Regarding Antisocialite’s assessment of restrictive bioconservative definitions of “human”, I agree. Delineating the bounds of species-citizenship, and positively constructing the unmodified as the only truly fit representatives of humanity, opens the door for a great deal of public policy pandering. The potential for mass killings may seem far removed from the experience of the technologically-developed Western world most transhumanists inhabit, but it isn’t a stretch. What might become of a sectarian, pogrom-prone state such as Iraq or Darfur when religious or tribal authorities start defining people with a gene tweak for disease resistance as “unclean”?

Those sympathetic to transhumanism ought also to wholeheartedly distance themselves from any notions in the reverse: that those who decline to upgrade themselves are somehow unfit because they are unable or unwilling to adapt. The class component must not be ignored: consider the myriad commercial messages that tell people the authentic life consists of the expensive travel and toys in which only a white collar comfort class can realistically indulge. Moreover, fear of monstrously indifferent, would-be supermen feeds bioconservative resistance.

The entire project of defining worthy and unworthy species-citizens, as perhaps my use of “fit” and “unfit” reveals, also carries with it some distasteful eugenic implications.