We are delighted to present this dialogue between our friends at Resistenze al nanomondo in Italy and Renate Klein and Gena Corea of FINRRAGE (Feminist International Network of Resistance to Reproductive and Genetic Engineering)
Resistenze al nanomondo: In times of memory loss, where movements and contexts seem to be born out of nothing – sometimes precisely in order to re-signify and destroy deep struggles and meanings – it is crucial to reconnect the meaning of today’s paths with those from which they derive, with those developed in the past whose critical analyses, such as yours, have their strongest confirmation today. Can you tell us how FINRRAGE was born and its path? What was your political and cultural context of reference and is it still the same today?
Renate Klein: FINRRAGE was born in 1985 at the ‘Emergency Conference’ in Vällinge, Sweden, that members of the newly formed network FINNRET organised. It followed from a panel at the 2nd Interdisciplinary Congress on Women in Groningen, Holland in 1984 which we called ‘The Death of the Female’? (published as Man-Made Women in 1985). The title referred to the rapidly developing reproductive technologies such as IVF (in vitro fertilisation) that had produced the first test-tube baby, Louise Brown, in 1978. Having just finished editing the first international feminist anthology on this topic Test-Tube Women: What Future for Motherhood (1984, with Rita Arditti and Shelley Minden, in which Gena Corea also had a chapter to be followed in 1985 by her own brilliant book The Mother Machine: Reproductive Technologies from Artificial Insemination to Artificial Wombs), I was increasingly convinced that these patriarchal technological interferences with women’s power to create new human beings posed a massive threat to female existence, rather than ‘liberation’ for women as some supporters claimed.
The 500+ audience members in Groningen appeared similarly alarmed about the menacing technical take-over of women’s lives. They urged us to create an international feminist network. Hence FINNRET was born (Feminist International Network on the New Reproductive Technologies). It was clear to us that this network had to include women from the Global South as well as from the Global North and encompass ‘old’ as well as ‘new’ reproductive technologies. Not foiled by the promises of the ‘Technodocs’ – as we began calling them – to bring happiness to infertile women who desired their own child, we pointed out the reality: these technologies were aggressively pushed onto white well-to-do western women, whereas poor brown and black women were subjected to female foeticide (especially in India which led to a huge imbalance in male vs female babies born). No test-tube babies for them: instead, they were subjected to forced abortions and harmful new long-acting contraceptives (such as Norplant exposed by Farida Akhter from Bangladesh whose ground-breaking book Resisting Norplant would be published in 1995).
No doubt the resistance to these technologies was especially strong in Germany as it was obvious that they embodied eugenics and would be used accordingly.
In April 1985, German autonomous feminists together with the Green Party organised a Congress: ‘Women against Gene and Reproductive Technologies’ in Bonn. Similar to Groningen, the audience, consisting of 2000 feminists, church women, trade unionists, students and ordinary public citizens, issued a strong ‘NO’ to the technological takeover of women’s reproduction and lives. It was exhilarating to see the broad-based support for this position which included mainstream media outlets. Unthinkable today! No doubt the resistance to these technologies was especially strong in Germany as it was obvious that they embodied eugenics and would be used accordingly. Indeed, Robert Edwards, who called himself the ‘Father’ of Louise Brown (and received the Nobel Prize in 2011 for his IVF feats), was a long-time member of the British Eugenics Society and a supporter of the idea that reproductive technologies could produce ‘superior’ children when supposedly ‘bad’ genes were detected in embryos which were then not implanted but discarded. To us it was clear that these technologies in men’s hands might be used to decide which women in which countries would be ‘allowed’ to have children – and which other women would be stopped from ‘breeding’ inferior children (see an article in the Scientific American on Edwards).
After the German Congress, well known feminist sociologist Maria Mies and other German women joined the FINNRET women at the Emergency Conference in Sweden. Maria was particularly insistent – and rightly so – that our global Network also include genetic engineering of other animals and plants. This led to the name change to FINRRAGE: Feminist International Network of Resistance to Reproductive Technologies and Genetic Engineering.
FINRRAGE was hugely successful. We had thousands of members in close to 50 countries. Every country had its own chapter but there was a central office that was the connection point and moved every 2-3 years to a new country. I was the first FINRRAGE Coordinator based in Britain 1985 – 1987. We organised many conferences in Germany, Spain, Austria, Australia, Brazil and, most memorably, two meetings in Bangladesh in 1989 and 1993 with Farida Akhter as organiser who was both the Bangladeshi FINRRAGE contact and Director of her own Research Network UBINIG (including the publishing company Narigrantha Prabartana).
The FINRRAGE philosophy was always clear: we saw the totality of reprotechs and genetic engineering as a patriarchal attempt by white men (there were very few women involved at the beginning) to usurp women’s reproductive powers and dictate which ‘healthy’ children were allowed to be born by which women. Similarly, we considered genetic engineering of plants an assault on small farmers being able to provide nutritious food for the poor. We already knew that genetic modification of plants produced inferior plants but huge financial gains for multinationals like Monsanto (now merged with Bayer). We always wanted abolition – to stop these technologies – which put us at odds with liberals including liberal feminists who wanted regulation. These political and social frameworks are the same today.
Gena Corea: A few women from different countries and backgrounds, and then many more, recognized the threat the new reproductive technologies (NRTs) posed to women, and wrote out, spoke out, agitated and organized. That’s what I see now, awed by how we all came together. But it’s not what I was able to recognize as it was happening.
So I’ll tell you how it emerged from my perspective at the time. And Renate Klein, who was a whirlwind of an activist, a mover and a shaker, everywhere, all the time, for decades and decades, will relate much more.
As a journalist and feminist, I had written a book entitled The Hidden Malpractice: How American Medicine Mistreats Women as Patients and Professionals. To research it, I regularly read medical journals like the Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology and interviewed physicians who wrote articles in the journals. Besides reporting on unnecessary surgery on women’s reproductive organs, on abortion, on horrifying obstetrical practices male physicians instituted after pushing midwives out of practice, the book covered experimentation on women in the development of contraceptives. It detailed the particularly horrendous contraceptives that targeted women of color, disabled and low-income women and what were then called “third world women.” These contraceptives gave women from the Global South limited ability to get the drugs or devices out of their bodies. (That is, rather than a diaphragm a woman could insert or not each time at will, technodocs and population control advocates pushed injectable or implantable long-acting contraceptives.) The book also reported on the forced sterilization of Black and indigenous women.
The Hidden Malpractice came out in 1977 and then, the next year, the first test-tube baby, IVF baby, was born in England. The Woodrow Wilson Center for Scholars in the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C. planned a light-hearted Valentine’s Day symposium on test tube babies and invited the feminist Gloria Steinem as one of the speakers. She had founded the feminist magazine Ms. One of the editors at Ms was poet Robin Morgan, the editor of Sisterhood Is Powerful, and writer of many passionate feminist works. Robin told Gloria that instead of accepting the invitation, she should get the Woodrow Wilson Center to invite me in her place because I had the background to understand the technology and the women’s health care politics involved. Gloria did so.
Robin then invited me to lunch and at that lunch, not only told me about the Woodrow Wilson invitation that would be coming, but urged me to write a book on the new reproductive technologies. I had the background to do it, she told me as she had told Gloria, since I’d spent years doing the research for The Hidden Malpractice.
Robin saw a need for such a book and made it happen. Looking back, I’m wonder-struck as the shining women who emerged in this struggle.
Knowing nothing about the NRTs, I agreed to write the book. The technodocs were announcing to the public that they were developing the invitro fertilization technology out of their compassion for the suffering of infertile women. The one thing I did know right away was that that was not true. I had been reading their journals for years. I had never found a trace of such compassion. Sometimes the male physicians would attribute a woman’s infertility to her resistance to accepting her natural woman’s role as mother. I saw blaming, not compassion.
So I gave the Wilson talk and then began five years of researching and writing what became The Mother Machine. It was like entering a long, terrifying nightmare. These were pre-personal computer days so I would type out notes on journal articles, books, etc, photocopy them, and then sit on the floor of my office cutting up one copy and placing the cut-up pieces into the pile for whichever chapter it belonged. I describe this because it was often while on the floor, scissors in hand, reading and cutting up the notes that I would be filled with the horror of what was unfolding for women. I felt quite alone.
They were two sides to the same coin: control over who is allowed to be born into the world. By dominating and controlling women’s bodies. A eugenic agenda.
But maybe a year into my research, in 1979, I was invited to participate in a conference on reproductive technologies in Amherst, Massachusetts, USA. Entitled “Ethical Issues in Human Reproduction Technology: Analysis by Women,” (EIRTAW). It was there that I met Janice Raymond who became another of the instigators of FINRRAGE. A professor of women’s studies and of medical ethics at the University of Massachusetts, Jan co-organized the conference. I always remember her speaking at EIRTAW because it was the first time I experienced this: That when someone speaks the truth powerfully, the air in the room changes. Oh, how the air changed when Jan spoke!
My talk was not on a “new” reproductive technology but on an old one, a contraceptive. I entitled the talk “The Depo-Provera Weapon” because its proponents used a language of weaponry. They spoke of “target populations,” which were women of color, “third world” women, disabled women.
I think FINRRAGE always saw, from the first moment, the connection between fertility technology for “first world” women and anti-fertility technology for “third world” women. They were two sides to the same coin: control over who is allowed to be born into the world. By dominating and controlling women’s bodies. A eugenic agenda.
In the development of both types of technology, technodocs showed little regard for, even thoughts about, the harm done to women in their experiments. In the case of in-vitro fertilization (IVF), women were not only experimented upon but were required to pay for this experimentation on their bodies. That is, though they were experimental subjects, they were called “patients” receiving “treatments” and they had to pay for it.
Now in England, Jalna Hanmer—maybe she was at Bradford University at that time—was looking at the NRTs critically. Though Shulamith Firestone, in her 1979 book The Dialectics of Sex, argued that the NRTs, including the artificial womb, would free women from the burden of pregnancy and childbearing, Jalna and her colleague Hilary Rose did not believe that for a minute. The technology would not free women, they saw. Science, allied with capitalism, would put control of women’s reproduction into the hands of men, benefitting men and threatening women. Jalna would become another of the founders/inciters of FINRRAGE.
I have no idea how Jalna knew what I was up to (maybe word got out at EIRTAW?), but she did. She contacted me. She had some research to do in Manhattan. I lived just outside Manhattan in New Jersey. I invited her to come stay with me as she did her research.
Jalna died a bit more than a month ago. What a brave and brilliant woman! I think, not only of her sharp mind, her commitment to women’s full dignity and freedom, but her determination. I see her setting off from my house early in the morning, briskly walking to the train station for her day’s research in the city.
Renate Klein also somehow knew what I up to, though The Mother Machine had not yet been published. She telephoned me. She was editing an anthology on the NRTs, she told me, inviting me to write a chapter in it. I believe it was in the process of editing that anthology, which became Test-Tube Women: What Future for Motherhood?, that she became radicalized on the NRTs. Renate, a powerhouse who has never let up on fighting against these technologies so women might survive, was another of the instigators of FINRRAGE. She works so hard and long and cheerfully and fiercely. Without Renate, I can’t imagine where we would be now.
Another of the founding instigators was Robyn Rowland who I met at the Second Interdisciplinary Congress on Women in Groningen, Holland in 1984 where we all five gave speeches on a panel entitled “Death of the Female.” Robyn had worked on a committee with some of the prominent IVF experimenters in Australia and challenged what they were doing to women. She was a powerful thinker, feeler, writer, speaker. And a stunning poet.
Our panel really alarmed and galvanized the women at the Congress. Until this point, I felt we were working in isolation in resisting the NRTs. Especially in the U.S., I hadn’t feel much resonance to these issues among feminists. But now here were hundreds of women recognizing the existential dangers of these technologies to women and wanting to organize. So together, in Groningen, we formed the Feminist International Network on the New Reproductive Technologies (FINNRET).
I may be skipping some events here because I am getting tired but the five of us (Renate, Jan, Jalna, Robyn and I) subsequently organized the International Women’s Emergency Conference on the New Reproductive Technologies in Sweden in Vallinge, Sweden, outside Lund, in July 1985.
Laughing, dancing, recognizing each other’s worth and the deep worth of all women, together we were resisting “the death of the female”.
About 100 women came from many countries, including Bangladesh, Japan, Israel, Chile, Bolivia, Brazil, Canada, Australia, the U.S. and all over Europe. Amazing, powerful, brilliant, committed women. They became so crucial to leading FINNRAGE. Especially Farida Akhter, co-founder if the activist UBINIG organization in Bangladesh, whose work then and in subsequent years can not be over-estimated. And Maria Mies of Germany, who argued we must include resistance to genetic engineering in our work. So it was that at that emergency conference (oh, it was an emergency!), we changed our name from FINNRET to FINNRAGE: Feminist International Network of Resistance to Reproductive and Genetic Engineering.
So much more to say but my body is demanding rest. At least this covers much of how FINRRAGE began, if not how it continued. I’ll close with an image that stays with me from the emergency conference.
On one of the five nights in Vallinge, we had a party. The Brazilian Ana Regina Gomes dos Reis and I were sitting cross-legged under a table for some unremembered reason. Ana was very witty and she came out with comment after comment that made me explode in laughter. We two sat together under the table, laughing and laughing, listening to the music and watching the lower legs of the dancing women gamboling past us. So full of life. Laughing, dancing, recognizing each other’s worth and the deep worth of all women, together we were resisting “the death of the female.”
Resistenze al nanomondo: You were one of the few radical feminist experiences that from the very beginning of its journey had initiated a broader critical discussion of genetic engineering by understanding not only the close link between it, eugenics and reproductive technologies, but by realising that they were part of the same horizon. Just as at the beginning of the development of artificial reproductive technologies you already understood where they were going. How do you explain this? And how is it that today, where everything is even more evident and the whole thing is well described by the researchers themselves, the criticism and opposition – with a few exceptions – is limited to and dwells only on certain plans such as the commodification of the living without understanding that we are already well beyond this and that we have arrived at its eugenic selection, technical reproducibility and engineering?
Renate Klein: From the very beginning women with lots of theoretical and practical experiences became FINRRAGE members. We were sociologists, lawyers, university professors, journalists, health activists, disability workers, environmentalists, students etc and many of us were also involved in networks to stop prostitution and trafficking in women and to support women with disabilities. Many of us were lesbians with a strong women-centred analysis. Also, the majority of FINRRAGE members were radical feminists but some marxist feminists joined and many had lived through the Women’s Liberation Movement of the 1970s. The central coordinator assembled academic papers and newspaper clippings about new developments in reprotechs and GE (genetic engineering) sent to her by the country contacts. Every three months a packet of information materials was then sent out to every country contact who in turn shared it with their groups. (Remember this was before the Internet and email!) in this way, our growing knowledge did not remain in an ivory tower but contributed to more women knowing about reprotechs and GE. And we also published a lots of books, for example Made to Order: The Myth of Reproductive and Genetic Progress (1987, edited by Pat Spallone and Debbie Steinberg); The Exploitation of a Desire: Women’s Experiences with IVF (1989 by Renate Klein); Infertility: Women Speak Out about Their Experiences of Reproductive Medicine (1989, edited by Renate Klein); Depopulating Bangladesh: Essays on the Politics of Fertility (1992 by Farida Akhter); Living Laboratories: Women in Reproductive Technologies (1992 by Robyn Rowland) and Women as Wombs: Reproductive Technologies and the Battle over Women’s Freedom (1994 by Janice G. Raymond), etc. We also published the Proceedings of the 1989 conference in Comilla, Bangladesh: The Comilla Declaration (archived here).
The Comilla Declaration is a fantastically comprehensive 103-page document that serves as a blueprint for resistance to repro techs and GE. It is as important today as it was in 1989.
The core group of FINRRAGE members, Farida Akhter, Gena Corea, Janice Raymond, Jalna Hanmer, Maria Mies, Robyn Rowland and me also published an academic journal from 1989 to 1992 called Issues in Reproductive and Genetic Engineering. Most importantly: FINRRAGE members liked each other and many of us became close friends. I think this mattered greatly, we knew we were united in a really important struggle. We were the David against the Goliath but we had endless energy and we also had great fun.
Resistenze al nanomondo: Artificial reproduction technologies were not developed to deal with infertility, but to select and produce human beings with certain characteristics. In our opinion, from the first step of intrauterine insemination, the inevitable point of arrival is the total artificialization of the whole process. From pre-implantation diagnosis to embryonic selection, the inevitable point of arrival is continuous optimization and implementation. These were the goals from the very beginning of eugenic and transhumanist thought and from the very origin of the development of artificial reproduction techniques.
Although we did not use the word ‘transhumanist’ in the 1980s/90s, it was clear to us that these technologies and their makers wanted nothing less than the restructuring of the Economic World Order.
Renate Klein: You are absolutely correct and I am proud to say that from its beginnings FINNRAGE understood these connections. It was – and continues to be – the dismemberment of women into fragments: egg cells from one woman, a uterus from another – manipulated by experimenting ‘Technodocs’ who want to see how far they can go in their attempts to control reproduction. After IVF success stalled, the new attempts with cloning around the turn of the century ended in disappointment rather than triumph: remember Dolly the sheep died prematurely and was riddled with arthritis! However, it is ongoing attempts to create egg cells and sperm from ordinary skin cells which, if successful and applied to human beings, has the potential to be the final straw for women’s procreation together with the artificial womb (ectogenesis), the successful completion of which so far has also remained elusive. Although we did not use the word ‘transhumanist’ in the 1980s/90s, it was clear to us that these technologies and their makers wanted nothing less than the restructuring of the Economic World Order (something even more openly desired today by the likes of Bill Gates, Klaus Schwab and the World Economic Forum). Of course, postmodernism – and later Queer Studies – pushed along the idea that truth did not exist and that there were no human boundaries to be respected. And of course, that biological sex was no longer important and a multitude of gender ‘identities’ would constitute our exhilarating non-binary future (as started by Gender Guru Judith Butler in Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, 1990).
Resistenze al nanomondo: Today, the radical feminist front against surrogacy is strong, but it struggles to broaden its critique to every artificial reproduction of the human without exception. It has reached the paradox of opposing surrogacy now and ectogenesis in the near future, without ever having spoken out against medically assisted procreation techniques. These represent a knot that sooner or later, in our opinion, radical feminism cannot fail to address.What do you think?
Renate Klein: I am pretty sure that if you read through Towards the Abolition of Surrogate Motherhood many authors do mention IVF, the technology that is used in all ‘gestational’ surrogacies today. We know that IVF is very dangerous for women because of the drugs involved, also because of the egg retrieval process that can lead to damage to the ovaries and the urethra and bladder. IVF pregnancies have a much higher incidence of gestational diabetes, placenta praevia, pre-eclampsia and premature births. In whatever I write about reproductive technologies, I try to emphasise these dangers (e.g. Chapter 2 of Surrogacy. A Human Rights Violation, 2017).
Occasionally, even a mainstream article talks about the difficulties of IVF as in this 2022 Washington Post article, although the ‘success rates’ they mention are far too high. In 2018, in an interview with Lord Robert Winston – the inventor of pre-implantation genetic diagnosis in the 1990s (a eugenic tool) – he says that success rates for a ‘live baby’ for a woman who is under 35 is a mere 21%. FINRRAGE had been saying this for years!!
We are told that until now about 8 million babies have been born from IVF. If the success rate is only 21%, this means that roughly 40 million women have gone through (multiple attempts of) IVF, and about 32 Mio of them never had a child. I think it is an absolute scandal that there are NO long-term research studies to find out the current health status of these millions of women who went through IVF since the 1980s! The drugs they need to take – first to stop any ovarian action, e.g. to be put in chemical menopause, then to start the egg ripening process with fertility drugs – are very very dangerous. We have reports of higher rates of breast and ovarian cancer in women, but because the studies are not longitudinal and global, many IVF specialists believe they don’t have to mention them to women!! Interestingly, the drug used to put women into chemical menopause is frequently Lupron: the same drug that is used as a puberty blocker for children. The use is off-label in both instances. It is a big medical scandal that will be written about in future!! How could it happen?
I agree with you that we absolutely must mention IVF which really is a failed technology. But because of pro-natalism in the west and the mostly socially engineered belief ingrained in women – even still today! – that they must have a child to be a ‘proper’ woman – IVF clinics attract plenty of clients who put themselves in great debt through repeated IVF attempts with all sorts of unproven expensive ‘add ons’ – during which their health suffers and often also their relationship with their partner – with mostly no baby at the end. As children born from IVF are now reaching their 40s, many experience quite serious heart problems, see Laura Corradi, ‘Assisted Reproductive Technologies and Health-Related Issues in Women and Children’, 2021. Corradi’s article also discusses serious adverse effects from IVF for women.
In June 2023 Kallie Fell from Jennifer Lahl’s Center for Biology and Culture published A Comprehensive Report on ART which mentions all the health risk for women from IVF as well as the new big trend for young women to freeze their eggs which will be mostly useless as few frozen eggs ever lead to pregnancies, but is hugely expensive.
The technodocs think that people are too stupid to not realise what they pursue in the ‘background’: world domination for the rich and powerful through synthetic biology and transhumanism.
Resistenze al nanomondo: It seems that history has taught us nothing. In 1975 a group of scientists meeting in Asilomar highlighted the serious dangers of recombinant DNA genetic engineering technology. An awareness as short-lived as all the moratoria put in place by the scientists themselves. In fact, nothing has changed and the research has continued unchallenged to the present day. Now at the international level, the research world, including some old promoters of the Asilomar conference, is pressing for a CRISP/Cas 9 regulation for germline genetic modification. We already know the reasons: to prevent the occurrence of serious genetic diseases. Exactly the same motivations for supporting the pre-implantation diagnosis necessary for in vitro fertilisation, being a technique that in itself can produce abnormalities in the embryo. Just as we already know the outcome of this process: from the exception for very serious cases, to those considered probable, to claiming this possibility as a new norm to best ‘optimise’ the procreation process. From the right to have a child, to the right to have a ‘healthy child’, to the right to have a child with ‘genetic enhancement’. What do you think?
Renate Klein: We learnt nothing from past dangers because it is not in the interest of capitalist patriarchs in charge of the medical industrial complex (Jennifer Bilek’s term) who want to push their research further and further to see how far they can go. When it was revealed in 2018 that Chinese researcher He Jiankui had used CRISPR/Cas 9 to produce two children with changed germlines, the scientific world reacted with ‘shock and horror’ at this apparent ethical breach. In reality, no doubt they were jealous that Jiankui had dared to be the first and that they are now limping behind. And yes, we are always told that all of this research happens so that some terrible diseases can be eliminated. But as women and (radical) feminists we know that this is the ‘foreground’ attempt to make us complicit with this wondrous work to allegedly reduce human suffering. The technodocs think that people are too stupid to not realise what they pursue in the ‘background’: world domination for the rich and powerful through synthetic biology and transhumanism. (Mary Daly and Janice Raymond both use the concept of foreground and background thinking.)
In terms of currently ‘optimising’ procreation, the openly expressed eugenic ideas of the Australian Oxford Professor of Ethics Julian Savulescu (I call him Professor of Unethics) to use genetic ‘enhancements’ to produce ‘the best children’ are hard to beat. He is open about his ideas that it is our ‘moral obligation’ to create children with the best chance of life. In his own words from 2016 in Gazeta de Antropología:
“A number of prominent authors have been concerned about or critical of the use of technology to alter or enhance human beings. I want to argue that far from being merely permissible, we have a moral obligation or moral reason to enhance ourselves and our children. Indeed, we have the same kind of obligation as we have to treat and prevent disease. Not only can we enhance, we should enhance”.
With people like Savulescu occupying ethics professorships in revered universities such as Oxford, it is a frightening prospect what likeminded colleagues in science and medicine will engage in once the full gamut of CRISPR/Cas 9 and further genetic modification techniques will be available to them. Already today, if a child is born with Down Syndrome, in many countries it is increasingly difficult to get good support services. And the mother will be told that this child would not have been born, if only she had undergone screening …
For Renate Klein
In an article of yours from 2008, From test-tube women to bodies without women, which we have taken up in the book Meccanici i miei occhi, you wrote “The ultimate goal of the genetic and reproductive industry is the creation of the immortal man capable of reproducing himself without women”. Today, this statement in the light of research developments for artificial wombs or for uterus transplantation pregnancies to enable ‘male pregnancy’ takes on its most ominous consistency. What new elements need to be taken into account today?
Renate Klein: Thank you for republishing my article ‘From Test-Tube Women to Women without Bodies’ (2008, Women’s Studies International Forum 31(3), pp. 157-175). I believe it is a good summary of my ongoing fears of what will happen to the sex class women in the age of postmodernism, cyborg culture and accelerating developments in technoscience such as artificial wombs and, in the last few years, the transplantation of wombs into heterosexual women as well as men aka ‘Transwomen’ who remain biological males.
I have been concerned about the assault on women’s bodies since the early 1980s. In 1996, I wrote a chapter in Radically Speaking: Feminism Reclaimed (1996, Diane Bell and Renate Klein, eds.) called ‘(Dead) Bodies Floating in Cyberspace: Postmodernism and the Dismemberment of Women’ (pp. 346-3358). I focused on the postmodernist celebration of fragmented bodies and recalled the important Women’s Liberation Movement’s slogan ‘Our Bodies – Ourselves’. It is crucial for women to remember that we are our bodies – with all our imperfections – and not let Technodocs dismember and fragment us. We are women with bodies: not objects and texts as postmodernist writers celebrate. I also refuted Donna Haraway’s beloved Cyborg that is part machine/part human – a cut-and-paste body! Cyborgs do not bleed – and women in the Global South who suffer from harmful contraceptives that disrupt their menstrual cycles might have great trouble glorifying such fractured and disassembled pseudo-women – ‘texts and surfaces’ – which Haraway nevertheless lauds as, “This is the self feminists must code” (1991, p. 161 in The Cyborg Manifesto).
I expanded this critique in 1999 with my chapter ‘The Politics of Cyberfeminism: If I am Cyborg rather than a Goddess will Patriarchy go away’? in Cyberfeminism: Connectivity, Critique and Creativity (1999, edited by Susan Hawthorne and Renate Klein.
The central delusion that humans are able to change sex, which has been taken up by governments and big corporations alike.
In addition to my critique of Haraway’s concept of Cyborgs that are superior to humans, I also criticised robotics specialists Hans Moravec and Ray Kurzweil who want to digitise our flesh into cyberspace – they still work on this today – so that our mind and consciousness can be downloaded onto a computer interface. It is the male dream of living forever – no matter in what form. Indeed, ‘matter’ and ‘mater’ matter less and less! Such thinking coupled with enormous amounts of money from US billionaires (as Jennifer Bilek has found out) has led to the Transcraze of the 21st century with the central delusion that humans are able to change sex, which has been taken up by governments and big corporations alike. Trans influencers on TikTok and Instagram tell teenage girls that it is easy to escape the puberty blues (that almost all girls have) by becoming a boy so they don’t have to cope with dangerous sex acts boys want them to engage in such as choking and anal sex, learnt from daily consumption of pornography. As the frontal cortex of their brains has not yet developed, they cannot comprehend the devastating consequences of puberty blockers followed by cross-sex hormones which will leave them infertile, unable to experience orgasms and with diminishing bone density and, possibly, brain damage. And they will be patients for life and depend on drugs. It is a medical crime against children, which, hopefully will be exposed and stopped soon.
So, my statement from 2008 still holds except to say that in the last 15 years, the trend to erase women has grown exponentially. We have to pass on to young women that we are our bodies and that our Leibsinn – German philosopher Annegret Stopcyk’s term to express the intrinsic living connections between all parts of our body/mind/soul – has to be paramount to refute the lure of Reprotechs and Transmedicine. IVF clinics already organise the extraction of egg cells and sperm from so-called transitioning children, so that later in life they can produce their own offspring. But these children do not yet have egg cells and sperm that are large enough to be extracted. So, they are told to temporally stop puberty blockers, in order for these gametes to grow. This is further medical abuse, as the girls then have to go through egg retrieval with all its dangers only to have substandard egg cells ‘harvested’ that will never be able to be fertilised. It is grubby medical capitalism to gain money now, and customers later for IVF. We need to tell children and their parents to resist it at all cost.
For Gena Corea
In your text ‘The Manhattan Project of Reproduction’ you described the development of artificial reproduction technologies and their prospects as the equivalent in biology of the Manhattan Project for nuclear physics. Today, reality has surpassed predictions: the New Mexico desert and the technolaboratories are among us, what other thresholds have been reached and will be crossed?
It had seemed so obvious to me that if men were dissatisfied with the masculine stereotype, if it caused them pain, if they could not live authentically as themselves from within crippling sex stereotypes, that they could challenge the deforming nature of the stereotypes. That would have been a life-forwarding movement.
Gena Corea: A threshold that has been reached and crossed is the existence of woman as a recognized being. I had never imagined that our very existence would be challenged. I should have. Certainly I had foreseen the horror of reproductive brothels. But that men would claim to be women, that I had not imagined. That men would try to bully us into calling ourselves, not women, but cis-women; that they would scornfully refer to women as front-holes, chest-feeders, uterus-owners, egg producers, menstruators— that I had not foreseen.
It had seemed so obvious to me that if men were dissatisfied with the masculine stereotype, if it caused them pain, if they could not live authentically as themselves from within crippling sex stereotypes, that they could challenge the deforming nature of the stereotypes. That would have been a life-forwarding movement. That did not happen. Instead, many identifying themselves as transgender mutilated and drugged their bodies to conform to the reality-defying stereotypes.
I don’t want to render invisible here the transsexual empire—the medical, scientific and psychological institutions that funneled the human pain of conforming to sexual stereotypes into surgical solutions. This left patriarchal power structures unquestioned and untouched.
Janice Raymond began to lay out the dangers of transsexualism in The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male published in 1979. I had somehow assumed that those identifying themselves as transgender and actually undergoing chemical and surgical mutilations to declare themselves women would be a very small group. It was small at that time.
But some 40 years later, the number is not small. And the virulence of the campaign to silence women who question men’s right to claim to be women is breath-taking.
Janice lays out all the further developments in her stunning book DoubleThink: A Feminist Challenge to Transgenderism, published by Spinifex Press in 2021.
Resistenze al nanomondo: The hCG vaccine, a ‘birth control vaccine’, was administered disguised as a massive vaccination campaign promoted in 2014 by WHO and UNICEF against maternal and neonatal tetanus that led to the chemical sterilisation of millions of Kenyan women. Similar episodes in Tanzania, Mexico, Nicaragua, the Philippines. A sterilisation project that in Kenya is still going on today. Today this ‘contraceptive vaccine’, impregnated with biological colonialism, from the Global South is ready to re-enter for the use of Western women. From manipulation to manipulation they have arrived at a vaccine designed to produce an immune response against a bodily process such as pregnancy. And the consequence of widespread infertility will open even more doors to artificial reproduction clinics. In 1994, you organised an international day of action against the pregnancy vaccine, making clear the importance you attached even then to this population control passing over women’s bodies. Where do we stand now?
Renate Klein: Feminist resistance against new immunological hCG contraceptives, also called anti-fertility ‘vaccines’, developed by Indian researcher G.P. Talwar in the 1970s to 90s and supported by the Population Council, culminated in 1994 with a powerful street theatre performance by Swiss feminist groups on the grounds of the WHO in Geneva. The World Health Organisation (WHO) supported this ‘vaccine’ through their HRP (Human Reproduction Programme). Armed with giant syringes, more than 50 women clad in white and wearing white facemasks peered through gigantic microscopes and pretended to perform vaccinations.
This event, which received global attention, was organised by the ‘Call for a Stop of Research on Antifertility Vaccines’, signed by more than 500 women from 39 countries and 430 women’s group to stop funding of this research (all details can be found in Judith Richter’s 1996 book Vaccination against Pregnancy: Miracle or Menace? After the event in Geneva, the WHO cancelled trials in Sweden.
The anti-‘vaccine’ and anti-population control policies’ campaign took many years but eventually was successful when major funders ceased paying for Talwar’s and HRPs work and trials in progress. The immunological contraceptive’s potential for eugenic sterilisation of poor women in the global South was enormous and, if allowed to be fully developed and implemented, would have caused untold misery (also because of serious adverse effects such as rheumatoid arthritis). The idea that a woman is ‘vaccinated’ with human chorionic gonadotrophin (hCG) antigens against her developing embryo when her immune system develops antibodies against her own hCG (secreted by the early embryo), which supports the placenta during a pregnancy, exposed the woman-hating nature of these male scientists’ thinking who had lauded this development as a miraculous medical break-through. The hCG ‘vaccine’ prevents the embryo from implanting, and therefore the pregnancy cannot continue.
I was part of the FINRRAGE delegation to the International Development Research Council (IDRC) in Ottawa in Canada in 1995. The IDRC had been a major funder of Talwar’s research since the 1970s and initially tried to convince us that we were wrong in rejecting this major initiative against the threat of ‘untrammeled’ population growth. They also claimed that the Indian trials were ethically conducted. But after viewing German FINRRAGE Ulrike Schaz’ film Antibodies against Pregnancy, which showed how Indian women in the trials were lied to about the nature and adverse effects of this ‘vaccine’ so that their given ‘consent’ was meaningless, IDRC representatives were clearly disturbed. In due course they removed funds and eventually Talwar’s research and trials ground to a halt.
Unfortunately, more than 10 years later in 2007, the retired Talwar resurfaced with a now genetically engineering version of the same immunological contraceptive. However, due to the reluctance of the Indian Medical Council to provide a permit for this new proposal, it has not advanced. But G.P. Talwar, now 97 years old, has not given up hope that his fertility ‘vaccine’ will see the light of day as reported in The Atlantic.
Women cannot afford to take our eyes off any new vaccine developments that can be used against women’s bodies in one form or another. Some mRNA vaccines like Moderna and the Pfizer-BioNTech Covid-19 vaccine have been associated with menstrual disturbances (disrupted or longer cycles, more pain etc). It remains to be seen if groups like the Population Council join with biotech companies to develop some new mRNA fertility vaccine. After all, in their worldview, while Asian women have been contracepted almost to non-replacement numbers (like western women), women in sub-Sahara Africa are still ‘breeding’ far too much.
Resistenze al nanomondo: Today the concept and meaning of freedom is abused. When you get to bodies and within bodies everything changes and ‘being able to choose’ becomes more efficient than constraint. But in our opinion, for certain issues the field of discussion cannot be freedom of choice. First of all, this is always within the possibilities and conditions that this system dictates, and it is a freedom imprisoned within the only horizon of sense and meaning that the system itself produces. What is portrayed as the apotheosis of free choice is in reality its most disastrous denial, since the individual is subject to a choice that is externally imposed or induced or made to be desired. But even assuming that a choice is made freely and consciously, one must not ignore the consequences that go beyond the strictly personal level, extending to all bodies and society as a whole. The very existence of certain techno-scientific practices and developments admits the possibility of access to bodies, opens up the idea that this is ethically acceptable. What do you think?
It is only liberals – and in particular liberal feminists – who use the concept of ‘choice’ to justify deeply women-hating practices such as prostitution, pornography and surrogacy and, more recently, ‘changing sex’ (which of course is impossible).
Renate Klein: Freedom of ‘choice’ is an illusion. It does not exist. Whenever we make decisions, they are constrained by our sex, our geography and class, our age, race and genes, etc. as well as the ideology of those (governments, corporations, technodocs, etc.) who tell us that it is our ‘choice’ if we engage in certain practices. Within reproductive technologies and genetic engineering we cannot freely decide for or against a certain procedure or product (e.g. IVF or genetically engineered seeds) as we are not fully informed about potential adverse effects. Often, we are lied to, but even more frequently, the researchers themselves have no idea what can (and will happen) after they apply their research ideas to our bodies or to the farmers’ fields. The world is littered with disastrous examples from Thalidomide to DES and the Dalkon Shield IUD for women, and the breakdown of plants and hence failing crops which lead to big losses for farmers and increases suicides (e.g. Bt cotton, Bt potatoes, canola and corn and Bt brinjal (aubergines) in India) (see Hawthorne, 2002/2022, Wild Politics: Feminism, Globalisation and Biodiversity, pp. 241-247).
I only use ‘choice’ when it can be applied to two equally good options. For instance: “Would you like a piece of chocolate cake or a slice of lemon tart?” I never use the term “pro-choice” in relation to abortion. Many women would like to have a(nother) child, but cannot do so for economic, health or relationship reasons. To call this ‘choice’ adds insult to injury when they have to decide on a deeply painful (and sometimes dangerous) termination of their pregnancy.
It is only liberals – and in particular liberal feminists – who use the concept of ‘choice’ to justify deeply women-hating practices such as prostitution, pornography and surrogacy and, more recently, ‘changing sex’ (which of course is impossible) and having a ‘gender identity’ (a feeling in the head that cannot be proven). No doubt they will also say that it is our ‘choice’ if we want to download our brains into our computers and become Cyborgs! We absolutely must avoid using the word ‘choice, in particular in relation to our bodies.
Resistenze al nanomondo: Some practices represent a crossing of an ethical boundary. The uterus for rent opens up the possibility of buying and selling of a child, that the human being can be the object of a contractual negotiation, medically assisted procreation opens up the possibility of selecting and programming a child, the mitochondrial substitution technique that will be followed by a child with the DNA of ‘three parents’ opens up the possibility that the human being can be a genetic bricolage. Today we have an ‘intended mother’, a ‘commissioning mother’, a ‘surrogate mother’, a ‘gestating mother’, a ‘genetic mother’ or a more neutral ‘parent 1 and parent 2’. Continuous re-significations that erase the mother, the one from whom we come into the world. The deconstruction of the dimension of procreation and, in parallel, the deconstruction of our sexed roots are the final frontier of transhumanism. Birth and our sexed bodies become the stakes for a profound ontological and anthropological transformation of the human being. At stake today is the very existence of reality under siege by artificial and synthetic dismantling and reconstruction. What do you think?
Renate Klein: We live in a deeply unsettling age in which destabilisation, fragmentation and dissociation rule. Plus, delusions and lies. And reversals. Truth does not exist anymore. Big pharma (and big banks and corporations) will try and justify anything they want to do by saying that it is ‘for our own good’. ‘Old fashioned’ legal documents such as the 1989 UN Convention on the Rights of the Child which prohibits the sale and trafficking of children are no longer adhered to.
Proponents of the uterus for rent (GPA, surrogacy) glorify some (poor) women risking their health – and indeed lives – as ‘breeders’ to produce a child for a (well to do) infertile couple, including now also those who are deemed to be ‘socially infertile’ such as gay or single men (see a June 2023 Senate bill in California that, if passed, would force insurers to pay for surrogacy and IVF expenses for gay men). The child is treated as a ‘Take-away baby’: it has not agreed to be removed from his mother right after the birth. Whether it is for love or money, such transactions amount to trafficking and baby selling.
We are living in the heyday of techno capitalism where everything can be bought or sold. And because everyone is told that it is all about ‘choice’, proponents of this ideology are telling people, especially young children, that they have the ‘right’ (another influential word) to do whatever they want. If they want to enter the life-long medical pathway to supposedly transcend their natal sex (which is impossible) that is their right and ‘choice’. Those who oppose this ideology are labelled hateful transphobes, bigots and TERFS and told that our ‘unkind’ statements are responsible for so-called trans-teenagers attempting to kill themselves.
We have to stand firm against such delusionary statements and actions as many radical feminists have already done. In Doublethink: A Feminist Challenge to Transgenderism (2021) Janice Raymond lists a group of women who were cancelled and/or lost their jobs due to pressure from the Transcult. Amongst them are Germaine Greer, Donna Hughes, Raquel Rosario Sanchez, Julie Bindel, Maya Forstater, Heather Brunskell-Evans and Janice Raymond herself.
At stake today is the reality of being human beings with blood, flesh and bones and a beating heart. We live in Orwellian times in which reversals rule the day.
As transhumanists advance their goals of exchanging unwanted or deficient ‘disabled’ human beings with synthetic and externally controllable body parts achieved through drugs, and/or operations as well as scientific manipulation of DNA and other cells (e.g. mitochondria), human beings, especially children, are already being prepared in school that there is no truth and that if they want to identify as a cat, their teachers have to accept this and address them with cat-identified pronouns. Although this story from the UK later turned out to be not true, it reflects on the growing demand that if a child decides to be ‘trans’ (an impossibility) teachers and parents have to identify ‘them’ with their new chosen pronouns.
You are absolutely correct: at stake today is the reality of being human beings with blood, flesh and bones and a beating heart. We live in Orwellian times in which reversals rule the day.
Resistenze al nanomondo: Like an oil stain, transfeminism is spreading with its deconstructions and specific political demands. The absence of limits, the fascination with techno-sciences, the aversion to nature and birth are in our opinion some of the points of encounter with transhumanism. And it is no coincidence that LGBTQ+ demands are financed and promoted by the entire biotechnology-pharmaceutical industry, the world of finance and the transhumanist world, and are lifeblood for the policies of progressive states. Where to trace the origins of transfeminism, of queer, of this progressive cyborg left that misrepresents the struggle for freedom and self-determination with the apologia of techno-scientific and transhumanist development under the guise of transgression and rebellion? Are we facing a change in thinking and vision or has there always been a direction never understood in certain ideologies and contexts?
Renate Klein: The current Transcult that now puts out its roots and tendrils towards Transhumanism, has its origins in post-modernism which began to rule universities in the 1980s. By the 1990s it had morphed into Queer ideology according to which anything goes, nothing is fixed and nothing matters (see Somer Brodribb’s early 1992 book Nothing Mat(t)ers: A Feminist Critique of Postmodernism).
In this ideology, nature itself can be queered and all boundaries including species boundaries are deemed old-fashioned. Xenotransplantations (e.g. pig organs into human) are permitted. And life is just a performance (too bad if you are stuck in a low paying exploitative job).
Through a cleverly organised global web of US Transbillionaires from the medico-industrial complex who are funding law firms, NGOs and other civil society institutions, the Transcult infiltrated governments and big corporations until they became beholden to their demands for ‘diversity and inclusion’. For this they were – and are – richly rewarded with ‘brownie points’. Almost like a Frequent flyer system! Government departments and big corporations can receive gold status once they show that their institution has implemented the LGBTQ+ demands. In turn, they are infiltrated by pro-trans/pro-Queer people who make sure that no critiques can be made of the Transcult. In Australia, the organisation that does this is called ACON and its subsidiary AWEI (Australian Workplace Equality Index).
In the UK it is Stonewall. The UK has begun severing these ties but if the Labour Party wins office in 2024, they will be back even stronger as Labour is beholden to Transideology. The UK for the moment has also backed away from self-ID laws whereas in Aotearoa/New Zealand and Australia they are spreading from state to state: Queensland Parliament voted for them in May 2023, New South Wales is discussing self-ID. Victoria and Tasmania had these laws for years.
But I don’t use the word ‘transfeminism’. As far as I am concerned it does not exist. The word is a contradiction: Feminism’s goal is the liberation of all women wherever we live. ‘Trans’feminism would render that goal meaningless; turn it into another Orwellian reversal.
None of us should use this word!
Resistenze al nanomondo: What could be today for us women the skills, the knowledge, the visions that we can no longer do without in order to resist a deadly and necrophilic system that would like us more and more in a tragic and perverse way to be ‘grateful corpses’, to borrow Mary Daly’s words? We live in a scenario where everything seems upside down, where meanings when they are not suppressed are re-signified. Those who were against genetic vaccines wanted people to die, those who do not believe the official narrative on climate change are enemies of the planet, those who do not want war are enemies of peace, those who oppose Biolabs reject ‘health security’ and those who are against the transhuman gender package deny new ‘rights’. In all of this there is no criticism and the rhetoric of health, infertility, environment, peace, rights is used: a health that will be traversed by new mRNA technologies, gene therapies and nanomedicine, eugenic procreation that will become the new normal, an environment that will be even more destroyed and manipulated by geoengineering techniques, new GMOs and synthetic meat, a peace that will mean not only atomic weapons, but also biological ones. In the light of all this, how is it possible to build a network of opposition, including international opposition, that is able to meet today’s challenges? And what is the legacy of FINRRAGE today?
We need to lean into life, into the life of our human bodies, in resisting the global drag into necrophilia.
Gena Corea
A word on transhumanism. The transhumanists believe that the human race can evolve beyond its current physical and mental limitations, by means of science and technology, into something much better. These arrogant men can do it better. They don’t even understand what a human body is and yet they assume they are capable of making it better. They have not themselves experienced the full capabilities of a human body but they think they can improve on…on what?!!! They don’t comprehend the nature of the organism they are going to make “better.”
Certainly they don’t even begin to comprehend what the female body is. They speak of it as a thing, an object, a receptacle, a vehicle for reproduction, a rented womb—they have no idea at all what we are, who we are.
When I write “the body,” I am not meaning skin, bones and a collection of organs. Not at all. I mean an ancient organism that is capable of connecting with all-that-is. I mean an organism living in what I call Caravan Time: Future, present and past all traveling on the same caravan, all held in a moment, all capable of passing information to each other. By “human body,” I mean a wondrous being that inter-is with the earth and more.
We are of the earth. We can not develop the muscles of ours legs and we can not walk unless the earth pushes back on our legs. We need the earth to become what we are capable of becoming. We inter-are with the earth. We are not separate.
Our lungs could not develop, could not breathe, if we were not inter-being with the air. (Thich Nhat Hanh introduced the verb I am using here: “inter-are.”)
Our connective tissue has a crystalline structure that enables us to communicate with other beings on this earth and beyond. We have an ability to gain knowledge from beings and structures far distant from us. (The visionary Emilie Conrad, with whom I was privileged to study, explored this in the practice she developed, Continuum.)
There are ways to access vast knowledge through our bodies. You ask: “What could be today for us women the skills, the knowledge, the visions that we can no longer do without in order to resist a deadly and necrophilic system that would like us more and more in a tragic and perverse way to be ‘grateful corpses’, to borrow Mary Daly’s words? “
We need to lean into life, into the life of our human bodies, in resisting the global drag into necrophilia. In a biophilic practice, we can develop our skills in accessing the knowledge and visions to which our human bodies are the gateway.
There are ways to access our body’s knowledge. Teachable ways. Various people happen upon these ways through different routes. I came upon them through a practice called Focusing. As they create, artists sometimes discover these ways.
I wish I could write in more detail about these ways. But because I am in the midst of moving out of my house—I will be out of here in days!—and searching for a new home, I can not do so at this time. I can only say that a vision we need is of a vast field of life of which we are a part and from which we can learn.
Our human life-filled bodies can bring us the knowledge we need to resist the necrophiliac system deadening the earth and us with it. There will be many surprises along the way as our bodies bring us what we did not know we did not know. Life-giving surprises. Accessing knowledge through our bodies is something grateful corpses can not do.
I think of a kaleidoscope. Right now, its picture is set on the necrophilic world the technodocs, the transhumanists, the transfeminists are constructing. A slight turn of the kaleidoscope and the whole picture changes utterly. With our human bodies, once we appreciate who we in truth are, we can turn the kaleidoscope.
Renate Klein: We must not stop resisting these women-, nature- and life-hating technologies. In order to prevent becoming ‘Living Corpses’ we should gain strength from re-reading Mary Daly’s books, especially Gyn/Ecology (1979), and fully recognise the many reversals that today’s version of Queer- and Trans-Technopatriarchy wants us to believe. We need to constantly make sure to remove the wool that is being pulled over our eyes and remain vigilant and connected to earth.
This starts with the education of young children who have become indoctrinated by the delusional Transcult. If children don’t learn what is right and wrong and that Truth exists – for instance that you are born as either the male or female sex (and very few intersex people which is not a third sex, but physiological/anatomic differences from either female or male bodies) – we have lost our (feminist) future.
FINRRAGE has a good legacy (and we are not dead yet, some FINRRAGE groups continue in Australia and Bangladesh). We have shown that when some dedicated women from the Global South and the Global North come together and work hard to organise conferences, publish books and engage in street activism and continuing education, we can become powerful and join with lots of diverse people to at least slow down some of the death-bringing necrophilic repro- and genetic technologies.
FINRRAGE did that successfully from the mid-80s to the mid-90s and we had the great advantage that many of our members were engaged in (higher) education. In Australia, Robyn Rowland and I taught Women’s Studies at Deakin University in Melbourne and reached thousands of students through our undergraduate, MA and Graduate Diploma courses on Reprotechs and GE. These students passed this knowledge on to their peers and civil society at large.
We valiantly fought the Technodocs in many countries by, for instance, debating them, as Gena Corea did on many occasions. We often held feminist demonstrations around an ‘official’ reprotech conference. I vividly remember a conference in Mallorca in 1986 where women with signs saying ‘hands off our ovaries’, ‘our bodies – our selves’, ‘we are not breeders’ etc. emerged during Gena’s talk on a panel with Technodocs (who became furious about this feminist disturbance)! Later that hot summer night we had a party which for me was the closest I have ever come to participating in a witches’ coven. Our sweating bodies gyrated against each other and we sang so loudly that neighbours complained. We felt women’s power flowing through our veins and we felt, that at least at that moment, we were invincible.
FINRRAGE groups continued well with our important work until 1994. In preparation for the International Conference on Population and the Environment in Cairo, the New York based pro-population control group International Women’s Health Coalition (IWHC) reached out to FINRRAGE delegates and bribed them, particularly poor women from the Global South, with air fares, accommodation in Cairo and ongoing money to cover their office expenses.
FINRRAGE had no money to hand out and at the conference in Cairo, together with Farida Akhter and other FINRRAGE women we had to travel two hours every day from our cheap accommodation in the suburbs to the city. We could not begrudge these delegates for taking the money, but it was a low point in my life to gate-crash the sumptuous cocktail party at one of the top hotels in town that the IWHC had organised for ‘our’ women. During the conference we also experienced the full onslaught of an orchestrated campaign against FINRRAGE and our workshops by programming their own sessions with high-powered speakers such as Vandana Shiva (a FINRRAGE affiliate who was kept in the dark) to collide with our Tribunal of Medical Crimes against Women so we had fewer women attending. It was a well co-ordinated attack on radical feminism and unfortunately it worked. I write about it in ‘Reflections on Cairo: Empowerment rhetoric – but who will pay the price?‘
FINRRAGE never fully recovered from this event. An internal dispute in the Co-ordinating Group which was at that time in Germany resulted in this group stopping to co-ordinate FINRRAGE activities. Of course, many of us continued our work and engaged in the Campaign against Anti-fertility ‘Vaccines’ as described earlier. But the collectivist FINRRAGE radical spirit had been broken. Reactionary libertarian pro-population groups with big money had won. It was a sad time that I still remember with great anger. All of this is documented in Stevienna de Saille’s 2017 book on FINRRAGE Knowledge as Resistance: The Feminist International Network of Resistance to Reproductive and Genetic Engineering. And we keep a FINRRAGE archive.
FINAARGIT is well placed to become the 21st century’s movement of resistance to reproductive and genetic technologies including surrogacy. Add to these big topics to resist the ideology of transhumanism and the Transcult with its seemingly endless monetary support from the US Transbillionnaires and their clones. You will need every bit of gritty determination, hard work and belief in the importance of standing up to these dehumanising and women-hating developments which aim at nothing less than erasing real live human beings with hearts, souls, minds and bonds – especially women and lesbians – with nature and other animals. You need to connect with young people who lack an education on these life-and-death issues. Let these dehumanising forces not succeed in compartmentalising us to cut-and-paste bodies and sever our umbilical cord with Mother Earth and with our real mothers.
Dr Renate Klein, Mission Beach, June 2023
www.finrrage.org
www.finaargit.org
Translated into Italian – Traduzione in italiano di Elisa Boscarol: https://www.resistenzealnanomondo.org/necrotecnologie/dialogo-tra-resistenze-al-nanomondo-e-finrrage-renate-klein-e-gena-corea/
Published in L’Urlo della Terra, number 11, July 2023
Pubblicato su L’Urlo della Terra, numero 11, Luglio 2023
www.resistenzealnanomondo.org
PDF version here.
See also: A World Without Mothers?
Resistenze al nanomondo are organising a conference against eugenics, biotech and artificial reproduction in Milan, Italy, on Sunday November 26, 2023.
winter oak 