Misogyny Prevention? Retroactively Engineer Genetics!

SATIRE | ISSUE NINE | WHAKAKATA / HUMOUR

Written by Nate & Nancy et al., 2026 | Contributing Scientists

Ever since I discovered the concept of sexism at age 16, I have been trying to find ways to do my part to decrease its prevalence. My studies led me to a lot of places – queer theory, postpostmodern sixth-wave feminism, intersectional speciesism, and radical bioessentialist egalitarianism. Ultimately, I found out that the world is far too complex for one person to meaningfully make a dent in the misogyny baked into our current society.

Even if everyone were to be like me, and make as much effort as possible to understand the lived experiences of women, such as making friends with them without catching feelings and making things awkward, or developing emotional intelligence to reclaim parts of my identity that toxic masculinity forbade, or doing my interdisciplinary PhD (Gender Studies and Engineering) on creating the world’s most sophisticated Period Simulator, us men still have blind spots that make it impossible to save the wonderful women of this world from the discrimination they face from us, themselves, each other, and anyone else.

The only option left is to cut it off at its source – the origin of sexism. But what is the origin? It manifests in so many ways, overlapping with culture, economics, design, and philosophy. Almost every society is patriarchal, so as much as I discounted it at first, I had to look through an evolutionary lens. Not evolutionary psychology in the way that manosphere-adjacent creators peddle. But an open-minded, peer-reviewed, symbolic comparison between environmental pressures, genetic expression, and the power structures across the animal kingdom.

After extensive research, I landed on one creature in particular: Seahorses.

In case you’re unaware, seahorses are one of the few animals in nature where the male carries the developing embryos for the majority of gestation. The female still produces the eggs, but during mating, she uses an ovipositor to transfer her eggs into the male’s brood pouch, where they are fertilised and develop. This has all kinds of effects – reducing energy costs for the female (since she no longer needs to gestate, though producing the eggs also incurs significant energy costs) and allowing the pair to reproduce more efficiently, as the female can begin developing another clutch of eggs while the male is carrying the current brood.  

Imagine if humans also behaved this way! If men could take on the responsibility of pregnancy, they would finally be forced to understand its challenges, creating a deeper empathy between them and their wives.  If intercourse necessitates the transfer of eggs, abortions would become a natural and unavoidable part of reproduction, enshrining females’ bodily autonomy at the most fundamental biological level. Sexual relations would inherently become more reciprocal, because the act is two-way. The man fertilises the female’s eggs, then they are deposited in the man.

Using my vast intellect, I continued research. I revolutionised gene-editing techniques to apply the anatomy of seahorses in a human context. But I found myself up against another barrier: time. So I pivoted yet again, delving into the world of particle physics. At a large government-funded agency, I was instrumental in resolving the centuries-old conundrum between quantum physics and relativity, creating a unified theory of quantum gravity that had the side effect of allowing us to manipulate causality on a small scale.

Now I had nothing but time. Using a looped temporal chamber, I began my experiments – on my own human cells to make it ethically sound. I quickly grew clones of myself, genetically modified to gestate. Once I tweaked the combination enough to ensure biologically feasible samples, I began phase two. I asked my most dear (and genetically distant) female friend to provide her own cells, which she consented to. I was still aware that my maleness may have been intrinsically coercive in this set-up, so I took every measure possible to ensure she had not been inadvertently pressured into agreeing.

Once I had performed the same procedures on her cells, retrofitting her DNA with the genes necessary for her biological system to emulate that of a female seahorse (while also iteratively improving the menstrual cycle to be much less painful and wasteful), it was time to test genetic viability. It took several hundred tries to get it right, but eventually sterility levels were below a tolerable amount, and offspring were viable. This part of the process was my personal favourite, though my friend politely declined to watch.

The final part of my plan, phase three, is to scale up the chronalistic technology to allow me to send my clones to the dawn of humanity. There, they will rewrite history, acting as a new Adam and Eve, except without the sexist connotations of Eve being created from a man and tempted by sin. I (and maybe my female friend) will also remain there, replacing the humans of the time with genetically modified clones, overseeing the development of a society untainted by biological inequalities as we travel back forward through time, and eventually ensuring that my counterpart in this alternate timeline creates the technology required to cause all this to happen in the first place, closing the loop.

I have already ensured that this will not result in paradoxes – in my work, I discovered changing the past creates alternate timelines. The only way to replace the original one in the time stream is to create a causal loop as I have just described. Therefore, this proposal will permanently erase sexism from existence; freeing women from their biological chains, bringing people of all sexes together in a greater mutual understanding, and encouraging men to pull their weight. The best part is, it will always have been this way. And we have all the time in the world to make it a reality. Thank you.