Our Culture Needs a Return to Biological Realism

By Christine Rosen

Saturday, September 05, 2026

 

Several recent stories might not, at first glance, seem connected: Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez posted videos of herself injecting fertility drugs into her stomach and, later, having her eggs harvested to freeze them; technology entrepreneur Bryan “Never Die” Johnson doubled down on his extreme health and longevity project despite being diagnosed with an autoimmune condition; and former NBA players Enes Kanter Freedom and Royce White announced their intention to register for the Women’s NBA draft in 2027 as a protest against the league’s absurd stance on gender.

 

These stories suggest our culture needs a return to biological realism — that is, a sensible acknowledgement of human limits and biological realities. The normalization of extreme claims about humans’ ability to push past or ignore those realities has only increased in recent years, to the detriment of our common culture and common sense.

 

Consider Ocasio-Cortez’s unpaid advertisement for the fertility industry. Whatever her personal reasons for deciding, at age 36, to freeze her eggs, she chose to make it a public performance, saying she hoped to “normalize” the process of delaying the decision to have a child.

 

This is where a biological realist might point out that while there are numerous understandable reasons beyond personal preference for a woman to freeze her eggs (including to preserve them while undergoing cancer treatment), it remains a harsh biological reality that most women experience a significant decline in fertility after the age of 35, and the women most likely to achieve successful pregnancies using their previously frozen eggs are those who froze a lot of them before 35. If Ocasio-Cortez were intent on educating women of her generation about preserving their fertility (rather than turning her personal choices into yet another Instagram-enabled political stunt), she would have noted these biological realities. She might also have acknowledged that the largely unregulated fertility industry raises many ethical and legal questions and has been implicated in cases of abuse and fraud.

 

It is not only eggs that deniers of biological reality hope to freeze; it is themselves, in perpetuity. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman reportedly paid a Canadian company, Nectome, a deposit of $10,000 to secure a spot on its waiting list to one day freeze his brain, with the expectation that the company will scan it and grant him some form of digitized immortality. “I assume my brain will be uploaded to the cloud,” he said. Altman is one of many Silicon Valley entrepreneurs on a quest for life extension and immortality. Transhumanist Ray Kurzweil has long predicted that humans, nanobots, and artificial intelligence will eventually merge to form a new species, while others in the AI successionism movement want AI to replace humanity.

 

Bryan Johnson, champion of the “Don’t Die” movement who is tracking and monitoring every possible bodily function he has while taking extreme measures to prolong his life, describes his journey as follows: “Conquering death will be humanity’s greatest achievement.” Talking to Ross Douthat on the Interesting Times podcast, Johnson described himself not as a man, but as “the first Don’t Die Homo sapien prototype.” Comparing himself to a self-driving car, he noted, “I’m building a self-driving body so it just automatically takes care of itself.”

 

The denial of biological limits is perhaps most prominent among transgender activists, who insist that biological men can become women and that those men should be allowed access to women-only spaces, including in women’s sports. Just as a child had to point out that the emperor wore no clothes, former NBA players Kanter and White highlighted the absurdities of men in women’s sports by declaring their intention to play on women’s teams. Their stunt was in part a response to criticism of professional athletes like WNBA player Sophie Cunningham for simply stating the obvious: Significant biological differences between the sexes make it unfair to allow men to compete against women. The overwhelming majority of Americans agree with her, and when Cunningham told reporters her position was “common sense,” she was correct.

 

Common sense does not fare well when pitted against the ideological zeal of an extremely small minority — especially when that minority controls the levers of power in institutions. During a press conference, WNBA Minnesota Lynx coach Cheryl Reeve hemmed and hawed but stuck to the ideological script, saying, “We need to protect trans kids.” Some WNBA players, like Golden State Valkyries player Gabby Williams, went so far as to claim she would “welcome a trans athlete on my team or against my team, anytime.” Even though the U.S. Supreme Court upheld states’ right to ban men from playing on women’s teams, the mainstream media and trans activists continue to push the message that biological men should be allowed to take spots on teams from women.

 

Kanter and White are forcing the ideologues to be honest: If they allow men to play in a professional women’s league, then the word woman has no meaning, and biological reality will have been jettisoned in favor of ideological conformity. It’s not a coincidence that the transhumanist and transgender projects share a prefix (trans means “across” or “beyond”). Acolytes of both seek to cross beyond the limits of biology; both movements are also characterized by a rigorous enforcement of groupthink.

 

Most people can’t afford to freeze their eggs like Ocasio-Cortez or meticulously track the duration of their nighttime erections like Bryan Johnson, and most will never play professional sports like the women of the WNBA. But when advocates of transgenderism, transhumanism, extreme longevity, and extreme fertility treatments promote the message that there is no biological limit that cannot eventually be overcome by medicine or technology, they normalize something that is harmful to a flourishing society: denying the reality of human limits.

 

Embracing biological realism does not mean artificially stunting the remarkable advances of technology and science or fetishizing the challenges of aging or conception for its own sake. It simply rejects the conceit of those who would claim the power to ignore biological realities. Their hubris is a reminder that the conditions that allow for innovation and scientific advances and prosperity do not always produce morally sound people.