Humanity on the Line

A review of ‘From the ‘Neutral’ Body to the Posthuman Cyborg’

Silvia Guerini, From the ‘Neutral’ Body to the Posthuman Cyborg’: A Critique of Gender Ideology (Mission Beach, Australia: Spinifex Press, 2023).

Surgeons must be very careful

When they take the knife!

Underneath their fine incisions

Stirs the Culprit – Life!

- Emily Dickinson, 1860

How did we arrive at this point where people assert themselves as not only the opposite sex, vis-à-vis “gender identity,” but also demand “affirmation” through medical interventions? Recently published by Spinifex Press, Silvia Guerini’s From the ‘Neutral’ Body to the Posthuman Cyborg: A Critique of Gender Ideology gives a vital, highly engaging critique of transgenderism, focusing on it as an industrialized, alienated war against the body. Her analysis emphasizes the technologized dismemberment of sex as the dismemberment of shared humanity for women, men, and children.

“Women and women’s bodies have become the terrain of appropriation and confrontation, but in this terrain I want to yield nothing,” she argues, …