Prof Tells Laura Ingraham Trans People Want to Create New Species

Transgender people are trying "to create a new species," part human and part machine, a guest told right-wing pundit Laura Ingraham on her podcast last week.

The source of that preposterous claim is Paul Nathanson, a professor of gender relations at McGill University in Montreal and a defender of what he considers traditional masculinity. It came on the Wednesday episode of The Laura Ingraham Podcast, titled "Transhumanism and the Assault on Traditional Gender and Masculinity."

They talked about the growing acceptance of a nonbinary view of gender, given that singer Sam Smith recently came out as nonbinary, and the announcement that the U.K.'s Prince Harry and his wife, Meghan Markle, plan to raise their child with a fluid approach to gender. Nathanson said this has happened because "feminists challenge the notion of gender" and have embraced the transgender movement.

"Their goal ultimately is the destruction or elimination of the traditional family, though, is it not?" Ingraham responded, according to a Media Matters transcript. She said the "traditional family" is "one last bastion of Western biblically centered morality that ... has helped us prosper, frankly, for millennia."

Then Nathanson, who said he questioned his male identity in his youth but now identifies as a cisgender gay man, dropped his bomb about trans people. "I think that the trans people have taken it one step further because by abandoning gender altogether, not simply rewriting it; they're basically trying to use social engineering to create a new species," he said. "Which is what, in fact, the transhumanists have been doing for the past half century. Using medical and other technologies to develop a new species. ... They want, they must, in fact, destroy whatever is in order to replace it with what they think should be."

Ingraham asked if the new species would be part human and part animal, and Nathanson said it would be a combination of human and machine. She didn't call him out on this claim but appeared to take him quite seriously. "Part machine," she mused.

Nathanson "seemed to conflate transgender identity with transhumanism, a school of thought that suggests humans can transform themselves as a species using technology," Mother Jones notes.

He also contended that trans people are "confused about who they are" and that their solution is to "mutilate their bodies." Ingraham denounced parents who allow their children to have hormone therapy, calling the practice "child abuse."

Jay Connor, writing at The Root, rightly characterized the whole conversation as "ludicrous," adding, "My only request is that when the trans community inevitably creates their invincible legion of transgender cyborgs, that they show no mercy on the conservatives who spoiled their imminent reign."