Gender-sexual transmobility as a normative challenge in a posthuman world

The article engages with consequences that the currently proliferating practice of reinvention of gender-sexual identities has for the normative order of society. An emerged posthuman era is featured by “morphological freedom” (A. Sandberg, et al.) conceived as a civil right of a person to modify their own body on their own terms. As a consequence, we can observe a major normative morphogenesis in the domain of the gender binary system. The longstanding cultural assumption that male-female dualities are “natural and immutable” is now rejected as a socially constructed system of patriarchy and male privilege in pre-modern and modern societies. The increasing number of transgender and transsexual passings around the world, as a part of a much wider phenomenon of visceral transmobility, challenges primordial ascriptive heteronormativity. In this context, of sociological interest is the question of how current normative morphogenesis is embedded into the socio-normative order, or whether there are any restrictions and barriers to prevent the dismantling of ascriptive constraints in the posthuman society. The proposed idea is that normative morphogenesis in the domain of ascriptive gender status allocation is accompanied with consistent maintenance of heteronormativity in a deeper sex assignment system. Although there are many countries worldwide (from Nepal to Canada) that have recently recognized non-binary sexual statuses allowing individuals to legally assign ‘third' sex, reluctance to recognize sexual transmobility on a mundane sexual level, as well as on the level of unconscious intentions, and institutional medical and legal activities, continues to keep on. Based on secondary analysis of relevant surveys' data, case-studies, evo-devo ideas, psychoanalysis, the main inference of the article is about the rigidness of morphotaxis (as opposite to morphogenesis), a latent mechanism functioning to preserve the primordial social order by the way of persistent reproduction of heteronormativity. Elaborating on Axel Honneth's theory of the “struggle for recognition”, it is concluded that the structures of “non-recognition” reproduced in the process of normative morphotaxis still matter and will not be eliminated by emerging opportunities of “morphological freedom”, but will ever find ways to contain transmobility in the domain of the gender-sexual normative system for the sake of the survival of the humankind, which is possible on the evolutionary foundation of sexual binary only.

Keywords

Authors

References