BioPhobia: A Progressive Manifesto

Frailty, sickness, physical suffering, the decline that comes with aging, the inevitability of death: these have haunted humanity throughout the thousands of years of our existence.

These difficulties are inherent to our embodied existence. Religions throughout the ages have grappled with these frailty of human life, sometimes by offering a renewed and perfect life after death (the promise of an after-life in heaven), sometimes —as in Buddhism— by counseling acceptance and reconciliation with the inevitable suffering and mortality of our flesh. Historically, some religions taught the rejection of the body:  for example in the intentional mortification of the flesh to purify one’s immortal soul.

Now there is a new medico-techno belief system that encourages the rejection of the body in favor of a mystical gender identity. This rejection of the body is BioPhobia.

BioPhobia, an unreasonable fear and loathing of one’s sexed body, springs from a complex of forces: techno-medicine vested interests, lobbying campaigns by trans activists, internet social media and the relative decline of ‘real life’ activities, and the TikTok styled cult of victimhood and suffering in which healthy physical development is rejected because it is somehow “privileged” and/or “boring” and lacks fetishized victimhood.

Humans are Embodied Beings

Those who believe they were born in the wrong body are participating in BioPhobia. We obtain life only in and through our bodies. It is physically impossible to be born in a ‘wrong’ body. Nonetheless, the anti-empirical metaphysical belief in this possibility is inherent in BioPhobia.

Social Death and Resurrection

BioPhobia promotes a type of living death in which the sexed body is renounced, the sexed individual dies a social death, and a fantasy identity arises like an immortal soul out of the sexed body’s social death. This social death is a fiction that is attained by so-called ‘affirmation’ in which the individual’s BioPhobia is propped up and promoted by the community at large.

Mystical Union of Gender

BioPhobia is a union of self with a mystical gender identity, which is understood simultaneously to be inherent and absolute, and yet also subject to frequent change. The protean and magical dimensions of gender identity provide the metaphysical center of BioPhobia.

Renunciation of Nature

BioPhobia stakes its claim counter to truths of inter-being, the microbiome, fermentation, and our fractal cosmos. Our living universe in which the modern human species evolved and through which we continue to propagate, is a system that is sexed, copulating, procreating, growing, and dying to be digested and recycled into new life. BioPhobia attempts to remove the enmeshed body from these deep biological truths and to place that individual on a techno-medical platform. Such a platform is itself costly, painful, and life-denying, but BioPhobia blinds many to these facts.

Love Your Embodied Self

The innate love for one’s natural body is rejected by BioPhobia; such inherent and natural love for one’s body is perversely labelled phobic. Many fall victim to this rhetorical inversion, and adopt a belief that hating their bodies is the route to rejecting “phobia”. This is a psychological inversion and a deeply destructive teaching.

Life Quest Derailed by Medicalization

BioPhobia promotes plastic surgery and drugs as a replacement for the complexity of the sexed body that evolved through billions of years of Gaia’s eco-sphere. The historical shallowness of BioPhobia is counter-balanced by its reliance on techno-medicine in a classic assertion of power at the expense of wisdom.

Denial and Magical Thinking

BioPhobia embraces the fruits of techno-medicine, and simultaneously denies empirical science out of which techno-medicine arises. Thus, BioPhobia denies the chromosomal origin of sexual difference, asserts penises can be “female” and claims that men can be women. These anti-empirical fictions are necessary to the success of BioPhobia. The wide-spread use of the phrase, “sex assigned at birth”, is indicative of the anti-empiricism of BioPhobia. Sex is inherent in chromosomes. Sex is not assigned at birth, but rather is observable via empirical methods even in very early fetal development. Anti-empiricism is a form of psychological denial and relies upon magical thinking. BioPhobia thus shares the anti-empiricism and magical thinking of conservative religions, but replaces traditional metaphysics with its own ideas.

Sex and Society

BioPhobia obfuscates the fundamental truth that Women are Adult Human Females and that adult human females have suffered religious, social, cultural and political oppression throughout recorded history.

Sex Based Rights

BioPhobia attempts to replace the empirical reality of sex with the social fiction of gender. This attempt has advanced in law and policy and corrodes women’s hard-fought sex-based rights. The international human rights treaty, The Convention on the Elimination of All Forms Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), aimed to uproot gender stereotypes because such stereotypes are inimical to the full human rights of women and girls. BioPhobia builds upon and promotes gender stereotypes so that natural and joyful gender-nonconforming behavior is rejected, and seen as wrong, threatening, and in need of life-long medicalization. This barbaric rejection of gender non-conformity is regressive politics at odds with the goals of CEDAW.

Institutional Capture

BioPhobia has infiltrated schools, welfare agencies, the courts, law, and medical practices. Legions of adult professionals promote BioPhobia to unsuspecting and vulnerable children and youth.

Eco-Crisis

BioPhobia reflects the broader human disdain for, and devastation of, evolved life. Thus, BioPhobia takes its place among the litany of contemporary eco-crises: radioactive pollution, plastic pollution, and anthropogenic climate change.