I’m in a snarky mood tonight.
But seriously?? The actual headline to the article is:
Head Transplants ‘Could Replace Gender Reassignment Surgery’ for Gender Dysphoria
I’m imagining how this would work out and both how absurd and dystopian it would be.
There aren’t nearly enough bodies that are eligible for organ transplants, both because there’s a very limited window for organ viability and the deceased needs to be fairly young and in reasonably good health. Young, healthy people don’t die at very high rates.
So, trans people are going to be vying for intact, young, healthy bodies when there aren’t even enough of those bodies to supply medically necessary, life saving kidney, lung, heart, and liver transplants?
Seriously, good luck with that.
I’m having a hard time believing this is a real headline, mostly because its currently impossible to dislocate and rewire an entire fucking nervous system, much less while the brain is not receiving blood flow from the body.
I mean, that is what the headline is claiming, right? That trans people will eventually have their heads cut off and placed on a different body? I didn’t bother reading the article before I wrote this because I’m hoping to be super pleasantly surprised by how wrong I am.
Oh dear god, I wasn’t wrong. I wasn’t wrong at all. That is exactly what the article is saying. It is not satire, or a misleading (badly written) headline. It is real. Oh my god. Here are some quotes, with commentary via me:
“There might be an ethical quagmire there. I’m not getting into it, I’ll leave that to society.”
I’m pretty sure that planning to eventually perform the procedure counts as “getting into it.” In fact, that might be the very definition of “getting into it.”
Dr Canavero told New Scientist he believes that head transplants could be carried out safely within two years. He says that a Russian patient has already volunteered to undergo the surgery. He intends to cover the costs of the operation by crowdfunding through sales of his book, Head Transplantation and the Quest for Immortality.
God help us. It’s like an episode of Dexter’s Laboratory.
However, experts in neuroscience have questioned the feasibility of the procedure…
You don’t say.
…while members of the transsexual community say that such a procedure should not even be necessary.
You don’t say.
Go read the rest of this train wreck, complete with quotes from poor, embarrassed scientists who have to explain why that is not how the nervous system works, in fact that is not how ANYTHING works, and this is the stupidest idea ever as though it were debatable. My personal favorite:
Arthur Caplan, head of medical ethics at New York University Langone Medical Center, wrote in Forbes that the concept of head transplantation is “both rotten scientifically and lousy ethically”.
You tell ‘em, Caplan. You tell ‘em.
That this is a serious article in effing NEWSWEEK magazine–about as mainstream as you get–shows how far down the rabbit hole we’ve gone because of trans activism. Head transplants…Head transplants! are actually being considered as a viable treatment option for gender dysphoria. Even if it’s a scientifically improbable idea, it is being contemplated. Is there any hope for sanity in this upside-down world?