Common Task, or What Transgender Lives Reveal About Our Transhuman Future

For nearly a quarter-century, a gaunt, unpaid-by-choice librarian named Nikolai Fedorov cataloged books by day at Moscow's Rumyantsev Museum and, by night, wrote a private cosmology so strange it would take a century to look prophetic. Fedorov believed science had no higher purpose than what he called the "common task": to conquer death itself, to literally resurrect every human being who had ever lived, and to build the spacecraft that would carry humanity's swelling, undying population off a single overcrowded planet. He gave away most of his salary, slept on a wooden trunk, and refused royalties on his own writing. A shy, half-deaf schoolteacher named Konstantin Tsiolkovsky used to visit him at the library counter. Tsiolkovsky later worked out the equations of rocketry that eventually put the first satellite, and then the first human, into orbit. He said the ideas came from Fedorov.

Today, on the other side of that same dream, biotech firms backed by some of the wealthiest people alive are trying to buy back a decade of human life. Altos Labs launched in 2022 with three billion dollars, the largest funding round any biotechnology startup had ever received, aimed at reprogramming aging cells. Retro Biosciences, seeded and championed by OpenAI's Sam Altman, has since raised or sought well over a billion dollars more, chasing the same goal: ten extra healthy years, engineered directly into the human body.

Meanwhile, roughly 2.8 million Americans over the age of thirteen now openly identify as transgender — about one percent of that population, according to the most recent Williams Institute estimate — and a growing share of them are, with medicine's help, rebuilding their bodies to match who they say they have always been.

Here is the question this essay wants to sit with: why does one form of deliberate, technological self-authorship — a hormone regimen, a surgery, a new name — provoke bans, panic, and legislative hearings, while another — a billion-dollar bet against death — gets a magazine cover and a TED talk? Both are humans reaching into the given material of the body and insisting it can be otherwise. Only one of them is currently allowed to be called visionary.

Problem

Modern societies have no coherent ethics for a species that has started, in earnest, to rewrite its own body — so we police the trans teenager and celebrate the immortality entrepreneur with two contradictory moral vocabularies.

That contradiction is not an accident of politics. It is the symptom of an argument philosophy has been having with itself for two centuries, and it deserves to be had honestly, in the open, rather than fought by proxy over bathroom laws and insurance codes.

Start with the thesis — the oldest and, oddly, the most radical framing available. The Book of Genesis states that humanity was made "in the image" of a Creator. For most of religious history that phrase was read as a fixed inheritance: a soul stamped once, a nature to be preserved, not touched. Fedorov and the current of thought historians now call Russian cosmism read it the opposite way — as a mandate, not a portrait. If God is defined by the act of creating, then to be made in that image is to inherit the verb, not just the shape. Humanity's task was never to sit still inside a finished creation; it was to keep the work going — healing, extending, engineering, terraforming, eventually resurrecting. A generation later, some of Fedorov's Bolshevik readers, Alexander Bogdanov chief among them, tried to fuse this almost liturgical ambition with Marxism itself, in a current called bogostroitel'stvo — "god-building": the idea that the proletariat, through collective labor and science, was literally building the god religion had only imagined in advance. Stripped of its theological costume, this is also Marx's own claim about human nature. He called it species-being — the idea that what makes humans distinct from animals is not that we live, but that we consciously, freely remake our own conditions of living, our own bodies included.

Read this way, transgender embodiment is not a deviation from that story. It is one of its most concentrated, most legible chapters. A person who uses hormones and surgery to bring their body into alignment with their identity is doing, on the scale of one life, exactly what the cosmists imagined civilization doing on the scale of the species: refusing to treat the given as the final word. It is a glimpse — small, individual, already happening — of a future in which far more human bodies, not just trans ones, will be openly and deliberately engineered: extended lifespans, edited genomes, augmented senses, redesigned reproduction. The transhumanist horizon isn't a break from what trans people already do to their own bodies. It is the same horizon, at civilizational scale.

Evidence

Put two sets of numbers side by side and the parallel gets hard to dismiss as metaphor.

Between 2016 and 2020, American hospitals performed just over 48,000 gender-affirming surgeries, according to a national cohort study published in JAMA Network Open — a figure that nearly tripled between 2016 and 2019 alone, rising from roughly 4,500 procedures a year to over 13,000. That is a population learning, at real scale and increasing speed, to treat the sexed body as something that can be intentionally redesigned rather than passively inherited.

In those same years, a different population — venture capitalists and the longevity founders they fund — was doing something structurally identical with a different target. Altos Labs' three-billion-dollar 2022 launch remains one of the largest single funding rounds any biotech startup has received. Retro Biosciences, which is using artificial intelligence to redesign the proteins that reprogram aging cells, has since raised roughly a billion dollars more, chasing a stated goal of adding ten healthy years to the human lifespan. Both projects rest on the same premise gender-affirming medicine rests on: that the body handed to you at birth is a draft, not a final edition.

The two populations, notably, are treated nothing alike. One is subjected to state bans, insurance exclusions, and a level of legislative scrutiny normally reserved for controlled substances. The other is treated as the cutting edge of human progress and funded with the kind of capital usually reserved for building rockets — which, not coincidentally, is exactly what Fedorov's own disciple went on to do.

Why?

Here the antithesis has to be taken just as seriously as the thesis, because it is not merely prejudice dressed up as caution — some of it is a genuine ethical objection, and it deserves a genuine answer rather than a dismissal.

Transhumanism, honestly examined, carries real risks. Life-extension technology funded at the billion-dollar scale is, for now, a product built by and for the already-wealthy; a future in which the rich buy extra decades while everyone else ages on schedule is not a hypothetical, it is the current business model. Gene editing and embryo selection raise real questions about consent across generations — the people most affected by germline engineering are not yet born to object to it. And the deeper fear beneath both debates is not irrational: if the body is infinitely revisable, what, if anything, keeps a human being a stable self across the revisions? These are not merely the fears of a mob. They are the legitimate opening moves of a serious bioethics.

But that same rigor has to be turned back on the way trans lives are currently policed, and here the antithesis demands its own correction — a rejection of what is often called transmedicalism: the belief that someone is only legitimately transgender if they experience clinically diagnosable dysphoria and pursue a specific medical pathway of hormones and surgery. The numbers already argue against it. Of the 2.8 million Americans who identify as transgender, only a small fraction — under 50,000 surgical patients over a five-year national window — have had any surgery at all, and the great majority of those were adults; across that same span, minors accounted for a small share of procedures nationwide, and only a few hundred, across four years, in the entire country, involved genital surgery. Being transgender, in other words, is overwhelmingly a matter of identity and social recognition, and at most a partial, non-surgical medical path — not the operating-room spectacle that dominates the political imagination. Making dignity and legal recognition contingent on a medical procedure most trans people never undergo is not caution. It is a second gatekeeper, imposed on top of the first, and it borrows the language of medicine to do the work of denying a human right: the right to define and be recognized as who you are.

The deeper cause of the asymmetry, then, is this: body modification that serves an already-legitimated goal — staying productive, staying rich, staying alive — reads as ambition, because it doesn't threaten anyone's inherited certainty about what a body is. Body modification that serves an internally felt truth about identity reads as heresy, because it does. Both, dialectically, are the same act — matter acting on itself, refusing to be finished — arriving before two audiences with two very different levels of institutional courage.

Future

This is where the interpenetration of opposites — Engels' name for the idea that two apparent contraries are not enemies locked in a zero-sum fight but conditions that produce and require each other — does real philosophical work, rather than just decorating the argument.

The "given" body and the "chosen" body were never opposites to begin with. No human body has ever been purely given: it has always been sustained by artifice — medicine, nutrition, clothing, tools — from the moment of birth. And no "chosen" modification is ever free of what was given: every transition works with existing tissue, existing biology, existing constraints. Thesis and antithesis interpenetrate. The synthesis is not a compromise that waters both down; it is the recognition that the right to remake the body and the duty to remake it justly, together, as a species are the same commitment, seen from two directions. Fedorov's common task, after all, was never a private hobby for the wealthy. It was explicitly collective — the whole species, or it meant nothing.

Concretely, that synthesis suggests three things worth actually doing.

First, separate the right to exist and be recognized from the medical pathway entirely. Legal gender recognition should run on informed consent — a model several U.S. states and countries already use — not on a diagnosis or a surgical record. Being trans is a matter of identity and rights, not a permission slip signed by a surgeon.

Second, fund the "common task" as a common task. If a society can mobilize three billion dollars in a single funding round to extend the lives of people who can already afford the best healthcare on earth, it can guarantee gender-affirming and general life-extending care as a public good, under public and bioethical oversight, rather than rationing one and lavishing the other. The current split — in which more than twenty U.S. states have moved to restrict trans healthcare while venture capital races to out-fund itself on anti-aging biotech — is not a values-neutral market outcome. It is a choice about whose bodily self-determination counts.

Third, build the oversight structures now, while the technology is still young and unevenly distributed, rather than after a two-tier humanity has already hardened into place. Participatory, cross-disciplinary bioethics bodies — not just corporate boards or state legislatures — should govern both frontiers, because the inequality already visible in who gets to remake themselves today is a preview, not an exception, of the inequality a transhuman future would otherwise lock in permanently.

Conclusion

Fedorov never lived to see a rocket leave the ground, and he refused, on principle, to keep more money than he needed to eat. He wasn't chasing personal immortality. He was trying to make the "common task" common — not a prize for the devout, the rich, or the medically approved, but the shared inheritance of a species that was, on his reading of its own scripture, built specifically to keep building.

The question this essay opened with was never really whether humanity will keep rewriting its own body. That is no longer a question; it is a fact already funded in the billions and already lived by millions, from a trans teenager quietly changing her name at school to a longevity lab quietly reprogramming a cell in a dish. The only question left is whether we do that work the way Fedorov's own disciples eventually did it in practice — unevenly, a moon shot for the few — or the way Fedorov actually meant it: as a task no one is excluded from and no one is forced into, undertaken together, in the open, as a right rather than a permission. A species made in the image of a Creator, if it takes that inheritance seriously at all, cannot consistently celebrate the entrepreneur re-engineering his own cells while criminalizing the teenager doing, in miniature, precisely the same thing. Either the common task is common, or it was never really about creation at all — only about who gets permission to keep making themselves.

Cis or trans, we’re all children of the common task.

Sources: Williams Institute, UCLA School of Law, transgender population estimates (2025); Wright et al., "National Estimates of Gender-Affirming Surgery in the US," JAMA Network Open (2023); reporting on Altos Labs and Retro Biosciences funding, TechCrunch, Fortune, and STAT News (2025–2026).