"I Don't Want to Be Flesh": Feminist Transhuman Futures in Years and Years (Part One)
/If you have not watched Russell T. Davies’ Years and Years, currently playing in the United States on HBO Max, you have missed something … memorable. Imagine This Is Us set in a near future UK when the world continues to collapse around us in plausible yet forward looking ways. We refract this dystopian world through the eyes of various members of one extended family whose lives is touched by the turmoil that surrounds him. For me, it did not always work but it hit a lot of raw nerves and it has been hard to get it out of my head. I’ve thought about the series often across the past year since I first watched it. More than anything else I saw, it captured the structure of feeling of the world at the current moment. I was delighted when Daisy Reid, a PhD student in Comparative Literature, chose to write about the series in my Science Fiction as Media Theory seminar. I asked her if I could share what she wrote here.
“I Don’t Want to Be Flesh”: Feminist Transhuman Futures in Years and Years
by Daisy Reid
The year is 2024. Donald Trump is approaching the end of his second term as President of the United States; extreme storms, floods, and heatwaves around the world have become so common as to be barely newsworthy; Angela Merkel has just died, leaving Germany in mourning. And, in a visibly upper-middle-class home in London, a seventeen-year-old girl initiates a nerve-wracking conversation with her parents.
Shifting uncomfortably in her seat, she begins. “I think I’ve been uncomfortable for a very long time…Ever since I was born. I don’t think I belong in this body. Oh my God.” Her parents’ eyes are full of sympathy, willing her on.
In reality, they have already snooped on their daughter’s internet history and found searches for “trans helpline,” “a trans life,” and “trans for teens.” They have all the right words prepared. They strain closer. When Bethany finally works herself up to it, blurting out, “I think I’m trans,” her parents, Celeste and Stephen, practically fall over themselves in their rush to comfort her. They assure her of their unwavering love and their wholehearted support for her transition from female to male. For her parents, this explains everything – from their daughter’s withdrawn nature, to her constant hiding behind screens and tech. They are confident they can get her the help she needs.
Bethany, however, is briefly thrown by their reaction. She is not transsexual, she corrects them, but transhuman: “I said, I’m not comfortable with my body. So I want to get rid of it. This…thing. All the arms and legs and every single bit of it. I don’t want to be flesh. I’m really sorry, but I want to escape this thing. And become digital.” Pressed by her parents, she continues, “I want to live forever. As information. Because that’s what transhumans are, mum. Not male. Or female. But better. Where I’m going, there’s no life or death, there’s only data. I will be data.”
Her parents stare at her, visibly dumbstruck, before the scene jump-cuts to Bethany running up the stairs, eyes streaming with tears, and the bedroom door slamming violently in her wake. Celeste is hot on her heels, charging after her with shouts and threats, positively boiling over with rage. In many ways, this has settled neatly back into the recognisable trope from which it was only briefly derailed: that of the troubled young person sharing a theretofore concealed aspect of their identity to their family, and being subsequently banished in disgrace.
Such runs a key scene in the first episode of Years and Years, a six-part TV drama created by Russell T Davies and jointly produced by the BBC and HBO in 2019. The show follows the multigenerational Lyons family over a period from 2019 to 2034, tracking their interlocking lives against a snowballing backdrop of global economic, political, environmental, and technological turmoil. The show is, of course, ultimately fictional in scope – Brigid Delaney of The Guardian refers to it as “dystopian TV,” Adam Rogers of Wired designates it a work of “sci-fi,” and Rotten Tomatoes simply calls it “a nihilistic projection of the future” – but, in a similar vein to such productions as Black Mirror, its core discomfort can be located in the very plausibility of the nightmarish world it constructs.
The global events we witness unfolding in Years and Years, from banking collapse, blackouts, and mass flooding, to the rise of far-right populist politics in Europe and an eerily prescient outbreak of “monkey flu,” are grimly aligned with an entirely conceivable version of the future towards which we all seem to be headed. Indeed, notes in the screenplay alert producers to the real-life events upon which the plot points are based: in a scene featuring a town of shipping containers cobbled together for an influx of refugees, for example, the script reads, “They’re being suggested now, in 2017 – search ‘shipping container homes’ or Container City” (Davies, “Episode One” 27).
Grounded as the show is within a reasoned extrapolation of contemporary reality rather than pure imaginative fiction, a “what if” scenario that inputs our current situation and pumps out a projection of where it could take us, this paper proposes that one can look to the transhuman storyline of Bethany Lyons (played by Lydia West) as taking seriously the idea that such concepts as uploading one’s brain as software, and enhancing the organic body with machinic implants, might begin a slow transition from the domains of science fiction and cyberpunk cultural production to that of tenable reality within the next few decades.
The science fictional mode is thus deployed in Years and Yearsas a metanarrative in order to not only speculate upon the future of human-technology interfacing, but also to question the very role of sci-fi in shaping it.
Bethany’s 15-year narrative arc throughout the show sees her maintaining her transhumanist impulses despite her parents’ initial explosive reaction. She soon receives public funding to have telephone technology embedded in her hand, and eventually becomes “fully integrated” with implants in every finger, digital lenses in her eyes, and the ability to interact with electronic devices using a tiny “wafer” embedded in her brain. Her transformation is, notably, facilitated by her career as a data miner; the government sponsors her surgeries, which in turn guarantee her high-earning employment in the public sector while vast sectors of industry are phased out due to automation.
This paper proposes examining the progression of Bethany’s speculative transhumanist future in Years and Yearsthrough the diffractive lens of real-life transhumanisms past and present, tracking elements of Bethany’s story back to the underground activity of fringe “biohacking” communities in existence today, in addition to exploring its links to, and tensions with, the masculine genealogies of Extropianism and Silicon Valley pro-market capitalists.
Anchoring the depiction of Bethany’s transhuman journey in dialogue with the posthuman and cyborg philosophies of Katherine Hayles and Donna Haraway respectively, in addition to outlining the myriad ways in which Bethany’s transhuman subjectivity both complicates and epitomises theories of gender performativity and intersectionality, this paper goes on to propose that Bethany’s is a uniquely feminist transhuman futurity that resists dissolution into the hyper-masculine tropes typical of Extropian technical progressivism by insisting upon symbiosis, relationality, and an ethics of care – thereby positing a recalibrated form of transhumanist embodiment that permits one to live digitallywithoutdisavowing the materiality of the feminine flesh, nor the attendant forces of affect, sensuality, connection, or emotion.
The term “transhumanism” was first coined in 1951 by Julian Huxley, younger brother of the novelist Aldous Huxley. An extension of what he termed “evolutionary humanism,” Huxley’s transhumanism essentially suggested that humans should be able to take an active role in their own evolutionary advancement. As such, he proposed implementing population-wide improvements via mechanisms of social and cultural control, so as to shape a more refined stage in the development of the species as a whole. Huxley’s transhumanist thinking ultimately strayed uncomfortably into the realm of eugenics, but his core doctrine of pushing humankind into the next “phase” of its evolutionary development persisted, and was picked up again in the 1980s and 1990s by the so-called Extropian movement in Southern California.
A group of majority cis-male, white, affluent techno-progressivists, the Extropians believed in the basic premise of fighting “entropy – the natural tendency of things to run down, degenerate, and die out – with its polar opposite, ‘extropy’” (Regis). Extropian transhumanism eschewed Huxley’s eugenicist angle, but instead proposed freely taking the work of humankind’s evolution into one’s own hands with recourse to developments in the realms of technology and science.
Such thinking drew directly and self-consciously from the techno-utopian aesthetics at the heart of much sci-fi, manga, and cyberpunk, taking seriously the potential for the widespread availability of such speculative technologies as brain-computer integration, cryonics, bionics, and advanced AI that would afford humans an expanded level of cognitive, sensory, and bodily being in the world.
Fast-forward to today, and transhumanism continues to exist as a fringe movement (albeit a growing one) largely associated with libertarians and pro-market Silicon Valley billionaires such as Elon Musk; in fact, the latter is currently pumping funding into the development of so-called “neural lace” technology, hoping to one day “implant[] tiny brain electrodes that may one day upload and download thoughts” (Subba). The sustaining transhumanist mission in the twenty-first century, propagated by the likes of Musk alongside such institutions as Humanity+ and the U.S. Transhumanist Party, is to radically extend the capacities and possibilities of the human form through technological upgrades, with a view to eventually transcending the final limitation imposed upon the human form: overcoming death itself, by activating a cyberpunk future in which we are no longer restrained by the ageing and flawed materiality of the human body.
Much like the young Bethany Lyons, many transhumanists ultimately hope to live forever as information – and, again mirroring Bethany’s fraught “coming-out” experience, they are treated with a hearty dose of scepticism, if not outright ridicule, within both the media and intellectual circles.
How, then, are we to understand the progression depicted in Years and Years from transhumanism being framed as a fringe ideology, a silly notion entertained by a troubled and vulnerable teenager – to its depiction in later episodes as a highly regulated and widely practiced tenet of modern Western society, with transhumanist body modifications a necessary prerequisite for stable participation in the work economy? As is characteristic of Years and Years, we can track the show’s projected future back to rumblings in the present moment.
Briefly putting to one side the hyper-visible, Musk-esque Silicon Valley superstars of transhumanism, we might instead turn to the “biohackers,” an underground community that has been steadily expanding since the early 2000s, as a key point of reference for understanding the show. Otherwise known as “grinders,” biohackers are known to actively insert microchips, implants, and magnets into their flesh in an attempt to speed up the transition to a transhuman future akin to that depicted towards the end of Years and Years. At present, these implants are relatively undeveloped; cybernetics professor Dr Kevin Warwick, for example, has a radio frequency transmitter inserted into his arm that automatically unlocks the doors of his university lab as he enters (perhaps, incidentally, the inspiration for one of Bethany’s own implants, which unlocks the doors of her workplace without the need for a key-card). Will Oremus of Slate suggests that we call these biohackers “practical transhumanists”: “people who would rather become cyborgs right now than pontificate about the hypothetical far-off future,” while Carleton University’s Tamara Banbury, a PhD candidate and biohacker herself, employs the designation, “voluntary cyborgs.”
Being medically unnecessary, such body modification procedures cannot currently be legally performed by health professionals – so biohackers regularly resort to self-surgery in order to attain their transhumanist goals, which has led to abundant images of gore and infection circulating among online community spaces for grinders, such as biohack.me. As a result of the risky lengths to which biohackers will willingly and very visibly go for transhumanist body modifications, journalistic exposés frequently frame them as an extreme subculture, teetering discomfortingly between pseudo-intellectualism, idiocy, and an outright threat, both to the bodily health of its individual members and the moral economy of society writ large.
The lack of regulation, countercultural leanings, and dangerous reputation that encircle the biohacking movement in its minor percolations in the present moment can be understood as an important precursor to a particularly visceral scene in Episode Three of Years and Years. Depicted as the year 2026, the episode sees Bethany and her friend Lizzie sneaking out to get digital implants inserted into their eyes without their parents’ knowledge. Unqualified foreign practitioners carry out the surgery on a boat off the British coast, working under the radar so as to avoid detection – but they end up botching the operation, and Lizzie’s new eye jerks about crazily, her vision transplanted into a laptop nearby rather than “integrated” into her head (fig 1).
Fig 1. Lizzie (Shannon Heyes)’s digital eye. Russell T Davies, Years and Years Episode 5, HBO & BBC, 2019, 50:42. Screen capture from HBO Max.
Extrapolating a few years from the bungled self-surgeries that are routinely posted on biohack.me, this scenario seems like a perfectly feasible successor to the underground activities of grinders happening in the present moment. As such, we might see such pursuits, in both Years and Yearsand its real-life subcultural referents, as the darker, lower-budget underside of the glossy transhuman future imagined by the likes of Elon Musk.
Pursuant to the surgery, as the characters of Lizzie, Bethany, and Celeste seek proper medical help in an NHS hospital, a nurse observes, “It’s been going on for decades. Cruise ships arrive at the docks, specially adapted as hospitals….And people go on board for cheap operations. It was facelifts in the 90s. Gender reassignments in the 2000s. Now they’ve discovered transhumans” (Years and Years E3). In other words, Lizzie’s is not a unique case; in Davies’ imagined future, unregulated individual biohacking is exceeding its obscure status to become a more popular pursuit, exposing a growing influx of young grinders to its many health risks.
It is worth dwelling here, however, upon the fact that the nurse frames transhuman surgery as something of a logical follow-on to gender reassignment surgery in terms of its cultural positioning – again, recalling the lexical mix-up depicted in Bethany’s “trans” coming-out scene.
This comparison between transhumanism/biohacking and transgenderism is one that persists on a number of levels throughout the show, and it is a crucial one to investigate in terms of parsing out Russell T Davies’ speculations upon how transhumanism might be incrementally absorbed into something like social normativity. Trans* thinkers such as Martina Rothblatt have long posited a continuity between transgenderism and transhumanism, predicting that, “First comes the realization that we are not limited by our sexual anatomy. Then comes the awakening that we are not limited by our anatomy at all” (318).
While it certainly merits clarifying that gender reassignment is a medical treatment and, as such, can hardly be approximated to a biohacking “enhancement” of the body, Rothblatt’s suggestion that both transgenderism and transhumanism pertain to a sense of morphological freedom over the way the body is shaped and performs in society is one that does seem to hold considerable weight in Davies’ speculative future.
By way of contextualising this, we might briefly look to the show’s transgender character of Lincoln Lyons, Bethany’s younger cousin. Lincoln’s transition throughout the series is so unanimously accepted by her family as to almost fly under the radar in terms of plot; one or two older characters comment vaguely upon her new habits of wearing skirts and ribbons, gently acknowledging that a change is taking place in her gender presentation, but the need for a spectacularised coming-out narrative is completely evinced. Nor, indeed, is Lincoln depicted as encountering the tired prejudices of so-called “TERFs” (or “Gender Criticals”), and their violent indictment of transwomen as threatening or aberrant, that are so rife in the United Kingdom at the present moment. In Years and Years, Lincoln simply starts presenting as female around 2027, and that is that; no need for further discussion or debate. In a similar manner, Daniel Lyons – Bethany’s uncle – is unquestionably accepted as a gay man, without this facet of his identity ever being either flattened or ignored, nor made out to be a point of contention. Given that Russell T Davies has been demonstrably committed to chronicling authentic LGBTQ+ stories for much of his career, most famously through the 1999 TV series Queer as Folk, this decision to depict an unquestioning acceptance of gender and sexuality as fluid and non-totalising signals Davies’ broader investment in tracking the historical progression and speculated futures of queer and trans* subjectivities across a cross-section of British culture. Beyond this, the myriad parallels that are drawn throughout the series between transhumanism and transgenderism, from Bethany’s “coming-out” narrative to the nurse’s offhand comment about surgery regulation, plant the seed in the viewer’s mind that the perceived ontological split between human and technology will, in the future, be universally considered as much of an arbitrary social construct as gender norms will grow to become. Further, to return to the nurse’s comparison between face lifts, gender reassignment, and transhuman surgery, we might note a subtle insinuation that, like its surgical predecessors, biohacking will soon become a properly regulated process absorbed into the medical industrial complex – a nod, of course, not only to Bethany’s later public-funded surgeries, but also to the potentially radical medical futures to which transhumanism might give rise in our own lives.
With all these overlapping perspectives in mind, we might now briefly revisit Bethany’s “coming out” episode. Given that transhumanism is still a relatively obscure, borderline eccentric philosophy in today’s society, as viewers of this scene we are implicitly aligned with Celeste: requiring an explanation as to what “transhuman” entails, and cultivating a deep scepticism about what we hear in response. This scene is represented as happening in 2024, by which time it is fair to predict that the dangers and more extreme cases of biohacking may have started to filter into the mainstream media, most likely framed as a subversive countercultural threat that targets vulnerable young people (again, a familiar narrative to many LGBTQ+ folks).
Celeste’s enraged rejection of Bethany’s “coming out” is thus conversant with the trope of the queer and/or trans* teen coming out to a prejudiced family, in addition tothe way in which one might anticipate a parent to respond to their daughter wanting to engage in potentially dangerous biohacking activity – a more extreme iteration, perhaps, of a mother being unable to stomach the idea of her daughter getting an illicit tattoo or piercing.
The incident with Lizzie’s eye only seems to corroborate Celeste’s (and, implicitly, our) perspective: transhumanism is a threat, both bodily on an individual scale, and existential on a societal, moral scale. However, the show’s unique format in spanning such an extended timeframe permits for such perceptions to shift, organically and believably, within its characters – and, therefore, for we as viewers to imagine our own worldviews shifting with them.
By the end, Davies depicts transhumanist biohacking as gradually becoming the new normal, incrementally shifting from its cultural perception as a “wacky cyborg plan” to a sort of natural “evolution” (Renstrom) in professional and medical development. As such, it becomes as seamlessly integrated into the quotidian social and economic life of the Lyons family as their much-used, Alexa-like virtual assistant, “Señor” (incidentally, a superb example of what Bruce Sterling terms “design fiction,” or a believable diegetic prototype of a fictional object – and another example of a technology to which the older Lyons were originally resistant, and yet which is transformed into an object of necessity, even affection, by the end.
Transhuman biohacks, we surmise, are a similarly conceived design fiction that will follow an analogous trajectory). Tracking the progression of biohacking from a transgressive and threatening subcultural activity in early episodes of Years and Years, to a government-sponsored and meticulously regulated process at a later point in the narrative, thus encourages viewers, via the shifting perception of Celeste, to question the ways in which our contemporary scepticisms, disbeliefs, or even prejudices against transhumanist philosophy or biohacking activity might evolve towards something like wide acceptance in coming decades.
In his particular depiction of LGBTQ+ subjectivities, Davies seems to suggest that such an evolution echoes the ways in which mainstream antipathy and moral panic directed towards the queer and trans* community in the UK might continue to progress into something like widespread inclusiveness, and acceptance to the point of being unremarkable – yet without straying into erasure.
MORE TO CoME
Daisy Reid is a graduate student in Comparative Literature at the University of Southern California. Her research interests include speculative and science fictions, critical plant studies, posthumanism, (feminist) materialisms, and the Environmental Humanities. Her current work focuses on SF depictions of plant life and fungi in their manifold imbrications with issues of gender, sexuality, erotics, and desire.
