The sea in Rimini smells of salt and coffee at dawn, and the gulls make a thin, tinny music above the pier. My wheelchair hums softly over worn stone, the rubber tyres picking up dust like flour on warm bread. A man once asked me—half-joking, half-afraid—whether I felt “less human” with a machine beneath me. His voice had a metallic edge, like a spoon against a glass. I remember thinking that our first monsters aren’t scales and claws; they’re the labels we say out loud… and the ones we whisper.
I’m Gerd Dani, President of Free Astroscience, writing from this Adriatic light. I’m simplifying complex history here on purpose, so you can follow every turn of the wheel. What you’ll read is personal, reflective, and yes—hopeful. I want you to hear the street noise as we ask a very old, very live question: who gets to be human next?
The Word That Erases People
So when I read about monstrification—the academic term for how societies strip people of their humanity—something clicked. That uncomfortable feeling of being observed, categorized, judged? It's ancient. It's systematic. And it's everywhere.
Here's how it works: you don't need dragons or vampires to create a monster. You just need to convince people that someone has broken the category of "normal human being".
Their bodies are wrong. Their minds are wrong. Their culture is wrong. Therefore, they're not quite human. Not quite deserving of rights, dignity, and safety.
The label can change—"savage," "subhuman," "illegal," "freak." But the mechanism stays the same: draw a line, put yourself on one side, and everyone you fear on the other.
When Medicine Became a Weapon
Let's go back to those ancient Greeks and Romans.
They had this theory about bodies. Four humours—blood, phlegm, black bile, yellow bile—kept you balanced. Change your climate, your food, your exercise? Your humours shift. Your body changes.
Sounds reasonable, right? Except here's the terrifying implication: if bodies are that malleable, then there's a slippery slope from "normal person" to "monster" to "animal" .
Suddenly, difference isn't just unusual. It's dangerous. Because if they can slide toward monstrosity, so can you.
Medieval Europe took this fear and weaponized it. They created the Great Chain of Being—a hierarchy where humans sat between angels and animals. But the "worst" humans? They overlapped with apes.
I can almost smell the parchment and ink as scribes carefully illustrated these hierarchies, placing some people just barely above beasts.
The Machinery of Hate
Let me tell you about Gerald of Wales, a 12th-century chronicler.
He described the English as "the most worthless of all peoples under heaven" . The Irish? Barbarous. Bestial. Sometimes literally half-animal.
But the worst monstrosity in medieval Europe was reserved for Jewish people.
In 1290, King Edward I expelled all Jews from England. But that wasn't the beginning. It was the culmination of decades of legal monster-making.
Jews were forced to wear badges. Confined to specific areas. Made hypervisible so they'd be easier to attack.
In art, they were drawn with hooked noses, fang-like teeth, and grimacing faces . One chronicler literally wrote that the Devil was their father. Another suggested they were physically deformed, part of the monstrous tribes of Gog and Magog.
This wasn't random cruelty. It was systematic dehumanization.
And here's what keeps me awake at night: it worked. When you convince people that a group isn't fully human, you make violence against them not just acceptable, but righteous.
The Curse That Justified Slavery
The Bible tells a story about Noah's son Ham. He saw his father drunk and naked. For this, Noah cursed Ham's son, Canaan, to serve his brothers' descendants.
Medieval scholars twisted this story. They connected Ham to heat (the Latin word calidus). Heat to Africa. And by the 11th century, some versions claimed Ham's descendants had deformed bodies, lived like animals, or had black skin as a "mark of shame".
One 14th-century manuscript described Ham's descendants as "disfigured peoples, some horse-footed giants, some with great ears, some with one eye" .
You can see where this is going, can't you?
When Europeans began enslaving Africans, they had a ready-made theological justification. These people were cursed. Visibly marked. Categorically different.
In 1503, Queen Isabella of Castile declared that "cannibals" could be legally enslaved. In 1625, Samuel Purchas wrote that Algonquians had "little of humanitie but shape" .
Caribbean colonies passed laws defining enslaved Black Africans and white Christian servants as distinct legal categories. They even erased mixed-race children by declaring a child took the legal status of their mother .
The law literally made mixed-race people exist and not exist simultaneously. Monstrous for crossing boundaries that should be "separate." Yet legally invisible.
When Science Became a Sorting Machine
Carl Linnaeus revolutionized how we classify nature. In 1735, he published The System of Nature—a meticulous taxonomy of life.
Humans were at the top. Divided into African, American, Asian, and European. Each supposedly had distinct physical features, behaviors, temperaments .
But Linnaeus added one more category: Homo monstrosus. The "monstrous humans." Hottentots who were "less fertile." Chinese with "conic heads." Patagonians who were "large, indolent" .
This was presented as science. Objective. Neutral. Just describing reality.
It was racism dressed in a lab coat.
Charles Darwin didn't help. He used "monster" to describe extinct species and mutated individuals. He called them "sports"—nature's jokes .
And then people ran with it.
Nineteenth-century "human zoos" and "freak shows" displayed kidnapped Indigenous people and disabled individuals. They were called the "missing link" between humans and apes. One pamphlet described them as "living proof of Darwin's Theory of the Descent of Man" .
I try to imagine what it felt like. To be stared at. Poked. Measured. Having your humanity debated by people who'd never speak to you as an equal.
Actually, I don't have to imagine it. I know what it's like when people see your wheelchair before they see you.
The Ultimate Monster-Making
The Nazis took monstrification to its horrifying conclusion.
Their 1942 pamphlet Der Untermensch (The Subhuman) described Roma, Sinti, neurodivergent people, disabled people, LGBTQ+ people, and Jews as having "features similar to a human ... lower on the spiritual and psychological scale than any human".
The message was explicit: "Not all of those who appear human are in fact so" .
When you deny someone's humanity completely, any violence against them becomes not just acceptable, but necessary. You're not killing people. You're eliminating a threat.
This is where monstrification always leads. To exclusion. To violence. To death.
The Monsters Among Us
You think this is history? Something safely in the past?
Look around. Monstrification is alive and thriving in 2025. It just doesn't always use the word "monster" anymore .
Politicians monstrify immigrants—presenting them as an existential threat to "our way of life." Trans people are framed as dangerous to children. Black men are portrayed as inherently violent. Muslims as potential terrorists.
The tactic is ancient: take a legitimate fear (economic hardship, social change, uncertainty), then blame it on a monstrified group. Convince people that recognizing "their" humanity means losing your own .
It's always a lie. But it's a lie that works.
Here's what really disturbs me: when we call mass shooters or serial killers "monsters," we're letting ourselves off the hook .
Saying someone "isn't human" suggests the rest of us are fundamentally different. That we could never do what they did. That our society doesn't create the conditions that make such violence possible.
But heinous crimes don't come from nowhere. They come from communities and values that create permission structures—social environments that enable, even encourage, a few individuals to commit atrocities .
Calling them monsters is comfortable. Looking at our own complicity isn't.
The Blurry Future
Now we're facing entirely new forms of potential monstrification.
People receive organ transplants from animals . We can genetically modify embryos. Someday, we might create "enhanced" humans with superior intelligence or strength.
Who decides what's "normal" then? Who gets left behind?
And what about the human-machine boundary?
In 1960, scientists proposed creating "cyborgs"—cybernetic organisms with mechanical implants and drug-regulated physiologies to survive in space .
It sounds like science fiction. But people already have pacemakers, prosthetics, cochlear implants. The line between flesh and technology is dissolving.
Star Trek's Borg Collective terrifies us because they embody this fear. They're humanoid species forcibly assimilated into a collective consciousness. "Resistance is futile," they declare .
The Borg are horror precisely because they blur the boundary. Prosthetic arms. Ocular implants. Nanobots in blood .
Are they human? Monster? Something else entirely?
The AI Question
And then there's artificial intelligence.
The resistance to generative AI creating art, music, writing—it's often rooted in fear that machines are encroaching on humanity's essence .
If we outsource creativity, do we monstrify ourselves? Do we become zombies—mindless, controlled by algorithms and datasets we can't access ?
These are legitimate concerns. Especially when AI is controlled by Big Tech's interests rather than the public good.
But we need to be careful. We shouldn't monstrify people who choose to blend their minds or bodies with technology .
Because the pattern is always the same: define normal, then exclude everyone else.
How to Stop Making Monsters
So what do we do?
First, recognize monstrification when you see it. It's any process that constrains or endangers people's lives simply because they challenge myths about tidy, unchanging social categories.
Second, understand the hidden agenda. Anyone pushing a monstrifying story is using historical patterns of fear and prejudice for personal gain .
Third—and this is crucial—realize that no one is safe in a culture of monstrification. Social categories aren't hermetically sealed. If we allow some people's rights to be stripped away, eventually the machine will come for us too .
Either everyone's rights are protected, or no one's are .
A Manifesto for Wonderful Monsters
In 1985, biologist Donna Haraway wrote about cyborgs. She made "an argument for pleasure in the confusion of boundaries and for responsibility in their construction" .
I love this idea.
What if instead of fearing blurry, moving boundaries, we celebrated them? What if difference and change expanded our collective choices rather than threatening them ?
The scholar Surekha Davies (whose work inspired this entire piece) proposes something she calls "monstrofuturism." A monster-centered ethics that accepts, welcomes, and celebrates human variety instead of insisting we live in fixed, discrete boxes.
Human difference doesn't have to be mapped onto a hierarchy. Some people aren't "more people" than others.
A better future would be one where people's sense of self isn't pinned to fixed ideas about what they are. Where we're all wonderful monsters—but not monstrous .
My Aha Moment
I'll tell you when this all clicked for me.
I was reading about the portraits in Schloss Ambras—those Renaissance "curiosities" displayed like objects. And I realized: the only difference between them and me is time and geography.
In another era, I'd be in that collection. The guy in the wheelchair. The "cripple." The one whose body doesn't work "right."
But here's the thing: my body doesn't define my humanity. Neither does yours. Neither does anyone's.
The boundaries we draw between human and monster, between us and them, between normal and abnormal—they're arbitrary. Made up. Enforced by whoever has power at that particular moment.
And that means we can draw them differently.
Or maybe—and this is the radical part—we can stop drawing them at all.
Why This Matters Now
I started this blog post talking about monsters. But really, I'm talking about war and peace.
Because monstrification is how we justify violence. It's how we convince ourselves that "those people" don't deserve life, dignity, safety. That they're not really human.
I'm European. I want peace in Ukraine now. I support all peace efforts. And I condemn violence and extremism from every political side.
Why? Because I've seen what happens when we start calling people monsters.
It never ends well. Not for them. Not for us. Not for anyone.
The moment we say someone isn't fully human, we've already lost our own humanity.
The Question I Leave You With
So here's what I want you to think about.
Who are the monsters in your world? Not the fictional ones—the real people you've been taught to fear, to exclude, to see as fundamentally different from yourself.
And then ask: who taught you to see them that way? What do they gain from your fear?
The boundaries of humanity have always been blurry, moving, and contested. They've been drawn and redrawn by whoever held power.
But you have power too. The power to recognize monstrification. To refuse it. To draw those boundaries more generously—or to recognize that maybe we don't need them at all.
Because in the end, we're all just people. Messy, complicated, beautifully different people.
Some of us walk. Some of us roll. Some of us see. Some of us don't. Some of us think in patterns that others can't understand. Some of us love in ways that confuse the majority.
But we're all human. Every single one of us.
The monster is the system that says otherwise.
This deep dive into the history of exclusion was written for you by Gerd Dani at Free Astroscience, where we make complex ideas accessible to everyone. If this made you think, share it. If it made you uncomfortable, even better. That's where change begins.
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