(video) Transgenders, culture wars & space expansion

This is a conversation with Inara Tabir (aka GalaxisGal) on the intersections of transgender issues, transhumanism, and space expansion.

This video is also on YouTube, and the audio-only version is in the Turing Church podcast.

I met Inara recently at a Terasem gathering and I found it intriguing that she is both a transgender activist and a space expansion activist. And she is a transhumanist.

I found this interesting and refreshing because I have the impression that, in today's culture wars, openness to and support for transgenders very often correlates with opposition to transhumanism and space expansion, and the other way around.

Of course, it doesn't have to be so. If anything, transhumanism is all about radical interventions on human biology, much more radical than anything that we have today, and space expansion will eventually need such interventions. So transhumanists and space expansionists should support transgenders, and transgender rights activists should support transhumanism and space expansion.

I’m known as a transhumanist (though I don’t call myself that anymore) and space expansionist (I call myself a spaceflight fundamentalist). See “Trans what? Reflections on transhumanists, transgenders, and the Ctrl-Left” for my take on transgender issues.

Of course Inara and I don’t entirely agree on everything. For example, I’m a card-carrying in-your-face Elon Musk fanboy because to me his commitment to making humanity multi-planetary weighs much more than anything they say against him. And I don’t think J.K. Rowling is a bad person.

But we do agree on many things, including the need to replace today’s hyper-polarized culture wars with more nuanced discussions, and of course the need to expand into space and make humanity multi-planetary.