Sexual Simulacra

Transgender ideology can become a form of Baudrillard's hyperreality. We must establish a synthesis position grounded in reality between embracing magical thinking and rejecting gender nonconformity.

Before publishing this, I should clear my throat. I consider myself a mature transhumanist in the mold of Natasha Vita-More and

Max More

. By “mature,” I mean transhumanism should first come with a heavy dose of wisdom and reflection about what it means to be human. Otherwise, within reasonable bounds, your body is yours, and mine is mine. If you want to augment your body through biohacking or med-tech intervention, that is your choice—as long as you don’t impose costs or harm onto others. I also have no hostility towards transfolk, though I resist the cultish extremes of certain trans ideologues. Those who wish to spark social contagions or recruitment campaigns among the young are not mature transhumanists. There’s a vast difference between helping those with rare gender dysphoria navigate the world and indoctrinating confused kids to adopt crude sexual simulacra.

Like millions of his generation, my teenage son is a gamer. I’ve spent hours watching him play Call of Duty and Apex Legends. The latter game is not so different from others in that the interface lets players customize their characters. As it happens, his favorite character was Bloodhound, who identifies as “nonbinary.” And in a sense, my son used to identify as Bloodhound for hours at a time. 

My son could choose from among other characters, but he likes Bloodhound’s enemy scanner. He has earned enough experience with the tracker to modify him them with all manner of “skins.” Game avatars are an example of how young people spend hours, running around in worlds gamers call “maps,” pretending to be someone or something other than themselves. 

Baudrillard’s Point

As an American trained mostly in anglophone philosophy, it pains me to admit that Jean Baudrillard has a point.

If you’ve never heard of Baudrillard, he’s a French philosopher known for a theory called “The Precession of Simulacra.” He writes:

The territory no longer precedes the map, nor survives it. Henceforth, it is the map that precedes the territory—precession of simulacra—it is the map that engenders the territory….

In other words, one feature of our postmodern condition is that, despite our progress, we have both created and discovered a more complex world. This complexity gives rise to the need to use various models, metaphors, and maps to navigate reality.

But these maps, of course, are not the territory. They are cognitive shortcuts. And they can take on a life of their own. Though we need maps, models, and metaphors in our investigations, these can take data—2D representations of 3D reality—out of their contexts. Reality’s contexts are rich and not reducible to bits, bytes, stats, or data points.

“Warm data,” writes complexity theorist Nora Bateson, “is information about the interrelationships that integrate elements of a complex system. It has found the qualitative dynamics and offers another dimension of understanding to what is learned through quantitative data (cold data).”

Bateson’s point is that there is more to life than numbers. Indeed, sufficiently abstracted, such data can fuel a kind of reductionism—a precession away from ground truth. So, whether in science or society, how can our minds/bodies become so divorced from our world?

Obvious examples include our dependency on smartphones and social media. It’s hard to deny that these techno-umbilical cords have transformed us. As Marshall McLuhan is credited with saying:

We shape our tools, and then our tools shape us.

I’ll pass over the irony that McLuhan probably never said those words, though our hyperreal memeplex has other ideas. The point is that technology—including the models, metaphors, and maps they instantiate—changes us enough to prompt questions about our very natures and technology’s place in our lives.

Baudrillard describes “precession” as the tendency for simulacra to pull us into a Hall of Mirrors. The simulacra can become so layered or nested that we eventually lose contact with reality. This strange trap surely relates to our sensemaking crisis. Indeed, we must construct tools and methods to navigate reality, but the more we use our tools, the more we operate outside reality. The tools, after all, are but simulacra. Our maps can become decoupled from the territory, which means we start to live more of our lives in our heuristic scaffolding than in the world.

Baudrillard calls this condition “hyperreality.”

Once you see the problem, it’s hard to unsee it. Baudrillard takes the point too far by suggesting that the “simulacrum is true,” but this is also generally why postmodernism fails. Reality returns with a vengeance. The precession of simulacra eventually collapses, and the world eventually punches us in the face. While postmodernists tend to blame capitalism for such woes, we can set that debate aside for now. But a question looms:

Can we acknowledge Baudrillard’s point without collapsing into absurdity?

Transitioning into Hyperreality

According to Psychology Today, “magical thinking—the need to believe that one’s hopes and desires can have an effect on how the world turns—is everywhere.” You can find synchronicities or spirits or signs. You just have to look for them. This tendency to make imagination into reality is human, but it’s rarely rational.

One of the most extreme versions of hyperreality manifests in trans ideology, which is an outgrowth of postmodernism and critical social justice. While these theories offer some justifiable critiques of modernist realism, POMO turns out to be a kind of intellectual ouroboros, a symbolic creature that eats itself in the end. That doesn’t mean Baudrillard has no point. It means postmodernism reveals more of its vaunted irony. Specifically, trans ideology thrives in hyperreality.

A simulacrum of “Jean” taken before his death. Photo credit Robert Croma

Before readers throw rotten tomatoes, I am not arguing that there is no such thing as those rare few who experience gender dysphoria. What I am suggesting is that not all transsexuality is created equal.

For the purposes of this conversation, I’d like to postulate two basic types: strong and weak transsexuality. Strong transexuals experience gender dysphoria as an epiphenomenon, which means the dysphoria is rooted in some underlying psycho-physiological substrate—aka reality. Weak transsexuals are those for whom the desire to transition is fundamentally ideological, cultural, or fashionable, and rooted only in hyperreality. In other words, weak transsexuals graduate from “I identify as…” transgenderism, which is a socio-cultural construction they can adopt rather than a condition they must confront.

As such, weak trans ideology originates in postmodern Queer Theory more than any supervenient property of our biological natures.

To understand the difference, consider that many trans ideologues are fond of deriding others as “essentialists.” This term comes straight out of the POMO lexicon. Most postmodernists think metaphysics—inquiry into the fundamental nature of reality—is impossible. There are no essences, that is, no properties of the physical world that can be known, much less that can influence other higher-order properties. According to this view, everything is a subjective or intersubjective “construction.” Because science is a subset of metaphysics – which acknowledges reality’s powerful properties—those quick to dismiss ‘essentialism’ end up dismissing that which is real, not to mention important modes of understanding that which is real.

Life is more than “lived experience.”

Left-handed people who lived in puritanical Massachusetts might have “identified as” right-handed to avoid persecution, but it’s hard to argue their handedness is a radically subjective social construction, full stop.

Most garden-variety gays and lesbians agree: I was born this way, they’ll say, and quite rightly. Not only does the denial of essences militate against sensemaking, it offends those for whom features of their identity, such as sexual orientation, are far more than subjectively determined. Denial of reality is a trans-ideologue’s version of “pray away the gay.”

That’s why a lot of homosexuals are feeling the strain of intersectionality. 

The label LBGTQ+ has lost its luster for many gays, especially those who see trans activism gobbling up decades of gains for homosexuals and women. So now we have splinter factions such as TERFs (trans-exclusionary radical feminists). Most so-called TERFs, such as

Kathleen Stock

, not only understand that synthetic augmentations of biological women and men, far from helping them “transition” to the opposite sex, actually help them transition to a simulacrum. 

The Fallout

Some transsexuals will be fine living in hyperreality. But others will come to regret arresting the fullest expression of their biological natures, especially if they transition during adolescence or earlier. Transition severs the complex nexus among the chromosomal, the hormonal, the developmental, and the psychological, which emerges throughout our lifetimes.

Regret is one thing.

Obliging women and girls to make unfair or uncomfortable accommodations for transwomen is quite another. For many, it’s a bridge too far—not only because it requires women and girls blindly to accept activist hyperreality, but because it requires women and girls to forfeit intimate aspects of their lives to people living under the spell of magical thinking (or sometimes even strategic predation).

My hope is that we can find a healthy middle ground between outright rejecting gender-nonconforming people and leaping to a dogma of re-engineering society and individuals around crude sexual simulacra.

I dedicate this to my mother “Gran” and her wife “Oma” who have been together for almost 25 years. Thank you for being a shining example of healthy marriage and family.