Venus Plus X

Transgender Transhumans! Are you headed to Venus Plus X?

También en español Depending on how you space it, VenusPlusX or Venus Plus X, it’s no accident that you may have stumbled over a novel by Theodore Sturgeon of the same name. Since first reading Venus Plus X in 1960, it has invoked a strong resonance with my own inner truth even though it was Sturgeon’s creative imagination, a perhaps fantasy. It is our namesake because it stands as the earliest and still clearest exposition of the world’s essential ideas and ideals in the world of sex and gender, and guides the our work as advocates, educators, and activists.

In the novel, a 1950’s human male, Charlie, is transported through time to a distant future where the surviving population of earth is a people called the Ledom (that’s model spelled backwards). The Ledom are fully functional androgynes, being capable of mutual impregnation and of resulting individual pregnancy. Most of the novel is focused on exploring the emotional and dramatic situational differences between normative human bi-gender society (envisioned through time flashbacks) and the behaviors of the Ledom, who are free of all sex and gender inequalities and limitations.

Throughout most of the novel the reader is led to think that the Ledom are some natural product of human evolution or genetic reengineering. Near the end, after Charlie has become friends with some Ledom and given them some feedback on their society vs. primitive human society (1950s), they give him a rather detailed explanation of how they view the society from which he came and how that view has come to shape their own. This is Philo’s Manifesto, which is an authoritative debunking of human history, philosophy, religion, and pretty much everything else, while showing the way to a vastly higher and transcendent body of truth. This short statement it is a must read for every person on earth.

Although Philo’s Manifesto is surely one of the most remarkable and complete syntheses of rational human knowledge of a subject normally considered too exotic to be open to intelligent, unbigoted, unbiased discussion, the final reality of the Ledom is even more remarkable. While the directed biological redesign of the human race into the Ledom is surely enough to be called Transhuman, in the final chapters of the story it is revealed that Ledom reproduction is not entirely biological, but involves a complex symbiosis from conception to adulthood with elaborate medical machinery that continually reshapes the “natural” human biology of development into a series of stages that lead to reproductively mature Ledom. That is truly a Transhumanist idea and far ahead of its time!

Without the medical machines, Ledom infants would be ordinary human infants. The creation of the Ledom is a deliberate act of human creativity, expressed in biomedical technology. This is a transformation of a very basic human character as all members of society enter into this reproductive symbiosis with the machine as a way to perfect their society. They have diagnosed the problems of humanity and conclude they all begin with sexual dimorphism and the resulting bi-genderism that rises from ignorance and refusal to examine reality carefully. Their reproductive symbiosis with the machines allows each to mature into androgynes indistinguishable in hermaphroditic sexual function and completely without gender.

Like Sturgeon’s Ledom, we examine many of the problems of humanity. Like Sturgeon, we feel many of the problems would not exist if humans were perfectly androgynous; however, we see many technological alternatives to the “brute force” approach in the novel (remember that DNA had been discovered only a few years before the novel was written, and nothing was known of its detailed structure and function). For example, a simple reduction in the expression of secondary sexual characteristics and the adoption of extracorporeal fertilization and gestation could achieve similar objectives.

Thus, unlike the Ledom, we do not expect to abolish sexual dimorphism. Rather, we seek to encourage health and longevity by discouraging extreme dimorphism that causes the incorrect and unproductive bi-gender model, and encourage either biosex to develop as symmetrically as possible to enjoy the full range of psychosexual and gender experience available to the human nervous system.

Extracorporeal gestation remains a distant technological objective, although planned fertilization is now part of the culture.

Today, as we learn to accommodate the needs of consciously transgender pre-pubescent children, we know that even crude pharmacological intervention at puberty can greatly enhance the experience of androgyny for the matured adult.

The technology foreseen by Venus Plus X is still in the distant future and may never be developed as an option for directed human reproductive evolution. On the other hand, the social changes envisioned in the novel are ready to move ahead today, since they depend only on changing human hearts and minds, and that means education and socialization, not biology. At VenusPlusX.org, we know how quickly such changes can occur in individuals and in groups, once a successful meme has been sufficiently distributed. While we support research into the technology of androgyny, we understand that the time is here today to empower the Transgender Transhuman community to assume leadership in the revolution for full sex and gender freedom and equality.

Editor’s Note: This originally appeared in July 2011, and is one of several posts being reprinted here in connection with the relaunch of VenusPlusX after a year’s hiatus because they are especially elemental in our thinking.

For more on Transhuman Erotic Freedom…

The Crowned and Conquering Child–Transhuman Lord of the New Age

For more on Transhuman Erotic Freedom…

Throughout all human history, those who understood the central mysteries of sacred sexuality and gender variation as keys to inner joy and outward satisfaction have hidden away their knowledge of such matters. Why did they conceal this marvelous knowledge, now freely available to all?

First, these mysteries are the most direct way to open the inner gates between the purely sensory and the transcendent spiritual experience of the individual. And this inner attainment enables the individual to break free from unfactual and untrue beliefs and habits acquired from the social environment. Once set free, the individual can cast off all sex and gender oppression and refuse any longer to be intimidated by the ignorant braying of the masses. A critical mass of such free people will overthrow the false religious, social, and economic structures of the past. Conservative forces will forever oppose such growth because of their investment in the dead cultures of our pastfathers. Human religions are deliberately designed to thwart such social maturation and at the same time deliberately deface, hide, and twist all past revelations of truth to conform to a false consistency within the foolish myths of human history.

Prophet of the New Age

The second cause of this earlier secrecy stemmed from a real fear of ruthless oppression by powerful social elites who derive their existence from mass ignorance. People are educated to question and resist integrating the evidence of their own eyes, senses, and erotic experiences. They are told that any internal personal experience is a delusion unless sanctified by a self-appointed middle-man  who presumes hypocritically to place himself between the individual and deity.

Sex and gender freedom, erotic freedom, is the foundation of all personal rights and interpersonal fairness. When a bigoted bully or other psychic degenerate (who might be a priest, a parent, a pastor, a teacher, a physician, an enemy, a peer, a “lover,” or just about anyone) convinces you to surrender your total personal erotic sovreignty in any way, they have gained unearned, unjust, and unwarranted control over your most basic physical being and made you their slave. Today’s slaves do not understand they are slaves or how they have been enslaved.

In late 19th century England the recovery of lost knowledge became an interest of Rosicrucian scholars who founded a secret order known, for short, as the Golden Dawn. Well-know cultural and social figures, such as William Butler Yeats were active members. Aleister Crowley, another member, most clearly enunciated the ideal of a New Age. He claimed to have received a direct revelation of the opening of the New Age, the Age of Aquarius, at the vernal equinox of 1904, through a supernatural contact. Crowley published his three-day revelation as “The Book of the Law” and built much of his career with occult and secret societies around this text.

Transhuman Lord of the New Age

One of the key ideas that emerges from the book and Crowley’s interpretive writings is “The Crowned and Conquering Child,” who is the deity of the New Age. Superficially, the term stands for the idea that the spirit of the people of the oncoming age will be fresh and open like a child. Child-like, but not childish. And such people will be free of the fears that turn the human heart from the truth. They will truly know the truth and the truth will truly set them free. It is a more complete expression of the concept, “The meek shall inherit the earth.” When one inquires into the esoteric significance of these ideas, a richer, though speculative, picture emerges with grand prophetic connotations. I love it!

Crowley associated the Crowned and Conquering Child with the deity Harpocrates, the God Horus as a child. Much as Sturgeon speculated inVenus Plus X, Crowley visualized the new age wherein the child-like becomes divine, god-like. This new order of being will be distinguished by having an unbiased will to live truth and by staying uncorrupted by impositions of false formalities, responding solely to the truth of each occasion. Thus we see that the Child is also the emerging Transhuman identity, free from the encumbrances of mythic belief, ready to perceive what is, and act constructively on those perceptions.

The Crowned and Conquering Child is not a single special person or even a single expression of personal freedom. The Child stands for the complete action of the new people of the new age, who embrace the future willingly and openly to create happiness and joy. The Child consciousness appears violent to anyone who holds to false ideas because it reveres nothing and is the sworn enemy of all such rubbish. The Child consciousness quickly rejects and overturns systems based on false premises, bullying, and forcible exploitation of others. Once the Child has fully emerged, the overthrow of status quo is intense, rapid, and trusting the pieces will all fall where they belong. In the words of Crowley:

The Quest of the Holy Grail, the Search for the Stone of the Philosophers—by whatever name we choose to call the Great Work—is therefore endless. Success only opens up new avenues of brilliant possibility. Yea, verily, and Amen! the task is tireless and its joys without bounds; for the whole Universe, and all that in it is, what is it but the infinite playground of the Crowned and Conquering Child, of the insatiable, the innocent, the ever-rejoicing Heir of Space and Eternity, whose name is MAN?

The course of the New Age is determined by the actions of the Crowned and Conquering Child. Nothing that does not fit eir plans survives from the past.

—Dan Massey