Ultra-Processed People

On bratwurst, baby-buying, and the lie of puberty blockers

MARY HARRINGTON

In news that should surprise no one, the Society for Evidence-Based Gender Medicine (SEGM) reports that the supposedly robust evidence base for puberty blockers is not just weak: it fails to replicate. The original Dutch studies on using off-label cancer drugs to halt puberty in gender-confused children claimed doing so afforded modest improvements in mental-wellbeing for some patients. But a newer study, just published, re-analysed existing data to show that for the majority this drug made no improvements to mental health, and around a third actually deteriorated.

This underlines what ought to be obvious. Dosing physically healthy kids with an off-label cancer drug with side effects that can include osteoporosis, seizures, cognitive impairment, and sterility is not, as supporters claim, a safe and temporary intervention but a powerful iatrogenic harm. And it’s being pursued despite the evidence for its benefits being at best extremely weak. Why, then, are so many so desperate to forge ahead with these experiments on children? Why don’t people want to know?

Well, this would not be the first time Big Pharma has downplayed evidence of harm and misled doctors about the safety of a treatment, in pursuit of profit. But I think it goes deeper than mere commercial greed, and that there are a great many people who really want to believe that humans have more medical control over our bodies than we actually do.

Take the notorious 2000s “It girl” Paris Hilton, who recently announced that she’s buying a second baby. Hilton revealed that this wasn’t due to her age (she’s 42) and that even if she was 20 years old she’d still use a surrogate - because “childbirth and death are the two things that scare me more than anything in the world.”

And no wonder. For childbirth and death both confront us with the reality that we don’t get to control every aspect of our own bodies. To be pregnant is to experience a radical loss of control over one’s body: given over increasingly obviously to the baby’s needs, subject to all kinds of involuntary processes, for a while it felt as though the boundaries of my embodied self were fluid in the extreme.

By the same token, we don’t usually get to choose the moment or manner of our death. Nor do we get to choose our sex. And nor do we get to control the normal sexed developmental pathway from childhood to sexually mature adult. This in turn confronts us with the limitations to the worldview we now apply, not just to the natural world but also to ourselves: of technological control and exploitability.

The philosopher Martin Heidegger offered a prescient description of this mindset in The Question Concerning Technology (1954). Here, he characterised the essence of technology as “enframing”: a refusal to encounter things as they are, instead viewing the world as resources ready to be exploited: the “standing-reserve”.

Heidegger died in 1976, before the long-term consequences of the 1960s transhumanist turn were clear. But as I’ve argued, embracing biomedical control of human fertility extended the domain of the standing-reserve, from the natural world to humans ourselves. Half a century on, we increasingly (en)frame every component of the human organism as standing ready to be exploited, remodelled, or re-ordered in service to individual desire. This mindset encourages us to re-imagine what people are, in a way richly evoked by the header image: mechanically recovered meat, frivolously re-formed as a simulacrum of anything else we please.

But the bratwurst in question, which is real and was spotted on sale in Austria, both illustrates this false promise and also its limits. In it, two colours of mechanically recovered reformed meat were reformed into a likeness of “Conchita Wurst”: in reality, a gay man called Tom Neuwirth, who made headlines in 2014 when he won the Eurovision Song Contest. If Neuwirth himself identified as transgender, this would be almost too on the nose. But while this is often assumed of him, Neuwirth himself has repeatedly emphasised that no, he’s a drag artist. And in dressing as a woman while retaining a beard and male pronouns, Neuwirth in practice highlights the irreducibility of the sex difference he plays with.

By contrast, the bratwurst Wurst is infinitely more “trans” than the real Wurst: a synthetic Wurst in synthetic-meat wurst. It implicitly collapses the difference between imitation and reality meat, and also imitation and reality sex, in much the same fashion as those transgender activists who insist, in the face of all evidence to the contrary, that “trans women are women”.

And this in turn reveals the lie at the heart of the transhumanist promise. In re-ordering humans to the standing-reserve, what we get is not the technological means of making ourselves into anything we desire. Rather, it’s a new order of pervasive substitution, in which we are forbidden to notice the difference between real and synthetic. This is the mindset which tries to convince consumers that “deli meat” slices made from mechanically recovered meat slurry is the same as cured ham, or that synthetic “plant-based” proteins, formed and flavoured via intensive laboratory processes, artificial flavours, stabilisers, preservatives, and so on, is the same as actual meat. It’s the same mindset that seeks to persuade us that Paris Hilton is as much the mother of the babies she ordered, as the woman who gestated them. Or, indeed, that one sex can “be” the other: the notion that one can be “transgender” in any meaningful sense is premised on the same lie of substitutability. Accordingly, we are now asked to accept that a section of skin and flesh sliced from a young woman’s thigh, rolled up, and then grafted to her groin, is as much a “penis” as the normally developing genitalia of an adult human male. And despite how patently false this is, cultural commitment to the order of total substitutability is now so mainstream it has assumed quasi-mystical qualities.

Why? I suspect this has happened in part because we’ve largely abandoned prayer, without having escaped the main occasions for prayer: birth, procreation, ageing, death. The result is an abyss of fear: men and women confronted - as Paris Hilton acknowledges - by those embodied processes we still can’t completely control, desperate to seize on tales of medical “progress”, and quick to disregard evidence to the contrary. Because all of these reaffirm the story of control, and in doing so beat back the darkness and terror.

Against this fear, even doctor-administered suicide looks more appealing than surrendering the moment of death to forces beyond your control. No wonder the lie of "puberty blockers” as a neutral, safe intervention can travel round the world before the truth of serious, irreversible iatrogenic harm can get its boots on. In service to the Meat Lego quest for total control of human flesh, “transgender children” serve as something akin to saints: living sacrifices to the impossible dream that we could one day entirely mechanically recover and reform ourselves, and have the result be better than the original.

Meanwhile, downstream of this fantasy, the same logic of substitution will go on oiling the wheels of commerce from commercial surrogacy to “free movement of labour” - by simply pretending its organismic and cultural casualties are not a thing. This is destined to fail. Human body parts are not interchangeable, any more than human sexes are, or gametes, or caregivers, or whole peoples. No one is really born “in the wrong body”. We are our bodies, as we are our relationships, as much as we are “selves” in some abstract sense.

But to the extent that we rebel against this reality in the name of that abstract self, and possess the technological means to push at its boundaries, we will go on trying to improve on our own given-ness: a quixotic project that, in the end, produces the “real” desired change only to the same degree as a protein laboratory produces “real” meat. Against this vision, and in rejecting its hubris, Conchita Wurst is a realist. We should join him.

Source: Reactionary Feminist