It's called transhumanism for a reason

On Dylan Mulvaney, sex, gender, fertility, and the future of humanity (happy Friday!)

Dylan Mulvaney is a real doll.

No, I mean a real doll.

If you’ve somehow been asleep the last month, Mulvaney is a trans actor who has lately become a pitch-person for various lady-focused brands, including Kate Spade, the skincare company CeraVe, and Bud Light (see what I did there?).

A couple years ago, Mulvaney was just another gay guy who liked musical theater and preening. Today, after hormone replacement therapy and facial feminization surgery, including

hairline advancement; a brow bone shave; a rhinoplasty; a cheek enhancement; a lip lift; a jaw shave; a chin reduction; and a tracheal shave -

Mulvaney can pass for a woman, if you squint! And have a couple Bud Lights. Don’t look at the knees, either. The knees are always the giveaway.

(BEFORE… Well, hello, soldier!)

(…and AFTER. See what I mean about the knees?)

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Which, good for Mulvaney, I guess?

It’s a free country, and if you can get rich and famous and meet the President (who no doubt had to be kept a safe distance from Dylan) just by getting your jaw shaved and wearing some blush, so be it. Especially if you don’t even have to change your name because it happens to be gender-neutral.

But seriously, folks, the rise of Dylan Mulvaney - and the trans movement more generally - signals a sea change in a way that the gay rights movement never did.

(TO FIND OUT WHY, SUBSCRIBE!)

Same-sex attraction has always been part of human biology; the gay rights movement simply demanded its acceptance.

But the trans activists are demanding a change in the way humans see themselves. And to me, that new vision seems to be the inevitable culmination of the fact that medicine and science have now completely divorced heterosexual sex from reproduction.

Women can use hormones to override their natural fertility cycles and have sex that essentially has zero chance of pregnancy. Should contraception fail, abortion is now cheap, legal, and safe.

But the opposite is also true. Women can now have children without ever having sex through artificial insemination; and men can hire women to do the same for them.

The rise of birth control has had an obvious impact on fertility. But it turns out dividing sex from reproduction is - slowly but surely - leading to an even deeper change.

Sex isn’t any less pleasurable, but it is now slowly becoming just another kind of pleasure. Some people like overeating. Some people like cannabis. Some people like watching sports every waking moment. Some people like sex with other people. And some people don’t. Maybe it’s too messy, emotionally or physically. Maybe their expectations for it are skewed from pornography. Maybe their own body image is poor, or they have physical problems achieving erections or orgasm. Why not just hit the vape pen instead?

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And so sex - not masturbation, but sex with other people - is slowly losing its cultural centrality. The change is visible in the rise of OnlyFans, the pornography site that grossed almost $5 billion in 2021, and in the unabashed sales of vibrators at retailers from Walmart to Bloomingdales. Vibrators have now become so sophisticated at both clitoral and vaginal stimulation that after using them regularly, some women find they can no longer have orgasms any other way.

We’ve come a long way from Onan.

Now we are approaching the last stop on this train, the place where gender and sex and sexuality become completely divorced. Because the dirty little not-so-secret of trans folks is that making yourself look like the opposite sex doesn’t mean you will have anything like normal sexual function. Hormones are a polite way to say chemical castration, surgically made vaginas frequently don’t work very well -

tissues are remodeled as per the native anatomy, but the function is newly created with a diversity of postoperative outcomes from excellent to less favorable -

Penises are even more complicated:

The average hospital stay for the phalloplasty procedure was 2½ weeks.

Of course, it should go without saying that none of these surgeries improve fertility; and giving hormone blockers such as Lupron can permanently damage the ability to reproduce. As the transgender clinic at the University of California, San Francisco warns:

Patients on hormone medications such as leuprolide usually have zero sperm counts.

But if sex itself is merely the chance at a self-induced orgasm, who cares? What really matters is self-actualization, and what could be a higher form of self-actualization than to override one’s own DNA and change gender?

At least until Neurolink arrives and we can port our consciousness into the ether.