Braidotti (2025) argues that AI-driven transhumanism erases human diversity by classifying non-normative bodies as “noise.” This article accepts her diagnosis of structural exclusion but challenges her prescriptions. Prosthetic and augmentation technologies may dissolve the very axes of exclusion Braidotti identifies—sex, race, and disability—by rendering bodily characteristics subject to individual choice. The Proteus effect, whereby altered self-representation transforms behaviour, becomes irreversible through permanent prosthetic embodiment. Yet this liberation generates a new exclusionary axis: as augmentation becomes structurally compulsory, the unaugmented face quiet displacement through market forces and actuarial logic rather than overt discrimination. As the treatment–enhancement distinction collapses, this structural pressure—which this article terms crawling selection—renders the choice to remain unaugmented increasingly untenable. Braidotti’s exclusion thesis is not wrong; the axis of exclusion rotates. This article proposes two correctives: a shift from static to dynamic tracking of exclusionary axes and the institutional protection of a right to remain unaugmented—the logical consequence of Braidotti’s own affirmative ethics of becoming.
