Blaire Ostler

The speaker shares two harrowing encounters with death: the near-death of her newborn son, who was resuscitated after five minutes without breathing, and her own close call during a third cesarean section when she felt drawn toward a "dark paradise" of unconsciousness. Her son's view that he was literally resurrected—and that this must therefore be heaven—frames her argument that transhumanism must address quality of life alongside quantity. She challenges critics who dismiss her social justice work as tangential, insisting that oppression based on race, gender, and sexuality are transhumanist concerns because death comes unequally to marginalized bodies.

Blaire Ostler traces the evolution of feminism through its four waves—from suffrage to intersectionality to cyber feminism—arguing that each wave moves closer to transhumanist ideals of genuine gender liberation. She critiques various feminist movements for their shortcomings, including liberal feminism's adoption of patriarchal structures, radical feminism's gender essentialism, and the "mean girl effect" of online call-out culture. Ostler argues that transhumanism offers the ultimate form of liberation: morphological freedom that transcends not only socio-political limitations but biological ones as well, enabling diverse forms of embodiment and reproduction. She challenges both feminists to embrace transhumanist technology and transhumanists to learn from feminism's progress and pitfalls in pursuing liberation.

Blaire Ostler shares her personal journey from faith crisis to renewed belief, exploring what it means to be made in the image of God from a feminist and transhumanist perspective. She recounts how the male-centric imagery of traditional Mormon theology led her to functional atheism, before finding a more expansive vision of God that embraces intersectional diversity—male and female, black and white, all bodies. Connecting Joseph Smith's teachings on theosis with the New God Argument, Ostler argues that if humanity evolves toward godhood, that divine future must reflect the full diversity of human experience, declaring that "God is as intersectionally diverse as ourselves."

Three Mormon Transhumanist Association members explore the intersections of religion, gender, and technology. The first speaker examines how post-secularism challenges the assumption that religion is fading, arguing instead that religion—understood as meaning-making systems—permeates even secular endeavors like environmentalism and science. A second presenter deconstructs binary notions of gender, highlighting biological complexity, transgender identity, and how reproductive technologies may expand possibilities for procreation beyond traditional forms. The final speaker delivers an allegorical "open letter to the lost children of Mormonism," using Nietzsche's three metamorphoses to describe the journey from orthodoxy to disaffection, calling for reconciliation with the "sacred feminine" to find a path forward.