Transgenderism, Transhumanism and the Desecration of Man

Rejecting God means rejecting what it is to be human:

The war against God has of necessity resulted in a war against humanity. Under the guise of wanting to create a better human future, the secular humanists and misotheists have actually enslaved and degraded mankind. Well over a century ago G. K. Chesterton had fully understood this.

In his classic 1908 book Orthodoxy he put it this way: “The secularists have not wrecked divine things; but the secularists have wrecked secular things, if that is any comfort to them. The Titans did not scale heaven; but they laid waste the world.”

So much of the insanity that we see swamping the West today is fully explained by this rebellion against our Creator. The transhumanist and transgender assaults on humanity are just a few clear examples of this. And the two can be examined together.

Several years ago American writer Jennifer Bilek released a useful book on transhumanism, transgenderism and the war we are in: Transsexual, Transgender, Transhuman (Spinifex, 2024). See my review of this book here: https://billmuehlenberg.com/2025/08/13/against-the-transhumanist-transex-behemoth/

Here I want to tie all this into a brief discussion of the latest book by Christian historian and theologian Carl Trueman: The Desecration of Man: How the Rejection of God Degrades Our Humanity (Sentinel, 2026). This important volume assesses much more than the two trans ideologies that I have mentioned, but a few quotes from the book can help bring these various areas together.

First, let me offer this from the book’s Introduction to give you a flavour for the direction he is moving in:

“[D]esecration is key to understanding the dynamic of modern culture and the anthropological confusion that it embodies. I will argue that the modern notion of man—free and autonomous as demonstrated by his ability to transgress boundaries once considered sacred—has paradoxically reduced him to nothing. In desecrating God, man has ironically desecrated himself. The answer therefore is not merely some nebulous re-enchantment of the world. As [American author Tara Isabella] Burton has demonstrated, this modern world is full of opportunities for enchantment. Rather, the answer is consecration. But consecration, like the desecration to which it needs to respond, has a specific shape. Only by the true consecration of man can his desecration be overcome. And that requires a return not simply to the alleged cultural benefits of Christian belief and practice but to actual Christian belief and practice….

 

In sum, this book argues that there are only two ways to address the question, “What is man?” We can embrace Nietzsche’s challenge and continue the project of self-creation, thereby becoming gods ourselves; or we can embrace the Christian faith, with its dogmas, its cultic practices, and its ethics. We can be Nietzscheans or we can be Christians. There is no stable third option. We must choose today whom we will follow: Christianity’s Messiah or Nietzsche’s Madman. All else is nihilism.  (xv-xvi, xx)

Trueman spends some time looking at Nietzche and others and then assesses contemporary culture. For example, he traces how early radical feminists such as Simone de Beauvoir in the 1940s paved the way for the two trans movements of today. Consider this lengthy but crucial quote:

 At its core, this form of feminism saw the difference between male and female bodies as disadvantageous to women and therefore as something to be overcome through technology. As Beauvoir herself put it in a 1976 interview with Society magazine, the destruction of the concept of motherhood was the true revolutionary goal. This lies at the heart of the cyborg feminism of Shulamith Firestone and Donna Haraway that has today reemerged in the writings of Sophie Lewis. The aim is to use technology to eliminate the significance of male-female biological differences, specifically in the matter of conception and childbirth. The title of Sophie Lewis’s first book, Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against Family, makes the connection explicit.

 

This kind of feminism is a direct challenge to the notion that we have limits, obligations, and ends. It sees the womb as a limitation. It sees motherhood as an imposition. And it sees the reproductive teleology of the body not as something to be embraced but as something to be overcome. It involves a desecration of the human body in all three aspects.

 

While these feminists are figures of the left, this preoccupation with overcoming the limits of the human body does not conform to typical political taxonomy. The most prominent advocates of transgenderism have been the gender and queer theorists, but the rise in recent years of broader transhumanist concerns among the tech elites represents substantially the same philosophical attitudes to the human body. The opening lines of “The Transhumanist Manifesto” make this clear:

 

“The Transhumanist Manifesto challenges the human condition. This condition asserts that aging is a disease, augmentation and enhancement to the human body and brain are essential to prevail, and that well-being is essential to prosper within safe and healthy environments.”

 

The manifesto identifies “the human condition” as one of limitations but sees it not as something to be accepted, let alone embraced, but rather as a problem to be solved. This is the same logic as radical feminism and transgender theory. Whether one sees those limitations in terms of reproductive capacity (as the gender theorists such as Judith Butler do) or mortality and intellect (as so many of the so-called Tech Bros do) is irrelevant to the central point: The body is problematic but this can be overcome through the use of technology…. (pp. 45-47) 

The whole area of human sexuality is obviously massively impacted by our attempt to flee or deny the one who created us. Much of this book looks at these matters in detail, be it homosexuality, pornography, IVF, surrogacy, prostitution, sexbots, and so on. Another extended quote is worth sharing here:

We denizens of modernity are increasingly engaged in an explicit, intentional, and total war against human nature, specifically embodied, mortal human nature. We advance under the illusion that we have powers greater than death.

 

Take, for example, the ideology of sex and gender identity that has been in the ascendant over recent years. It has separated biological sex from personal identity. If your brain tells you that you are gay, or that you are a woman trapped in a man’s body, then the problem is with the sexed nature and telos of your physical body. What you want to be is the center of who you really are. To a striking degree, the embrace of both gay and gender ideologies represents a fight to overcome the role our physical bodies play in our nature, as if they were an imposition upon our true identity, a frustration of our authentic existence. If a facelift is an attempt to defy the aging process, gay sex and gender reassignment surgeries represent attempts to defy the authority of the sexed human body. By engaging in these procedures (and in the latter case, insisting that the ability to do so is a basic right), we are making bids for the total sovereignty of the individual will over embodied human nature. It is the end game of expressive individualism and the realization of the Nietzschean dream of godlike self-creation.

 

Yet that embodied human nature ultimately is sovereign because death itself remains sovereign. Like the knight in Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal, we might be able to fool ourselves for a time that this is a chess game we can win, but in the end, death will checkmate us. All the surgery in the world cannot defeat it. There is nothing like standing at the graveside of a loved one to make one aware that human nature is not a social construction…. (pp. 164-165)

Trueman closes the book by repeating something he has said throughout: a return to “cultural Christianity” is simply not enough here. Even an atheist like Dawkins recognises the cultural advantages of the Christian faith. A social media quote I just came upon by Guinea-born Catholic Cardinal Robert Sarah nails it: “The West has denied its Christian roots. A tree without roots dies.”

Or as Trueman put it, a cultural Christianity “offers only residues of a world built by a God long since dead. . . . If desecration is the pervasive problem of our day, then nothing less than consecration is the answer.” He closes the book by noting how we must proceed:

Only a renovation of the heart, redirecting it toward God, is able to do that. And that only takes place in the context of the church, where humanity by creed, cult, and code can once again realize what being made in the image of God truly means.

 

Yet there is a warning here too. To repeat: The creed and the cult cannot be separated from the code; that applies as much to Christians who desire the first two as it does to atheists who desire the third. One cannot believe the Apostles’ Creed, recite in church on the Sunday, and then treat others with snarling contempt for the rest of the week. One cannot believe that the cross is God’s strength made perfect in weakness and exalt the crucified Christ in praise at Evensong while adopting attitudes to power and methods of engagement outside of the church service that owe more to Nietzsche than to the New Testament. Our chief end is to glorify God and enjoy him forever. Only when we realize that will we also realize what it means to be truly human here and now. (pp. 209-210)

I strongly urge you to get a hold of this incisive volume. I just looked and found that I have 16 of his books, so you might consider getting some of his other important volumes as well.

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