LGBTQIA
At the 2003 Transvision conference at Yale University Vanessa Foster, the chair of the National Transgender Acton Coalition, declared that transsexuals like herself were the first transhumanists. Transgendered people have been on “cutting edge” by asserting their right to use technology to modify their body.
Gays, lesbians and bisexuals are also natural allies of transhumanism since the right to control one’s own body means being able to share it with other consenting adults. The champions of natural law attack homosexuality and human enhancement with the same arguments. In-vitro fertilization allows lesbians to have children without having sex with a man. Work on fertilizing eggs with the DNA from another egg or replacing egg DNA with sperm DNA would allow gay parents to both have a genetic link to their children.
One activist who saw that link is veteran gay rights activist Randy Wicker. Wicker was one of the first gay rights campaigners to come out on radio and television in the early 1960s, and he has been active in gay rights in New York City since. Then in 1996, when an international backlash started against the cloning of the sheep Dolly in Scotland, Wicker had an epiphany. He saw that the right to clone was a fundamental reproductive rights and gay rights issue since “cloning renders heterosexuality’s historic monopoly on reproduction obsolete.” Wicker started the Clone Rights United Front with other gay rights activists, then co-founded the Human Cloning Foundation, and has become a national spokesman on cloning as a reproductive right.
Wicker’s argument has made some headway with gay theoreticians like Chandler Burr, author of A Separate Creation: The Search for the Biological Origin of Sexual Orientation, who acknowledges that reproductive technology “takes us another degree further from the idea that babies are produced only by two heterosexual people having heterosexual intercourse.”
Links
Queer Transhumanism
By Dale Carrico - 1/5/2004 - Betterhumans
Bioconservative Arguments Against the Right to Human Enhancement Technologies for GLBTQ People
