. It relies on blunt physical literalism, the animal fact of brute force and parts rubbing against each other. If reality stops there—if nothing exists but strength and matter—then people are whatever they can make their bodies do.

And so, Chu proposes, they should do whatever their bodies can. Which, in our age of high tech, is more and more. Mentioned nowhere in the essay, but lurking behind it like some obscene sorcerer, is the Faustian biohacker Martine Rothblatt.

In From Transgender to Transhuman: A Manifesto on the Freedom of Form (2011), Rothblatt already made the exact same argument as Chu. But he took it one inevitable step further. Rothblatt can see no reason, because there is none, why abolishing the distinction between sexes shouldn’t also mean abolishing the boundary between man and machine. It’s all just parts: “a human need not have a flesh body, just as a woman need not have a real vagina.”

The primitive logic of meat and bone unites here with the industrial logic of code and steel, because the two are really one and the same. Take lumps of dough and remold them to fit your desire—use pills, use silicone, use scalpels. Take mud and make brick; take plastic and make a synthetic womb. It’s only objects anyway. What matters is who inserts what where. Who dominates, and who submits.

Of course, the whole thing falls apart with exactly that one little question: who? Who is the person that wants to become a woman, or a cyborg, or simply to become slimmer, faster, longer-lived? Apparently we’re not just our bodies, because our bodies are the very things we want so badly to change.

Leaving aside for a moment questions about which changes we should make, the very fact that we want to make any reveals something critical about what “we” are. Every cell of us is material, every passing thought has an analogue in some electric flicker from synapse to synapse. Yet it is possible for creatures of synapse and bone to have such thoughts as “if only I were just a little taller.” Something in our bodies is not of our bodies.

This is an ancient mystery. It can’t be resolved with pat answers or neat rules (admittedly a temptation among conservatives). But it also can’t be muscled away with a better drug regimen or sharper blades. It requires a different confession of faith altogether, starting with the assertion that the world isn’t made from blobs of mere gunk to be pushed around.

Every particle of the universe is aflame from the jump with meaning, or else nothing—no matter how intricate its wiring—could think anything at all. The shape the world comes in is not an accident; the spirit is not a by-product of the flesh. Mind, and not matter, is the first and fundamental thing. 

But that means there will be paths we should travel down, and others we should shun. Some things—like prosthetic limbs—will draw us up on the slipstream of the spirit. Other things—like puberty blockers—will drag us down into an agony of the flesh.

Negotiating the difference between the two is a process of discernment—often tender, rarely cut and dry. I understand the impulse to decline the invitation altogether, to tear the levees down and let the raw energies of nature pour out in one unbounded flood. But make no mistake that our humanity itself will be washed away in the riptide, submerged in a wash of atoms that churn forever and forever in the emptiness.

If we want to keep existing, we have to accept that there is such a thing as us—embodied, but not only bodies; irrevocably male and female, but indisputably more than flesh and blood. That’s our crisis, and it is a religious one. To keep from losing our souls, we need to begin from the premise that we have them.