For the past year, I’ve written several articles on the Better Way Antivaxxer conference in Bath highlighting both what was included (American Covid skeptics getting co-opted into full-scale antivaxxerism) and what was notably absent (anti-trans activism). In particular, I pointed out that anti-vaxxer rhetoric and ant-trans rhetoric has significant overlaps, in particular their shared fear of (((transhumanists))) as the arch villains of our global story. Given the significant rhetorical overlaps, I found it odd that trans issues were not mentioned a single time during the inaugural Better Way conference, and wondered whether that odd absence was deliberate or a fluke. So, when I learned the conference was returning to Bath with a whole morning session entitled “From AI & Transhumanism to Being Human”, I had to see if the silence on transgender medicine would hold. It did not, in one of the darkest ways imaginable.
Like much of the conference, the transhumanism morning was largely a mix of boilerplate fear mongering and technical difficulties, with the added joy of endless cringe jokes about AI coming to silence the truth-sayers. As usual, speakers lamented the supposedly beneficial technologies that sinister globalists are developing to undermine the sanctity of life. Old standards like gene splicing and vaccines filled with microchips got heavy play, while the speakers struggled to substantially integrate fear of AI into their conspiracy theories. One continuing oddity is the way that these speakers fixate on Klaus Schwab like he’s the devil incarnate, but can’t bring themselves to condemn Elon Musk for Neuralink, the most well-known version of the sort of mind/machine technology they’ve been freaking out about for years.
It was the first proper speaker, Vera Sharav, that hit me the hardest. Sharav is a medical conspiracism activist and holocaust survivor who founded the Alliance for Human Research Protection, an antivaxxer activist group that promotes Sharav’s movie “Never Again is Now Global”, alongside speeches from RFK Jr. Sharav has faced criticism from organisations like the Jewish Forum for Democracy and against Antisemitism for comparing the Covid vaccine to Zyclon B, the chemical used in Nazi gas chambers.
Sharav’s speech wasn’t primarily about Covid, nor did it spend much time on vaccines. It was a speech I’d heard many times before, because it was the textbook right-wing anti-trans conspiracism that Jennifer Bilek, James Lindsay, Matt Walsh, and others have mainstreamed into anti-trans politics. According to these conspiracy mongers, gender affirming care is a (((globalist))) plot to use our children as test subjects for radical transhumanist technologies that will allow these depraved elites to escape death, while the rest of us die from the effects of their evil testing.
Sharav opened the speech by claiming that “transhumanism and technocracy” are fundamentally about population reduction experiments, “eugenics on steroids”, that aim to replace genuine humans with superior cyborg models. According to Sharav, “a transhuman creature will have no gender, no imagination, no empathy, no soul, and no god”. While the last two seem true of any entity in this world, it’s unclear why a transhuman being should lack imagination or empathy, two very useful skills for almost any set of goals. As for lacking gender, it seems that transhumanism makes this more of a personal choice, something that “gender critical” activists should theoretically support, so it is odd to hear the abolition of gender lamented in this way.
Unfortunately, the throwaway line about a genderless transhuman presaged the core of Sharav’s talk:
The transhumanist mindset has given rise to the desecration of children’s body’s and minds. Children are the prey of a morally depraved two-pronged assault, yet few are raising their voices. Child trafficking for the amusement of pedophiles and a diabolical medical crime, namely the mass transgender sexual transition experiment on children. Children are being subjected to experimental, cross sex hormone therapy and transgender surgical mutilation of their sexual organs, thereby preventing human birth. Children and adolescents are being mislead to believe that choosing one’s gender is a form of freedom.
In this one paragraph you have harmful misinformation about gender affirming care mixed with two distinct but related kinds of antisemitic blood libel conspiracism: Qanon pedophilia theories, and the Jennifer Bilek/Keith Woods style claims of Jews testing on gentiles to achieve immortality. Sharav literally says “transhumanists seek to extend the lifespan of the master caste infinitely and indefinitely”. As someone who grew up hearing stories of the holocaust, it would give me significant pause if I started spouting off about the “master caste”.
Sharav’s rhetoric cribs directly from the recent queer theory moral panic pushed by right-wing American activists in their ongoing attempts to undermine our public school system, which they rightly see as an existential threat to their regressive worldview. Sharav claims, with zero evidence, that:
Transgender promoters have penetrated the educational institutions across the country. They lobbied for legislation and LGBTQ education in schools, normalizing what is clearly not normal. Children as young as three are being indoctrinated in preschool to regard transgender as normal or desirable. It’s fun! Women’s private spaces, including women’s sports and college housing opened their doors to any man who chooses to identify as a women. Even women’s toilets are no longer off limits.
It is crucial to understand that Sharav and other religious activists at this conference are advocating for the maintaining of traditional gender roles, not just caution with regard to gender affirming care for minors. Laura Aboli, an entrepreneur and activist, wrapped up the transhumanism talks by referring to transgender activism as an “evil psy-op” aimed at undermining our perception of objective reality. She claimed that the movement was using orwellian techniques to indoctrinate adults into claiming that “2+2=5” and children into believing that “gender is a choice”.
Nor was this anti-trans sentiment confined to the transhumanism section. In a recent episode of Skeptics with a K, Michael Marshall discussed several more examples throughout the conference, where leaders and speakers attacked LGBTQ+ activism and treated gender affirming care as the sort of evil a normal person would violently resist. Equally disturbing was the persistent fear mongering about dysgenics, the theory that modern society is causing humans to devolve or degrade in various ways. It went beyond fear of us offloading mental tasks to AI and ventured into fear of corrupted biology that was pure “blood and soil”. Tess Lawrie, the lead organiser for the conference, asked the transhumanism panel if we need to store human sperm and eggs in a human seed vault to hedge against the rise of post-human entities. The paranoia was so dark and absurd, it harkens back to the discussion of “precious bodily fluids” in Dr. Strangelove.
It was not entirely surprising to hear this rhetoric take its rightful place amidst all the other (((globalist))) conspiracism on display at Better Way, especially since a speaker on the first day of the conference praised James “OK groomer” Lindsay as a reliable source. It was clear that his work had found fertile ground in this community.
What struck me as more viscerally horrifying was hearing a holocaust survivor promoting the antisemitic conspiracism of a literal nazi. Even that shouldn’t have been surprising, since I gave a Skepticamp talk at last year’s QED (2023 tickets available now) about how some Jewish politicians will promote antisemitic conspiracism when it serves their ends. Still, it should be upsetting to hear blood libel coming out of the mouth of a holocaust survivor, no matter how jaded one gets from engaging with this material. Here is a person who survived scapegoating and extermination, promoting conspiracism developed by nazis and white Christian nationalists, for the express purpose of scapegoating and eradicating trans people. The only thing that could made it worse was knowing that much of the audience would readily accept the existence of trans individuals as further proof we’re living in fallen times.
The reason this matters is that social psychologists are actively debating the degree to which conspiracism puts people at risk of spiraling into further conspiracism. If the Better Way conference had gone a second year with zero mention of trans issues, that would give us some reason for hope that conspiracism doesn’t tend to beget conspiracism. Instead, what we have is the exact opposite, a community that appears to go from 0 to 100 in its promotion of anti-trans conspiracism.
I believe the most plausible explanation for that rapid onboarding of a new conspiracy are the significant overlaps between anti-trans conspiracy theories and anti-vaxxer conspiracy theories. This is stark evidence that conspiracism communities are susceptible to similar sounding conspiracy theories, and further proof of the inevitable slide towards antisemitism, even when the speaker truly believes in the promise of “Never Again”.
I believe we should be seriously concerned, because individuals who fell into these conspiracism communities during Covid seem at high risk of migrating from the waning discussions of Covid to the ever-present culture wars around trans rights and whatever marginalised community becomes the next target of right wing moral panics. Given how it is still culturally acceptable in many social spheres to be only skeptical of gender affirming care for minors, especially compared to vaccine skepticism, I expect that many fledgling conspiracists will gravitate towards those friendlier waters.
If a literal holocaust survivor can succumb to promoting nazi holocaust propaganda repackaged for trans people, we need to take seriously the virulence of these ideas and the likelihood of continued spread and cross-pollination. The enthusiastic onboarding of anti-trans, antisemitic conspiracism at Better Way should make us very worried about what is to come.
