How trans ideology paved the way for motherless babies

The future is technological, and this includes human reproduction. In Silicon Valley, a very particular sort of technological pro-natalism is emerging – not a movement to try to persuade ordinary people to have families so much as a push to create genetically superior children. The way they see it, the future of human reproduction is – and should be – increasingly technological.

There’s a vast amount of money moving into the reproduction industry. Interestingly, the big players here are often the same people who have been ruthlessly pushing gender ideology – the insane idea that you can change your sex at will. Why would this be? What is the connection between the fad of transgenderism and tech-fatalism?

It’s not hard to see why Silicon Valley billionaires would be interested in reproductive tech. Emma Waters of the Heritage Foundation has reported on the wealthy elites who invest heavily in technologies that enable the creation of “superior” children – the embryos chosen for health, creativity or other traits. Waters notes that in 2022 alone, $800 million was poured into fertility-tech startups, with a focus not on addressing the decline in the US birth rate, but on curating the best possible offspring.

Tech moguls such as Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Marc Benioff, Peter Thiel and others have financial interests in reproductive technologies. Musk, for example, believes that humanity’s evolution will increasingly involve cyborgs and AI, and is investing millions in fertility initiatives focused on countering declining birth rates. What few people seem to grasp is that much of the groundwork for getting people to accept radical genetic engineering has been laid by gender ideology. People think of gender ideology in terms of sexuality and identity, but it functions not just as a social movement, but also a highly effective marketing campaign, particularly targeting young minds.

It forces a shift in perception, undermining the male-female sex binary across various cultures and societal structures – legal, political, medical and social. Gender ideology insists that sex is fluid and that individuals can transcend their biological reality. Its core message – that human beings are not sexually dimorphic, that sex exists on a spectrum and that men can breastfeed – prepares us to accept radical shifts in reproduction, such as the idea of male motherhood and pregnancy.

This dovetails with the “tech-natalist” idea that mothers don’t matter, and that superior humans can be gestated in laboratories outside a woman’s body. Scientists have already made progress with developing artificial wombs and, as Waters points out, many in the Valley would like to see the development of complete ectogenesis, outsourcing the entirety of pregnancy to these artificial wombs.

They don’t seem to understand the terrible price we’d pay for this, and the suffering it would impose on the children of the future. The whole concept of motherhood, which is increasingly viewed as irrelevant, is at stake.

What people have been led to believe is that gender ideology is simply a culture-bound syndrome like anorexia, or a medical scandal like the opioid crisis. While this may be comforting (it gives the impression that gender madness will simply fade out), it also provides false hope and prevents us from seeing the real target – and the power of the forces aimed at that target.

Technological advancements are challenging societal norms in profound ways. Many people are unaware of how far these technologies have come or how massive the financial investments in the industry are. The billions of dollars invested by philanthropic oligarchs, the medical and tech sectors and governments in gender ideology are much more aligned with reshaping human reproduction than simply supporting a small group of young people undergoing a “social contagion.”

Irwin Jacobs and his late wife Joan, for instance, have funded both the gender industry and tech-natalism. Their financial support of civil-rights organizations such as the ACLU as well as tech institutes that promote gender-identity ideology, shows how interconnected these social-engineering movements are. They have also donated to the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, which embraces AI and the future of human biology. Capital management firms such EY and BlackRock are also deeply involved in the gender industry, but not because they hope to profit from the market for surgeries and hormone treatments. Even if these procedures lead to further health complications, requiring more medical interventions, the financial returns are not likely to justify the huge investments.

The reason LGBTQI+ NGOs receive such large sums from these companies to promote gender ideology is that it sets the stage for them to control how we reproduce. So the true target of the gender industry is not how we experience sex, or who we are attracted to, but how we have children.

Seen in this light, the billionaire pushers of gender ideology are clearly not champions of gay men or women at all. Their excitement is about engineering superior humans, which makes it all the more sinister that they’re simultaneously pushing for the sterilization of young people via puberty blockers and surgery.

Proponents of the movement argue that there is no downside to technological reproduction and that it could even create greater equality between the sexes. One of the most prominent supporters of this idea is Martine Rothblatt (born Martin) who wrote the first international bill of gender rights. Martine is an American entrepreneur and lawyer who identifies as transsexual and trans-humanist. He has four children with his wife Bina and yet he entirely overlooks and downplays the unique abilities of women.

True equality lies in respecting differences, not in erasing them. Perhaps this is distasteful to Rothblatt and his trans friends who would like to believe that there is no part of womanhood they can’t simply put on like lipstick.

But women have a genius for bearing and raising children. And if society convinces that being liberated from gestation and motherhood is a form of freedom, it risks erasing the very essence of humanity.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s May 2025 World edition.