Issue link: http://cp.revolio.com/i/2624
10 Fall 2009 All Aboard for Fun Time! After publishing our initial edition of h+ — an issue filled with strategies for living a long life, manipulating human evolution and developing the first device for uploading memories — I worried that readers would think we were from another planet. After all, the 'zine posted just as people were contemplating the potential failure of the entire economic system and wondering if there would be a run on the banks. So in our second issue, we came down to earth, so to speak, and took on the theme of social responsibility from the radical technological viewpoint. We covered various points of view on economic crisis and transition, and resolving problems related to clean energy and water. Mighty noble of us, hmmm? Anyway, this time out, we're headed down a different track. No, not irresponsibility, but good, wholesome (well, mostly wholesome) fun, pleasure, happiness, play and self- enhancement. We asked many of our favorite contributors to come up with ideas related to those things that make us feel good and help us to enjoy a long and enhanced life. The response has brought me joy, and I hope it does the same for you. It perhaps behooves me to emphasize that this is a theme issue, lest people think we have become giddy. The next issue will surely be solid and sober, back to the serious work of making a long-lived and livable, enhanced future. Meanwhile, we leave you to contemplate the importance of play, sex, self-enhancement and mind expansion in our now and near- future worlds. Who Put the TRANS in the TRANSition to Post-Humanity? As transhumanism continues to be a buzzword for radical technological alteration, it awes me to recall that transgender people began getting hormone treatments right after World War II (1949). And in 1952 (the year that I was born) Christine Jorgensen's male-to-female gender reassignment surgery was all over the newspapers. Touted as the "first sex change surgery" (in truth such surgeries were performed in Germany in the late 1920s, but by the early '50s, surgery was being combined with hormone therapy), Jorgensen's media coverage opened up a new world of gender change. While it would be quite an exaggeration to claim that the West has accepted full rights for transgendered people (there is still bigotry and a lack of legal protections in the U.S. and elsewhere), the fact is that the basic right of a human being to make an extraordinary transformation in the nature of his or her or hir gender was established many years ago. Sex reassignment was not stopped or shut down. Now, a woman-to-man gives birth to a baby and most of us barely bat an eye. As we move into an age of shifting identities, where we can be whatever or whoever we choose to be in our second lives; where biotechnology might soon offer changes in skin melanin bringing about the age of the trans-racial, as people start to evolve novel body ornamentations and eventually parts, as we learn how to control our hormones to amp up our estrogen or testosterone to suit the needs of the day, we should always remember to thank the transgendered. They have walked point for our basic right to self-alter. editor in chief self enhanCement, fun ... and Who Put the trans in the transition to Post-humanity? RU SIRIUS