Feminism and Identity in the Transhuman Age

What does it do to our sense of ourselves, when we reimagine humans as raw material?

Frictionless, automated, self-cleaning border control kiosks at Vancouver Airport

Originally delivered as a lecture hosted by the Houston Centre for Humanity and the Common Good, Regent College, UBC, Thursday 13 November 2025

What do we mean by “feminism” these days? I’ve lost track of how many “waves” we’ve had. Similarly, no one really knows what an “identity” is. Something legal, individual, or trait-based, or oppression-based, or maybe metaphysical? Is it an internet avatar? A passport chip? It’s a mess. As for the digital age, what do we mean here? Are we starting with Alan Turing, or Facebook, or what?

I could spend the next hour just on feminism, which is to say giving you the ‘too long, didn’t read’ recap of Feminism Against Progress. But I’m not going to do that, because it would be boring for me and anyway you can just read the book. Instead I want to develop a handful of themes from the book, based on how my ideas have developed since I wrote it.

I’ll start with some definitions. By “feminism” I don’t mean the intersectional thing with the rainbow insignia and the special victim categories. Nor do I mean the girlboss thing where some well-paid women get to lean in by leaning on less well-paid women. I mean women’s aggregate response to the impact of technology on our specific embodied interests as female human beings, encompassing all that ought to be implied by “female human beings” properly understood.

By “identity” I don’t mean special victim categories, or some nebulous self-actualisation thing. I mean the soul, in approximately the Thomist sense: an immaterial aspect of every human being, that is the form of the body, that is characterised by rational consciousness, and is not merely an epiphenomenon of that body. That’s a strong set of claims in this day and age, but for reasons that I hope will become clear, this is a day and age that calls for strong claims.

As we’ll also see, what used to be called the “soul” has become attenuated into this far thinner and more mercurial term, “identity”, for reasons that are themselves bound up with at least some strands of feminism. Those reasons are also bound up with the digital age. And by this I don’t just mean Facebook or Twitter or whatever, but the whole technological paradigm that began to crystallise following the two World Wars, and which has extended the overall existing trajectory of modernity but turned it inward, upon humans ourselves.

In fact a more accurate term for my topic tonight isn’t “feminism and identity in the digital age” but “feminism and identity in the transhumanist age”. Because we’re already in it, and have been for the last 50 years or so.

By now you should have sensed the common, convergent theme that in my assessment underlies each of these strands: technology. By this, again, I don’t only mean “the internet” or a particular set of machines or socioeconomic changes. I also mean, with increasing intensity as we move toward the present, the technological mindset as such: what Martin Heidegger talks about when he discusses the question concerning technology. This paradigm is considerably older than just digital technology.

These three convergent themes, feminism, identity, and the transhumanist age, all fuse in this question, the one concerning technology. Specifically, the question concerning the application of technology to humans ourselves. And if we make the mistake of attributing this set of problems to, for example, “modern feminism”, or “woke identity politics”, or even just The Yoot spending too much time on their phones, we will get our causality hopelessly muddled on what is, in truth, a metaphysical problem.

Eve and the Serpent

When I first set out to scratch at these questions, the argument I wanted to make faced in two directions: toward the women’s movement, and toward conservatives. In one direction, I wanted to address those (I felt) upper-class voices then loudest in mainstream feminism, for whom the purpose of the women’s movement was a settled matter: total sex parity, in all respects, to the point where it had come to seem offensive even to suggest that sex differences exist, and sometimes have political significance. I think of this in shorthand as “Clinton feminism”, and you see it all over even now.

And in the other direction, I wanted to address a backlash I could already see gathering on the Right, against the Clinton feminists and their consequences. One in which because some of what the Clinton feminists demanded plainly doesn’t make sense, it was therefore necessary to abolish the whole shooting match, maybe repeal votes for women, and in any case cast anything even faintly associated with feminism into the outer conceptual darkness.

Facing toward the conservatives, I made the case that when understood historically, the women’s movement is a wholly legitimate entity. It’s better (and more sympathetically) understood neither as evidence of the arc of the moral universe bending toward justice, as the progressives have it, nor as some inexplicable urge by wicked, witch ladies to destroy Western Civilisation. Rather, the women’s movement emerged originally as a response to revolution: that is, as a set of contingent adaptations to the way women’s lives were transformed, and sometimes upended, by industrialisation.

This revolution rewrote the economic map, forcing what Karl Polanyi called “the Great Transformation” into a “market society” where the basic economic unit was not households but individuals, and where increasingly work happened somewhere outside the home. This precipitated a huge range of consequences for women, depending on their class and situation, and triggered large-scale social reform campaigns as a consequence.

These included (to name a few) campaigns for sex-specific workplace protection for manual labourers, against sex-specific workplace protection for knowledge workers, numerous subtypes of campaign to update the legacy legal and political status of women to reflect the new socioeconomic environment, to elevate and value the role of motherhood in private bourgeois homes drained of economic activity, to control the availability of hard liquor, and much else besides. In all this, two themes intertwine and sometimes compete: a feminism that calls for recognition of women in our distinctive reproductive role, and a feminism that calls for women’s entry into the market on the same terms as men. At times these sets of interests could clash along social class lines, with feminists on both sides.

In other words: first-wave feminism was not evidence of some miraculous frenzy of moral progress, after the endless premodern “Dark Ages”. It was rather an effect of technological change, as it interacted with the reality of women’s embodied lives and interests, and also with existing sociocultural norms and legacy legal and religious frameworks.

With this in place I turned to face the progressives and argued further that the set of beliefs we inherited from this first wave of feminism no longer applies. Because since that era we’ve begun a new industrial revolution, or perhaps a new phase of our ongoing technological revolution.

Enclosure and the machine

To make more sense of this, I need to make a brief detour to introduce two terms that have helped me understand the nature of this ongoing technological revolution: enclosure, and enframing. One is drawn from the economic historian Karl Polany, and the other from the philosopher Martin Heidegger.

For Polanyi, one of the central features of Britain’s transition to market society was the process of enclosing the commons. Prior to this, which is to say in medieval times, all land was “owned” by the Crown, who granted rights accordingly, in conjunction with duties and depending on social status. Most ordinary people were subsistence peasants who had a right to use some portion of common land to produce the goods they needed for everyday life. Enclosure was the (sometimes violent) process whereby this class was deprived of these rights and expelled from land which thereafter became the private property of some landowner or other.

We’re in the country of land acknowledgements here, so perhaps the best way to parse what I’m talking about is as a process akin to internal colonisation, in which the English peasantry were deprived of “indigenous” status and became the much more deracinated working class. It’s also not a coincidence that it was often East India Company “nabobs” returning to England who brought Empire money and an imperial-style transactional approach to underlings to bear back in the home country as well. Many of these displaced peasants settled in the New World. Others became England’s industrial proletariat.

Enclosure also has a bearing on this country, Canada. Over the century between 1750 and 1850 huge numbers of crofters were displaced from common land across Scotland by landowners, and many of them departed for Canada rather than starve or work in factories: estimates vary but somewhere between 70,000 and 150,000 Highland Scots were “cleared” from their homes. Canada struggles today with the question of Indigenous land claims, and the tragic irony is that at least some of those whose displacement of Native Canadians began that struggle were themselves Indigenous Scots, of Celtic heritage, who had themselves been displaced by the internal colonisation of enclosure.

“Enclosure” can work as a master-concept for understanding the trajectory that set the women’s movement in motion. Little by little, ever more of human activity was enclosed and brought into market society, that had hitherto been part of informal or household economies. Women’s work was often the first to be enclosed, notably spinning and textile-making but later many of the productive tasks that, in the medieval era, had generally been coded as “women’s work”. In practice, what this tends to do is both liberate (I don’t want to hand-make my garments, thanks) but also create new dependencies (now we rely on the textile looms, the factories, and so on; we might call this a dynamic of liberation but also capture. All of those first-wave women’s campaigns occurred against this larger backdrop of liberation, and technology-enabled enclosure by the market.

The spirit of technicity

What are we doing when we enclose something, and re-order it to market society? I name-dropped Heidegger above and want to round off this little interlude or detour by offering his term “enframing” as a means of deepening that understanding. In The Question Concerning Technology Heidegger argued that the essence of technology is not a set of tools, techniques, or machines but a mindset or way of looking at the world. Specifically it is that mindset in which we encounter everything in the world not in the fulness of its being but in terms of its instrumental value, as ordered for use. Heidegger specifically characterises this as a type of epistemological violence: a “challenging-forth” that forces whatever we encounter to reveal to us only those of its aspects which are useful to us and standing ready for our further employment to some end. The world is thus evacuated of its own nature and becoming, and appears instead as an inert “standing-reserve”, whose only function is to be ready to hand.

Heidegger grounds his analysis with a reference to Aristotle’s doctrine of the four causes, suggesting that the specific epistemological move, that enables the instrumental character of technology, has its origin in a distortion or dis-ordering of our understanding of the four causes, and hence of causality as such. For Aristotle, “causality” was understood not sequential terms but as multiple dimensions of the way in which something comes to be.

“The four causes are the ways, all belonging at once to each other, of being responsible for something else.”

As well as the material and efficient cause (roughly, the stuff, and the force that acts on it) Aristotle understood things have a “formal” and a “final” cause, which is to say its nature and purpose. But we have, Heidegger suggests, collapsed causality almost entirely into efficient cause - as when a snooker cue “causes” a ball to ping across the table.

Elaborating on Heidegger’s analysis, we can note that historically this occurred in the early seventeenth century. It was, in fact, one of the most significant changes to take place at the inception of modernity: the discarding of formal and final cause as obstacles to scientific inquiry. One of the most famous proponents of this metaphysical narrowing came from Francis Bacon, in Novum Organum, written 1620. The only worthwhile telos for anything was now, in Bacon’s words “the relief of man’s estate”.

My gloss on what Heidegger calls enframing is this collapse of causality. The re-ordering of everything such that it appears both without its intrinsic nature, denatured, and abstracted from the ends to which it is naturally directed. This is the central epistemological move that enables all of what we now gesture at while mumbling about “modernity”.

What Charles Taylor called “disenchantment” or secularisation can be seen as this gradual refashioning of the world, through the 18^th and 19^th centuries, as standing-reserve. It’s no longer formed of substances with a nature and directedness, whose ultimate ground is God. Rather it’s a set of inert resources to be mined, used, “developed”. We see this in the retreat of God first into Cartesian dualism, then God as “divine watchmaker”, and finally simply as gone, as first noted by Nietzsche in his parable of the madman who cries out that God is dead because “we have killed him.”

Over the course of secularisation, in Sources of the Self Taylor also tracks the transformation of what the medieval philosophers would have called the “soul”, in the Thomist sense I sketched above, as it loses that link to the transcendent and becomes the secular “self”. But even over the course of this trajectory the “self” still largely retained enough of that older Christian connotation of transcendence, of the imago dei, to hold out against the encroaching tide of technologization. But as the philosopher Carl Trueman points out (in a forthcoming book, The Desecration of Man) what Nietzsche’s madman has realised is that without God there are no longer any given limits on anything. There are no longer any barriers on what we can do, or to whom. And the thing about seeing the world as standing-reserve, as resources to mine, is that eventually you exhaust a resource and need to move onto the next. You’re always on the lookout for new seams to tap. Eventually that was going to come for the last taboo; enframing humans.

“Ye shall become as gods”

The germinal idea was already there long before it was realised: that we could make mankind better by working on him, as a plastic thing. Eugenicists were already strategizing in the 19^th century on how to “improve” the human species, as one might a strain of prize cattle. Meanwhile the workplace efficiencies to be had from treating humans as interchangeable working parts were first set out by Frederick Winslow Taylor, in Principles of Scientific Management, in 1911. Commenters on his work observed at the time that the precedent for Taylorism was the instrumental attitude taken by slave-owners toward the humans they enslaved and exploited.

But the first regime to really run with the idea that humans could be refactored by force, as stuff was the Third Reich, Nazi Germany. Mercifully their atrocities were halted and the camps and nightmare laboratories destroyed. But that wasn’t the end of the invitation, to remake ourselves as stuff.