Jennifer Bilek introduces her new book with a requiem for the American left. The left is dead, she writes in Transsexual Transgender Transhuman: Dispatches from the 11th Hour, or, more accurately, the left was cut down and gutted. What now shambles along in its place, masquerading as the left and often enough mistaken for it, is a monstrosity. Bilek saw the left die, saw the flames licking at what was to become its funeral pyre: the Occupy Wall Street encampment in New York City’s Zuccotti Park. It was 2011 and Jennifer Bilek was there. She describes the crackle of energy she sensed radiating from the Occupy protests, the hope roused in her as she marched across the Brooklyn Bridge in a crowd 40,000 strong. Whatever weaknesses may have marked Occupy Wall Street, the revolutionary zeal it awakened was real, meaning it was dangerous. So the mayor ordered a raid. The camp was stormed by police in the pre-dawn hours of a raw November night, the protesters roughly evicted from their tents, their books and placards and personal belongings shoveled into sanitation trucks. By daybreak, the movement’s nerve center was leveled. When protesters tried to return, they were arrested. By winter’s end the movement had faded and scattered, suppressed with brute efficacy by the state. 

In the years to follow, Bilek writes, a creeping paranoia settled over the left. Its ranks shifted their domain from the streets to social media, where, increasingly siloed, they turned against one another. What Bilek calls a “burgeoning authoritarianism” began to take hold. Disillusioned by the difficulties of punching up, this new breed of isolated, insecure, Instagramming activists defaulted to policing their peers instead, each denunciation of another’s petty treasons offered up as proof positive of one’s own spic-and-span political consciousness. 

Meanwhile, corporations were ironing out methodological modernizations of their own, advancing glossy “social responsibility initiatives” to obscure grift’s machinations under the guise of a superficial righteousness. Diversity and inclusivity, care and community, vague daydreams of sustainability: these were the core components of the corporatists’ newborn social conscience. Conveniently, none of these in any way endangered their bottom line. Instead, diversity and inclusivity opened new avenues for targeted marketing; mawkish avowals of concern for people and planet strengthened consumers’ emotional attachment to their favorite brands. Over the last decade, authentic grassroots resistance has been supplanted by well-funded Social Justice™ operations engineered, implemented, and managed by the same cadre of billionaire men busily pillaging and plundering behind Wall Street’s closed doors. With this co-optation, the left was killed off from the inside out, and today the well-heeled hustler sons of capitalist patriarchy conduct their business dressed in the slain movement’s skin, like some alien parasite donning the husk of its victim to avoid detection. I am thinking specifically of the film Men in Black (1997), in which a cockroach-esque alien kills a farmer and then conceals himself inside the man’s corpse to appear more terrestrial while carrying out his malign agenda. Alas, the disguise is a flop, since the farmer-suit quickly rots, the flesh bruised and waxen, sagging slumped as the alien drags it along. No one, observing the decaying farmer, would believe all was well with him. Just like with today’s political left, it is apparent that something has gone hideously wrong. 

For Bilek, the ascent of transgenderism supplies the example nonpareil of the parasitized state of the left. She frames transgenderism as a medical-industrial complex profiteering scam, with the usual slew of wealthy white men at its helm. (Though, in this case, a more-than-usual number of these wealthy men are demanding we call them women.) The transgenderist scam has taken men’s sexual fetish for fantasizing themselves female, formerly known as transsexualism, wrapped it up in sparkling Social Justice ribbons, then gifted it back to the mainstream as a political cause and cultural fad. As a consumer trend, transgenderism benefits the corporatists by expanding the market for pharmaceuticals and cosmetic surgeries. Beyond its sales-boosting powers, transgenderism also functions to reinforce an already widely, if subconsciously, held view of the body as a motley assemblage of interchangeable parts, ready to be sliced and diced and rearranged at will. The normalization of this dis-integration primes the public to accept increasingly radical interventions into healthy bodies, procedures and treatments undertaken not for therapeutic reasons but for purposes of image/identity management. Here is where transhumanism slithers onto the scene. With its embrace of self-actualization through techno-medical “optimization” of the human organism, transgenderism represents a soft launch of the transhumanist crusade against biological creaturehood, mankind’s self-induced evolution out of nature. Doubtless there is money to be made here: “If we are all transhuman, expressing that could be a never-ending saga of body-related consumerism,” Bilek writes. But transhumanism emerges from an ambition even more basic to manmade civilization than the mad dash for capital. What the men are chasing after, even more than money, is the power to vanquish and transcend life on earth. 

Transgenderism – along with the transhumanism it prepares the way for – aims to increase human (male) control over material reality while consolidating the wealth of the (male) corporate ruling class, at the same time as it recapitulates manmade culture’s vendetta against the natural world. From this angle, it would appear that transgenderism is positioned to advance male power, not social justice. Yet the left in general is blind to the distinctly patriarchal aroma of these projects. Hope as we might that they’d know better, they believe the hype. 

Progressivism, social justice, liberation, human rights – all have been reduced to buzzwords in a PR spectacle whipped up by corporations, and the corporate-owned State, to enlist as shills the quashed left’s dazed and adrift majority. It’s fair to say along with Bilek that, as a marketing tactic, hitching medicalization-chic body modification to the movement for lesbian and gay equality, human rights rhetoric, and the “free to be you and me” feel-good vibe of an afterschool special was brilliant. A feat of evil genius to be sure, deserving of just as many advertising awards as Barack Obama’s 2008 phantasmagoria of HOPE and CHANGE. Huge swathes of the population have been roped in, from mild-mannered liberals ready to repeat “trans rights are human rights” as per the ready-made positions package handed down by their chosen culture wars tribe, to rebellious teens drawn in by queerness’s brash glamour. Up for sale, along with designer bodies and spurious promises of relief from repressive sex roles and an oppressive sex-class system, is moral identity, a shared cause, a sense of individuality, an easy enemy (the right-winger or the TERF). In other words: everything that bereft leftists were stripped of by the death of their movements. It is no wonder, then, that the buy-in has been enormous. Corporatists are professionals, after all, with a standard procedure ready to go: 1) identify some weakness or fear or dissatisfaction; 2) exploit that unhappiness by marketing a false solution to stoke desire; 3) convert desire into dependency. Take the money and run. 

And it is at tracking the money that Bilek excels. As an investigative journalist, she has done more than anyone to expose the snarl of stakeholders that have collaborated to consecrate transgenderism as the zombie-leftist cause célèbre of our age. For those of us who balked at the notion that pharmaceutical firms, along with the State and George Soros, had fallen in line to champion transgenderism out of the goodness of their hearts, in solidarity with the oppressed, as if BlackRock had spontaneously hatched a social conscience, Bilek sets down the facts that lend solid ground to our instinctive skepticism. She profiles the wealthy men – Jon Stryker, Jennifer Pritzker and his Illinois governor cousin J.B., among others – who present themselves as philanthropist allies, loud and proud, donating millions of dollars to transgender advocacy organizations, gender clinics, and educational institutions. Meanwhile, more quietly, these same men are reaping the profits of medical technology investments. 

Bilek also shows how the medical industry itself maneuvers to prop up people’s access to voluntary endocrine disruption as a matter of human rights. That the pharmaceutical industry is the top spender when it comes to lobbying Congress tells us what we need to know about blue-tie-wearing politicians’ raging against laws that would place limits on the trans-medicalization of children. (“Protect trans youth,” they cry, as their bank accounts brimmeth over.) But Bilek cites more specific causes for alarm as well, identifying the ties that bind advocacy groups such as the Transgender Legal Defense and Education Fund and the Trevor Project, the United States’ largest LGBT+ youth organization, to Big Pharma funders. 

The media fascination with all things trans can likewise be traced back to the medical-industrial till. Bilek explains how magazines like Vogue, Vanity Fair, Seventeen, and The New Yorker are owned by media conglomerates with massive investments in medical technologies and gender medicine. What is true of magazines is true of TV and movies as well, since the Disney Company – which owns ABV, Marvel, 20th Century Studies, FX, and National Geographic, to name just a few – boasts a similarly telling investment profile. Bilek reveals that whenever people consume mainstream media, they’re being glutted with corporate propaganda, “slick advertisements” passed off as entertainment and education. 

Bilek’s rigorous accounting of the money that courses through the transgender movement leaves little doubt about the role of profiteering in this social and biological re-engineering project. Yet I worry that, in her hyper-focus on the profit motive, the more latent but no less formative ideological undergirdings of transgenderism may slip from view. Along with corporate malfeasance, dissociation is another recurring theme in Bilek’s work. She writes that transgenderism promotes a dissociation from one’s body that radiates out to become an intensifying disconnect from the material, biological, natural world. According to Bilek, this dissociation is deliberately cultivated by the medical-industrial complex to dissolve whatever lingering urge towards bodily integrity remains, and thereby usher in an era of unchecked for-profit technological colonization of the human organism. Transgenderism shades into transhumanism as the next frontier in this entrepreneurial venture, expanding the consumer base for commodified body parts from a queer minority to the general public. For Bilek, this is primarily a corporate capitalist phenomenon. I do not deny that there is money to be made yoking people ever more intimately to medical technologies, nor that amoral men are eager to make that money and maximize it. But it seems to me that, as much as transgenderism and transhumanism’s pushers may promote dissociation to drive their sales, these ideologies are as much products of dissociation as they are instruments of it. Both rely on already widespread dissociative tendencies for their mass appeal. Dissociation, then, is the fundamental issue, one that lays the foundation for, rather than arises from, the current crop of popular delusions. 

Bilek names pornography, sexual fetishism, and the internet as additional forces of dissociation plaguing contemporary society. As with transgenderism and transhumanism, they are simultaneously products and reproducers of disconnect. And as with transgenderism and transhumanism, although there are substantial profits to be reaped by marketing porn, fetishism, and the collective retreat into entranced virtuality, the profit motive fails to fully explain their cultural ascendancy. The popularity of these “products” cannot be neatly attributed to some evil-genius corporate scheme. However much capitalism may exacerbate a pre-existing dissociation for the purpose of exploiting consumers, capitalism is not the cause of endemic alienation. There is a deeper pathology at play. 

In the essays collected in Transsexual Transgender Transhuman, Bilek refers to transgenderism as an assault on biological sex. The attack’s objective, she argues, is to upend sexual dimorphism, defined in the book as “what it means to be human at its core.” Initially I was puzzled by this definition of humanity. Aren’t all mammals sexually dimorphic? And wouldn’t that make biological sex the essence not of our humanity, but of our animality, our shared nature as creatures of the earth? It occurred to me, then, that it is precisely because sex confirms our similarity with other animals, instead of our uniqueness as humans, that men have targeted it for technological overhaul. In western patriarchal culture, humanity is held up as animality’s opposite. Men have sought to deny that they are animals, mammals, primates. They have called “human” the mind and spirit or soul while demeaning our sexual anatomy as the lingering blot of a lesser “animal” element. The animal in the man has been a defect to overcome. To follow this line of thought is to conclude that humanity will only be consummated after it has been cleansed of biology’s taint. 

Bilek is dead-on when she characterizes transgenderism as a “transhumanist religious ideology that ultimately foregoes the body for a technological supremacy of the mind,” and transhumanism as a “tech-driven, hubristic flight from flesh, mortality, and nature.” What I would take care to clarify, however, is that the flight from the flesh is not a problem of capitalism per se. Medical-industrial grifters may be the latest operatives rushing it along, and they may, on the face of it, be driven by greed. Even so, it seems shortsighted to lay manmade culture’s withdrawal from biological reality at capitalism’s feet. It is impossible to make proper sense of transgenderism’s rise when it is figured as just another corporate racket. The flight from the flesh, from mortality, from nature: this escapism has been the established trajectory of manmade civilization since its inception. All patriarchal religious ideologies forego “the body for a technological supremacy of the mind,” with dissociative mind/body dualism as their founding tenet. Even before its fatal co-optation, the political left failed to reckon with this basic principle of patriarchal doctrine. No less male-dominated than the right and the center, the left has incorporated rather than countered patriarchy’s fundamental assumptions and obsessions. The standard leftist analysis, therefore, offers scant protection against the enticements of transgenderism and transhumanism, with their promises of freedom (from the body) and absolute self-determination (in opposition to nature’s tyranny). This is why today’s zombie left took the bait, why they’ve bought in and become faithful defenders of the medical-industrial complex, useful idiots in collusion with capitalist patriarchy. These leftists don’t know male dominion when they see it—but as radical feminists, we can’t afford to lose sight. 

Bilek’s dogged attention to transgenderism’s cash flow is essential in how it exposes the movement as a strategic crusade of the technophilic male master class. This is a crucial part of the story, but it is not the whole story. Understanding the role of capitalism in the transgenderist coup cannot tell us why the male master class is so preoccupied with revamping the human body in the first place, why so many people happily pay to submit their bodies to the revampers, or why dissociation reigns. The risk in mistaking the profit motive for the be-all, end-all is that it obscures the fact that capitalism itself is an outgrowth of patriarchy, and that beneath every contemporary crisis, ancient ideologies still churn.

As long as these pathological patriarchal ideologies are left intact as the intellectual bedrock of our culture, we will see them seep poisonously to the surface time and time again. The outrages they breed may take novel forms, their rhetoric updated to echo popular discourse, the marketing campaigns they come wrapped in freshened up for a new era. In substance, though, they will be unchanged; men’s same old malignant hatreds, fears, and denials will still hold sway. And they will continue to wreak the same devastation. To be a radical feminist is to know that the end of capitalism will not necessarily bring the end of male dominion. Profit, after all, is not the only bottom line. 

Thank you to Spinifex for kindly providing a copy of Transsexual Transgender Transhuman for this review. 

Aurora linnea is a radical lesbian (eco)feminist writer living at the ocean’s edge in the region of North American 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.