From Bad to Worse to the End of the World: A Review of From the ‘Neutral’ Body to the Posthuman Cyborg, by Silvia Guerini. 

Review by WLRN Staff Writer, aurora linnea

Ours is an age of acclimation to the dystopic. Served up a steady diet of horrific future scenarios in snack-sized portions packaged as entertainment, we are rapidly inured to the worst of what, not long ago, we believed worse than possible. As yesterday’s unimaginable becomes tomorrow’s New Normal, a high-gloss Teflon coating of unreality glazes over atrocities already underway. Nothing sticks: it’s either too horrible to be real, or the confirmed realness of the thing sinks it below the standard of what’s now considered horrible. The more dystopic the culture becomes, the harder it is to recognize as such, as the mind skirrs off the surface of the cataclysmic status quo to slump down into a quagmire of denial and malaise. We therefore owe our thanks to those who refuse to tiptoe around the horribleness of the current situation, or the fact that all signs point to an impending tumble deeper into the abyss: it’s precisely the bucket-of-cold-water-to-the-face treatment we all need right now, to keep us awake and alert. 

Which is why, when Italian radical ecologist Silvia Guerini describes a Dutch public television program wherein surgically mutilated adults are paraded naked in front of a captive audience of children to normalize the body-loathing premises of “gender medicine,” I’m horrified, disgusted—but I’m also grateful. In one episode Guerini recounts, a woman who had her breasts amputated tells children, “I woke up and my breasts were gone, I had the look I always wanted…[a]nd I felt ecstatic.” A young girl asks if the ecstasy of elective mastectomy might be compared to flying. The breastless woman grins; yes, she answers, like flying! “I want it too,” announces the girl. 

Presumably, this indoctrination scene is intended to be heartwarming, what with all its body positivity and cutesy kids-say-the-darndest-things analogies. But Guerini’s heart is unwarmed by state propaganda conditioning children to daydream of cosmetic surgery. Instead, she calls out the bizarre spectacle as a portent of Western Civilization’s runaway degeneration into a hypercapitalist technocratic wasteland ruled by deranged and predatory male billionaires at war with the flesh, with nature, with life itself. Prophesying of this variety is a sure way to get oneself disinvited from parties, a lesson I’ve gleaned from personal experience. Yet it was bell hooks who wrote, “Hope lies in the possibility of a resistance that’s based on being able to face our reality as it is,” and so, by staring down reality with an unfaltering gaze, Guerini lays the foundation for whatever hope we have left. 

As a campaigner against GMOs and nanotechnology, the editor of the ecofeminist newspaper L’Urlo della Terra (“Screams of the Earth,” probably the most excellent newspaper title ever), and co-founder of the International Feminist Network Against All Artificial Reproduction, Gender Ideology and Transhumanism (FINAARGIT), Guerini has had her eye on the big picture of patriarchal violence against the living world since the early 2000s. In her new book, From the ‘Neutral’ Body to the Posthuman Cyborg, published by Spinifex in October, Guerini forces readers to face that same big-picture reality with snappy manifesto flair. She urges us to recognize that what is unfolding is not some unfortunate but more or less trivial fandango of absurdist neologisms and anatomically ambiguous unicorns run amok. Rather, we’ve found ourselves in freefall from bad to worse: from the corporate state scamming children into dissociative bodily alienation to the rebranding of artificialized reproduction and genetic engineering as shortcuts to social justice, we are speeding along a trajectory set to crashland us all as the detainees of a wholly synthetic, manmade and male-controlled world. 

The ties that bind transgenderism and reproductive technology have been illuminated in recent years by growing scientific interest in womb transplants for men wishing to simulate femaleness, but Guerini makes clear that wherever public policy takes the trans turn, left-leaning calls for “medically assisted procreation” tail close behind. As an example at the global level, she refers to the United Nations’ Matic Report, adopted in 2021. The resolutions included in this report endorse gender ideology and its “affirmation” by the medical-industrial complex while calling for UN member states to “ensure that all persons of reproductive age have access to fertility treatments,” self-proclaimed gender identities notwithstanding. The report declares the UN’s noble goal of developing a “holistic, rights-based, inclusive and nondiscriminatory approach to fertility.” Leaving aside the sketchy presumption that anyone at all has a right to be fertile, what is implied here is that humans are entitled to procreate on their own terms, biology be damned, and regardless of bodily debility perpetrated in service to bespoke identities. It also suggests that “queer” people – and “trans” people most of all –  are unjustly excluded from procreation not only by insensitive medical professionals but by dint of their own disobliging bodies. The corrective to the iniquity is obvious: medically assisted procreation for everyone. (Cue the Oprah clip: “You get a test-tube baby! You get a test-tube baby! Everybody gets a test-tube baby!!”) 

Roundly affirmed by elite global institutions, the questionable premise that to breed is a human right goes unquestioned, and access to the latest reproductive technologies – from designer IVF to gender medicine’s white whale of soothing men’s “dysmorphia symptoms” by outfitting them with donor uteri – is swiftly incorporated into the LGBTQ++ platform of demands. It should shock no one that the medical-industrial complex has set its full heft down behind this new humanitarian cause. Guerini describes Italy’s University of Padua’s scheme to market itself as a one-stop-shop “gender identity hub,” its range of pharmaceutical and surgical offerings supplemented by in-house gamete cryopreservation services. This way, when the first set of treatments render identity consumers sterile, as they’re apt to do, those consumers can still claim their right to procreate with just a little help from their friends (i.e., the good doctors, the good hospital, the good Big Pharma). Thus the medical industry can sterilize its patients, many of whom are young women; cultivate a veneer of medical ethics by acknowledging the likelihood of sterilization; and then market a new procedure entailing a new set of pharmaceuticals and equipment, hence a new set of fees, to compensate for the sterility it inflicts. And such is not the sleaziest possible corporate profiteering—it’s a human rights crusade! 

It is also, as Guerini acidly observes, very “queer.” Reproductive technologies have become a fascination of the queer/trans set, an essential element of their grand vision for liberation. In the queer utopia, men have free access to hormonal drugs to stimulate pseudo-lactation, so that they can nurse from their ersatz breasts the babies they’ve commissioned grown on-demand in rented wombs or ectogenesis tanks; everyone is free to remodel their flesh by means of whatever cosmetic procedures they please; and all of these procedures should be performed free of charge, for they are lifesaving medicine. Clearly, freedom abounds. Yet the concept of freedom on which this Queer New World is based is defined not by liberation from tyranny or social oppression. Rather, the driving fantasy here is freedom from the human body. “The goal is a ‘liberation’ and ‘emancipation’ from the living itself…and from the constraints of nature,” Guerini writes. Bodies, in their natural, earthly givenness, curb individuals’ freedom to be exactly what they desire to be; nature imposes limits, and all limits are inherently oppressive. To be free is to exercise one’s will untrammeled by the least limitation. And so Guerini argues that the queer/trans liberation movement in its contemporary technophilic form is motivated by “a desire to break every boundary,” a wet dream of infinite “fluidity.” In defiance of stodgy, stultifying “assigned” biology, the body should be made malleable for malleability’s sake. It must be neutralized, scrubbed clean of every sign of its organic animal origins. The “neutral body,” then, is the body negated, de-sexed and denatured, “reduced to the state of simple matter to be redesigned” according to the wills and whims of persons conceived not as bodily beings, but as the possessors of body-objects. Taking the neutral body for freedom’s symbol, the queer/trans movement succumbs to an infatuation with technologies promising to expand human control over biological functions, forms, and processes. As novel, avant-garde a phenomenon as transgenderism is glossed up to be, its fundamental ideological antagonism towards biological reality is nothing new. The pursuit of liberty through body modification and artificialized everything is in fact only the latest iteration of manmade culture’s quest to conquer nature, the hoary madness of the Fathers dolled up for a new generation in shiny silver lamé Barbarella drag. With transgenderism, patriarchal biophobia is treated to a queer makeover. It’s an obvious case of “New Look, Same Killer Taste!”—but the marketing has proven seductive, and the hungry masses have bought in. 

Unfortunately for transgenderist true believers, they’ve made the fatal error Audre Lorde warned against: they are trying to use the master’s tools to tear down his house. And instead of tearing down the house, they lock themselves up inside it, the master’s wards and vassals. Because those who scrounge from the master’s toolbox become reliant not only on the master himself but on the perpetuation of his system; if they hope to keep making use of his gear, they’ve got little choice but to submit to his authority. Likewise, as Guerini notes, “[t]he price for emancipation from the living and its natural constraints is submission to the technological constraints of the machine world.” Bound to the authority of techno-patriarchy’s fraternal elite, dependent on Big Pharma and Big Tech and the whole earth-devouring machinery of industrial civilization, the transgenderist slams shut door after door to any real hope for freedom. 

Meanwhile, the master himself, in his guise as conscienceless medical industrial complex corporate overlord, perceives in the neutral body not some daydream of unlimited freedom for one and all, but rather a virtually limitless opportunity to cash in. Neutralizing the body is a great investment. First, the patient pays to have her body neutered, denatured, de-sexed, and deconstructed. Then, she pays for a custom-built new flesh she believes will better accessorize her chosen identity, buying back body parts and bodily functions piecemeal, as commodities. Since fluidity is the name of the game, her identity is liable to change at any moment, in which case she’ll need to purchase new parts, and avail herself of new prescriptions and medical services. And on and on it goes, as the body – to quote a brilliant passage from Guerini’s text – is “transformed into a permanent construction site in the ‘transition-biomarket’ with its biodesign clinics and technomedical bricolage.” 

Guerini’s analysis of the capitalist racket that has conspired to shoot transgenderism onto its current pedestal as malestream culture’s cause celebre draws heavily from the work of Jennifer Bilek, whose research into the money behind the LGBTQ++ movement is invaluable. But, radical feminist ecologist that she is, Guerini is also quick to realize that, while there’s no doubting the money-grubbing greed at play, transgenderism is ultimately driven by a deeper, older, more ideological urge. I find myself disappointed when feminists conclude that transgenderism is basically one big elaborate swindle because while this may be a solid anti-capitalist analysis, it isn’t quite a feminist one. For as long as patriarchal civilization has reigned over the earth, Man has been pitting himself against organic biological creation, struggling to vanquish the natural world, pin it down, punish it, and replace it with a world of his own invention. By applying this ethic to the human body – subordinating the corporeal reality of sex to male fantasies of femininity and masculinity – transgenderism is revealed as just another manifestation of the same ancient crusade. So too for transhumanism, the movement to merge human beings with machines to hasten human evolution towards post-biological excorporeal-and-under-control omnipotence. Guerini, again thinking alongside Bilek, sees transgenderism and transhumanism as inextricably linked, sharing a common set of premises and principles, as well as a similar fanbase (e.g., western industrial imperial governments, wealthy white men). The two make natural bedfellows because both are rooted in the patriarchal imperative to overthrow biological reality. 

“We are witnessing an attack on life,” Guerini warns, “[w]e are witnessing an attack on nature, on all that is born.” This attack has been ongoing for millennia; throughout the history of male dominion men have waged it on countless fronts, tirelessly, viciously, and today they have the weapons to be more efficient than ever in their assault on the living world. Transgenderism and its cyborg big brother transhumanism are part of this age-old attack, both movements for male liberation from nature, for the establishment of a patriarchal utopia: a purely manmade virtual reality zone. Guerini writes: “Today, bodies are the new terrain of conquest and battle. A war against bodies reduced to guinea pigs to be genetically manipulated, against life responsible for having been born and expecting to die, against ‘natural’ procreation which must become artificial, against nature as the main witness of what life is like outside the artificialisation of the laboratory.” This is the reality we must face, and the fray we must enter, if we are to have any hope of commanding a resistance fierce and serious and passionate enough to defend “a wild and free living.” To save the real world from male dominion. With uncompromising clarity of vision, Silvia Guerini turns our eyes in the necessary direction. Our task now is to gather the courage not to look away. 

Thank you to Spinifex for kindly providing a copy of From the ‘Neutral Body’ to the Posthuman Cyborg for this review. 

 Aurora linnea is a radical lesbian (eco)feminist writer living at the ocean’s edge in the region of North America colonizers dubbed “Maine.” She strives to contribute to the global feminist struggle to end male dominion through poetic dissidence and uncompromising disloyalty to the necrophilic patriarchal empire presently destroying life on earth.