There’s a dangerous piece of legislation creeping forward in the UK: yet another round of trans activists attempting to slip gender ideology into the law books by stealth, hiding behind the language of banning gay conversion therapy. Canada went through an almost-identical ordeal a few years ago. I was very active in that particular debate. (I almost testified before Canada’s Parliament amid that debate, which the trans activists ultimately won.)

The UK’s new “Conversion practices draft bill” has been covered brilliantly at Sonia Sodha’s substack, as well as Sarah Phillimore’s. And Dennis Kavanagh and Helen Joyce of Sex Matters had a wee natter about it on video here.

So it’s already very well covered in terms of the UK’s legal-expert, gender-critical perspective.

Still, I’ve got a bit of added perspective I’d like to toss into the discourse…

The identity part of “gender identity”

The problem, as I see it, is the “identity” part of “gender identity”.

The debate focuses so much around the word “gender”, that “identity” tends to slip right under the radar. Which is weird when you think about it, because the gender part really isn’t an issue.

Debates about gender expression are long gone. No one cares anymore about women wearing pants and not shaving their arm and leg hair, or men wearing blouses and painting their fingernails, or whatever.

The difference between the past and the present is that now we’ve hitched people’s fluid and diverse manners of personal “gender expression” to a rigid collection of distinct, sacred & holy “gender identity” categories.

Tomboys are now said to be literally boys; femininity in young boys means they’re literally female, or at least something so close to it that only a heretic would venture to disagree. Et cetera.

(To boot, we then convinced everyone that some of these categories necessitate supposedly life-saving medical “treatments”, and then we declared that no one is allowed to question anyone’s vibes about their magic “identity” categories.)

In a sense, “gender identities” have a lot in common with the religious/cultural/ethnic concept of castes. They are socially constructed categories whose relevance is derived from a cultural system of belief rather than any material basis of distinction: the difference between a man and a “trans woman” is, quite literally, purely a matter of tribal/identitarian feelings. The exact same can be said for the difference between a Brahmin and a Dalit — an “Untouchable”.

And we’ve always known that it’s very risky to inject such concepts into the language of legislation.

We’ve been down this road before. Let’s not do it again.

The UK has explicitly grappled with this issue over the past decade and a half. Discrimination against people based on their perceived “caste” is obviously bad and should be prohibited by law. Virtually everyone agrees on this. But the problem is, by explicitly, legally naming caste as a freestanding protected characteristic, the government risks making the category of caste look official, stable, and administratively real.

Following a landmark 2014 employment tribunal over caste discrimination — Chandhok & Anor v. Tirkey — the UK government undertook a public consultation to determine if caste should be addressed solely through case-law under the existing anti-race and anti-religion discrimination framework, or if it should instead be promoted to its own explicit legal protection category within the UK’s definitive anti-discrimination charter, the one we’re all familiar with by now: the Equality Act 2010.

In 2018, the results of the consultation were released, and the response was overwhelmingly opposed to entrenching “caste” as a legislatively salient category separate from existing case-law surrouding ethnic, religious, and racial discrimination. The reasons cited included the argument that caste is almost impossible to define, and that naming it might perversely incentivize employers, universities, landlords, and other agencies to explicitly ask people about their caste status.

Arguments about caste are taking place across North America, too. For one example, in 2023, California Governor Gavin Newsom vetoed legislation that attempted to add caste as an explicit protected characteristic, and he cited more-or-less the same reasons for opposing it.

(Let me play devil’s advocate for a moment. There is a respectable argument for naming caste explicitly in law: because caste is such an ambiguous and shape-shifting concept, some hypothetical cases of caste discrimination may not fit neatly into the protected characteristics recognized under the UK Equality Act 2010, such as race — including ethnic or national origins — or religion or belief. I’m sympathetic to that concern. But it still doesn’t persuade me that caste should be given a legal status of its own. There are obvious drawbacks which just can’t be overcome. It’s better, I think, to argue more carefully at the case-law level, and to stretch existing protections where necessary, than to give caste a freestanding legal life of its own.)

You will officially have a caste/gender identity whether you like it or not

Another argument for keeping caste out of legislation is that it essentially associates South Asians with the caste system whether they like it or not. Which is why the overwhelming majority of Hindus and South Asians who responded to the UK consultation were opposed to reifying it in the language of law.

Many LGB people feel exactly the same way about the government entrenching “gender identity” in law: it’s a hazy, spiritual concept that is strongly associated with us in the public imagination, but which many of us don’t want to be forcibly associated with. Gays who oppose the whole gender identity ideology are in many ways a lot like South Asians and Hindus living in the UK who oppose the caste system: we are a subgroup within a minority group, who are at risk of discrimination because the outside majority fails to recognize and protect us, instead just assuming we’re okay by default with this categorization system that they incorrectly perceive to be representative of everyone within our minority category.

There’s one big difference between caste and gender identity, though: “gender identity” proponents want to see the label reified in law beacuse it confers advantages to its believers at the expense of everyone else — they benefit from it. There is a sizeable activist group who want their identity to be forced on everyone else. Whereas with caste, it’s the opposite: there is a sizeable activist group who want out of the discrimination they face because caste is imposed on them against their wishes. It’s lower castes who have it imposed on them, whereas with gender activists, it’s everyone else, ordinary men and women not involved in “GenderWorld” and just trying to go about their business, who end up losing their rights.

The draft bill to “ban conversion therapy practices” is a trojan horse campaign, mounted by extremist “gender identity” true believers, whose primary objective is to insert their mystical concept of gender identity into law, thereby reifying it and making it “official” and “real”, and forcing everyone else in the country to play along with their personal way of dividing and organizing and categorizing and grouping society.

Those who oppose this legislation should be bringing forward the parallels with caste legislation, and driving home the point that this is driven by a quasi-religious activist group that is motivated to impose its own discriminatory worldview on everyone else — even after we’ve demonstrated over and over again that it’s entirely “vibes-based” (as Sonia Sodha calls it) — spiritual mumbo-jumbo that lacks even the slightest bit of material evidence to back it up.

Social “identities” are not fit for legislation

It’s clear that the concept of “gender identity” — like the concept of caste — is unfit to be amended into the Equality Act 2010 itself. With respect to caste, the Government Equalities Office’s 2017 public consultation and subsequent 2018 conclusion put an end to it. With respect to “gender identity”, last year’s Supreme Court verdict killed it. But the trans activists, obsessed extremists they are, have regrouped, and they are now trying to sneak their worldview into the law books through the back door, because they know that they can’t get past the bouncers out in front.

It’s useful to note that the Equality Act 2010 did grant special protected status to “gender reassignment” rather than “gender identity”. That’s explicitly because gender reassignment — so-called “sex change” medical treatment — can be delineated via material actions and measurable conditions in a way that self-declared “gender identities” cannot. This is fundamental legal philosophy — law 101: don’t create loopholes by introducing laws that are based upon private belief categories for which there is no recourse to materially challenge them. To do otherwise is to create a charlatan’s playbook. Plainly: leave the word “identity” entirely out of legislation. Legislate around actions and material, measurable, falsifiable, independently verifiable conditions. Did you actually get a sex change? OK, your boss can’t fire you for having done so. (Your boss still doesn’t have to pretend your sex has literally changed, though. The protection you have is that you can’t be fired simply because you went out and got yourself some “sex change” “treatment” — and that’s about it.) On the other hand, did you just show up one day and announce you’re a they/them and then demand special accommodations and exemptions from the workplace rules of conduct? Yeah, no, I call shenanigans. You’re free to believe whatever you want about yourself (that’s existing freedom of belief law for you) and you’re free to associate with others who share your belief (that’s existing freedom of religion law for you), but there’s no justification to elevate your personal beliefs about your “gender identity” above the rules that society already has in place for such matters.

In short: don’t legislate around people’s personal “identities”. Legislate to protect, say, same-sex sexual and romantic acts, sure; don’t legally reify personal social identity labels that are vague and self-defined. And don’t legislate to override plain-obvious materially factual and salient categories such as male and female. Making it illegal to question or challenge people’s personal private “identity” beliefs plainly violates basic principles of secular law.

Let’s remind people of the parallels with caste legislation when we’re arguing and campaigning against this new bill.

Postscript: let’s also not shift the overton window around gay conversion therapy

Let’s also not forget that gay “conversion therapy” is a real issue that still matters. Here in North America, we are more sensitive about religious discrimination, because it’s more out in the open here, compared to in the UK. The question of whether gay “conversion therapy” is harmful is settled: it is absolutely and deeply psychologically harmful, even in the contemporary, relatively “softer” form of talk therapy that happens today, compared to the terrible old days of actual physical electroshock treatment that homosexuals were once subjected to. That is separate from the question of how best to address the ongoing issue of gay “conversion” practices in society — particularly in religious communities — and whether or not government legislation in the current environment is a reasonable measure for society to take at this time. I addressed that in a post here, if you’re interested. (TL;DR: yes it’s an issue; it’s ambiguous how prevalent it is, but it definitely still happens and it matters; however, now is a terrible time to try and address it legislatively because of the current political “gender” climate.)

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Another year. Winter’s thaw has begun. The dirty snowbanks that flanked Toronto’s roads have melted. And for certain media gays, it means Oscar season has come and gone once again.

Now we’re left to pick over the last year’s supposedly most celebrated films — most of which most of us surely missed on the big screen. Now it’s spring, and those otherwise barely-seen titles trickle down into our various streaming subscriptions, where they serve as advertising cornerstones: enticements to let their exclusive platforms quietly keep slipping $13.95 or so per month out of our bank accounts.

Post-Oscars is when HBO, Netflix, MUBI, and the rest of the channels flatter our artsy egos — nudging us to concede that membership with them is a cultural necessity, worth roughly the price of one more Negroni each month. Or they at least endeavour to make the math feel fuzzy enough that cancelling seems vaguely irresponsible.

About $15 a month adds up. But then again, isn’t the intellectual cachet worth it? Is one extra Cosmo really all that much to a cultivated cosmopolitan like you?

Of course, deep down we all know it: intellectual, cultural FOMO is the real product on offer. All tallied, those subscriptions add up to billions. And those billions in turn ride on the idea that they confer a cultural “product” that signals importance.

Hence, Hamnet.

There’s big money riding on this ostensibly modest character study of Agnes Hathaway, bride of Shakespeare. In truth, there’s nothing modest about it — either in substance or in context. It’s a product of the corporate side of Hollywood, through and through.

I didn’t enjoy it. (Despite Jessie Buckley’s undeniably great performance, and Paul Mescal’s undeniable sexual attractiveness.) My dislike of the film should not surprise anyone who knows me. Or really, anyone who’s read enough reviews of it. There’s a consensus in certain cinema cicles that the film wasn’t much more than gussied-up “grief porn”.

But there’s another line of criticism of the film: that of its treatment of Shakespeare’s work itself.

My dear friend Sky is far better equipped than I am to address the even bigger problem with Hamnet: its abuse of the Bard, his legacy, and his written work.

I read Sky’s review with the pleasant recognition that he knows far more than I do — and just enough evidence to convince me I’d agree with him even more if I were as versed in the Shakespeare as he is. (Plus I laughed at “Sappy happy Shakesepare in Love” and “Bardolatry”.)

I know Sky in person, and I know that the more you argue with him, the more convincing he is.

Sky’s a well-known writer in these parts. I’d call him a gay Canadian cultural icon and an intellect with old-school clout and seasoned input into the gender debate — a topic about which he’s spoken fearlessly and honestly, and because of which he’s suffered abuse from the puritans in our midst.

Please do head over to Sky’s brand new Substack, give subscribe and follow, read his review of Hamnet, and while you’re there, you can also read his review of two recent “gender-critical” (for lack of a better term) books written by gay men…

Fox Varian is a 22-year-old woman who underwent breast removal surgery at just sixteen. As a teen, she struggled with severe mental distress and identified as transgender. She has since detransitioned and filed a medical malpractice lawsuit against the psychologist who approved the surgery, as well as the surgeon who performed it. This week, the trial concluded and the jury ruled in her favour, awarding her two million dollars in damages. It’s the first time a detransitioner’s legal case has gone before a jury, and the victory is being hailed as a landmark decision by detransitioners’ rights advocates, medical ethicists, women’s rights advocates, children’s rights advocates, and gay rights advocates. I would count myself in more than one of those categories.

I hope the circumstances of this particular case are not unique — that the patient’s particulars are universal enough across most detransitioners that many, many others can sue and win in court on the strength of this precedent.

But there are details that give me pause. Things like this make me worry. Per the Epoch Times:

Neither side is questioning whether such surgeries are appropriate for minors: Varian’s attorneys are arguing that she was not a proper candidate for the procedure, and that Einhorn and Chin [the psychologist and surgeon, respectively] failed to recognize that.

So the case is less about whether so-called “gender-affirming care” is legally negligent, but rather whether failure to follow its supposed rules “appropriately” is. Per the National Review:

The case did not challenge the general propriety of such “care” of minors with gender dysphoria, but alleged it was not appropriate in Fox’s particular case.

That’s presumably referring to the transgender “standards of care”, as laid out by various activist groups roleplaying as serious medical authorities, like WPATH, the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (formerly known as, if I recall correctly, ACCPTBDIATPTBW, or A Couple Crossdressers Pretending To Be Doctors In Addition To Pretending To Be Women).

This, to me, adds a note of concern alongside the celebration. Because the transgender “standards of care” were made-up nonsense to begin with! Who cares if they were or weren’t “appropriately” followed? What we should care about is whether the universal standards of care and the universal standards of reason were applied — the Hippocratic Oath, and the universal principles of human rights.

Alas, this is how law often works. It anchors itself to any “recognized” authority or any “formal” standard it can point to, and then measures individual cases against that benchmark. Instead of confronting first principles directly, it prefers to import them second-hand. Philosophical, ethical, and epistemological questions — what is true, what is right, what is justified — get pushed outward and delegated to whoever can successfully present themselves as an authority. The legal process then limits itself to checking whether a case conforms to those borrowed standards, rather than asking whether the standards themselves deserve to exist.

Fake it ‘til you make it: the transgender mantra

In the case of “gender-affirming care,” activists understood this structural weakness in the legal system and reverse-engineered their authority around it: they crafted an ersatz “standard of care” tailored to the system’s demand for a benchmark, with the express objective of acquiring legal force through recognition alone. Once installed, it became the yardstick courts and medical and standards-setting authorities have used, because the system would rather compare conduct to an accepted rulebook than examine whether the rulebook is grounded in reality.

The deeper problem is the circularity this creates. Courts borrow their standards from outside authorities rather than grounding them in first principles — but once a court rules on the basis of those borrowed standards, society then turns around and treats the ruling itself as authoritative. The prestige of the legal system retroactively blesses whatever framework it deferred to in the first place. A standard that entered the courtroom on borrowed credibility leaves with institutional credibility stamped on it.

That is a laundering mechanism. Weak or partisan frameworks can pass through the legal system and emerge wearing the costume of settled legitimacy. The public hears “the court upheld it” and assumes the underlying principles were tested, when in fact only procedural conformity was tested.

At that point, one of two things must be true. Either society is wrong to treat legal judgments as morally or epistemically authoritative — since the system explicitly declines to ground its decisions in first principles — or the legal system is failing in its duty by accepting that authority while refusing to do the philosophical and factual homework that would justify it.

Authority is being claimed somewhere without the corresponding burden being carried anywhere.

As is always the case with transgender anything, everyone assumes someone else already did the homework, because too few people are willing and able to do it themselves. It’s a prejudice of a certain kind — a squeamishness, and a studied avoidance, dare I say a phobia, of the t word. Surely there’s a term for that kind of prejudice…

Benjamin Ryan (@ , benryan.substack.com), a journalist who, to his credit, doggedly covers the transgender beat and, to his detriment, can be exasperatingly naïve, has the exclusive details of this story. He was apparently the only journalist to cover the entire three-week trial in White Plains, New York, and he also has exclusive access to the full legal filings. He’s preparing a major piece for publication. I’m waiting for his reporting for additional details; I’m sure there will be plenty of nuggets. (Here’s hoping I won’t cringe too hard at his naïve spin on them.)

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I. Blame the Editors

The UK press is years ahead of its North American counterpart in its reckoning with the cultural car crash of “transgender”. It’s by no means perfect — the Brits still have much work to do before the scandal is behind them — but already, reading the overseas coverage feels surreal, like seeing into the future. I’m reminded of the ‘90s comedy-fantasy-drama TV series Early Edition, in which tomorrow’s newspaper arrives on Kyle Chandler’s doorstep a day early.

Consider this piece from the Telegraph. Compared to the North American press, Michael Deacon sounds as if he’s not just in another time zone a few hours ahead of us, but in another time a few years ahead of us, with an assessment that will sound shocking to North American readers, but shouldn’t:

How did something as self-evidently bonkers as trans ideology gain such a powerful grip over our society? Over our politics, our universities, the BBC and countless other institutions? Funnily enough, the people I blame most are not the fanatics who actually believe in this nonsense — for the simple reason that there are, in reality, very few of them.

No, I think the real blame lies with a group of people who are rather more numerous. That is: the cowards who just went silently along with it all, or even pretended to believe in it, because they didn’t dare speak out.

Deacon’s right to point a finger at the ordinary people who went along with the transgender phenomenon. They saw where the conversation was heading and didn’t see much personal benefit in pushing against it. So they kept their mouths shut.

But laying the blame squarely on the crowd stops at the symptom, not the cause.

Compliance of that scale has a psychology. People gauge the social temperature. They pay attention to the tempo of a room — how a raised eyebrow can close a topic, how an awkward silence tells you to move on, how a single off-key remark can mark someone as difficult.

Such customs and taboos don’t originate in the crowd. They’re shaped by cues issued from farther upstream — cues that signal what’s respectable, what’s fringe, and what’s unsafe to say out loud. Once those cues settle, responsibility disperses. People tell themselves they’re just keeping the peace, when in fact they’re helping to cement norms whose validity they never seriously examined — the kind that are later seen as obvious mistakes, even disasters, once the consequences come due. Each individual assumes it’s someone else’s problem, until one day it’s everyone’s.

Right now, the institution that sets the beat is the media. There’s feedback, of course — applause and indifference matter — but tempo and selection still run downward, as they do from a DJ to a dancefloor. What gets played, what gets skipped, and what never makes it onto the floor at all reflects the judgment of those controlling the sound system. Follow the transgender beat and you arrive at the liberal legacy press — and above all at the editorial heads of its North American institutions.

Even today, with information flowing freely, the power to interpret it, to separate the signal from the noise, to make meaning out of it, remains highly centralized. The public may gather facts on its own, but it still looks to a few institutions to decide which ones matter — and what story they add up to.

To see how that authority came to shape the trans debate, it’s worth stepping back to get our bearings.

The origins of “gender identity”

The media didn’t invent transgender ideology. Its doctrines emerged from the performative language games of liberal-arts academia — postmodern queer theory — which drew many fetishistic transvestites into its orbit. Within that framework, the notion of an innate “gender identity” served as a pseudoscientific reframing of a sexual paraphilia — a persistent and intense sexual urge or fantasy. It replaced the uncomfortable reality of autogynephilia with a more accommodating narrative — one that redirected attention away from atypical sexual proclivities and toward identity, shielding cross-dressing men from embarrassment and from serious scrutiny.

Within the academy itself, queer theory operated as a kind of parlour game: clever, transgressive, and insulated from real-world consequences. The rules were tacitly understood, at least at first. This was wordplay and provocation, a way to signal sophistication and score points within a narrow intellectual milieu. Nobody said it out loud, but most of the players understood that none of it was meant to be taken literally.

The trouble began when those ideas escaped that context and entered the real world, where they hardened into truth claims, then moral imperatives, and eventually into a sprawling medical and bureaucratic apparatus built around real human bodies, with real and irreversible consequences.

That spread was greatly accelerated following the invention of the iPhone. Millions of teenagers were handed smartphones and left to congregate largely unsupervised on social media platforms like Tumblr and Reddit, where ordinary adolescent anxieties about sex and identity collided with the abstractions of queer theory. En masse, young people began to ruminate over their supposedly “wrong” bodies, coalescing into a patchwork of online tribes with competing interpretations of sex, sexuality, and what came to be called “gender identity”. They adopted names — like tucute (pronounced “too cute”), truscum (“true scum”), transmaxxer, enby (N.B., or non-binary), genderqueer, and countless more — that didn’t reflect aesthetic styles, but doctrinal positions.

Unlike earlier subcultures from the pre-digital age — rock-and-roll rebellion, punk, goth, or emo — this new, online-centred cluster of movements did not primarily signal alienation through clothes, music, or attitude. It signalled it through belief — more religion than fashion. A digital counterculture almost has to take this form. In a culture mediated entirely by text and screens, belief is the most legible form of identity. After all, online life is not organized around shared physical spaces or visible styles, but around discourse: arguments, assertions, moral claims, and theories that attempt to make sense of an increasingly disembodied social world. These movements’ adherents have not merely opted out of mainstream taste; they have rejected material reality as an authority, treating the biological constraints of the human body as obstacles understood to be literally surmountable through rhetoric, dedicated activism, and increasingly, medical intervention. They took the queer theorists’ writings as religious texts, read with deadly seriousness and without irony.

By now, estimates range from roughly 1.5% to 5% of Americans and Canadians under 30 identifying as transgender, with far higher concentrations in certain liberal enclaves. In some liberal-arts institutions, reports suggest that a majority — sometimes nearly the entirety — of a student body now claims to have “discovered” that they are trans.

A vast medical infrastructure has risen to cater to this new market. “Gender clinics” have sprouted across the continent, generating billions in revenue by prescribing lifelong drug regimens and performing surgeries that permanently alter healthy bodies and frequently result in sterility. These interventions involve the irreversible removal, reconstruction, or chemical suppression of normal human organs, often in patients who are young, distressed, and highly suggestible.

Physical and psychological harm has been done to tens of thousands of vulnerable young people — quite possibly more than a hundred thousand by now.

At the same time that transgender identification emerged as a novel mass phenomenon among young people, the original adult male population from which transgender ideology first emerged — men with an eroticized internal self-concept of “womanhood” — underwent an explosive expansion into public life. Men who had previously kept cross-dressing practices in private began, in numbers never before seen, to demand recognition not merely as transgender, but as actual women in law and material fact — a categorical shift in how sex itself was defined and enforced. The consequences have been far-reaching, particularly for women’s rights, gay rights, and freedom of speech, as private self-conceptions were elevated into public, legal, and institutional demands.

The media’s responsibility

That brings us back to the main question: who’s chiefly responsible for the trans craze? Universities generated it; social media amplified it; the medical-industrial complex capitalized on it. But it was legacy media that normalized it.

In the editorial boardrooms of print and broadcast media, a consequential decision was made: to treat the transgender phenomenon not as a volatile, internet-borne social trend demanding careful scrutiny, but as a moral cause to be endorsed and advanced. Editors chose to frame it not as a mental-health crisis or cultural contagion — akin to the 1990s Multiple Personalities craze, or the 1980s Satanic Panic that preceded it — but as the next chapter in progressive liberation politics, a successor to earlier civil-rights narratives that their audiences already revered. Something like Gay Rights 2.0. Once that framing was set, long-standing tribal allegiances locked in. Dissent became incomprehensible, and healthy skepticism registered as ignorant bigotry.

That decision right there is what inflated trans into a full-blown pandemic, when it could have otherwise been contained while it was still just a concerning outbreak.

Those most responsible1 are:

• David Remnick, longtime Editor of The New Yorker

• Dean Baquet and Joe Kahn, the former and current Executive Editors of the New York Times, respectively

• Edith Chapin and Thomas Evans, former and current Editors-In-Chief of NPR, respectively

• Brodie Fenlon, General manager and Editor in chief of CBC News

• Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, and Trevor Noah of late-night liberal “comedy news”. Though not editors by title, these television hosts consciously accumulated audience trust and came to function as de facto editorial authorities shaping the liberal news narrative.

(Honourable mention goes to Kath Viner, longtime Editor-In-Chief at The Guardian — which is technically a British outlet, so I’ll leave it off the list because this is about North American media. But it’s clear that The Guardian’s editorial stance caters to an American liberal readership.)

Over in the UK, there are signs that a long-delayed reckoning in the legacy media may finally be beginning. In November, the BBC’s top brass — Director-General Tim Davie and BBC Head of News Deborah Turness — resigned following the leak of an internal memo that was sent to the Board of Directors, alleging serious bias in the BBC’s reporting on transgender politics, among other issues. The memo, and subsequent media reports following its release, uncovered an organized faction of trans activists inside the Beeb who schemed to systematically suppress news that was unfavourable to their cause and to advance puff pieces that were favourable to it. Since the departures at the top, the BBC has vowed it will take concrete steps to correct its biased reporting on trans-related issues.

But this side of the pond, there are as yet no known course-corrections afoot at any of the major liberal media outlets.

What matters most here is not just that these editors made the wrong call, but that their institutional authority allowed them to make it stick.

Old Media vs. New Media: The Lords vs. the Commons

I’m inclined towards a Malcolm Gladwell-ian view of the editors’ role in perpetuating the trans craze, borrowing some of his ideas from The Tipping Point.

I’m generally ambivalent about the “airport nonfiction” genre — pop-sociology tomes like Freakonomics or Blink — but Gladwell’s Tipping Point does contain a useful insight into how trends form and persist. I don’t necessarily buy his typology of “mavens,” “connectors,” and “salesmen” in the particulars, but the underlying idea holds: certain well-positioned actors exert outsized influence in establishing, legitimizing, and sustaining ideas.

In that sense — as a small set of well-positioned actors exerting disproportionate influence — the legacy liberal media still wields enormous and excessive power over mainstream liberal politics. People continue to treat institutions like The New York Times, The New Yorker, NPR, and the CBC, along with quasi-institutions like The Daily Show, as arbiters of legitimacy, using them to gauge the “baseline temperature” of liberal society. The digital landscape has splintered and reorganized how people consume information, but these legacy outlets remain the final word on what counts as respectable discourse. And because their authority is so entrenched, their misjudgments can have outsized consequences.

The New York Times’s credulous reporting in the lead-up to the Second Gulf War, for example, wasn’t just a mistake in hindsight; it was a failure that legitimized a manufactured consensus at the moment it should have been interrogated. The U.S. invaded Iraq over a lie about Saddam Hussein possessing weapons of mass destruction — a claim presented as settled fact rather than an extraordinary assertion requiring extraordinary scrutiny. Once the Times waved it through, much of the liberal media ecosystem followed, and this played no small part in the years of bloody Middle East conflict that ensued.

Trans ideology is, in this sense, the Iraqi W.M.D. boondoggle all over again: a fictitious claim laundered into orthodoxy by elite media institutions — the same cycle, only we have not yet reached the turn back toward reality, nor the difficult reckoning that follows, at least in North America.

There’s a loose structural parallel here to the UK Parliament’s two chambers. The House of Lords acts as a staid moderating chamber to the more impulsive House of Commons. Legacy media plays a comparable role in relation to the sprawling new-media ecosystem — not because anyone designed it that way, but because decades of accumulated cultural authority make it an unofficial upper chamber of liberal discourse. It acts as a brake, a filter, a certifying body. New ideas, analyses, and political shifts don’t truly enter the “official” conversation until they’ve been sanctioned by these institutional voices. The problem is that when this self-appointed upper chamber errs, its mistakes reverberate through our entire society. Its stabilizing function can become a distorting one.

In principle, editorial curation serves truth. It exists to exclude claims that deny reality, reject evidence, or falsify history. Holocaust denial belongs outside respectable discourse for exactly this reason: it repudiates settled fact and attempts to erase reality through assertion. The distortion begins when that gatekeeping function is inverted — when curation stops serving truth and starts serving ego: in this case, a self-flattering mythology cultivated by an editorial class convinced of its own historical nobility. With respect to the transgender debate, editors stopped weighing claims against evidence and instead enforced a preferred narrative, allowing sympathy for people caught up in the trans subculture to outrun careful editorial judgment.

Transgender ideology is uniquely suited to this inversion because it frames participation in its narrative as a moral obligation rather than something to be tested against reality. Institutions are expected to treat self-declaration as more authoritative than observable facts. Disagreement is no longer examined or argued with; it is treated as a kind of moral contamination.

The “gender-critical” position — which I subscribe to, and which liberal media elites decidedly do not — does not deny reality; it insists upon it, pointing to biological sex as an observable constraint that self-selected “gender identities” cannot simply will away. Treating reality-denial and reality-insistence as morally equivalent is not moral seriousness. It is the abdication of editorial judgment in favour of ideological loyalty.

Every upper chamber justifies its authority with a story about restraint, wisdom, and historical responsibility. The editorial class is no different. Liberal media editors fancy themselves sage guardians of the long, centuries-spanning civil rights project — defenders of the steady march of progress against the capricious “commons” which occasionally threatens to steer us off course. It is this self-image that has driven the editors to deliberately sideline the gender-critical perspective, pressing their thumbs on the scale so hard against it that everyday liberals take the cue and treat criticism of trans ideology as unmentionable.

Having assumed this upper-chamber role, legacy media no longer merely reports on reality. Its judgments are meant to guide downstream behavior. They function as instructions for how reality should be treated.

A fork in the road: defect to the right or stay silent?

As the public slowly comes to its senses about the scale of what’s been allowed to unfold, it’s become obvious that the legacy media completely botched the transgender story. It misreported, moralized, and then insisted everyone pretend otherwise.

As trust erodes, liberal audiences have begun to respond in two distinct ways. Some leave loudly, exiting the ecosystem altogether. Others stay put and learn to keep quiet, suppressing views they suspect are widely shared but officially disfavoured.

For those who leave, loss of trust doesn’t remain confined to a single issue. When a trusted outlet is seen to misrepresent reality on an issue this fundamental, its credibility collapses wholesale, as disillusioned audiences begin to question its reliability in general. They seek alternatives they believe will speak candidly about trans issues, and they shift their allegiances toward “heterodox” new-media outlets (e.g., Substack), or to right-wing outlets — podcasts, mostly — that are willing to challenge liberal orthodoxies on “gender identity.”

By speaking honestly about the trans issue in a way legacy outlets refused to, the heterodox Substack middle earned its credibility on the merits. The right and far-right, by contrast, acquired an unearned credibility surplus — a trust windfall created by the trans issue — and it was promptly spent beyond its warrant. Right-wing podcasts used that surplus to legitimize claims about public health, geopolitics, and democratic institutions as a whole, that ranged from shaky to outright indefensible. In this way, the liberal media’s mismanagement of the transgender beat hasn’t merely driven audiences away; it has effectively subsidized new forms of misinformation. By forfeiting trust where it mattered most, legacy outlets created the conditions under which credibility could migrate — and be misused.

Its extreme editorial bias has alienated moderates, centrists, and even many dyed-in-the-wool liberals (myself included), accelerating its own decline. There’s a bitter irony here: in trying so hard to appear hip to a social-media-driven fad, legacy media only succeeded in making itself seem even more out of touch.

Not everyone has defected to right-wing podcasts or the heterodox new media ecosystem. The liberal legacy media’s audience remains large and influential. But among those who stay, a substantial number are privately skeptical of the more extreme claims of trans ideology.

Because they don’t see their views reflected in the pages of The New York Times or the monologues of late-night television, they begin to doubt themselves. Perhaps they’re mistaken; perhaps they’re alone. And so they keep quiet — among friends, family, and colleagues.

More than any other factor across society, the liberal media’s hostile editorial stance toward the gender-critical perspective has sent a clear signal: views critical of transgender orthodoxy should be treated as germinal, fringe, and career-limiting. Not to be aired in public. Not to be defended aloud. Not safe for work.

This is despite the overwhelming scientific evidence on the gender-critical side — not to mention the overwhelming evidence that ours is the majority view, even among liberal progressives. Poll after poll shows that trans ideology is broadly unpopular once respondents are asked about its concrete claims rather than vague expressions of sympathy for “trans people” in the abstract. When questions turn to specifics — males in female sports, or the medicalization of children — support collapses.

What results is a classic case of preference falsification: a majority view that appears marginal because those who hold it have been trained to believe they are alone, and to behave accordingly. Such equilibria can persist for years. But they are inherently brittle. When the gap between public conformity and private belief grows too wide, the illusion of consensus tends to collapse abruptly — as in East Germany in 1989, when decades of enforced public compliance with the state gave way, almost overnight, to open defiance and the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Common sense: the enemy of the people

Not only have we got the weight of science plus a decidedly non-vocal majority behind us, our view is also overwhelmingly backed by basic common sense. But, you see, in the minds of many liberal elites, that’s a minus, not a plus.

In fact, it’s because transgender ideology runs counter to common sense that it’s been embraced and zealously guarded by liberal media gatekeepers. Common sense is the domain of the great unwashed. The boondocks. The Bible Belt. If an explanation is simple enough for the masses, the thinking goes, it can’t be the whole story. A more intricate theory must be closer to the truth. Complexity is often right, after all. During the Scopes Monkey Trial, creationists clung to a blunt certainty — “We’re made in God’s image” — while the scientific account of natural selection was more complex, counterintuitive, and intellectually demanding. But the lesson of Scopes is not that complexity always wins, only that sometimes it does. The danger lies in turning that observation into a rule. Many liberals have absorbed the pattern as a heuristic: the more thinky, the more true. Complexity becomes its own credential, and certainty in the simple view is dismissed reflexively, whether justified or not.

Applying that logic to trans ideology, the liberal gatekeepers sided with the people selling them postmodernist dreck about sex being an unknowable, mystical spectrum rather than a material, biological binary because, hey, that’s such an abstract, intellectual idea, it must be more true than the sex binary that’s so plainly visible to the commoners.

This reflex has a history — one rooted in how liberals have long understood their moral and intellectual relationship to conservatism. Since the Progressive Era, when reform movements made social betterment a mass moral project rather than a niche philosophical concern, liberals have framed the liberal–conservative divide on social issues (setting economics aside) as a struggle between high-minded, reasoned, abstract thinking and low-minded, gut-level, emotional reaction. By the mid-20th century, that framing had become the dominant template: anti-Black and anti-gay biases were cast as instinctual flaws — primal fears surrounding racial and sexual minorities. The African American Civil Rights Movement and the Gay Rights Movement were framed as correctives to these flaws: appeals to people’s higher faculties, meant to override their baser impulses.

Progressivism, in this telling, becomes a collective effort of moral and intellectual elevation — a joint undertaking by the enlightened to shepherd society toward a higher plane. It follows, then, that liberal media gatekeepers imagine their role as pulling the majority up and away from its irrational anxieties and fears about minorities, for the betterment of all mankind.

It’s not that this story is wrong, broadly speaking. On many social questions, progressivism really was right and conservatism really was wrong. The mistake is treating that historical pattern as a law of nature. Even if liberals’ abstract, intellectual arguments have usually beaten conservatives’ knee-jerk reactions in the past, there’s no guarantee this will always be so. Sometimes common sense is genuinely sensible. And sometimes the supposedly high-minded, intellectual take is a mirage — not wisdom, but a bout of toxic, neurotic overthinking.

Thinking ourselves into knots

Transgender ideology is nothing if not an epic bout of overthinking about sex. Clarence Darrow, who defended evolutionary biology against religious dogma at the Scopes trial, would spin in his grave to see that today’s elite liberals have effectively switched sides — they cling to a new superstition and lash out at biology.

What changed isn’t the science, it’s the political psychology. Progressive politics began to run out of enemies. Gay rights was a genuine and deeply cherished victory among liberals, and after equal rights were secured in law — quite literally, following the Supreme Court’s Obergefell and Bostock rulings — the movement faced an uncomfortable question: what now? Rather than declaring victory and standing down, it expanded. New letters were added to the Alphabet Soup, the whole enterprise was rebranded as “queer,” and its mandate widened dramatically. When the movement eventually turned its pitchforks on biological sex itself, it was likely because biology is an opponent that can be reliably depended on to stick around forever. A war against human nature is a war that never ends — and, subconsciously, that permanence seems to appeal to some. It offers a reliable psychological payoff: perpetual struggle supplies meaning, while an ending would force a reckoning with what comes next. Thus, the movement is spared the difficult work of inhabiting a moral landscape without obvious villains, where triumph would require restraint rather than escalation.

Moments like these are reminders of why common sense still matters. It’s a necessary counterweight to our tendency to think ourselves into knots.

Without that knot-tying, the verdict is straightforward: transgender ideology does not withstand scrutiny. The science is clear, and the principles underlying so-called “trans rights” collapse under even minimal examination. At its core lies a false premise: that there exists a special category of people who are somehow exempt from the material facts of biology — or who must be treated as if they are — and that the rest of society is therefore obligated to refrain from making ordinary, accurate references to their biological sex.

That premise isn’t just wrong; it’s fundamentally illiberal. It conflicts with secularism — by forcing people to assent to a metaphysical belief about identity; with freedom of speech — by enforcing compelled language and prohibitions on plain description; and, once it enters the medical realm, with the Hippocratic obligation to do no harm. Everything built on top of this axiom inherits its incoherence. What’s marketed as a civil-rights framework is, in practice, a repudiation of the liberal norms it claims to extend.

It also opens the door to predictable and ugly boundary violations. Declaring an identity is increasingly treated as sufficient to override sex-based distinctions that exist for good reason. We see this most clearly in women’s and gay people’s spaces — dating scenes, sports, prisons, changing rooms, shelters — where some individuals wield the label “trans” as carte blanche to bypass reasonable — liberal — scrutiny. In practice, this often means aggressive, entitled men — sometimes profoundly unwell, to put it delicately — demanding access and deference, while everyone else is told to suspend judgment.

What else would we expect? That’s what you get when self-declaration is fetishized above reality, evidence, and every other social cost.

This is all the more striking given that the transgender theory of “gender identity” is far more complex, abstract, and freighted with postmodernist sophistry than the simple, common-sense view of sexual dimorphism. But complexity is not a proxy for truth. It’s not how complex an idea sounds that makes it true; it’s how true it is that makes it true.

If you rely on crude pattern recognition, matching trans to the nearest historical analog, usually gay rights, by way of the trans movement’s deliberately imitative surface script, all the po-mo Judith Butler wafflepuffery that it rests on can start to look like evidence of depth rather than obfuscation. The thinking goes: this is complicated, therefore it must be right. But a moment of honest scrutiny collapses the illusion. Sex really is simple, because the science is simple. Humans come in two sexes, which are identifiable with remarkable reliability. Sex cannot be changed or transcended by clothing, hairstyles, hormone regimens, or cosmetic surgery — except at the level of superficial appearance. And the differences are not incidental; they matter profoundly to the organization of human society — especially where sexuality and female safety are concerned.

Here’s one example, drawn from human sexuality. Feminine gay men do not become straight “women” through surgery, and almost everyone involved quietly knows it. Post-transition, their dating pool remains tiny — largely limited to a narrow niche of bisexuals and fetishists. The vast majority of heterosexual men, including many who loudly style themselves as allies, are not interested.

Yet the liberal media’s endless insistence that “trans women are women” is framed as kindness — as affirmation, as care, as protection for vulnerable people. In reality, it does harm. It sells distressed gay men a false promise: that there exists a genuine escape hatch out of the gay dating market and into heterosexual male desire. There isn’t. And by repeating that lie from positions of authority, the media nudges vulnerable men toward irreversible medical interventions in pursuit of a fantasy that never materializes.

It also signals to parents that if their children’s behaviour deviates too much from sex stereotypes, their bodies ought to be “corrected” through “gender affirming” medical interventions as early as possible. In practice, this is effectively gay conversion therapy by another name: we’ve known for a century that very gender-nonconfirming children are more than likely to grow up to be gay — not “trans” — if left to develop naturally. I know this firsthand, because I was one such boy: naturally feminine, more attuned to girls than other boys, and for a while, distressed about being a misfit boy. If I had been raised in the current cultural climate, I would almost certainly have been encouraged to believe I was a “transgender girl” trapped in the “wrong” body and I would have ended up a lifelong medical patient. Countless gays and lesbians who came of age before the trans craze express relief that we weren’t psychologically and surgically steered toward an artificial opposite-sex identity.

Here’s another example about the importance of biological sex, this time about female safety. Men do not become women by declaration, costume, or self-description. Full stop. Pretending otherwise does not erase the risks associated with male bodies and male behavior — a fact reflected in the criminological data, which consistently shows that male-pattern offending does not disappear with a change of identity. When sex-based boundaries are replaced with identity claims, the result is predictable. Women’s prisons, shelters, changing rooms, and sports are places where sex differences matter. Ignoring that reality in the name of “inclusion” does not make women safer. It exposes them to risk. Suppressing inconvenient facts to preserve a moral narrative does not protect anyone — it shifts the cost onto women and girls, who are then expected to absorb it quietly.

Common sense isn’t the problem here. It’s the safeguard. When it’s dismissed as unsophisticated and pushed aside in favor of ideology, the costs don’t disappear — they’re simply deferred, and paid by someone else.

These facts have largely escaped liberal media editors. They defaulted to the heuristic instead — thinky equals liberal equals true; common sense equals conservative equals false — and that shortcut explains why they latched onto transgender ideology so quickly, despite the mountains of evidence that it represents a wrong turn away from the liberal values they claim to steward. In their eagerness to stay on what they assumed was the right side of history, they stopped doing the most basic reality checks.

This time, the Commons is right and the Lords are wrong. It wasn’t the masses who rushed into something foolish; it was the elites. They were hasty, credulous, and easily flattered — seduced by a fashionable, dangerous pseudoscience because it made them feel smarter and more virtuous than everyone else. They bought into this nonsense — I’ve taken to calling it gender Scientology, only half in jest — precisely because it reassured them of their own moral and intellectual superiority. They fell for the Emperor’s new clothes.

II. The Power of the Powerful

Perhaps earlier I was too hard on poor Malcolm Gladwell. He was subjected to an online mobbing recently, because he did an about-face on some of his earlier, public endorsements of transgender nonsense. I admire Gladwell’s principled, if belated, honesty: he confessed that, with respect to men in women’s sports, he’d previously “given lip service to the idea of trans ‘inclusion’ … because he’d been ‘cowed’ by activist talking points” as Jon Kay put it at Quillette.

Gladwell isn’t alone. When the ground beneath a prestige narrative starts to rumble, the first shifts come from the people trained to notice such cultural tremors — the thinkers who can feel when their own class is defending a story past its expiry date. Gladwell’s move is one of those early tells.

Which is really saying something, since Gladwell is a staff writer at The New Yorker — a publication I would describe as the poisoned well at the heart of the plague. Under David Remnick, The New Yorker has been especially zealous in its embrace of transgender extremism. The wider significance of that embrace lies in its position at the apex of the liberal prestige hierarchy. Among the most influential liberals, The New Yorker remains the most trusted source; what it reports and endorses is treated as presumptive truth. From there, its judgments trickle down through elite networks, shaping the discourse the way fashion spreads: by prestige cues, like the infamous cerulean blue sweater in The Devil Wears Prada.

Take this disgraceful New Yorker piece from a few years ago about Lia Thomas, a male athlete who joined his college’s female swim team, which I subjected to a thorough fisking at Graham Linehan’s Substack. The piece makes a mockery of The New Yorker’s famed fact-checking department, at one point equivocating on the easily-fact-checkable question of whether or not men can radically reshape their pelvic bones by popping estrogen pills. It’s shocking how willing they’ve become to throw facts out the window the minute anyone whispers the word “trans”.

Even The New Yorker’s daily crossword puzzle — recently introduced — is but another sewer outlet where the magazine’s once-vaunted credibility drains away. One of the magazine’s first crosswords offered the clue “Acronym for a certain prejudiced individual,” with the answer TERF. For those who don’t know, TERF stands for Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminist — a member of a broadly liberal activist movement for women’s justice and equality that rejects transgender pseudoscience. Evidence-based feminists are not “prejudiced individuals” unless you define prejudice as a synonym for dissent, or you’ve chosen to side openly with misogyny and quackery. This is not the sort of error a serious editorial culture permits.

This is the same magazine, it bears remembering, that originally published Eichmann in Jerusalem — Hannah Arendt’s landmark meditation on the banality of evil, and the clearest account ever written of how ordinary institutions and respectable people become accomplices to authoritarian systems. Arendt’s great insight was that evil often arrives draped in procedure, moral certainty, and professional conformity — carried out by people who believe themselves virtuous, enlightened, and “just doing their jobs.” It doesn’t always wear jackboots; sometimes it wears lanyards.

To go from publishing Arendt’s warning to exemplifying the very pathology she described isn’t just ironic. It’s horrifying.

A few weeks ago, The New Yorker published an essay by Adam Gopnik that sent me into a small spiral of outrage. This is awkward, because I’m a Gopnik devotee. He’s one of the finest writers alive. And the essay itself is no exception: it’s exquisitely written and, taken on its own terms, unimpeachable in both craft and content. What bothered me was the hypocrisy of The New Yorker publishing a piece that so eloquently articulated principles the magazine itself does not uphold. I found myself thinking: does David Remnick even read his own magazine?

Gopnik’s piece, titled How to Endure Authoritarianism, reflects on Eastern Europeans’ long familiarity with authoritarian pressures, from both the left and the right. Writing from Poland, he recounts conversations with people who lived under Nazi occupation and Soviet rule, and who learned through experience how power is enforced in everyday life. From those histories, Gopnik draws a line to the present American moment, suggesting that the dissident tradition offers lessons for societies trying to preserve liberal democracy. As he puts it:

“They were trying to become a liberal democracy in the face of tyranny and illiberalism, while we are trying to save one in the face of the same forces.”

Crucially, Gopnik stresses that this struggle does not take place only within formal politics. It unfolds in what he calls the “pre-political” realm — in everyday life, speech, and conduct:

“This is not to suggest for a moment that our struggle is even remotely comparable in scale to theirs. But the essential insight of the dissidents, in Poland particularly but not in Poland alone, was that resistance against authoritarianism begins as much in the pre-political or nonpolitical arenas as it does in politics.”

To illustrate this, Gopnik turns to the great Czech dissident Václav Havel, and his famous 1978 essay The Power of the Powerless, in particular Havel’s argument about “parallel structures” — informal cultural and social spaces that arise in response to ideological domination. Havel’s point was that authoritarian systems are sustained just as much by their subjects’ participation in known falsehoods as they are by state-sanctioned violence. People repeat slogans they don’t believe, display signs they don’t endorse, and perform loyalty they don’t feel, simply to get by. Resistance begins when people refuse to play along — when they try to live, as Havel put it, “within the truth.”

Gopnik summarizes the idea succinctly:

“By living ‘within the truth,’ Havel meant simply refusing to participate in what are known to be lies or to be easily intimidated by the intensity of the liars.”

All of this is exactly right — as far as it goes. What Gopnik does not ask is whether some of the institutions most eager to warn about authoritarianism have themselves become instruments of the kind of conformity Havel described.

In the here and now, The New Yorker operates squarely within the oppressive system Gopnik describes. The magazine is no longer merely observing pressures toward conformity; it is one of the institutions that helps enforce them. And the proliferation of heterodox new media outlets — most notably the rise of Substack — is best understood as the emergence of new parallel structures in precisely Havel’s sense, rather than a descent into chaos or extremism, as it’s sometimes characterized by the old media.

Havel described such structures this way:

“For what else are parallel structures than an area where a different life can be lived, a life that is in harmony with its own aims and which in turn structures itself in harmony with those aims? What else are those initial attempts at social self-organization than the efforts of a certain part of society to live — as a society — within the truth?”

That description fits the present media landscape uncomfortably well. Independent writers didn’t flee legacy institutions because they rejected truth, professionalism, or liberal values. They left because those institutions stopped tolerating open disagreement on foundational questions — including sex — and began demanding ritualized assent instead. When any kind of authority enforces a moral line that many people privately reject, parallel structures inevitably arise. That’s a natural human response.

Pronouns are the new greengrocer’s sign

One response I often hear is that this is all being overblown — that transgender politics simply isn’t important enough to warrant this level of concern. There are bigger issues, after all: inflation, war, climate, democracy itself. Why fixate on something so marginal?

(Setting aside, for the moment, the rather revealing assumption that medical harms disproportionately borne by gay, autistic, and gender-nonconforming people — along with women’s concerns about their rights, dignity, and safety — can be treated as marginal in the first place.)

But that objection misunderstands the point. This is where Havel’s most famous example becomes indispensable. In The Power of the Powerless, he asks us to imagine a greengrocer living under communism who places a Party slogan in his shop window: Workers of the world, unite! The greengrocer doesn’t believe the slogan. He isn’t trying to persuade anyone. He hangs the sign for one reason only: because failing to do so would mark him as suspect. It would invite scrutiny, harassment, or professional harm. It is a mark of compliance with the tribe — a small act of public conformity that signals one’s willingness to participate in a lie if the group demands it.

It looks trivial. That’s the point. Its apparent triviality is precisely what makes it such an effective test of tribal loyalty.

The contemporary parallel should be obvious. Today, pronouns function as a new kind of greengrocer’s sign. They’re presented as a trivial courtesy — a small linguistic adjustment, easily made. But like the sign in the shop window, their significance lies in what they demand: public participation in a contested metaphysical claim about sex and identity. To comply is to signal one’s moral alignment. To refuse is to invite suspicion, sanction, or exclusion. It’s compelled affirmation, dressed up as politeness.

This is why the question of transgender ideology can’t be dismissed as marginal. It isn’t about how many people “transition” — though that’s a not-remotely-marginal scandal in its own right. It’s about whether institutions demand assent to propositions many people privately know to be false — and whether declining to participate in that ritual is treated as a moral failing. That’s the dynamic Havel was diagnosing. Once you see it, it becomes impossible to unsee.

Once upon a time, The New Yorker played the role of dissident — a legacy Adam Gopnik treats with obvious reverence. Today, in practice, it functions as an enforcer of the conformity Havel described.

Transgender ideology sits at the psychological core of the contemporary culture war because it operates through the logic Havel identified: enforced signalling of allegiance. It pushes people into a moralized us-versus-them framework, activating primitive instincts around loyalty, threat, and expulsion. That dynamic corrodes trust far beyond the issue itself. It doesn’t persuade; it alienates. And alienation, not persuasion, is what destabilizes democracies.

I’ve argued before that the transgender mess carries real political risk for liberals. That was not alarmism. Gender ideology is not converting large numbers of people in its favour; rather, vast numbers are being repelled by it — especially when it’s enforced through schools, workplaces, law, and the media — by institutions that claim moral authority while refusing honest debate.

Here the historical comparison with Havel’s Czechoslovakia needs careful handling. In his case, the authoritarian left held power outright. It ruled through slogans and institutional enforcement. The United States today is obviously not that. But the mechanism Havel identified — compulsory belief, public performance, and the slow destruction of legitimacy — isn’t unique to one country or one era.

In the American case, gender ideology has not produced left-wing authoritarian rule through the government itself. Instead, it’s led to a backlash that helped clear the path for the authoritarian right to take control of the federal government. The backlash emerged in response to the left’s illiberal excesses across institutions that once claimed to stand for liberal values: universities, NGOs, and above all the press. When liberals are told, over and over, that obvious falsehoods must be affirmed and common sense suppressed, they disconnect from the tribe: they become angry, cynical, and politically homeless — easy prey for demagogues. And behind the privacy of the voting booth curtain, when an opportunity finally presents itself to express dissent without direct personal consequence, they take it.

They took it in great numbers in 2024. During the election, analysts found that Republican attack ads focusing on Democrats’ extreme positions on transgender issues resonated strongly with voters, particularly in battleground states where they ran relentlessly. These campaigns likely contributed to a measurable shift in the popular vote. Ultimately, Donald Trump took the White House by a margin of roughly 1.5 percent. In a contest that close, cultural issues dismissed as “marginal” can prove decisive. This one likely was.

That’s why the greengrocer’s sign matters — because it’s small. Because it reveals whether institutions still care about truth, restraint, and legitimacy, or whether they’ve drifted into enforcing belief for its own sake. That’s what the left’s variety of authoritarianism tends to look like: slogans, taboos, and compulsory affirmations couched in the language of progress. Ignore the red flags beneath the virtue-signalling, and the consequences arrive later, in far more dangerous forms. Political excess on the left has a way of empowering the right. There’s a vivid example in modern political history: the far-left communist activist Marinus van der Lubbe’s burning of the Reichstag in 1933 didn’t create the far-right Nazi regime, but it gave it the pretext required to consolidate power.

Legitimacy is power

Which brings me to the real subject of this essay: legitimacy. Havel wrote about the power of the powerless — the courage of dissidents to live within the truth. But there’s also the power of the powerful: the ability to define what counts as truth in the first place. That’s what legitimacy is. In authoritarian systems, legitimacy is enforced by the state. In liberal democracies, it’s mediated by the press. It is the mechanism through which societies decide what is serious, what is fringe, what is respectable, and what is mad. And in modern liberal societies, that mechanism still runs through the legacy media. They don’t just tell people what’s happening, but what to make of it.

Editors confer legitimacy outward, and they cultivate legitimacy inward. They earn authority by behaving like honest brokers — reality-based, restrained, trustworthy — and then they spend that authority to guide public judgment. That’s the deal. It’s not written into law, but it’s one of the foundations of liberal pluralism. Without it, you lose a sense of shared reality. Without shared reality, tribal warfare takes the place of democratic disagreement.

Legitimacy is fragile. It can be accumulated slowly and squandered quickly. When legacy media behaves like the upper chamber of liberal society — careful, serious, skeptical — it earns the right to arbitrate between competing claims. But when it trades reality-testing for moral preening, or confuses activism with analysis, it spends down its legitimacy at an alarming rate.

And a legitimacy vacuum never stays a vacuum; it gets filled. In recent years it’s been filled by the only force in American politics that still knows how to turn alienation into power: the authoritarian right. It didn’t need to persuade; it only needed liberals to embarrass themselves loudly and refuse to stop.

The transgender debate exposed all of this. By demanding public assent to propositions that were visibly untrue, legacy outlets spent legitimacy they hadn’t realized was finite. The public noticed. A substantial portion of it peeled off — first quietly, then electorally. They pulled the lever for Trump not out of devotion but because they wanted someone — anyone — to stop insulting their intelligence. It was a self-inflicted wound: in endlessly berating the public, the liberal media didn’t birth an enlightened left, but an empowered right, which happily converted cultural alienation into political authority.

Ultimately, this has nothing to do with the metaphysics of sex. It’s entirely to do with legitimacy. Shared reality is the substrate of liberal democracy. The press is the institution tasked with maintaining it. When the press loses interest in describing the world as it is, and becomes obsessed with instructing the public on how it ought to be spoken about, legitimacy collapses. And when legitimacy collapses, reactionary politics quickly follow. The civic sphere becomes a kind of Lord of the Flies contest over who can offer a sense of order: Ralph, who believes in rules and cooperation, falls to Jack, who promises order through force, fear, and spectacle. In American politics today, Trump is Jack.

Repair, not dismantle

But the answer isn’t to abandon authoritative media institutions or pretend they no longer matter. They do matter — and not just out of nostalgia. Liberal democracy needs a functioning fourth estate for the same reason it needs independent courts or competitive elections: there has to be some institution capable of maintaining a shared frame of reference. Without that, disagreement devolves into factional psychodrama instead of democratic dispute.

Humans aren’t epistemic free agents, much as we like to pretend otherwise. No man is an island, and no society functions as a federation of lone researchers. Cognition scales through trust — we pool judgment, defer to referees, and lean on institutions to sort seriousness from noise. Authoritarian systems force that role onto the state; liberal democracies delegate it to the press. The point is, there’s a basic human need for someone to adjudicate what counts as real.

This feels counterintuitive, because the past decade has trained people to celebrate decentralization — a thousand Substacks, a thousand podcasts, a thousand channels of dissident analysis. Much of that’s been healthy. Fragmentation broke the monopoly of legacy institutions and exposed their failures in real time. But fragmentation alone doesn’t solve the problem legitimacy used to solve: integration. A society can surface truths through a dispersed media ecosystem; it can’t orient itself through one.

When legacy outlets implode or forfeit credibility, the gap is filled by rumor, resentment, and the loudest faction willing to claim certainty. Thoughtful pluralism recedes. That’s how a culture loses its bearings.

This is why repair matters. The problem isn’t that liberal media institutions have authority; it’s that they’ve misused it. Some institution has to play the role of integrator — a place where claims are tested against reality, weighed against competing values, and presented back to the public in a form that allows disagreement without disintegration. The task is to bring the existing institutions back into alignment with the standards that once made that possible: truthfulness, restraint, intellectual honesty, and tolerance for dissent without moral panic.

We need central, authoritative voices that can speak to the whole populace and channel the zeitgeist honestly. We need our private narratives to be compared against a shared one, or we lose any sense of common culture.

In other words, the digital ecosystem still has use for an upper chamber. The question is whether the current occupants are willing to behave like one again.

The Washington Post’s slogan — Democracy Dies in Darkness — is right, even if its editors don’t fully grasp why. Darkness doesn’t come only from state censorship. It also comes from respected institutions that stop telling the truth while convincing themselves they’re acting nobly. Liberal societies don’t withstand that indefinitely.

The hard road ahead

What comes next for liberal media editors won’t be easy, but it can’t be avoided.

First, they have to admit error — plainly, without euphemism, and without quietly shifting emphasis as though nothing fundamental went wrong. Editors will have to acknowledge that they failed in their most basic duty: to test claims against reality rather than enforce them as moral obligations. That will upset audiences and provoke internal resistance, which is why it’s been avoided. But this is just the sunk-cost fallacy on an institutional scale: deferring the reckoning doesn’t prevent it; it only ensures the eventual cost is greater.

There’s also real human damage to contend with. Many people underwent transgender medical interventions believing they were acting on a deep inner truth, when in reality their self-conception of “being trans” had been shaped by powerful social dynamics and cultural incentives, and reinforced by institutions they trusted. As the narrative begins to crack, regret will surface. Some of it already has. And when it does, the harm will reveal itself for what it was: a product of good intentions, professional incentives, and the quiet belief that someone else must have checked the facts.

Editors can’t undo what has already happened. But they can stop adding to it — and they must. They can make clear that reality is not negotiable, that disagreement is not abuse, and that liberal societies do not demand assent to metaphysical claims. They can reopen questions that were prematurely closed, and report honestly on outcomes that were previously waved away as inconvenient.

None of this will be painless. Once trust is lost, it doesn’t regenerate on demand. But the alternative — continuing to enforce a story that no longer holds — guarantees further collapse.

The editors seem to think they’re choosing comfort over chaos. They’re not. The chaos is already here; the only open question is who gets to govern it. The real choice is between a hard course correction now, led by institutions that still remember how to be liberal, or a slow displacement by parallel structures — some responsible and serious, others trading in misinformation and resentment.

There is still a window. Not a wide one. But wide enough. The issue was never merely about sex. Transgender ideology is the mechanism; media legitimacy is the medium; and the future of liberal democracy is what’s at stake.

Only connect

In the end, the matter is simple. It’s about telling the truth: in the shared civic sphere, trans women are men; trans men are women. In private life, people can arrange their social world as they like, and although there may be some friction around courtesy at the boundary between private and public life, it’s not an unsolvable problem. We do this with people’s private religious beliefs all the time. It’s basic pluralism — liberal democracy 101.

The transgender controversy matters for the same reason the media matters, and for the same reason democracy matters: reality has to be shared, and sharing reality depends on everyday honesty. When institutions demand polite falsehoods in small things, people stop trusting them in serious ones. Shared reality collapses. Liberalism can’t survive that.

I’ve always believed that liberalism, at its best, is a humanist project — the kind my literary hero E. M. Forster captured so concisely in his epigraph: Only connect. It’s a reminder that liberalism begins with ordinary human dealings — how people speak, listen, and relate truthfully to one another, even when honesty is inconvenient or costly. Václav Havel’s injunction to “live within the truth” asks for the same thing: not allegiance, not slogans, but honesty.

That standard applies to institutions no less than to individuals. And it leaves liberal media editors with a question they can no longer evade: are they prepared to meet it?

You mention Helen Webberley, whom I recently watched in her debates with and . There’s no doubt people like Webberley do or facilitate harm, and harm of an especially grievous sort where children are concerned, but I think it’s important to recognise that she doesn’t intend harm. She’s maleficent, not malevolent.

I don’t say that as if it should exculpate her, but it is a difference which points clearly to the fact which I read your piece to be making: what we are dealing with here are two worldviews, two different accountings or models of the same phenomena, models which conflict at the level of language and at the level of rights and personal autonomy.

That the sex spectrum bullshit has always been bullshit is clear from the speed with which the transfaithful always move from that claim to the binary claim that they need to disrupt the process of sexual (read that term in both senses) maturation and the hormone of the other sex in order to realise their true selves, and from the obviously binary nature of their embodiment goals. That is, if sex is a spectrum not a binary, why are all the girls cutting off their breasts and calling themselves Adam (he/him), why are all the boys growing breasts (or having them implanted) and calling themselves Eve (she/her)? Where — o, where!— are the Cthulus (shim/sham) with third, fourth, or fifth gametes being generated in organs which somehow have escaped the anatomists’ ken?

Again with regard to Webberley and my own personal encounters, I find your observation of the cultishness, religiousness, and mysticism of this whole movement sound. Webberley and her ilk might be called Ambassadors to Neverland, who see themselves as bridges between our world and theirs, the conduits and interpreters of special knowledge gleaned from their acquaintance with the higher mysteries of sex as experienced by the citizens and denizens of Transneyworld. Webberley is an ambassador for business, but everyone can savour the smugness of this high and noble office in those teachable moments when they are called by fate and circumstance to ‘correct’ the language and ‘check the thinking’ of us who dwell — if only mentally — outside the themepark.

I like that you put sex in both its senses at the centre of your thinking. Not enough is said about the role that sex acts, the disgust (the ick) they can elicit, and the place of disgust in our moral intuitions, play in the lack of criticism this ideology finds in wider society. Same-sex attracted people are familiar with this; much of what might be called passive homophobia (i.e., the tolerance of, the silence around homophobia, rather than homophobia in the strict sense) is due to the desire of many in society to avoid the ick which for them attends the thought that two women or, most especially, two men might recreate carnally.

This ick is at work in the minds of those parents (as reported in Hannah Barnes’s book) who are relieved to have a trans child rather than a gay one; and it is at work in the almost complete ignoring of what you articulated so well in a recent note: that much of trans identity is an attempt either to be or not to be an object of male heterosexual lust. That is, society prefers to think about trans as an innate identity and refer it to the doctors for medical care partly because then it doesn’t have to confront the (icky) fact that much of this has to do with sex — the activity.

Witness the reluctance with which conservative commentators (such as John Anderson here in Australia) hear or talk about this aspect of the trans phenomenon; they visibly tighten up if their interlocutor talks freely about fetishes (for example), even if the extent of it is using that term. And of course one of the purposes of the term ‘gender’ has always been to avoid the term ‘sex’, even when there’s no ambiguity.

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Big thank you to Substacker for giving me permission to republish his writing here.

For context, this piece was written as a reply to this essay of mine:

How do they know?

Jonny Bell recently shared a chilling video on X of Helen Webberley, the disgraced UK doctor who, alongside her husband, runs a lucrative online business selling drugs to parents who believe their children are trans.

(In 2018 the Webberleys were convicted of running an unregistered medical clinic. Her husband was subsequently banned from UK medical practice for giving puberty blockers to children. Helen’s licence was also suspended, though she regained it after successfully mounting an appeal, backed by trans activists.)

It’s a simple 45-second clip of Webberley boasting that she’d given cross-sex hormones to a twelve-year-old. According to her, the child’s very life was “saved” by the “treatment”.

It’s incredibly creepy, because she speaks with the calm, blissed-out certainty of a cult member in a trance. She projects that she absolutely knows that the child has a mystical transgender soul.

After sharing the video, Ophelia Benson asked, how do they know?

The question is about what [Webberley] and trans ideologues in general think is going on with “trans children” and “trans” anybody. What does it mean? It’s not physical; it’s in the mind. Trans people “feel like” the opposite sex. Trans people “feel as if” they are in the wrong body. It’s about feeling and feeling like; it’s about ideas and self-something – explanation? description? understanding? It’s interior, and it’s emphatically not physical. It’s in the mind.

Mystical souls; magical thinking

There’s something about gender expression and magical thinking that’s remarkably consistent across cultures, at least in boys, if not as often in girls. All over the world, males who exhibit atypically feminine interests or behaviours are often deemed to have ultra-mystical souls. They’re presumed to be more connected to the spiritual world than other men and women. They’re often made out to be shamans, or priests, or are assigned to ceremonial or ritual duties. They aren’t treated as entirely human.

(For just one example, in India, feminine boys are declared hijras, sent off to live with gurus, and they earn a paltry living performing at ritual ceremonies such as weddings. Even in the modern-day West, effeminate men — often closeted gays — are vastly over-represented among the clergy in virtually all religious communities.)

It accidentally exposes how primitive the thinking is among “gender identity” believers: for all the trans activists’ window dressing about spectrums, they still envision men and women as essential castes: in their worldview, men and women are still material after all; the sex or gender “spectrum” is the liminal space between the essential man and the essential woman — it’s an opening into the spiritual domain, whose inhabitants transcend the material world.

These are precious beings who must be protected and revered, because they aren’t quite material; they are outside the corporeal sexes.

Therefore, to people like Webberley, it’s immaterial what we do to a trans person’s body. The body is merely the vessel that this magical being occupies. It is not the being himself; it is a vulgar carapace. All the better to enhance it — to shape it to reflect the beauty of his soul.

All of this is an outcropping of our species’ innate instinct to tell men and women apart. As always, the transgender phenomenon only proves how fundamentally we distinguish between males and females. It’s just that the trans believers process the stereotypical outliers in a radically superstitious framework, and the “gender criticals” don’t.

If sex doesn’t matter, why all the fuss?

While gathering these thoughts, I arrived at two insights, which have helped me to understand two things that never made sense about the transgender movement. The first is about the aforementioned, purported “sex spectrum”: why do activists always defend trans ideology by reaching for arguments about sex “spectra” when trans-identifying people are virtually never actually claiming to be on any kind of spectrum? Bruce/Caitlyn Jenner does not claim to be half-man/half-woman, or some in-between combination of woman and man. He claims to be all woman. As do virtually all transwomen, and vice-versa for virtually all transmen.

The utter irrelevance of the “sex spectrum” argument has always bothered me: it’s bad enough that it’s not true. It’s exasperating because in addition to being wrong, it’s entirely beside the fucking point! Even if sex were a “spectrum” it would get autogynephilic men no closer to their Holy Grail. It would do nothing to “prove” that they’re literally — and entirely, not just partially — female.

But now I see what the activists are getting at. Men and women are still binary and material, and they make up the bulk of us mere mortals, but there’s a magical space in between us where trans people supposedly exist. That there is the “spectrum” — and because it’s a magical place where the rules of material reality don’t apply, anything goes in there. It’s off-limits to rational inquiry. This is Stephen Jay Gould’s non-overlapping magisteria all over again: back in the days of New Atheism and philosophical debates about science and religion, this was Gould’s stubbornly agnostic attempt to straddle both sides of the science/superstition divide. Repurposed for the transgender debate, the argument goes, You and I are still ordinary men and women, bound to the rules of the material world, sure. But once someone’s deemed transgender, who are we to ask questions, because that’s a different realm which science cannot understand.

The Lord works in mysterious ways, kumbaya.

To which, I say: no thank you. All apologies to the late, great Stephen Jay Gould, but there’s a reason I’m an atheist and not an agnostic. I don’t play nice with any degree of pseudoscientific woo-woo, specifically because, as a gay man born in a sprawling family of Evangelical Christians, I’ve experienced first-hand the harm superstition can do, specifically to people like me — misfits. And we’re watching transgender superstition harm a whole new generation of “misfit” gays and lesbians, just as its evangelical forebear harmed so many of us in the generation I came up in.

The second insight I gleaned while thinking about humans’ seemingly innate compulsion to associate androgyny with supernaturalism, is that it entirely reinforces the sex binary, rather than disproves it.

The only reason trans people are said to be on a spectrum while the rest of us normies are still acknowledged as plain-old binary is that, in truth, humans can tell males and females apart while at the same time we can tell that none of us entirely fits the stereotypical boxes of man and woman. Trans ideology is a manifestation of confusion or panic when someone strays too far from the norm. Whereas secularists and feminists and the like can see a gender-bender and comprehend that he or she is just a natural outlier — perfectly fine just as he or she is, and also perfectly clearly male or female — trans ideology draws a boundary between masculinity and femininity specifically so that the men and women who fall too far outside their respective sides can be corralled back to their safe and “proper” category.

With respect to the gay and/or autistic cohort of trans-identifiers (I’ll get to the AGPs in a moment), gender-bending misfits aren’t smashing the binary when they declare transgender identities. Quite the opposite: gender benders simply being their true selves — free from special pronouns and “gender identities” — are living proof of the natural variations within and between the sexes, in terms of behaviour and presentation. They are therefore the exceptions that prove the rule — we recognize that gender benders are bending gender norms, because we know what those norms are in the first place. And we accept that they’re still men and women, no matter how much diversity in behaviour and presentation there is between the sexes.

But when people deny that their atypicality is natural by claiming to have been classed as the “wrong” sex, in framing their gender expression as wrongness, trans-identifying gender-benders are in fact failing to smash the gender binary. Their actions demonstrate a desire to conform rather than rebel, putting the lie to the rhetoric they so ostentatiously deploy. They’re conformists who’ve co-opted the look of rebellion as a fashion statement.

The phenomenon of autogynephilia also reinforces the sex binary: it is just a reflection of the binary mechanics of sexual orientation. So-called “gender euphoria” and “gender dysphoria” are analogs of the evolutionary mechanics of sexual attraction and sexual aversion, respectively. Straight men exhibit attraction to females and aversion to males. Sex with females feels amazing; sex with fellow males feels icky. (The degree of “ick” that a sraight man feels when having sex with a fellow man — or even just imagining sex with another man — correlates to the degree of bisexuality he does or doesn’t exhibit.) When straight men are sexually fixated on themselves (because of a crossed wire in the brain) any reminder that they are men feels icky — their sex drives are sending punishment signals (“gender dysphoria”). The fantasy of themselves being female, by contrast, sets off a flood of chemical rewards in the brain (“gender euphoria”). Many such men become addicted to chasing that neurochemical high.

(In a sense, it’s like porn addiction, but it’s all playing out inside one’s own mind.)

Homosexuality has the same structure of heterosexuality — hard-wired attraction to one sex; hard-wired aversion to the other — only the sexes are reversed. For gay men, sex with guys releases all the endorphins and sex with girls triggers all the neurochemical ickies.

All of this — all of human sexual behaviour — rests on a fundamental mechanic embedded deep in the lower brain: the ability to distinguish between true male and true female people with tremendous accuracy. Heterosexuality, homosexuality, and autogynephilia are therefore all rooted in the absolute binary of sex. None of these sexualities would exist if not for our brains’ capacity to tell men and women apart with uncanny speed and accuracy. Bisexuality is more-or-less reliant on this mechanic, too, because virtually all bisexuals of either sex still exhibit different degrees of attraction to their partners based on their sex. (Some people don’t have as strong an instinctual ick factor as others at their non-preferred sex.)

Nevermind arguments about chromosomes, or multi-valent somethingorothers, or intersex DSDs. It’s this deep mechanic that exists in the primitive part of the brain, which can intuitively detect who’s male and who’s female, and which subsequently triggers our brains to react accordingly — this is tangible proof of the sex binary, and it’s the reason the sex binary matters on an everyday, practical level.

It’s how we each react to the sex binary as it’s highly accurately perceived by that primal instinct we all have that distinguishes trans activists from gender critics: the trans activists can detect the sex differences same as the rest of us can, those liars! But the subsequent reaction they have diverges from ours. When their primal sex detector signals a mismatch between someone’s sex and his or her stereotypical presentation, it causes them to reach for superstition and religious and tribal impulses — thoughts turn to magic gender souls and evil transphobes out to harm vulnerable members of the tribe. The alarm goes off, and they no longer see a person — they feel deep instincts.

By contrast, when us gender secularists see a mismatch between someone’s sex and his or her stereotypical gender presentation, we still see the person in front of us. We don’t go into panic mode and revert to primitive animal instincts, because we’ve trained our advanced frontal cortexes not to get confused when we see a gender-bender, because we’ve fully absorbed the fact that sex and gender expression are two different things.

That’s really the root of it, isn’t it. There are myriad strands of thought we can go off from here — the political strands, the implications for gays and lesbians, the science — and I’ve got dozens of essays covering various of these aspects.

But at heart, sex is binary, and the trans movement only proves it further. It’s just that their beliefs are ultimately reactionary and superstitious, and ours aren’t.

Trans is the most fascinating and complex social, cultural, political, religious, spiritual, and sexual phenomenon I’ve ever seen. And at the same time, it’s as simple as, nah, actually there are just two sexes. Figure it out already.

It’s exactly because it’s so simple and yet so unfathomably complex at the same time that it’s become a powerhouse force in society. It’s the ultimate culture war catnip.

God, I wish it would end, though. It’s such a horrible battle, with so many pointless casualties.

(To end things on a positive note, watch this delightful music video from a classic indie track, featuring cute boys in makeup, revelling in artifice, singing in almost falsetto-like, breathy high notes, to an infectiously catchy tune. It’s cheery, gender-bendy bliss! That’s why All The Kids have loved this banger for over a decade now… Consider it a spiritual palate cleanser, and a dutiful reminder that gender bending isn’t the same as transgender ideology. There’s joy and art and fun in gender bending, even still! XOXO!)

Thank you for reading! Arty Morty’s Substack is a reader-supported publication. I make most essays free, so that they can be shared with those who most need to read them. But I rely on donations from readers to pay my bills. Consider a paid subscription or a donation if you’re so inclined. It helps me tremendously to continue the work. Cheers!

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This post is an expanded version of a comment and guest post of mine at Butterflies and Wheels, a blog and lively commentary community that focuses on secularism, humanism, feminism, and free speech, run by the incomparable Ophelia Benson.

Once again, an American media outlet that advertises itself as an “intellectual” and “middle-ground” liberal outlet has tried to defend trans ideology. Once again, the result is a convoluted mess that tries to square the circle, to salvage the unsalvageable. To date, it’s still too difficult for American liberals to fully come to terms with how bad trans ideology is. It’s a bogus religion, like Scientology. (Or really, like any of the others.) But like Scientology, it’s uniquely American. And such nonsense could only really thrive in America.

And Americans are uniquely averse to challenging — or even questioning — their fellow compatriots’ religious beliefs, no matter how crazy they are. The USA is the land of Scientology, and it’s also the land of Mormonism. It’s ALSO the land of transgender. This is not a coincidence. These are different manifestations of the same phenomenon.

To go back to the piece in question, published at , an otherwise wonderful Substack that excellently covers the intellectual liberal position in our challenging times…

This latest entry in the by-now trite genre — this latest earnest attempt among American liberals to square the circle, to make trans somehow look like it’s got some thin veneer of human rights at the bottom of it, when it’s by now so clear that it was a mistake, that it’s fundamentally anti-liberal down to the bones… is actually not half-bad!

, the writer, starts out with gusto. He makes clear the distinction between sex and “gender”, and he lays out some truly shocking and very well-sourced data points. This level of research is truly impressive!

But then the liberal compulsion to close ranks and spin trans into a fundamentally positive story of human rights and self-expression at all costs gets the best of him, and the second half of his piece is knee-jerk reactionary nonsense. Supposedly, radfems have gone too far. “Trans people” just want their “rights”.

ZZZ…

I’m so sick of this genre.

I’ve written an extensive comment there, and instead of reproducing it here, I invite you to read his whole piece, and to read my rebuttal, and to like and share either or both as you’re so inclined. The conversation started over there, and let’s make more of it, over there, where everyone’s already talking and listening.

Here’s the original piece in question:

Persuasion

A Manifesto for Liberal Trans Activism

By virtually any measure, trans activism has failed in the United States. It has proven itself a decisively losing electoral issue, been repudiated by the Supreme Court, lost the culture war, alienated a majority of society, and caused public op…

Read more

10 months ago · 103 likes · 10 comments · Jamie Paul

And here’s my rebuttal to it:

https://www.persuasion.community/p/a-manifesto-for-liberal-trans-activism/comment/177855483

An extra note:

Sorry I’ve been so slack in publishing articles lately. The truth is: I’m struggling in the real-world to stabilize my income. This means right now I don’t have as much time and focus as I’d love to give to my Substack. It’s a strange paradox: the less I write here, the less money I get from here, but at the same time, Substack requires a lot of focus and energy in order to write here and make money here. The balance of that paradox has meant that, at least for an interim period, I’ve had to put all my energy towards low-income service-industry jobs, leaving me not much time or energy to write more here. But I want to write more, and hoo boy do I have a treasure trove of amazing pieces, half-written, sitting in my drafts folder. As soon as I can get more time and energy to apply here, I sure as hell will, and you’ll love what I’ve got to say!!!

One day, it would be nice to live off my Substack writing alone. And you’ve supported me halfway towards that goal! I’m still not quite there yet, though. Soon!

xoxoxoxo

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I wrote this in April 2021 about my dear friend Graham Linehan for Lesbian and Gay News (which is, sadly, now defunct). You can also find a published copy of it at Plebity. Considering the horrendous news out of London the other day — a small phalanx of armed police officers arrested and detained Linehan upon his arrival at Heathrow Airport, because of three irreverent, mildly provocative tweets he wrote* — it seems appropriate to republish it here now. Please read and share. Thanks!

*Well, to be perfectly fair, one of Graham’s tweets was pretty spicy in terms of provocativeness. I don’t condone it. But I’ve tweeted my fair shair of bad tweets too, especially when I’m angry, or under a lot of stress, or drunk-tweeting late at night — which I’ve been known to do. As Graham once said while defending me in such a predicament: people shouldn’t be judged based on their worst tweet. If we all did that, none of us would be speaking to one another by now, and the platform would be gone amid a blaze of infighting. The worst-tweet-to-best spread couldn’t be wider in Graham’s case: he’s been on the platform for over a decade and he’s racked up tens of thousands of tweets! His batting average is stellar. But with such sheer volume, and with the amount of hostile scrutiny he’s under, people are bound to pin a foul on him from time to time. Still, he’s knocking out more homeruns than pretty much anyone else…

An out-of-line tweet here-and-there merits a commensurate response, something along the lines of, at most, say, a warning or a very short-term suspension from the platform. Armed government arrest? Outrageous. This should go without saying.

Anyways, on with the essay from 2021…

Graham Linehan’s gender blasphemy exposes the fear that stifles the trans debate

It’s like when people see Jesus on a piece of toast.

Look at this user profile on the lesbian and “queer” dating app Her. (This one’s actually a mock-up, but there are plenty of real ones that look just like it.)

Maybe you see a vulnerable member of a marginalised community, in need of an abundance of sympathy and compassion. Or perhaps you see a white, straight, middle-class man (as I do) acting like he’s entitled to intrude on lesbian spaces. Whatever the case may be, we are living through a time in which two groups of people will look at the same photo, but each is reaching a vastly different conclusion about what they’re seeing.

The people in the second group, who see a man, want to speak up and say something, but they’re afraid to offend the people who see something else — the ones who don’t see a burnt piece of toast but an image of Jesus. So Graham Linehan stepped up and published some photos of profiles from the Her app to challenge this emerging taboo and call attention to it.

Katie Herzog and Jesse Singal, hosts of the popular Blocked and Reported podcast, dedicated a good twenty minutes of their programme to a character assassination of Graham, sneering at him, not for his gender-critical beliefs (they pride themselves on their fair-mindedness) but for expressing them in a way that they deem to be morally unacceptable. He was assailed for supposedly rampantly “misgendering” trans people, just being generally irreverent about the trans issue (A comedian! Irreverent! The nerve), and worst of all, that he supposedly published images of transwomen to cruelly single them out for ridicule, which is how they interpreted the stunt with the photos. So the problem with Graham isn’t that he’s an unbeliever, it’s that he’s offending the believers with his flagrant demonstrations of unbelief. Blasphemy, in other words.

Internet disputes are peculiar things. The more alike the two opposing sides are, the hotter the flare-ups that ignite between them. And sometimes which side you end up on can come down to subtleties in your personality that tip the balance one way or the other. As people debate Graham and the podcast, parallel worlds are emerging: one side interprets anything Graham has ever done as proof that he’s a bully who punches down at vulnerable people. The other side insists Graham is a principled man angry that he’s not getting a fair shake from people who he feels should know better.

Well, Katie & Jesse should know better. They’ve both faced mobs of trans activists, they’ve both been smeared and harassed online. Many of their listeners have been left baffled as to why they’d be so hostile to a fellow journalist facing the same thing. It’s true they defended Graham’s right to free speech in a strictly narrow technical sense, but they took pains to denounce his words, encouraged people not to read his journalism, and even suggested he should get off the internet.

But this apparent hypocrisy isn’t unprecedented: it seems even the most avowedly open minds will batten down the hatches when someone’s breaking taboos in a politically treacherous climate. It’s a common enough reaction that, by appearances at least, just as many listeners agreed with Katie & Jesse as disagreed. The sides have become entrenched, and the side who are convinced Graham’s blasphemy makes him a bad person just can’t see it any other way. So why is it so hard for some otherwise free-speech-supporting liberal progressives to tolerate blasphemy? And why is it so hard to get them to see the other side’s point of view?

The first problem for gender heretics when they get accused of things like “misgendering” is that even acknowledging the act requires the accused to play along with gender belief. Like sin, if you don’t believe in it, you can’t really agree or disagree that you’ve committed it. So addressing such accusations comes with burdensome conceptual unpacking work right from the start.

But the bigger problem is that the two sides have completely different views on just how harmful blasphemous acts like misgendering are to transgender people, or whether they’re harmful at all.

One side — my side — starts with the foundational assumption that everyone, trans or not, is first and foremost to be treated as an individual, no more or less equally deserving of respect than any other individual, and then builds from there. Of course I understand how much sensitivity there is in the transgender community about, say, pronouns. I’m a gay man; I’m deeply embedded in the gay community. I even worked at a trans bar back in the day. But I don’t take it as religious doctrine that anyone who simply claims to be a transgender woman is one — I don’t believe in gender religion and I reserve the right to have my own beliefs about anyone — and I don’t take it as law that I have to abide anyone’s pronouns. I aim to be respectful, but it’s case-by-case, and I’m the judge.

But the other side, the one that sees Jesus in the toast, starts out with the foundational assumption that anyone who identifies as transgender belongs to a special kind of people who are, to true believers at least, almost supernaturally vulnerable. There are lots of problems with that, but the big one is that “trans” is a label anyone can freely adopt, and the doctrine that once you call yourself trans you’re no longer seen first-and-foremost as an individual but instead you’re now first-and-foremost a member of a special class — this is ripe for exploitation. And us gender heretics are watching it get exploited like crazy, and we’re tearing our hair out in frustration because the other side, the ones who can only picture Jesus whenever they hear the word “trans,” seem completely oblivious, no matter how loud we yell.

Graham spoke on our podcast a few weeks ago about what he calls a “sacred caste.” The left — especially the American left — is starting to frame transgender identity as a special caste of people who are essentially sacred: so precious, so vulnerable, so cherished they are above criticism. Graham’s from Ireland; he’s seen first-hand the perils that befall society when it holds up a group as untouchable. He also has a sharply honed sense of how to balance compassion, respect, and — this is sometimes absolutely necessary — offence. He made a TV show that fondly depicted members of the Irish untouchables (Catholic priests, of course) while at the same time gently pushing to make them just a little bit more touchable. It was a bold thing to try, and the result was almost a miracle: he marched right into the most taboo topic in Ireland, made comedy out of it, and he pulled it off spectacularly. Somehow no one was offended and everyone on all sides loved it. But that was before social media and wokeness. And the Catholic Church had nothing on the power that gender ideology has today over some parts of society. So when Graham marched into the gender debate, I can imagine he had no idea what he was going up against.

Even nonbelievers (roughly analogous to “gender critical” people) can be hostile to fellow nonbelievers who speak too candidly about gender. Tweets about the Blocked and Reported episode said things like, I agree with Graham’s beliefs but I think it’s wrong to misgender. Wrong to misgender when? Always? What’s the rationale behind that? I think it’s driven by fear. (It’s partly a misunderstanding about personally offending individual trans people, too. The way they describe Graham you’d think he’s running up to random transwomen, shouting “you’re a man!” and maniacally laughing in their faces, but really his “misgendering” crime is that he doesn’t respect their feminine pronouns when he’s reporting on their misogynistic misdeeds and crimes against women, or just generally, if they’re jerks.) But I think right now there’s such a deep climate of fear around transgender that everything’s out of perspective and it’s got everyone unsure where to position themselves so they don’t look mean, get cancelled, or end up on the dreaded “wrong side of history.” It’s like, when you see someone taking a bold stance, better announce that he’s not with you, just to be safe.

I remember this exact same thing playing out back in the New Atheism days. Americans, even liberal Americans, have always been averse to blasphemy, especially comedic blasphemy. Things that in retrospect we can see were only mildly provocative caused ceaseless hand-wringing in the liberal media at the time, with everyone asking, how offensive is too offensive? Salon magazine was the worst of them. They churned out story after story saying it’s OK to be a nonbeliever but what’s of paramount importance is that you don’t get too offensive to Christian or Muslim believers, and as liberal authorities they got to determine what counted as too offensive, and they loved to call out the nonbelievers they deemed to have crossed their line.

This reached its nadir in the terrible hours and days after the Charlie Hebdo massacre. Many liberals clamoured to disavow these gentle cartoonists for going too far, for crossing their personal lines of propriety. A bunch of people had just been slaughtered, and frightened liberals were throwing their bullet-ravaged, still-warm bodies under the bus.

So where is the line of propriety? There’s always a balance, always two sides to weigh against each other, and where you locate the point of equilibrium is determined by your own priorities and values. Everybody has their own personal threshold. When a hot-button issue arises, it’s because society is in the process of hashing out the issues and working towards a general consensus on where the line should be. In the case of criticising Islam, say, you had to weigh sensitivity to anti-Muslim discrimination against the need to address misogyny, homophobia and freedom of speech. Islam was the landmine issue back in the day, and if you dared to criticise it, every frightened liberal immediately ran you through their personal threshold calculator and if you fell foul of the line they’d scramble to denounce you as an Islamophobe as quickly as possible. Debate around Islam has relaxed somewhat, and liberal anxieties about cartoonists and philosophers offending religious feelings have eased. A lot of liberals who denounced the Jesus and Mo cartoons as morally unacceptable at the time probably look back now and cringe.

Of course today it’s trans. To go back to Graham and the picture (the one of the crossdressing male claiming to be a “lesbian” on the dating app Her), when you look at it, what you’re actually doing is you’re weighing, well, sensitivity to anti-trans discrimination against the need to address misogyny, homophobia and freedom of speech. Pretty much nothing’s changed except the name of the religion.

On her podcast, Katie Herzog conceded that she too has a personal threshold, a line where she’ll reject someone’s pronouns or even reject their trans identity. I see Katie & Jesse’s role in the trans debate as just like what Salon magazine’s was in the atheism days: their stance is that it’s OK to be an unbeliever but what’s of paramount importance is that you don’t get too offensive to trans believers, and as liberal authorities they get to determine what counts as too offensive, and they love to call out a gender critic they deem to be over their line, which, to them, is the line.

They’ve missed the point of Graham’s stunt entirely. Actually, they’ve missed the point of the entire trans debate. The reason it’s such a hot-button issue right now is because there is absolutely no consensus on where the line should be. No one — not even Graham — is out of bounds because none of us has been given a fair chance to discuss the bounds and agree to them. So Katie & Jesse have no moral authority to declare what’s over the line. Nobody agrees — at all — on, say, when the imperative to be polite to someone who identifies as trans supersedes the need to uphold women’s safety or respect gays’ boundaries. (Americans, always skewing towards the religious without even being aware of it, lean instinctively towards putting gender identity above all else. Brits, who skew secular, are starting to go the other way, which has got the American liberal media completely puzzled; their obliviousness to their own religiosity amuses me.)

There are a million questions more that are nowhere near consensus, like for instance, who the hell even counts as trans? It was remarkable listening to Katie describe swiping through profiles on the dating app Her, how some of them were transwomen and some of them she determined were actually “cisgender men.” There’s Katie, running the profile pictures through her own personal threshold calculator, determining that, yes, it is acceptable to reject some of these people’s professed beliefs after all.

And I doubt she even knew that’s what she was doing. She wasn’t even aware that that right there, the calculus she was doing that she couldn’t even articulate, that’s the point. Whether or not or how much we accommodate people’s transgender identity doesn’t come from holy decrees or whatever morally superior sorting ability Katie seems to think she has. It comes through consensus-building and open discussion of the issues at hand. And people want to talk about it. Everybody’s desperate to talk about it! They have so many questions they want to ask but they can’t because the fucking gender police are always listening and ready to cancel you.

Transgender is an active faultline in the culture right now. When Graham Linehan published those images of males with highly dubious claims to being lesbians (to put it generously), what he was doing was creating a little earthquake: tension was building because lesbians were angry and frustrated that they were constantly being intruded upon by straight men, and no one was listening. So Graham — generous, and always with his attention towards the voices that go unheard rather than the big fashionable causes-du-jour — offered up his sizeable platform to call attention to it. This was blasphemy at its most high-minded: he broke a sacred rule to show that the sacred caste was committing an injustice that was going unnoticed by the public.

We need more of these little earthquakes to release the growing tensions around trans and open up the debate so we can actually make some progress. Indisputably there are serious conflicts between gender ideology and women’s rights, gay rights, and freedom of speech. The gender ideologues declared it taboo to talk about these issues. But unless more people start breaking these taboos, the tensions will keep building up and we’re gonna get The Big One, a massive and ugly backlash which could do terrible harm to the entire LGBT community.

The irony of it is, Graham Linehan is becoming the poster child for gender blasphemy but he isn’t half as outrageous as he’s made out to be. In fact, he’s shown tremendous respect to transgender people and many transgender people are proud to call him a friend and an ally. Because he is an ally: one reason he cares so much about this issue is because getting to the truth of it — talking about it freely and openly — matters just as much to trans people as it does to anyone — more so.

After The Satanic Verses came out and the character assassination of Salman Rushdie took hold, even his literary contemporaries came under the spell. While Rushdie was in hiding surrounded by armed guards and the body count was mounting, all John le Carré could say to the matter was, “There is no law in life or nature that says great religions may be insulted with impunity.” Rushdie, a man who hadn’t intended to insult religion to begin with, and who had actually written the bloody book out of admiration for Islam, nevertheless ended up the poster child for the debate about the right to insult Islam with impunity. Ironically it was his respect for Islam that led him to write about it honestly, and ultimately got him into all that trouble with it. And so it is with Graham and transgender people. Just last week, on the Trans Day of Visibility, he hosted five transgender guests on our podcast for a civil and friendly discussion about (among other things) the politics of pronouns. And yet he’s somehow become the poster child for debate about the right to misgender with impunity. I guess it’s always like this when there’s a controversy with a religious angle. It’s only in hindsight, after the fear and the pressure is lifted, that we can all look back and see what we got right and what we got wrong.

It took 15 years for le Carré and Rushdie to reconcile. Rushdie’s a far more gracious man than me — I never forgave le Carré in my mind. The people who called themselves liberals but abandoned Salman Rushdie to the wolves because of words he wrote that were supposedly blasphemous, it still boils my blood. To me it’s always been one of the most shameful moments of the left in recent decades. The principles were so clear-cut — people were being murdered! — there was not a drop of ambiguity whether Rushdie deserved everyone’s full support. But there’s something about blasphemy: the fear and confusion it conjures, the conflicting values it exposes within ourselves. It creates such a division among even the most progressive liberals; what side you end up on comes down to subtleties in your personality, like what happened with the Blocked and Reported podcast.

If you ask me, it separates the cowards from the heroes.

Follow and subscribe to ’s Substack here. There are plenty of ways you can support him and his legal issues there. I encourage you to do so.

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“THE EROSION OF TRANS RIGHTS, IS THE EROSION OF ALL OF OUR RIGHTS.”

That little nugget of wisdom is floating around on social meeja. It’s idiotic.

There is no erosion of the human rights of trans people, i.e. the human rights that everyone has. There is no such thing as specifically “trans” rights. There can’t be, because “trans” is a fiction, and because making that particular fiction a basis for rights would obliterate women’s rights as well as lesbian and gay rights. It’s unworkable to make it a “right” for men who pretend to be women to force everyone else to agree. It’s unworkable because it’s not true and it drives a tank through women’s rights.

That’s Ophelia Benson, speaking about the latest meme rippling through the vacuous currents of the transactivist echo chamber.

This recent post of hers set a few thoughts in motion — as her work so often does. In case you haven’t noticed by now, Benson’s blog, Butterflies and Wheels, is my go-to salon — a digital Algonquin Round Table where clever commentary and thoughtful debate reflect the values of liberalism, feminism, humanism, and rational inquiry. For more than a decade, it’s been the first site I check in the morning and the last at night, a daily ritual marked by an embarrassing number of midday refreshes — which tells you everything you need to know about what this intellectual gathering place means to me.

(It has early gender critical cred, too: the late Magdalen Berns was a guest author there in 2016!)

But I digress. Back to the post at hand…

Why do people see things like (for example) the push to let crossdressing football and rugby men bash female players on the pitch and then lather themselves up in the women’s shower after the match as if this is all a new frontier in human rights, instead of what it obviously is: letting the horny hounds off the chain?

A big part of the problem stems from people’s mistaken conception of “trans people” as a fixed subset of the population, supposedly analogous to gay people. Those unaccustomed to critical thinking just presume “trans people” are a small group of individuals who were born with an innate and harmless condition that has caused society to persecute and discriminate against them.

But they’re wrong to presume that. In fact, “trans people” are a wide open identity group: “trans” is a social label that anyone is free to adopt anytime, for pretty much any reason, as long as they say they “feel” it’s right for them. The trans contingent has no real or material membership prerequisite, so there’s no fixed limit on how much the group could conceivably grow or shrink. Its size can vary widely based on how appealing a trans identity happens to be at any given time. And very recently, what was once barely a blip became a booming presence, propelled by social media and the political tides of the culture war.

Trans is nothing like homosexuality — the latter of which, because it involves actual, physical sex acts driven by primal, animal instincts, is a much more materially delineated phenomenon whose definition is fairly self-evident and whose boundaries maintain themselves naturally. Being a natural phenomenon, homosexuality also has a remarkable degree of consistency across generations, cultures, economic classes, and other population demographics. “Trans” identity, by contrast, has the fluidity and demographic inconsistency that we see in things like political and religious movements, and in faddish subcultures like hippies and punks. The trans craze is unambiguously a man-made subculture and not a natural phenomenon.

The number of people who loudly announce themselves to be transgender (or who quietly drop the label) is directly dependent on the circumstantial pros and cons of them doing so. Everybody who decides to identify as “trans” does so because it allows them to gain something that they want — or it allows them to avoid something they don’t want. Every time you (the proverbial you, not you you) change a social policy to make it “more trans inclusive,” you’re not easing the burden on a small, fixed group of people who can’t help but be innately “trans” and who would otherwise struggle to cope with their day-to-day lives without the concessions that trans “inclusivity” policies offer. Instead, you’re incentivizing more people who’d otherwise have carried on just fine, to hop aboard the trans bandwagon instead.

Trans “inclusivity” policies are in practice more like trans incentives: intentionally or not, the result is that they serve as promotions for the movement, promising features and perks to draw new members to invest themselves into the tribe by “coming out” as trans. The “coming out” narrative implies that people aren’t signing up to be a part of a new subculture that is rife with cultural cachet, but instead boldly daring to reveal their inner true selves in an act of political courage.

Which is total nonsense.

You can see how and why “trans rights” came to be conflated with gay rights. It was a very clever marketing ploy by the trans activists to hitch their wagon to the gay rights movement. The idea of “coming out” — the act of bravely revealing what was once shamefully hidden — has taken hold of the public's imagination with real cultural bite. But let’s look at what exactly it means to “come out” as gay:

There have always been men and women who, in the privacy of their minds, are far more attracted to members of the same sex. For some, the idea of a relationship with the opposite sex isn’t just unappealing — it's unthinkable, no matter how much pressure they face to conform to heterosexual norms. Others have lived “in the closet,” moving through the motions of heterosexual life, their private longings tucked away — a quiet adaptation to social expectations they felt they couldn’t defy. In any given cultural context, the number of people who come out as gay correlates directly with how welcoming that environment is. Homophobic cultures produce fewer openly gay people; gay-affirming ones, more. But — and this is crucial — the actual number of people who are innately homosexual doesn't change. The point is: it’s an innate human variation, always present, just hidden beneath the surface of society — and unjustly so.

The unjustly part is important, too: it’s not just that gays had private desires, it’s that there was no justifiable reason for them to keep them hidden or to refrain from acting on them publicly. No one has been able to identify any societal drawbacks since lesbians and gays have been legally and culturally incorporated into public society and welcomed to live our homosexual lives out in the open. Thus, the gay rights movement has been a spectacularly successful social justice campaign.

You get the idea.

HOWEVER! The same factor of social injustice cannot necessarily be said to apply to these other groups of “closeted” people:

• There have always been straight men who secretly enjoy crossdressing. If crossdressing was seen as less taboo in society, they’d gladly do so out in the open all the time.

• There have always been straight men who, in the privacy of their minds, find it sexy and appealing to imagine themselves as women. Some of them would go ahead and try to force everyone else to imagine them as women, too, if given the chance to.

• For as long as there have been women’s public locker and shower rooms, there have been men who fantasize about getting naked inside them. You’d be surprised just how far some men would go to get into them. If the social and legal barriers were lessened even a little, a lot more men would elect to go for it.

• There have always been men who prey sexually on children and who dream of having the kind of unsupervised access to children that women are freely granted and that men are prohibited from having. The depths of scheming and planning that such predatory men are willing to go to is almost unimaginable. Just look at the Catholic priest scandal.

• There have always been teen girls who long to be boys — to escape the burden of objectification they endure. To many, if they were told they really could exempt themselves from the trials of girlhood, they’d leap at the chance.

• There have always been lesbians who long to move through the world free of the everyday grind of homophobia and misogyny they’re subjected to, for simply looking and acting the way they naturally do. If society is not continuing the necessary work to lessen the burden of homophobia that lesbians still endure, some of them might opt to live in a kind of closet instead, by attempting to camouflage themselves as ordinary men through “male” identities, surgeries, and cross-sex hormones.

• There have always been gay boys and young men with naturally feminine attributes, for whom the thought has crossed their minds, “If only I were a beautiful young woman, hunky young men would find me attractive instead of repulsive, and I’d be so much more popular! I’m so ashamed of being gay. I feel like a freak…” If enough of their peers and parents and teachers encouraged them further along this line of thinking, some of them would attempt to “change” their sex.

• There have always been social chasers, people who need to be at the centre of the party, who get unbearable FOMO at the sight of a big glittery rainbow parade that they aren’t leading. Given a chance to “identify” into the parade, they would happily co-opt it and make it all about themselves.

None of these people are innately “transgender”. None of them need a social or legal “right” to censor everyone’s acknowledgement of their biological sex in order to carry on with their lives — none of them.

In fact, everyone — all of society — is far better off if nobody is legally designated as a separate class of special people entitled to such a “right”.

Automatically granting “trans rights” to some of these groups of people poses an immediate threat to the safety of women and children: making “trans” a no-questions-asked all-access pass to women’s safe spaces plainly does just that.

Granting “trans rights” to other groups — as in the right to legally suppress the fact of someone’s sex from being openly acknowledged or mentioned — undermines women’s rights and gay rights in a variety of other ways, too, some blatantly obvious and others more subtle.

One such pitfall that perhaps doesn’t get the attention I think it deserves is this: the promotion of “transness” as a supposedly “healthy” alternative to gayness or gender non-conformity disincentivizes society from working to lessen the burdens of prejudice that are unfairly carried by “nonconforming” women and gays. As much as the trans movement pulls people into it via incentives, people are also pushed into it by everyone else’s disincentives: everyday people lack the will to truly address the problems of sexism and anti-gay bias that continue to plague the culture. Society’s newfound veneration of “trans” sends a signal to unhappy women and gays that their misfit status is a problem that ought best be solved within themselves if they want to fit into society: it tells them they’re better off modifying themselves and irreversibly damaging their bodies in order to be brought into conformity with the status quo.

This is what the bogus concept of “trans kids” does. It reframes the fact that some boys are naturally feminine and some girls are naturally masculine as a situation to be medically addressed through “gender clinics”, as if medicalizing today’s gender-bending youth will cleanse our past from centuries of homophobia, or something.

It doesn’t logically make any sense, but this topic was never the domain of logic, and instead the domain of gut feelings and tribal anxieties. To most straight people, when they hear the word trans, the first thing that comes to mind is, “How can I get out of this topic as quickly and safely as possible, without being seen as a bigot?” Whereas to a gay man like me, who has suffered from gender dysphoria in my youth, the first thing that comes to mind is, “How can I help these young vulnerable people as much as possible, and how can I ensure their safety?”

I despair, because these supposed “trans rights” are just dragging more people into the maelstrom. It’s threatening to drown us all.

This is a modified and expanded essay based on a comment and guest post I made at Butterflies and Wheels.

Psychologist and behavioural geneticist Michael Bailey, who is the author of the extraordinary book The Man Who Would Be Queen (which you can read RIGHT NOW! FOR FREE! RIGHT HERE! with the author’s blessing, and I highly recommend you download and read it), is conducting a research study on autogynephilia.

But before you go and read the book, I’m asking you to give me a quick couple minutes of your time, to answer a few survey questions for Michael Bailey’s project.

Bailey has done extraordinary work shining the light of science on the phenomena of homosexuality and autogynephilia among human males — subjects which are obviously of enormous interest to me — and he’s been the target of numerous harassment campaigns from trans activists as a result.

Please take a couple minutes to complete this brief survey of his. You will be doing science a favour! Below is the announcement and the link to Bailey’s survey:

ANNOUNCEMENT

Research Study of Beliefs, Attitudes, and Questions Concerning Autogynephilia

I am studying common beliefs that people have about autogynephilia (AGP), their attitudes about AGP, and what they would like to know about AGP.

You are invited to participate in my research study: Beliefs, Attitudes, and Questions Concerning Autogynephilia (STU00223398), Principal Investigator: Michael Bailey, Department of Psychology, Northwestern University (jm-bailey@northwestern.edu).

You must be at least 18 years old to participate. You will not be compensated for participation. Participation involves completing an online survey that will take approximately 15 minutes to complete.

To participate, or to find more information, click the link to the survey below:

SURVEY LINK

Following the election, America's centre and centre-left media is taking baby steps towards a course correction on the transgender issue. It's great to see that American legacy media people are beginning to see the light, but they've got a long way to go.

Jonathan Chait has a new piece at The Atlantic that argues, refreshingly, that Democrats need to moderate their stance on trans. But Chait, a former columnist at The New Republic and New York, offers up an example of how the centre and centre-left media continue to struggle to understand this subject.

My big essay from last month was about how legacy journalists obstinately refuse to ask the most fundamental question about transgender — what exactly is it? — because doing so would force them to reckon with the trans movement's fundamental untenability. Legacy media journalists instead hide behind the safety of the familiar, treating “trans rights” as analagous to gay rights: framing it as, supposedly, a movement to liberate a subgroup of people who’ve been persecuted over an innate attribute that society has failed to accommodate. Trans is seen by the left as a convenient new social justice project to replace the smash hit of gay rights activism, which has won so many of its battles so decisively that it’s lost its lustre. Now that gays are mainstream, we’re no longer useful as a brave and noble cause to rally and unite the activist left behind.

But transgender makes much more sense when it’s understood not as an identity-politics or social-justice issue, but as a loose term to describe what began as a small group of adults with a rare psychiatric condition, which subsequently exploded into a fad and a subculture via social media.

Chait makes all the mistakes I pointed out in my essay. I wrote last month that, with respect to the trans issue, journalists “wave the question [what is trans?] away with various excuses, and they focus instead on a much simpler framing of the issue: does it make a few unhappy people seem a little happier if we pretend? It’s easier to rationalize away the enormous damage that’s done to people’s bodily health (and the damage they’re doing to the social fabric) by focusing on the supposed benefits to their mental health, at least as it seems in the short and medium term.”

This is almost exactly what Chait says: “The major questions about trans rights are: Do some people have the chance to live a happier and more fulfilling life in a different gender identity than the one to which they were born?…”

But Chait, what is a “gender identity”? If people are already more-or-less free to dress and act as femininely or masculinely as they please regardless of their sex, why do we need to build a whole new cultural concept to suppress all mention of some people’s sex? It seems rather obvious that “gender identity” is a fundamentally regressive way of conceptualizing the relationship between someone’s biological sex and his or her femininity or masculinity.

I also wrote about how the transgender subculture conflates itself with a medical condition: “the trans extremists have merged their subculture with a psychiatric medical diagnosis: to obtain a diagnosis of gender dysphoria is to gain ‘validation’ as ‘truly being’ transgender — it’s held as ‘proof’ that their mystical ‘gender identities’ are real.” Chait makes the same mistake, framing the problem with “trans kids” as merely “allowing adolescent and preadolescent children to medically transition without adequate diagnosis.” (Emphasis mine.)

There is no medical diagnosis for trans, just as there is no medical diagnosis for goth or emo. Transgender is a social construct — a subcultural identity group, but one that is unique in that it’s closely associated with the cultural practice of extreme body modification. Doctors try to shoehorn their patients’ quasi-religious demands for medical “sex changes” into a non-superstitious framework by looking narrowly at the patients’ self-reported, short-term mental health outcomes. The mental-health framing of “sex change” treatments might make some sense in some limited, tightly controlled adult circumstances, but this application does not scale well when it’s loosely applied to anyone who shows interest after being badgered with the sales pitch that they might be happier living “as the opposite sex.” And it certainly doesn’t apply to children. In any other context (such as the practice of FGM in Africa) we would (and we do) immediately recognize that medical procedures performed on children to satisfy cultural norms are inhumane — a violation of basic human rights.

Chait then decides that women’s bathrooms can be casually given away to men as a consolation prize for letting women keep their sports: “One can easily defend Lia Thomas’s right to be addressed as a woman and allowed access to women’s bathrooms without supporting her participation on a women’s college swim team.”

Jonathan, the only reason YOU find it so easy to give women's bathrooms away to horny, kinky men (and we know for a fact that Lia Thomas is just a crossdressing autogynephile who's heavily active in the online fetish scene) is because YOU'RE not a woman.

Chait has also fallen into the trap of failing to comprehend that the trans subculture, being a quasi-religion, has two groups of “experts” who weigh in on it. I wrote in my essay:

“With regard to medical treatment for minors, [journalists] report that there’s disagreement or confusion in the field, but in fact it’s not complicated at all. The field is neatly divided into two camps: the nonbelievers and the devout.”

…Before any reporter speaks to a gender “expert,” they must first assess the supposed expert’s ideological and theological position on sex and transgender identity. Journalists should directly ask their sources to disclose whether they believe in the facts of biology — that sex is material, binary, and unchangeable — or not. If an “expert” disputes these fundamental facts, you have your answer: they’re in the cult. To them, this is all ritual therapy: they’re initiating new members into the sect, not providing secular medicine, though they will vehemently deny the charge.

Chait uncritically cites Masha Gessen, Katelyn Burns, Brianna Wu, and Dr. Erica Anderson as experts on the transgender subculture without pointing out that each and every one of these people personally identifies as a member of the transgender tribe. As I said in my essay, this is like asking a bunch of Scientologists to weigh in on the merits of Dianetics and E-meters. What’s the point? You already know what they’re mandated to say, because their continued membership in their tribe depends on them toeing the party line. There are plenty of doctors who don’t eschew biological facts and who have expert-level knowledge of the medical treatment of psychological distress related to sex and gender expression. And there are plenty of feminist women who could weigh in on the topic of their spaces being given over to men, too. Chait apparently spoke to none of them. Probably because deep down, he already knows what they’re going to say, and it’s not going to be supportive of the trans-activist orthodoxy.

Chait finishes by saying, “I can’t claim to have compiled a morally or politically unassailable accounting of which compromises Democratic politicians should make. What is unassailable is the principle that compromise without complete surrender is, in fact, possible.”

On both of those counts, I agree. His take is certainly not unassailable in the details, but at least the principle behind it is: it’s time for the left to compromise and reassess.

And that includes the media class on the left or centre-left.

The American liberal media class needs to learn that trans rights as in workplace and housing protections for people who identify as transgender is one thing. But “trans rights” as in forcing all of society to pretend that the facts of biology are inapplicable to those who state that they don’t believe in them is another thing entirely: as I said in my essay, that’s akin to religious nationalism.

And there’s nothing progressive about that.

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1. Natural Kinds versus Non-Natural Kinds

The two sexes, male and female, are what philosophers call natural kinds. The concepts of man and woman correspond to groupings of people “that reflect the structure of the natural world rather than the interests and actions of human beings,” to use the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s definition. Men and women are fundamental, universal classifications of humans — categories that transcend cultures and generations, as objectively, naturally distinct as hydrogen is from helium. So naturally, the sexes are an essential aspect of human life. We’re primates, with all the deeply ingrained instincts that apehood entails, including sexual instincts.

But we’re also highly cerebral, and humans’ uniquely complex minds are preoccupied most of the time with abstract concepts and ideas. So in addition to natural kinds, we also organize ourselves into groupings called non-natural kinds, such as religious affiliations, social classes and castes, and especially among young people, subcultural tribes like goth, punk, and emo. These are subjective, human-created categories that reflect our social and cultural ideas about the world rather than any intrinsic, biological distinctions. Goths are certainly real and they exist — I used to be one — but they are not an innate, universal, natural category of people the way, say, women are. Without reference to the cultural context within which the goth subculture exists — prevailing conventions about clothing & presentation, behaviour, and beliefs — there is no way to define who is a goth and who isn’t one. The same holds true for, say, Catholics or Buddhists or liberals or conservatives or Brahmins or Dalits. They are all social constructs — ideas we uphold and share in our collective minds. Females and males as groups don’t have that problem defining themselves. If some day extraterrestrials come across our fossils long after our species has gone extinct, they will have no trouble distinguishing male from female human skeletons, without any need to decipher our long-gone cultural mores.1

However, the demarcation between natural kinds and non-natural kinds isn’t always cut and dried. We live in two jumbled and overlapping realms simultaneously — the hardware of the natural world and the software of collective ideas that operate on it — and this sometimes leads to confusion and disagreement among the populace about which groupings arise naturally — from our hardware — and which exist primarily as concepts in our minds.

Take sexual orientation, for example. Scientific evidence shows that gay and straight, like the sexes male and female, are natural kinds. They have a material, biologically hard-wired basis that is observable independently of self-reports or social contexts, consistent across cultures and history. About two percent of all people are born gay — with innate sexual instincts that are exclusively or nearly-exclusively focused on members of the same sex — and that number doesn’t change no matter which country or which century you’re looking at. But there’s a sociocultural layer which complicates society’s understanding of sexuality: our physical and physiological sexual instincts are sometimes stifled by social conventions. Some homosexuals live in the closet, and no doubt some individuals who identify as gay or straight could, from a biological perspective, be more accurately described as bisexual — or vice versa.2 This has led to an absence of agreement in the popular cultural narrative about whether gay, straight, and bi should be understood as social constructs — choices we make, influenced by our upbringing, our social environment, and our values — or as fixed, natural categories in their own right. Same-sex attracted people like me, a gay man, have achieved broad acceptance across Western society, but all the same, we continue to occupy a somewhat hazy, indeterminate space with respect to the question of what exactly makes us who we are.

Confusion in the popular culture about homosexuals’ nature-versus-nurture origins has lingered for so long (despite the fact that scientifically, sexual orientation is well-established as an inborn, natural trait), it’s created an opening for the blatantly man-made, culture-bound social construct of transgender to slip in alongside gays and lesbians. The trans movement has seized the opportunity to model itself as a copy of ours, and its adherents falsely assert that transgender, too, is a natural kind — a fundamental, hard-wired aspect of human nature that has been historically obscured and imprisoned by social conventions, in the same way that homosexuality has proven to be. The trans activists, in emulation of the gay liberation movement of the 1970s & 1980s, argue that their movement only superficially looks like a mere cultural phenomenon to those who haven’t yet come to understand it more profoundly.

In fact, today’s trans activists are trying to claim that their “gender identities” are more fundamental, natural classifications of the human species than sexual orientations or even the two biological sexes are.

On this basis, they are demanding that society completely discard the universal, biological meanings of the words man and woman, and give them over to the activists’ socially-constructed “gender identities” instead.3

Extremists within the trans movement — I call them transgender fundamentalists or just gender fundamentalists — are not only seeking to replace the biological underpinnings of sex with their “gender identity” model, they’re also misappropriating and swapping out the conceptual underpinnings of homosexuality for transgender: they wrongly claim that homosexuality is a mere social construct — supposedly not “invented” until the word came about in the 1800s, despite widespread evidence of homosexuals’ presence and consistent characteristics throughout history. And they simultaneously insist that the opposite is true with respect to trans: they claim that when the term “transgender” came into broad cultural usage via social media, it revealed a natural category of people who have always been present, but who have up until now been inexplicably unaccounted-for throughout history.

If true, this would be a radical, civilization-upending discovery — that since the dawn of humankind none of us has ever known one another’s true sex; we’ve only been interacting with each other’s “gender identities” this whole time — or at least, we should have been, if our oppressive culture hadn’t inhibited them. If it’s not true, then the transgender fundamentalist movement is headed for an iceberg: it will soon go down as one of the biggest cultural disasters in history.

All evidence points to the latter case.

No one has ever dug up any credible historical evidence to back the transgender argument without watering down the definition of “trans” until it just means a scattering of sex-stereotype-defying people or crossdressers or homosexuals — and I guarantee you, they never will. There is no documented culture on Earth apart from modern transgender extremism that has ever attempted to impose a wholesale ban on its populace from recognizing one another’s biological sex whenever their stated “gender identity” contradicts it. Gender benders have always existed — masculine-presenting women and feminine-presenting men — and sometimes they have been culturally respected (though, alas, usually not), but they have never been taken literally to be the opposite sex, or anything close to it. They are sometimes allocated to special social categories, so-called “third genders,” such as the “ladyboys” of Thailand and the fa’afafine of Samoa, but these groups are simply gay males, interpreted socially and spiritually as something like, “not quite men but certainly not women either” within their indigenous cultures. The fact that they are male is never in question.4 On rare occasions when a few people — invariably women — pretended to actually be the opposite sex, it had more to do with society’s lack of respect for women’s defiance of social norms, and a need to circumvent rigid, sex-based vocational limitations — think Mulan or Yentl — than any kind of enlightened connection with their supposedly innate “gender identities.” No, the fictional characters Mulan and Yentl were not transgender, and neither were any of the real gender bending historical figures such as Joan of Arc, George Sand, or the ancient Egyptian queen Hatshepsut. They all knew full well that they were women, and they did not dispute it. They did not share some innate, essential quality that overrode or negated the fact that they were women, unless you believe that strong women who dare to defy the constricting roles that are socially imposed on them are not actually women at all. That’s extremely sexist, don’t you think?

But many people are hesitant to challenge the unfounded assertion that “trans people have existed throughout history” because they can’t get a handle on how to tackle such a grandiose statement conceptually, and they don’t know how to disentangle it from the quite correct assertion that homosexuals have existed throughout history — many of whom were forced to live in the closet. The gender fundamentalists ruthlessly enforce a taboo against discussing the LGB separately from the T for this very reason — they don’t want the buzz to catch on in the culture that LGB and T are fundamentally distinct phenomena that come from entirely different conceptual realms (biological versus cultural), because the T has nowhere near the same level of credibility on its own.5 And they systematically rewrite gay history, unilaterally declaring that the butch lesbians and feminine men of the past were “really” trans — that they must have had special secret “gender identities” which retroactively obligate us to amend their sexes — and therefore their sexual orientations as well — in the history books.

To make myself perfectly clear: the modern concept of transgender is a non-natural kind: it’s a completely idea-based, cultural concoction in the same way that goth is. Contrary to sex, which is a material fact, or sexuality, which in adults can be confirmed with lab tests such as pupillometry and phallometry, there exists no objective, material marker to distinguish “transness” from “non-transness” in individuals — and there never will be.6 Some gender benders & crossdressers choose to call themselves “trans” or perhaps “nonbinary” or some other newly invented term; others don’t. Some people who become captivated by thoughts of being the opposite sex (or neither sex) act on their thoughts by taking up transgender identities and/or pursuing cosmetic body modifications; others act on such thoughts in different ways, or not at all. Our present culture strongly encourages people to consider that they might “be” transgender, and the sales pitch tends to land among a hodgepodge of different cohorts for various reasons, including alienated or rebellious youth (much like goth or punk used to), and straight men with fetishistic transvestism. (The “gender identity” concept originated as a genteel cover story, a smokescreen to obscure the fact that the first trans people were sexually fetishistic crossdressing men seeking to upgrade their private, kinky hobby to a public, full-time gig.)

Transgender identity is entirely dependent on people’s self-reports about their feelings and the cultural context through which they’re interpreted.

This is arguably the trans activists’ primary bone of contention with the rest of the world: the fact that male and female and homosexual and heterosexual are fundamental, natural categories of people, but trans and “cis” are… well, I wouldn’t say they’re “made up” (that wording’s maybe a bit harsh) but they’re culturally contingent social categories. Which, when you think about it, should have been completely obvious to everyone all along: they’re just identities after all, and identities are social constructs by definition.

The main objective of the gender fundamentalist movement is to flip the facts around — to force society to swallow the lie that male and female (and by extension, gay and straight) are oppressive social constructs — literally, “white supremacist colonialist” fictions — while trans and “cis” are as fundamental as the elementary particles and as universal as the laws of thermodynamics.

This is why the gender fundamentalist movement is obsessed with children.

They want to establish that transgender is a natural kind and that it’s something inherent in people from conception (again, parasitizing the gay rights movement, marketing trans as an exciting new upgrade for tired old sexual orientation). The most obvious way to do that is to single out and identify supposedly innately trans people as close to conception as possible.7 Amid the cultural upheaval and interpersonal disorientation caused by social media, many people have taken the bait. More and more, we live in a software-based world, and this is priming us to turn against our own hardware — the physical reality of our bodies. This is especially true with young people — “digital natives” — but social media has impacted all of society. The trans mania exploded when it was aggressively marketed to angst-ridden teens in the early days of Tumblr and Reddit; a tidal wave of newly “discovered” trans kids quickly followed as parents took to Facebook; now in our fully social-media saturated TikTok age, people are beginning to declare that their toddlers are trans. No doubt soon there will be newborn trans babies. (I suppose there will eventually be not-yet-born trans fetuses and embryos, too, before this terribly destructive craze runs its course.)

The transgender movement is different from most other socially constructed identity groups in that its fundamentalist adherents have sought to forcibly impose a restructuring of our entire society around their personal beliefs. In this sense, it’s not just an eccentric social tribe like a religious sect or a subculture that could otherwise be ignored and left alone if one disagrees with its tenets. It’s become more like a religious nationalist movement — a strange, ostensibly left-wing mimic of Christian nationalism or Islamism. In the last five years or so, trans hysteria has swept over progressive governments. Laws have been put on the books all over the world which enshrine as legal fact the fiction that “gender identities” are fundamental and innate, and which denounce the reality of biological sex as an outdated and bigoted belief — “unworthy of respect in a democratic society” as a judge notoriously put it in a since-overturned UK employment tribunal. Lawmakers have outlawed female-only spaces and banned lesbian-only events at the behest of males who claim to be women or lesbians and who hold biology-denying “gender identity” fundamentalist views. Police have arrested scores of women for publicly stating the fact that the biological sexes are salient categories which cannot be opted into or out of by the whims of people’s socially-contrived ideas and desires. In many jurisdictions, governments are intervening to promote gender identity beliefs in children, injecting transgender fundamentalism into the school curriculum right on up from kindergarten, and courts are beginning to order children removed from their homes if their parents don’t consent to subjecting their bodies to experimental medical “sex change” treatments, which by design would render them sterile and dependent on ongoing medical care for the rest of their lives.

This is all in service of the transgender fundamentalists’ mission to prove that humans were naturally meant to be primarily categorized according to everyone’s supposed “gender identity” — basically whatever we decide, like a user profile option — instead of the hard, unchangeable fact of our sex, which is fixed from the moment the very first cell that multiplies every one of us into existence — the egg — fuses with a sperm. Our sex is not a drop-down menu selection; it is infused into each and every cell of each and every one of our bodies.

The gender fundamentalists are being propped up by well-meaning but misguided progressives who have so far failed to grasp the scope of the fundamentalists’ demands and the size of their rapidly growing movement — and along with it, the devastating social consequences that will inevitably result from their futile mission to browbeat everyone until their sect’s private, mystical beliefs become universally acknowledged facts. Some liberal-minded people play along because they mistakenly believe their acceptance of everybody’s right to defy sex stereotypes in their behaviour and presentation — which is undoubtedly a good thing — necessitates a reappraisal of biological sex as a concept — which is undoubtedly unwise. They’re put off by the fact that males and females are born with inescapable, natural differences that will always matter in at least some circumstances — especially circumstances that conspicuously involve our physical bodies, such as sports, medicine, or anything to do with sexuality (dating & mating, sexual orientation, and reproduction). They have embraced gender fundamentalism as an alternative to sex realism, partly to avoid conflict with people who hold trans identities, but also out of a belief that by blurring the distinctions between the sexes they’re taking a step towards equality between them — a bogus idea that if I pretend hard enough that I can’t see who’s male and who’s female, then this will eventually rub off on everyone else and therefore inequality will decrease… or something. (Scrutinize the logic too much and you’ll realize it doesn’t even make sense.)

In reality, of course, it’s just a way to avoid addressing the societal problems of sexism and homophobia (in addition to avoiding confronting the trans activists’ delusions). The differences between males and females must be confronted and taken fully into account in order for true equality to be achieved between the sexes, and in order to understand why some people are unhappy about the sex of their bodies. We need to also acknowledge that some men’s motives for claiming to be women are rooted in their erotic attraction to female bodies, and their interest in entering women’s spaces is exploitative.

And of course gays and lesbians are shoved back into the closet if we’re not allowed to acknowledge that we exclude from our dating pools those who are not the same sex as ourselves. Straights, for that matter, are shoved into a kind of closet, too. And for that matter, people who identify as transgender are also being harmed, when the truth is withheld from them to spare their feelings: that on the dating market, everybody is only pretending that we don’t still classify trans-identifying people according to their true biological sex in the privacy of our minds — which the evidence clearly shows we all do. Our sexual orientations, being natural kinds rooted in biology, can’t be overruled at will, no matter how sexually “inclusive” we wish ourselves to be. If trans-identifying people have hopes of finding long-term partners, they need to know the truth, that their dating prospects are not going play out as though they have literally changed sex following so-called “sex change” medical operations.

2. Folk Illness and Social Contagion

Most ordinary people don’t really believe that “gender identities” supersede sex and sexual orientation. The metaphysical beliefs that motivate the movement’s true believers in their war against biology are not shared by the majority of people who nevertheless accommodate and enable them. Everyday people who want to support their trans-identifying friends, colleagues, and family members invariably avoid thinking about the question of what exactly transgender is. Even at the medical clinics that make their millions (actually, their revenue is in the billions now) providing trans-identifying people with drastic, permanent body modifications on demand, the exact nature of their patients’ supposed “gender identities” is a question that is studiously avoided. Nor is the question ever directly addressed by the journalists and science educators who report on this area of medicine, or the judges and politicians who adjudicate and create policy around it. They all wave the question away with various excuses, and they focus instead on a much simpler framing of the issue: does it make a few unhappy people seem a little happier if we pretend? It’s easier to rationalize away the enormous damage that’s done to people’s bodily health (and the damage they’re doing to the social fabric) by focusing on the supposed benefits to their mental health, at least as it seems in the short and medium term.8

What they fail to understand is that the metaphysical question is the one that matters above all others. It's people’s quasi-religious belief that their “gender identities” are a fundamental natural kind that is making so many of them distressed about their bodies in the first place — especially young people. Legions of young people report hating their bodies because they’ve been taught that they had the misfortune of being born with a vulgar mismatch between their sexed bodies and their supposedly innate “gender identities.”

The central doctrine of the “gender identity” belief system, and the idea that is spreading like a virus through the culture, is that we as a society aren’t supposed to be noticing and reacting to each other's actual, physical biological sex, but to each other’s stated ideas about our sex instead. It’s an emperor’s-new-clothes gambit: if we can get all of society to profess belief in invisible “gender identities” it will finally make them real, and our lying eyes will be condemned for their blasphemy, having misled us all this time about the naked reality of everyone’s biology. This is of course impossible, but what’s worse: the very idea has the effect of turning vulnerable people’s minds against their own bodies. It makes them conceptualize the visible evidence of their own sex as taboo, and when they look in the mirror, every pang of recognition in this or that body characteristic, that it exposes their true biological sex to all who see it, becomes a source of shame. It turns their bodies into a psychological target that they direct their anxieties and hostilities at.

In the case of young children, it’s their parents who have begun to experience this biology-shame by proxy, and the parents are inculcating it into their children. Stereotypically feminine-acting boys and stereotypically masculine-acting girls are perfectly normal, and it’s a common phase for such children to experience some degree of confusion or distress about the concept of sex as they grow up, because their first awareness of it comes via distinguishing behavioural patterns — stereotypes — between the sexes. The deeper meanings of male and female are a lesson that comes later. As these naturally stereotype-defying kids integrate into society, they face a challenging decision: to try to fit in, or to try to take pride in having maverick personality traits that might put them at odds with traditionalists. Most kids mix elements of both as they come into their own. Children’s developing brains are evolved to handle this challenge: they’re highly neuroplastic so that they can adapt to their environment. But in kids with “gender identity” indoctrinated parents, there is no longer a process of learning how to balance self-expression with social adaptation. The child is instead given a simple answer: you are “trans”; you were born with a mismatch between the “gender” of your “identity” and the sex of your body and we are going to fix it for you. Sometimes the parents become so terrified of the prospect of their child entering into puberty, convinced that the visible emergence of their child’s secondary sex characteristics is literally a life-threatening crisis, that they seek out highly experimental and powerful “puberty blocking” drugs to stave off the natural process of their child’s body development, at the cost of permanent sterility and severe impediment to the child’s bone and brain development.

Given that the transgender subculture is based around a metaphysical belief that’s incompatible with scientific analysis — it’s impossible to construct a study to prove or disprove the conjecture, “Our biologically sexed bodies are profane and oppressive and our gendered souls are sacred and holy” — you shouldn’t be surprised to find that it’s taken on many aspects of a New Religious Movement. To the movement’s predominantly young new adherents, every act of surgically or chemically undoing or sex-swapping the visible sex characteristics of their bodies — or better yet, preventing them, in the case of pre-pubescent children — becomes a ritual baptism and a cleansing of original sin, an act of corporeal purification to achieve spiritual unification with the transgender tribe. In our unmoored and socially anxious digital age, awash with Photoshopped and FaceTuned images of impossibly perfect-looking people, the appeal of membership in a quasi-religious tribe that preaches transcendence and escape from the physical limitations of our messy, hopelessly flawed, mortal bodies is powerfully seductive, especially to boys and girls struggling with insecurities around their natural, sex-stereotype-defying personality traits, and as they move into puberty, their budding sexualities. It’s also seductive to parents who secretly harbour homophobic anxieties about their feminine sons’ and masculine daughters’ future sexualities.9

But the tenets of gender identity ideology also serve the desires of predominantly older, straight men in thrall to exotic sexual fantasies involving female role-play and sex-role swapping. Autogynephilia, the technical name for the kink of being sexually attracted to oneself “as a woman” is most likely an inborn variant of male sexuality (not unlike homosexuality in that sense), and it’s suspected to be present in about three percent of the male population.10 Autogynephiles are probably a natural kind — born that way — they’re just lying about the nature of the kind: it’s a glitch in the sex drive’s hard wiring, not a supernatural “gender identity.” The evolutionary mechanism that is supposed to keep men’s sexual targeting strictly aimed outward at females of the species (for the sake of reproduction) has a crossed wire, and it’s gone off course and turned back towards itself, like a heat-seeking missile on the fritz. (Sexologists even use a term that’s evocative of ballistics: an “erotic target location error.”) The result is that these men develop sexual and romantic fantasies about turning into women, and they usually mollify their urges in private by dressing up in women’s clothes.

This group forms the historic backbone of the transgender movement. We don’t entirely know why some men experience autogynephilia more intensely than others, but we do know that when some of these men’s private lusts are left unchecked, they can turn into full-time fixations. Some men become so driven to transform into the objects of their sexual attraction, to make their fantasies of being women come true, that they “come out” as “transgender women,” and then seek entry into female-only domains such as women’s changing areas, sports teams, and social circles — especially lesbian social circles, for obvious sexual reasons. Many of these men are so infatuated with their “female” alter egos — they have literally fallen in love and formed a pair bond with themselves — they are willfully blind to the harms caused to everyone else by their biology-denying delusions. People mistake these men’s aggressive, vehement insistence that they’re women, and the rage they express at those who deny it, as proof that they’re suffering from a grave and torturous injustice committed by society against them. While it may be true that they’re suffering from a painful sexual and romantic yearning to be female, the fact that they are male is not a social injustice. It is absolutely not society’s fault that they’re male, and there is no moral obligation for anyone to pretend that we don’t see their sex. These men are hijacking social justice activists’ bleeding hearts to selfishly indulge their fantasies at everyone else’s expense, eviscerating women’s rights, gay rights, and freedom of speech in the process.

The founding principles of gender identity ideology were conceived by these straight men as a way to rationalize their sexual paraphilias — that’s the scientific word for kinks “of marked intensity” — in order to alleviate the mental anguish they experienced as a result of them: I’m not wearing silk stockings and a satin dress because I’ve got an overwhelming sexual compulsion that I’m ashamed and embarrassed about; I’m wearing them because I’m actually a woman, and I just happen to have been born trapped inside the body of a man. So there’s nothing for me to be ashamed of. The problem is you, the people who have oppressed us with your fear and ignorance, because you don’t understand how transgender souls work.

Postmodern academics — and later, confused and vulnerable young people online — have taken literally these men’s outlandish musings about the supposedly transcendental nature of their sexual proclivities, and they have elevated the fetishistic transvestites’ folkloric beliefs about “gender identities” into religious doctrine, when previous generations at most only politely tolerated them out of courtesy.

From there, “gender identity” beliefs caught on with feminine gay men and butch lesbians struggling with mental distress surrounding their atypicality: one way to escape the bullying, abuse, and shame that can come with being a sex-stereotype-defying homosexual in a hostile environment is to try to move through the environment by stealth, camouflaging yourself as an ordinary, sex-stereotype-conforming heterosexual of the opposite sex. The “gender identity” belief system offers convenient backing for that rationale. They tell themselves they’re not evading their innate homosexuality which has caused them to stick out socially, but rather they’re embracing their natural, supposedly innate “gender identity,” and any distress they feel about being different can now be externalized as a product of society’s “transphobic” ignorance about how “gender identities” work. Thus, the burden of shame that is unfairly imposed on gender benders by society is not overcome by building resilience and self-confidence, it’s merely transferred back onto society instead. The social problem of how to integrate sex stereotype defying people into society and ensure their equality and liberty isn’t being addressed; rather, it’s being handed off and shuffled around like a hot potato, with help from “gender identity” pseudoscience.

(Straight people are all too eager to get on board with this rationale, too, because it absolves them of guilt surrounding any lingering discomfort they still have about butch dykes and femme gay guys. They’re keen to shield us poor, tragic gender benders from shame out of a sense of pity for us. I, for one, find that attitude highly insulting. If straight people didn’t treat gender bending gays and lesbians as pitiable in the first place, we wouldn’t feel such an overwhelming need to escape from our bodies and hide behind transgender identities.)

And now in the social media age, rife with anxiety, body image issues, and identity crises, these concepts have ignited the imaginations of all kinds of demographic subgroups, particularly those on the fringes of culture, encroaching like wildfires across the horizon of the cultural landscape: autistics, foster children, hipsters, YouTubers, military veterans, third-wave feminists, 4chan incels, Japanese anime fans, computer nerds, furries… and yes, goths. It’s in the zeitgeist: self-actualization by achieving healthy bodies and minds is out; self-actualization via angry pronoun demands and invasive surgeries is in.

So it’s no wonder people’s entry into the transgender subculture and their adoption of transgender identities is often accompanied by severe mental anguish — gender dysphoria, as it’s labelled in the latest iteration of the DSM, psychology’s bible. The movement was made to appease people’s mental anguish rather than to overcome it. This psychological-anguish aspect of the transgender subculture makes it unique in comparison to other socially constructed identity groups.

Although… You might half-jokingly argue that goth is a kind of appeasement of mental anguish, too: wallowing in depression and angst. And scientific research has in fact found a significant correlation between goth identification and depression as well as self-harm, although the direction of causation is still in question. Does goth identity lead to depression or does depression lead to goth identity? The scientific verdict seems to be that adopting a goth identity has a mild-to-moderate ability to cause or exacerbate symptoms of depression, anxiety, and self-harm in young people.

And yet, just like having a diagnosis of chronic depression doesn't “prove” that anyone is inherently goth, getting a psychologist to produce an “official” diagnosis of distress relating to one’s sex does not “prove” that anyone is inherently transgender.11 We recognize that goth is a subculture and that depression is a mental condition — they are two different categories of things. But the trans extremists have merged their subculture with a psychiatric medical diagnosis: to obtain a diagnosis of gender dysphoria is to gain “validation” as “truly being” transgender — it’s held as “proof” that their mystical “gender identities” are real.

And besides, the condition of gender dysphoria that underpins and supposedly validates the trans movement is, like transgender identity itself, a cultural epidemic rather than a universal phenomenon — it’s a culture-bound syndrome or folk illness — a disease which has “no known objective biochemical or structural alterations of body organs or functions, and the disease is not recognized in other cultures.” Distress about one’s sex is a byproduct of feeling ill-at-ease with the social expectations one associates with their sex — it’s a 100% social construct, like everything else to do with the transgender subculture.

And finally, like the goth subculture’s cause-and-effect relationship with depression, but with much, much more intensity, immersion in the transgender subculture is often the leading cause of patients’ mentally crippling gender dysphoria.

First, they decide that they’re trans, and then their mental health collapses because of anxiety about their “wrong” bodies, and a belief that the world is full of evil “transphobes” who are out to kill them.

The widespread conflation of transgender identity with medical need has turned it into a form of cultural iatrogenesis — the transgender subculture is causing the disease that it’s supposedly meant to cure. That’s why there weren’t any transgender people in the past: no one suffered from having supposedly been born with their “gender identity” stuck in the wrong body until transgender pseudoscience was hatched by crossdressing autogynephiles and closeted gays in the 20th Century. Those today who label children and adolescents “transgender” — including doctors and journalists — are not merely politely acknowledging their “identity,” they are contributing to their illness.

By now, these three ideas I’ve outlined have been fused together in the cultural discourse. There is now an inferred link between (1) identifying as transgender, (2) having an inborn, soul-like “gender identity,” and (3) there being a moral imperative to medically erase any sex traits in one’s body that one feels are “mismatched” with it. Transgender identity is now synonymous with a moral & spiritual right to access “sex change” medical procedures on demand. When applied to minors, its connotations are unambiguously spiritual and medical. A “trans kid” is not merely a kid who identifies as trans in the way some kids identify as goth. A “trans kid” is (supposedly) self-evidently born with the spiritual essence of the opposite sex (or neither sex), and is therefore entitled to get his or her body medically fixed, the sooner the better.

In other words, the identity label “transgender” cannot be ethically treated as separate from a medical greenlight to undergo “sex change” procedures, because that’s what it’s understood to mean by most laypeople today. Therefore there is no ethical, secular ground to concede the label “transgender” for anyone who isn’t conceivably old enough to make an informed decision to sterilize him or herself and undergo irreversible body modifications with all the inherent risks that such procedures entail. If you grant that a child or adolescent “is” transgender, it’s as good as casting your lot with the “gender identity” mystics and declaring that the child or adolescent was born innately in need of invasive medical body modifications in order for his or her “true self” to thrive.

There are no “trans kids,” there are only kids who have been taught to believe they are trans, and who may be experiencing psychological distress and being subjected to unnecessary medical procedures as a result of that belief.

3. Secular Medicine versus Ritual Therapy

A secular approach to gender-related medical treatment and transgender identity is still possible — for adults. I am personal friends with some people who identify as transgender, who have undergone medical “sex change” procedures (all as adults), and who don’t believe any of the superstitious ideas that have become endemic in transgender communities online. These people have no illusions about their biological sex, and they see their medical procedures through a pragmatic, material lens: they went into them fully aware that they’re serious, high-risk treatments designed to make them feel comfortable in their bodies, and not rites of passage into the other sex. However, I believe such best-case scenarios are rare. In the vast majority of cases of distress relating to one’s sex, physical interventions such as breast implants or reductions or removals, or the reconfiguration of male genitals to resemble a vagina, should be considered last-line medical treatments reserved for especially serious cases which don’t resolve with therapy, or they shouldn’t be conceptualized as medicine at all, but rather as elective cosmetic procedures.12

I also know people who went into their transgender medical procedures under the influence of the “gender identity” religion, believing that the procedures would magically “affirm” their true spiritual sex and seamlessly usher them into the social domain of the other sex — that they would be “born again” embodying the exalted ideas of what a man or a woman is that had transfixed them. Many of them are now disillusioned and full of deep regret and anger. They believe they were misled and exploited. One has committed suicide. Among the rest, virtually all of them say that they would not go through with the procedures if they could go back in time and choose again. It’s their plight that propels me to take action against this movement. They have been wronged, and their suffering has gone scandalously unrecognized.

This is why I believe that people who subscribe to supernatural “gender identity” beliefs are poor candidates to be approved for gender-related medical treatments. And they certainly shouldn’t be the ones in charge of assessing others in that regard.

In the past, psychiatrists carefully vetted patients before approving them for “sex change” medical procedures, and many applicants were turned down because they were acting under the influence of delusions.13 But around the beginning of the 2000s, gender mystics absorbed in their fantasies took up careers in the field and began to take over the medical clinics. Once they gained control, they instituted a new medical model of treatment based on affirming their spiritual belief in ineffable “gender identities,” which they called “gender affirming care.” The clinicians who endorsed psychiatric vetting and held onto an evidence-based, therapy-first philosophy towards sex-based distress and “sex change” treatments were cowed into silence or swiftly expelled.

The World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) became the movement’s ecclesiastical council, and its annual conferences took on the character of religious revival meetings, full of raised hands, whoops of “amen,” call-and-response chants, and endless sermons about their great satan, “transphobia.” As the conferences became more evangelical in tone, WPATH leadership closed them to the public and instituted a strict ban on allowing journalists to observe the proceedings. By 2023, WPATH had become so zealous in its mission to prove that “gender identities” are innate, natural kinds fixed at conception, it issued a new edict, recommending the removal of all age restrictions, opening up the possibility of “sex change” operations on kids of any age. (This new edict was promoted by the Biden Administration’s Assistant Secretary of Health, a 66 year old father of two who in 2011 began to identify as a transgender woman, and then quickly became a token of virtue for the Democratic political establishment.)

Such a religious takeover of a field of medicine is unprecedented, so much so that it has left many science-minded people ill-equipped to fully process what has happened. It’s rather like if Scientologists systematically took over psychiatry.

Journalists are especially misguided in their coverage of WPATH and its metaphysical conceptualization of “gender affirming care.” With regard to medical treatment for minors, they report that there’s disagreement or confusion in the field, but in fact it’s not complicated at all. The field is neatly divided into two camps: the nonbelievers and the devout.

On the one hand, there are clinicians who understand that biological sex is real and unchangeable, that gender dysphoria is a culture-bound syndrome, that transgender identity is a social contagion, and that surgeries and hormones are a high-risk, drastic treatment approach which should not be taken lightly (if at all). This group, being science-minded, are polite to a fault and overcautious about expressing their reservations.

And on the other hand, there are clinicians who are hostile to the concept of biological sex, and who believe that “transness” is an innate state of being, and that “trans people” cannot live their best lives unless they get surgeries and hormones to align their bodies with their innate, spiritual “gender identities.” This group are activists with an agenda, and they push it aggressively.

Both of these camps advertise themselves as “experts” in the field of gender-related medicine, but like with any religion or cult, the “experts” who literally believe in it should not be trusted to evaluate it honestly. You wouldn’t expect a Scientologist to offer unbiased testimony about the efficacy of E-meters, so why would you expect a gender fundamentalist to offer unbiased testimony about the wonders of sex change surgeries for children?

Before any reporter speaks to a gender “expert,” they must first assess the supposed expert’s ideological and theological position on sex and transgender identity. Journalists should directly ask their sources to disclose whether they believe in the facts of biology — that sex is material, binary, and unchangeable — or not. If an “expert” disputes these fundamental facts, you have your answer: they’re in the cult. To them, this is all ritual therapy: they’re initiating new members into the sect, not providing secular medicine, though they will vehemently deny the charge.

Separate out the “experts” who are inside the “gender identity” bubble from the rest, and you’ll make out a much clearer picture of pediatric gender affirming care: there is no secular justification for any of it at all.

There are other examples of illegitimate “medical” procedures that are promoted within sects or specific cultural environments, but which have no objective medical benefit on their own.

The NXIVM cult (pronounced “Nexium”, like the heartburn pills), based out of New York State, conditioned its members to have the intials of its leader and founder, Keith Raniere, branded into their skin with an electro-cautery device — an excruciatingly painful rite of passage. The doctor who performed the procedures insisted they were medically justified, citing the sense of wellbeing and belonging that the women reported feeling: “It was about trust. They would come in… and give me a hug. It was a very meaningful initiation ceremony.”

But whatever sense of wellbeing the victims reported after being scarred by the procedures is — or rather was, because Keith Raniere is serving 120 years in prison and the cult has collapsed — entirely dependent on remaining members in good standing within the group. It was only in the context of the NXIVM cult’s belief system that the scarrings provided any psychologally positive outcome. As soon as the victims left the cult and abandoned its tenets, happiness turned to acute anger and resentment at the medical abuse they had been subjected to.

The New York State Department of Health ruled that these procedures therefore violated medical standards, and the doctor who performed them, Danielle Roberts, had her license stripped.

This exactly parallels reports from detransitioners — people who have left the “gender identity” belief system. Once people come to their senses about the reality of biological sex, and that their supposed “gender identities” are not natural kinds but merely ideas they hold in their minds, taught to them by the transgender subculture, they are plagued by intense remorse and fury over the medical mistreatment they endured.

The “gender identity” movement works tirelessly to quash detransitioners’ testimonies, systematically suppressing long-term patient follow-up data, and ravenously attacking detransitioners and the journalists who attempt to publish their stories, characterizing them as the worst bigots of all. (A universal feature across all cults is the ruthless persecution of apostates. See also, the Church of Scientology’s KGB-esque Office of Special Affairs.)

In Northern and Saharan Africa, as well as parts of the Middle East, Female Genital Mutilation — removal of clitoris and/or labia in part or in full — is considered a rite of passage for girls, and in countries such as Egypt and Somalia, the prevalence of the practice is up to 98%. Despite the fact that most women who were subjected to FGM when they were children report happiness with the procedure as long as they remain within the cultural environment that condones it, the World Health Organization decries the practice as “a violation of the rights of children. The practice also violates a person's rights to health, security and physical integrity; the right to be free from torture and cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment; and the right to life, in instances when the procedure results in death.”

Medical organizations across the West have yet to wake up to the obvious parallels between youth “gender affirming care” and FGM: the subjects of such body violations can only be happy with them as long as they stay within the cultural ecosystem that conditions them to see the supposed benefits of them. Right now, in our current social climate in the West, transgender is having a moment. But if it turns out to be a passing fad — and already there are clear signs that it is, such as diminishing popular support for it, and reports of drops in patient numbers at the clinics — the cultural framework that sustains the subjects’ reported happiness will shift, and so will their perception of themselves and what’s been done to their bodies.

Transgender extremism is thus a circle of horror: like FGM, its victims must perpetuate it on future generations in order to justify that it was done to themselves. Once the system collapses, everyone awakens to the reality that it was all unnecessary and harmful.

And of course, the gender clinics stand to lose billions of dollars, and the clinicians who continue to operate them are already in ethical jeopardy. Like the tobacco industry from the beginning of the 1950s, when incontrovertible evidence began to expose the carcinogenic effects of cigarette smoking, they could not acknowledge that their product was deadly without admitting that they were already culpable, so they doubled down with propaganda and lies to stave off the repercussions and protect their own interests for as long as they could. High-profile “gender identity” peddling doctors like Jack Turban are in this situation right now.

And the crossdressers will inevitably be exposed as frauds: men with sexual paraphilias who exploited the social justice movement for their own benefit, causing almost unfathomable harm to vulnerable people’s bodies, to women’s rights, to gay rights, and freedom of speech.

In retrospect, these points will be terribly obvious to everyone: that “gender medicine” for minors had been a horrific scandal (and a lot of “gender medicine” for adults was equally harmful), and that most of the men who called themselves “trans women” were acting under the spell of their short-circuiting sex drives, and nothing more.

The impending reckoning promises to be a historically unprecedented cultural, medical, and political catastrophe.

“Gender identity” has tainted progressive politics in the eyes of an entire generation. Countless people have abandoned their liberal political affiliations and lost trust in liberal media outlets like the New York Times, the Guardian, and the New Yorker upon realizing that the transgender movement has mutated into a dangerous cult and that liberal politicians and journalists are foisting it on the rest of society, perhaps unwittingly. Wittingly or not, they are complicit in a grave injustice.

In the existential tug-of-war between the material world and the conceptual world, between the hardware of our bodies and the software of ideas that animate us, only our software can be truly reprogrammed. While we can improve our bodies in many ways, we are each ultimately stuck for life with the one we were born with. That’s a fact we cannot ever fully transcend. And that’s a good thing. Our imperfect bodies are what make us human, and learning to value and love ourselves for who we are is the great project that gives meaning to each of our lives. The great project of civilization is our collective attempt to help each other in that regard. Transgender fundamentalism has been a detour from civilization’s path to progress, a lurch toward the false promise that we can each opt out of the challenges that society collectively faces — that every man is an island, where we can satisfy our desires and overcome our fears by imagining reality away, lured down a false path of personal enlightenment by medical shamans who sold us lies. But in the end — spoiler alert — you’ll find it was all just a dream. Sorry, Neo and Morpheus, we are not trapped in the Matrix after all. The real world is all there is, and all of us men and women must work together to make it better.

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Footnotes:

The International Olympic Committee has ignored the growing global consensus around fairness and safety for female athletes, instead choosing to open up women’s Olympic sports to anyone who wants to compete in them. This comes at the same time that many global sporting authorities are moving in the opposite direction, taking steps to protect the category of women’s sports from being redefined to the point of meaninglessness by ever-more-absurd calls for “inclusivity.”

All around the world, sporting regulators are reaffirming that the raison d’être of women’s sports is rightful exclusion: they exist to be a separate category for athletes with female bodies — that is, to be very specific: women’s sports exclude bodies which have the undeniable physical advantages that male puberty gave them thanks to the abundance of testosterone produced by a functioning pair of testicles.

The IOC has instead kept in line with the radical identity politics of the social media-fuelled transgender movement, which seeks to suppress any acknowledgement of individuals’ inborn, immutable biology in favour of everyone’s self-declared “gender identity.”

This year, IOC officials took their position to an even further extreme, announcing that biological sex is entirely a “private” matter, and that any kind of test at all to verify athletes’ biological eligibility to compete in women’s sports would be “unfair” to male athletes who wish to compete against women. To the astonishment of sports & performance scientists, the IOC declared that the sole criterion for eligibility to compete against women is that the box on their passport is marked with an “F”.

(It should go without saying, but a passport is not a scientific document and the administration of passports varies significantly from country to country. In most countries it’s not at all difficult for males to get their passports marked “F”.)

This has put the IOC — as well as the trans activists and media outlets backing it — in an indefensible position. Things quickly spiraled out of control when two athletes entered the women’s Olympic boxing ring despite having been previously disqualified from women’s competitions after lab tests confirmed that they’re male. According to the IOC’s rules, this is perfectly fine — and this is to be expected, given that the IOC has been loudly advertising that anyone is welcome to compete against women in the Olympics, no questions asked. Of course males will turn up if you advertise that you won’t do anything to challenge them.

But the optics of males punching women in the face live on television — even though this is entirely in accordance with the rules that trans extremists and their media sycophants have been lobbying for — are such an obvious violation not just of fairness but of women’s safety — and human decency — that a full-on meltdown has ensued. Once-respectable news outlets are lashing out at everyone in an attempt to distract us from the shameful mess that they themselves have made.

It’s utterly hypocritical, but with no better line of attack available, the media and the IOC have gone after the credibility of the genetic tests which showed the boxers, Algeria’s Imane Khelif and Taiwan’s Lin Yu-Ting, to have male (XY) chromosomes.

Remember: the IOC and the media insist that there’s no need for sex verification tests in the first place, so it’s absurd for them to now confer so much importance on the supposed falsity of Khelif and Lin’s test results when they simultaneously insist that those test results have no relevance anyway. To the IOC and its media backers, sex is all in the eye of the beholder (of a passport). It’s a sign of desperation, and of an absence of moral grounds to defend their position, that they selectively decided to get involved in the matter of sex testing only now that the public is concerned about their laissez-faire policy toward males punching women in the face for sport, and only insofar as to try to muddy the legitimacy of the test results. The media cannot accept the validity of the tests, because they expose trans activists’ ideals as unfair, outrageous, and untenable in the real world.

Nevertheless, even though it does nothing to change the absurdity of the IOC’s policy one way or the other, it bears noting: there is absolutely no basis to contest the tests’ credibility — both boxers are indisputably male.

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Each of the boxers took two DNA tests: the first while participating in championships in Turkey in 2022, and the second in India in 2023. (The results of the 2022 tests were delayed and didn’t come out until after the championship was over. They came back ‘male’ but it was too late to halt that year’s event. As soon as the athletes returned to compete the next year, a new set of tests was immediately ordered — and this time the results came back in time to expel the men from the ring.) The tests were handled by their respective countries’ independent national laboratories, all fully certified and accredited by the international Court of Arbitration for Sport — the same body that oversees drug testing for the Olympics. Tellingly, the boxers both declined to appeal the results, and both dispatched letters from their lawyers refusing permission to release the details to the public, citing medical privacy. Nevertheless, the full lab reports have leaked, and they’ve been seen, vouched for, and described in detail by highly respected journalists, including here by Alan Abrahamson, formerly of the LA Times and NBC Sports.

The test results are ironclad and conclusive: the boxers are male. This has been a matter of public record for over a year, and it was given widespread media coverage when the athletes were disqualified from the New Delhi championships last year. The Algerian ambassador even got involved, but ultimately failed to persuade anyone that his athlete’s disqualification was unjust. For good measure, a formal letter was sent to the IOC, giving it a year’s warning in advance of the Paris Olympics that these two male boxers were likely to try to compete in them as women.

And remember: the test results aren’t supposed to matter anyway because according to the logic of trans activists, the IOC, and the media outlets that back them, biological sex is irrelevant in women’s sports.

The sole basis of the media’s attempt to discredit the genetic sex tests is the fact that they happened during competitions that were organized by the International Boxing Association, whose current president is Russian, and an ally of Vladimir Putin. The IBA is admittedly a mess. It’s caught up in a number of unrelated controversies, and it’s locked in a bitter dispute with the IOC over Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. So the strained logic implied by the media is that the tests were staged as part of a Russian-orchestrated plot that has been playing out since 2022, a massive conspiracy to reputationally damage the IOC and of course to (supposedly) put vulnerable transgender people in danger.

None of which makes a lick of sense, considering that nobody but the IOC is to blame for its own stubborn policy of refusing to acknowledge that biological sex matters in women’s sports, and eschewing screening tests in favour of what amounts to taking people at their word, even in dangerous combat sports like boxing.

(FYI: both Khelif and Lin have advanced to the point that they’re guaranteed medals at the time of this writing.)

It’s important to note that neither Khelif nor Lin claims to be transgender. (Khelif is in fact a conservative Muslim who is outspokenly hostile to transgender-identifying individuals.) So transgender beliefs aren’t directly involved in this case anyway. Typically in cases of transgender identity in women’s sport, there is no question that the competitor is biologically male and went through a typical male puberty with the athletic advantages that result from it. In those cases, trans activists lobby for them to compete in women’s sports purely for inclusion’s sake — naked identity politics: it’s unfair to exclude them and it will hurt their feelings and invalidate their identities. They scream and shout and make noise and threats until everybody’s intimidated or exhausted into silent acquiescence.

Take Laurel Hubbard, for example, who competed in 2020 Tokyo women’s weightlifting. Born Gavin Hubbard, Laurel is the child and heir of New Zealand’s Dick Hubbard, the breakfast cereal magnate of Hubbard Foods and former mayor of Auckland. Hubbard was firmly established among the Who’s Who in New Zealand, one of the richest and most powerful men in the Pacific Islands, long before announcing a transgender identity and “she/her” pronouns. There has never been any question that Laurel Hubbard is biologically male. Pronouns and name changes and newfound “identities” have never been taken as scientific evidence of a literal change of sex or a biological mixup-at-birth by anyone except the truly delusional. Hubbard was 43, over a decade older than any other competitor in weightlifting, and still displaced a female athlete to take a spot at the Olympics.

The government of nearby Samoa, an island nation with a rich cultural history of diverse gender expression, strongly protested the situation. In Samoa, gay males are raised to wear women’s clothing and are designated as “fa’afafine,” a gender role distinct from other men. Despite this cultural practice, Samoa adheres strictly to sex-based divisions in athletics, even for its most gender-diverse citizens. Which is to say, the Samoans haven’t been deranged by Western activists’ sex denialism despite being very on board with gender diversity, and they view the Olympic transgender policy as an outrage.

(In Hubbard’s case the IOC got lucky: due to a torn arm ligament, Hubbard did not win a medal. The image of a male middle-aged playboy millionaire bodybuilder taking a woman’s spot on the podium would surely have drawn further outrage.)

One has to wonder, if the boxers Khelif and Lin did claim to be transgender, as weightlifter Laurel Hubbard had in the previous Games, would the IOC and the media still be questioning the results of the sex tests? Or would they instead be wailing that the sex tests themselves are an affront to athletes’ sacred “gender identities”?

Ironically, there is another transgender athlete competing in women’s Olympic boxing this year, and no one is bothered by it. Hergie Bacyadan is a transman — a female who goes by “he/him” pronouns. Bacyadan, a martial artist from the Philippines, does not take anabolic steroids or testosterone, and acknowledges being biologically female. Absolutely no one objects to Bacyadan competing in women’s boxing because Bacyadan plays by the same rules as everyone else. This puts the lie to the claim that “transphobia” is at the heart of people’s objections to Khelif and Lin’s participation in the women’s ring. The media is completely ignoring the many transgender athletes competing at the Olympics who absolutely no one objects to, for the simple reason that they aren’t cheating! They’re competing in the biological sex class that aligns with their bodies, and rightly leaving their feelings about personal expression, internal sense of identity, and spiritual sense of “gender” to domains outside the physical sports arena.

Many media outlets have also stooped to perpetuating the sexist and racist canard that opposing males in women’s sports is analagous to enforcing outdated standards of femininity. They put up pictures of strong Black women athletes with muscular features alongside headlines that imply we’ll be coming for them next. It’s a disgusting tactic, but scaremongering is the only arrow remaining in the transactivist-left’s quiver.

It’s boxing, for god’s sake — all the women competing in Olympic boxing have strong, muscular features; none of them look like Megan Fox or Kim Kardashian. And ironically, the only people suggesting that busty-curves-equals-real-woman are the trans activists and the media.

The criteria for eligibility to compete in women’s sports should not be appearing to be female, it should simply be actually being biologically female. This contravenes the central tenet of trans ideology, which is that when it comes to sex, appearances matter more than biological facts.

But what about edge cases, you might ask. Aren’t there some circumstances where someone’s biological sex might be ambiguous? Shouldn’t we try to be fair and inclusive to them?

Yes, we should. And we are. There is a small number of males and females whose genetics give them atypical traits for their sex. They were formerly called “intersex.” But transgender activists exploited this term to sow confusion and imply that some people are born in between the sexes male and female — which is completely untrue — so the preferred, less misleading term in use today is DSD, or difference/disorder of sexual development. It’s perfectly possible to have universally enforceable rules and medical tests that also take people with DSDs into account.

For the purpose of athletic competition, the most relevant advantage that divides bodies into two very different performance classes is the presence of testicles. Typical males are born with a pair of functioning (testosterone-producing) testes which flood the body with testosterone beginning in puberty, leading to a host of irreversible body changes that massively improve the body’s athletic performance: stronger bones, denser and faster muscles, larger heart, bigger lung capacity, longer limbs, etc.

In essence, men’s and women’s sex classes in sport are meant to separate bodies that were enhanced by functional testicles during puberty (men’s sports) from bodies that weren’t (women’s sports).

Chromosome tests, which require from their subjects only a quick, painless cheek swab, are a very reliable proxy for the presence of functional testicles during puberty, because the vast majority of males have functional testicles, and precisely zero females do.

There are, however, edge cases in which males do not develop functional testicles, or are born with a genetic condition which prevents the body from processing testosterone (this is called Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome). Arguments can be made that some of these people should be allowed to compete in women’s sports; I and many others find them convincing. Some athletes would fail a genetic (XY chromosome) sex screening test, but if they can prove that they don’t have functioning testicles now and didn’t have them during puberty, they might be permitted into women’s sports on appeal.

Did you have a working set of balls growing up? Yes or no. See? This isn’t actually complicated at all, despite the endless hand-wringing about edge cases and genetic anomalies from the trans activists, the IOC, and the media. If you had functional testicles during puberty, you compete in Formula One. If you didn’t, you compete in NASCAR. They’re both great sports with their own unique, positive aspects, and neither is inherently superior to the other, but they run on fundamentally incompatible hardware. It’s as simple as that. Many people in my camp would even offer certain males with intact testicles a chance to compete in women’s sports as long as the circumstances can be shown to be biologically fair (i.e., their bodies somehow didn’t benefit from high levels of testosterone during puberty), and still we’re called evil, hate-filled “transphobes.”

One thing that does complicate the matter is that some males born with functional testicles are misidentified at birth and presumed to be female, at least during their childhoods. Some males are born with a genetic condition that stops the penis from developing properly, and it ends up resembling a vulva. Their functioning testicles sometimes remain inside the abdomen (they don’t descend into the scrotum as would typically occur) and sometimes they descend normally, but nevertheless, confusion about their sex results from the atypical initial appearance of their genitals. The technical name for this is 5-ARD. In the Dominican Republic they’re poetically called “güevedoces” — roughly, “huevos [‘balls’] at age twelve,” because even though they are often presumed to be girls in childhood, once puberty kicks in it becomes clear that they’re male, and have fully functional testicles. Their voices deepen, their physiques become unmistakably masculine, and their micropenises increase in size enough to dispel any ambiguity about their biological function.

This is the condition that South African runner Caster Semenya has. Semenya has won two Olympic gold medals in the women’s 800 metre track race. It was later proven that Semenya is a male, born with a malformed penis and fully functional internal testicles, and Semenya knew it all along. Therefore most people now agree that Semenya cheated, and denied medals to Alysia Johnson Montaño of the USA at the London Games in 2012, and Melissa Bishop of Canada at Rio in 2016.

There’s speculation that Imane Khelif and Lin Yu-Ting might also be 5-ARD “güevedoces” like Caster Semenya is. So far there’s no concrete evidence for or against the conjecture. But circumstantial evidence suggests these two have been identifying as women for a while, and it’s often the case when males identify as women for reasons not related to the transgender subculture, it’s because they were mistaken as girls in childhood due to malformed genitals. Khelif’s father insists he raised Khelif as a girl but other than a birth certificate which was suspiciously only issued just a few years ago, there’s so far no hard evidence of this. Of course it doesn’t change the fact that Khelif is male one way or the other, but it does add to the speculation that he was born with a DSD, and that atypical genital appearance in early childhood was what initially instigated his family’s pretence that he’s female.

The only hard evidence of anything that we have are the certified laboratory tests. The only thing we know for certain is that Khelif and Lin are male.

In the upside-down world of the 2024 media landscape, the one thing that we know for certain — those boxers are male — is the one thing we are being told we must not believe.

Here’s a little gallery of some of the distortions, lies, racism, sexism, derangement and delusion that’s being put out across the centre and centre-left media. It’s a damning indictment of the state of our society right now. Our trust networks have collapsed to the point that once-reliable news sources are openly spreading lies to buttress their own political biases.

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I’m really happy with how this piece turned out. I’ve wanted to tackle the “man/woman” vs. “male/female” distinction (or attempted distinction) for a long time.

The words just can’t be uncoupled, definitionally. Even if we occasionally might refer to a trans person as a “man” or a “woman” in casual talk, this isn’t so much redefining the terms “man” or “woman” so much as using the words figuratively rather than strictly literally. There’s an understanding that it’s context-specific, and that there’s a bit of compromise from the sex-grounded definition of the word, not entirely unlike how we’d use a metaphor. If the underlying definitions of man and woman were to become completely uncoupled from sex, they’d no longer serve their purpose — they’d no longer make sense — even to trans-identifying people.

Speaking of metaphors, this is my favourite paragraph:

And that’s the danger of this game, of trying to shift “man” and “woman” into malleable concepts instead of material facts: the people strugging with confusion about sex and gender identity — the apples who paint themselves orange — don’t always settle nicely into the basket with the oranges. They struggle to fit in, and they often suffer, sometimes terribly — sometimes to the point of suicide. Eventually it becomes crystal clear that orange paint does not an orange make, because their shape is a little off, their skin texture is wrong, their body has a different firmness, they don’t smell the same… and most importantly, they don’t work the same in the kitchen, if you catch my drift. You simply cannot make orange juice with an apple.

Here, again, is the link to read the essay:

Listen to the audio version (for paid subscribers only) below. Do please consider becoming a paid sub; it helps me pay my bills and keeps me writing. Thanks!

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UPDATE: You can listen to me read this article while you do your business, by clicking here.

Here’s a pet peeve of mine: linguists, like philosophers, sometimes get tangled in their own intellectual webs and lose sight of the big picture. All that book learnin’ and sometimes they come out dumber for it.

So it seems with a linguist named Vyvyan Evans, who penned an embarrassingly messy piece for Psychology Today in defence of “gender identity.” He commits many of the usual sins of illogic that this topic routinely elicits in the intellectually confused, including mansplaining feminism to women, not actually backing up his central argument with… well, any argument at all, and — my personal unfavourite — he assumes that the convoluted Western, social media-pickled “gender identity” movement has precedents in other cultures and times. (It doesn’t, really. Gender roles vary from culture to culture — as in the social roles and titles and customs and such that are available to men and women — but no other culture has ever attempted to make it taboo or illegal to distinguish between males and females, which is the key component that makes 21st-century gender ideology so nutty, and it’s the part that the gender-critical movement objects to.)

But here I want to address another mistaken idea of Evans’s. It’s the one that relates directly to his field of expertise, linguistics. He says:

Whatever one’s views on the immutability or otherwise of biological sex, gender is itself a sociolinguistic construct. While it certainly has a basis in biology, it is confected in a cultural context.

Are “man” and “woman” word games?

That’s an argument I hear in various forms all the time — that male and female may be biologically “real things,” but man and woman are basically word games. I’ve wanted to address this line of thinking for a long time.

A commenter named What a Maroon, who has far more knowledge of linguistics than I, has written a great rebuttal:

But anyway, yes, “gender” is a sociolinguistic construct. …But that doesn’t mean that [the concepts of man and woman] are arbitrary, with no basis in reality. We wouldn’t survive long if our mental representation of the world (however incomplete and distorted it may be) had no relation to the real world. You have to be able to distinguish between an apple and a rattlesnake, and know that one is good for eating and the other is something to avoid, even if your language doesn’t distinguish between apples and pears, or red and orange. And knowing that there are two sexes that are immutable, and being able to distinguish between them, is pretty key to the propagation of our species—we wouldn’t be around to argue about gender if Og and Mog hadn’t known which was which.

But that is not gender essentialism. …Gender essentialism is saying that if you like to play with dolls and dress up in frilly clothes, you must be a girl regardless of your anatomy. Or that you have an inner sense of your gender that overrides your anatomy.

Hear, hear.

Let me add to that point.

One not only has to ask why there’s need for a meaningful distinction between an apple and a rattlesnake, one must also ask why some people want to erase or modify the distinction between an apple and a rattlesnake, or an apple and an orange, or — obviously, because this is what we’re really talking about — between a man and a woman.

Are we trying to correct a logical error here? Is something broken? Is the current means by which we categorize men and women not working? I daresay it’s not broken, because when we investigate the motives behind those who claim to have been miscategorized, we see that they themselves still rely on the common, material, sex-based definitions of men and women for everyone else; they just don’t like how the categorization system maps onto themselves.

(For example, I’ve heard countless stories of trans-identifying males, seeking sex with women, being outraged at the idea that they should have sex with other transwomen. Given that they preach that transwomen are women, you’d think they’d put it to practice by having sex with fellow transwomen, who are women after all, they insist. But no. When it comes to everyone else, they know full well that transwomen are actually men; they just don’t want that rule to apply to themselves.)

Indeed, trans-identifying people must rely on the material, sex-based definitions of man and woman in order to know how to fashion the opposite-sex guises they maintain. Men who claim to be women and women who claim to be men (or who claim to be neither men nor women; i.e., “non-binaries”) are in fact more conscious of gender and sex stereotypes than other people are, and the argument that gender identity should supersede sex paradoxically relies further on sex distinctions than the material sex-based categories it seeks to overthrow.

(Many trans activists even go so far as to advocate for reinforcing sex-based dress codes: they’re bitterly hostile to drag queens, for example, on the argument that allowing men to wear dresses while acknowledging that they’re still men threatens to destroy the argument that males who wear dresses are by definition “women.”)

In the current definition — that is to say, in the real world outside the influence of the social media-fuelled gender identity fad — men and women are simply males and females, and while there are stereotypical differences in appearance and behaviour between the two, deviations from the norms don’t invalidate the categories. Feminine-dressed males are still men, and masculine-dressed females are still women, because there is a vast array of different properties that distinguish men and women beyond their superficial presentation. We use the words “men” and “women” in countless contexts to distinguish males from females, even though we know that sometimes, superficially at least, the men might look more like women and vice-versa. By contrast, gender identity activists seek to reinforce the categories man and woman on such strictly superficial terms that deviations from stereotypical presentation necessitate that they be completely recategorized.

Orange paint does not an orange make

It’s as if they’re trying to replace the distinction between apples and oranges — different fruits which have a vast array of different properties — with the claim that all apples are red and all oranges are orange, and then to claim that if you dip an apple in a can of orange paint and toss it into a basket of oranges, that everyone is obligated to act as if they can’t tell it’s an impostor.

Upon seeing an orange-painted apple in a basket of oranges, the reasonable reaction should be to ask, “why has someone gone to such trouble to pass that apple off as an orange,” not “I’m so much cleverer than everyone else, only I can tell that this orange-painted apple represents how complex the sociolinguistic concepts of apple and orange are.”

(And the conclusions one might draw after recognizing that someone is trying to pass an apple off as an orange — a man trying to pass as a woman or vice-versa — can vary from case to case: some cases might elicit a lot of sympathy and others might elicit much distrust and suspicion. A system that recognizes when apples are trying to pass as oranges and then inquires about the circumstances is far better reinforced against exploitation than a system that shuts down the question and gaslights everyone into never asking questions again. The latter system, which gender activists espouse, seems like it was designed by exploiters who are trying to conceal their motives. Gaslighting, indeed.)

For all Evans’s talk of how apples and oranges — or men and women — are mere sociolinguistic concepts, the real world puts the lie to it. Many transgender advocates don’t even argue that gender identity is a concept separate from the material reality of their sex — rather, they argue that their sex was incorrectly “assigned” at birth. It’s not that some females can be men, you see; it’s that I was never a female; there was a terrible mixup back at the hospital when I was born, and I’ve really been male all along!

Which is to say, even if you do grant that “man” and “woman” are mere sociolinguistic concepts uncoupled from the material facts of sex, the activists are so acutely aware of how untrue this is in practice in the real world, they almost inevitably up the ante and take aim at material reality anyway — they still attack biological sex itself even if you concede to them the labels “man” or “woman.”

If I’m being honest, in the practical day-to-day world, I don’t particularly care who calls him or herself a “man” or a “woman,” as long as it’s clearly understood that it’s a little falsehood, a linguistic shorthand for a more complicated situation that we all agree about in principle — that transwomen are male and that transmen are female, and that people who are struggling with gender dysphoria (or claiming to be) ultimately only have grounds to ask for language concessions from others, rather than to forcefully impose language restrictions on others.

And that’s the danger of this game, of trying to shift “man” and “woman” into malleable concepts instead of material facts: the people strugging with confusion about sex and gender identity — the apples who paint themselves orange — don’t always settle nicely into the basket with the oranges. They struggle to fit in, and they often suffer, sometimes terribly — sometimes to the point of suicide. Eventually it becomes crystal clear that orange paint does not an orange make, because their shape is a little off, their skin texture is wrong, their body has a different firmness, they don’t smell the same… and most importantly, they don’t work the same in the kitchen, if you catch my drift. You simply cannot make orange juice with an apple.

Look at the motives behind the painted apples and it becomes clear that for all the linguists’ babbling about sociolinguistic concepts, it means next to nothing in the real world, and at the end of the day all this academic jibber-jabber about “man” and “woman” is confusing the vulnerable among us, and emboldening the misanthropic among us. It’s doing vastly more harm than good, especially to the very people these foolish word games are ostensibly intended to help.

It’s better to say upfront that apples can’t really be oranges than to get everyone caught up in the harmful lie that they can.

UPDATE: You can listen to me read this article while you do your business, by clicking here.

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(This post was adapted and expanded from a comment of mine at Butterflies and Wheels.)

I really enjoyed this chat with Sasha White. She’s quickly establishing herself as an extraordinary journalist and an excellent interviewer. In our most recent chat she succeeded in bringing me out of my shell to talk about some things I’ve never before addressed in public. For instance, I talked about the cancellation mob that almost killed me two years ago, and damaged my delicate relationship with my dying mother.

In the emotional space that Sasha opened up, I felt comfortable enough to address numerous other live-wire issues. I’m glad I had the opportunity to speak so frankly in Sasha’s company.

I managed to broach some topics that are front-of-mind to me lately, especially the complicated subject of information distribution and trust networks.

I feel like the information-overload age we’ve entered into is a dystopia and we need help finding our way back to sanity. I’ve got much more to say about that in future writings, for sure. You can tell I’ve been reading a lot of Jon Haidt ( ).

I’m presently holed up in my little hermitage, working on a couple big pieces that I can’t wait to get out to you. In the meantime, do enjoy this very frank, friendly, and open chat with me and Sasha. Comments are open to paid subs! xo

And if you’re interested in further watching, here’s a chat between Sasha and I from three years ago that I’m still very fond of. It’s an excellent primer on the subject of gender, if I dare say so myself:

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And for you paid subscribers, thank you again so much! Rent day is almost here and I think I’m gonna make it! :) Below the fold, find my audio reading of the latest essay, plus an article just for you, about wokeness’s “nondescript fist of self-righteousness”, with a little foray into the ever-expanding alphabet soup, and the ever-cluttering Pride flag. Cheers!

Brigid LaSage: Woke community centre as church.

Regarding the gay community centre’s ascent to Woke Nirvana, Brigid LaSage says: “The same could be said of many woke churches.” The comparison knocked the wind out of me. It’s so true! The mural is like a stained glass window, or perhaps the carvings on the outside of a church, signalling its virtue to the laity below. Even the way the community centre looms over the centre of the Village (the “gay village”, that is) is very church-like.

From now on, every time I walk past the Centre I will never not see it as a church. A corrupt church from a corrupt religion that’s oppressing the community more than helping it.

Brilliant!

BeadleBlog: Similarities with elitism on Ivy League campuses

“This is the inevitable path of a movement that exists solely to be more activist-y than everyone else."

Rob Henderson wrote in his recently published book about the elites at the Ivys: the need to signal their separation from the masses (my words) through their clothes, vacations, social manners, etc. I believe you're both talking about the same behavior and I think back to my younger days and people who always had to be "in the know." These types would mention some obscure musicians, the latest fad starting up, the newest party drug and then smirk when the rest of us were unaware of this stuff that doesn't matter. I believe it had the same purpose, to exhibit their specialness, as those who are more activist-y.

Oli Blah Blah: Guardian columnist as archetypal class entity

The Guardian columnist as a class entity will ALWAYS assume the highest moral position, because they cannot conceive of a world in which they aren’t the most moral. In fact they conceive of themselves as the arbiters of moral truth itself. They don’t make mistakes, because in hindsight they can always flip the script. For example, when you or I, mere bumbling humans, make a mistake they would say our intentions don’t matter, only effects matter. But when a woman is raped by a “trans” identified man on a “single-sex” hospital ward Owen Jones will say the intent, to pander to the feefees of poor little marginalised “trans” folx, is more important and noble than the real life consequences. They cannot even see they are doing it. One rule for thee, another for me. They accord themselves a rampant moral privilege, and they never examine it.

Tracy Hill: safe, don’t-get-our-hands-dirty peers

I love the pithy turns of phrase here: “jumped up” Owen Jones. “Safe, don’t-get-our-hands-dirty peers” (I AM 100% STEALING THAT YOU CAN’T STOP ME). They “squirm to jump ship to the sane side” Ooh the pithiness. Love it!

Hear hear, well said. The stinking self-righteous Guardian. I detest the paper, but am forced to read it so that I cannot be accused of not seeing both sides. Owen Jones is a jumped up little embarrassment and all my safe, don't get our hands dirty peers still continue to read the Guardian and only the Guardian. But sanity is on the up thanks to people like you and those mentioned in your great article. And indeed let us never stop mentioning what they did, especially when they squirm to jump ship to the sane side now the Cass review is out. Cowards.

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PREFER AUDIO? You can listen to me read this piece, plus you can read a supplemental companion piece, here.

“‘Woke’ isn’t dead — it’s entered the mainstream” says Gaby Hinsliff, a columnist at (where else) The Guardian. To which I ask, what’s the difference? Any music nerd will tell you: a countercultural movement is dead the minute it goes mainstream.

Take the early ‘90s grunge phenomenon. It lost its edgy appeal once the look was subsumed into the suburban retail fashion supply chain, and the fad quickly passed after that. “Alternative music” was a misnomer by the mid-’90s: in what way was it alternative when it dominated the Billboard charts? By 1997, the corporatized counterculture that had come to define the era was lampooned on (where else) The Simpsons, when they introduced Poochie the surfin’, rappin’ dog “with an attitude,” a crass attempt to remain “hip with the kids” in the satirically self-described “worst episode ever.”

Wokeness is certainly a countercultural phenomenon. Like “alternative,” the term “woke” only makes sense relative to the mainstream: to describe people who position themselves politically far to the left of whatever ideas have already been embraced by the establishment. So it’s more of an intensifying adjective to other causes and issues rather than a coherent political worldview in its own right. Being against racism or homophobia by itself isn’t woke; being way more against racism than everyone else, and against all the possible queerphobias — even the ones you normies haven’t even heard of is. Being in favour of making the criminal justice system more fair isn’t woke because it isn’t distinct enough from the common sense view. To make it woke, you have to be in favour of doing away entirely with the prisons and the police. You get the idea.

This is a point that Hinsliff struggles to grasp. In her column she tries to define “woke” as, variously:

• “the broader push for social, racial and environmental justice”

• “the idea of being more open to sometimes uncomfortable challenge from minority perspectives that were previously suppressed”

• “saving the planet”

• “uncovering forgotten histories”

• “inclusivity at work”

• “ ‘be kind’ ”

• “getting more used to acknowledging conflicting views based on different life experiences”

To which Ophelia Benson (who else) keenly observes that, for starters, Hinsliff is mixing up “radically different things”:

Social justice is not the same thing as “environmental justice” and climate change isn’t fundamentally political. What to do about it is politicized (but shouldn’t be), but the change itself is not responsive to whether we shout “fascist!” or “wokerati!” at it.

Those are two radically different things, so there’s no point in calling the pairing of them anything.

This is the inevitable path of a movement that exists solely to be more activist-y than everyone else: the condensing of all ostensibly progressive causes into a great, faceless ideological black hole. The logical endpoint of the moral-bidding-war meltdown of “wokeness” is a singularity: a state of mind which, to those inside, is a realm of infinite, utopian virtue. To everyone else it looks literally pointless. “Woke,” both the word and the movement, always had not-so-subtle transcendental, spiritual connotations: a shade adjacent to nirvana.

(Speaking of grunge!)

Here’s a little anecdote, an example of wokeness subsuming everything ostensibly progressive until it ends up meaningless and useless. About 20 years ago, the city-funded community centre at the heart of Toronto’s gay village put up a mural which loomed over the neighbourhood. It depicted, along with a lesbian in a wheelchair, a middle-aged leatherman clad in fetish gear, and a teenage girl straining to crush her breasts into a binder. The message was clear: adult men’s fetishes and distressed teen girls’ trans identities would now be central parts of the community’s activism.

And sure enough, that’s exactly what the community centre focused on in the ensuing years, as the activists shifted over to “queer theory,” with its emphasis on sexual permissiveness and hostility to biological sex distinctions.

(To be clear, I have no beef with the gay leather scene. I just don’t think it’s in need of publicly funded support, and I don’t think leather daddies are in any way marginalized. Binders, on the other hand, I have all kinds of beef with.)

Credit where it’s due: they do pick apt murals. The next shift among “queer” activists was to embrace all-encompassing, universal, woke ideals. That’s been reflected in the community centre’s new mural, which recently replaced the one with the lesbian, the leatherman, and the trans “boy.” Just as the first mural presciently captured the shifting cultural mood inside the building, so too does the second: now it’s a raised fist — a universal symbol of righteous protest — filled in like a quilt with patches that depict the “progress” flag, various shades of the colour brown (skin tones, one presumes), animal hide prints (animal rights?), blue waves (the environment), and miscellaneous patterns whose symbolism I can’t decipher. That tracks with the direction “wokeness” is going: an incoherent melding of anything conceivably virtuous into one big nondescript fist of self-righteousness.

I’ll bet that the people who work inside the community centre think they’re at the epicentre of all virtue now, and that their noble mission has naturally expanded from when it served gays and lesbians in the time of rampant AIDS and gay bashing, to LGBT outreach, to LGBTQ+ propaganda, to 2SLGBTQQIA++ hysteria, and now at long last they’ve arrived at righteousness in its true, pure form, having transcended all individual causes. Woke nirvana.

But I know for a fact that the gay people who live and work in the neighbourhood have little or no use for the community centre’s services anymore, because it’s strayed so far from the community it was founded to support. I am one such person, and I wouldn’t darken their bloody doorstep. My own “community centre” has nothing to offer my community now but insults and condescension. In its lurch to woke extremism, it’s become not just useless to us, but hostile to us, and in so doing it’s set itself up for its own undoing.

That’s a sentiment we’re seeing across society: people are fed up with the extremists.

To go back to Hinsliff’s Guardian article, does this mean that wokeness is being embraced by the mainstream, or killed off by it? In the aftermath of the Cass review, Hinsliff can’t dispute that there are “tough lessons to be learned” about moral absolutism “that can be fatal to progressive causes.”

But Gaby, I shout at the screen, it’s the moral absolutism that’s being rejected, not the causes themselves. People cared about the environment and gay rights and gender nonconforming people and women’s rights and all the rest before “woke” came along, and they’ll continue to care about all of it long after “woke” is gone.

The moral absolutism is the wokeness.

Hinsliff panders to the Guardian readership by offering a self-flattering alternative view, which says that the woke movement is moving along just as it always intended, having more-or-less already achieved its true goal, which was only ever to gently nudge the Overton window, to take the establishment a baby step to the left, rather than smash the whole system and burn as many witches as it could find:

Woke is no longer wildly anti-establishment; increasingly it’s becoming the boring old establishment, to the point where teenagers will doubtless soon be ripping it apart on TikTok, since turning into baby conservatives is the only thing really guaranteed now to confound their parents.

It is radicalism that initially breaks down doors. But what usually ends up walking through them is a version with the sharp edges smoothed off that most people find they can live with, and that’s where woke is heading now. It’s not dead. But it is evolving, and that’s how living things ultimately survive.

Now, you might argue that this is a difference which makes no difference, the distinction between “wokeness is dying because the mainstream are fed up with woke people’s extremism” and “wokeness is actually secretly winning by merging itself into the mainstream and changing it a bit for the better.”

But that’s wrong. There’s a big distinction, and it’s an important one. When we look back, one of these views will put the people behind wokeness in their rightful place in history alongside the McCarthyites and the lunatics of the Salem witch trials: villains at the heart of some of our darkest, most terrible chapters in history. The other view, which Hinsliff is pushing, will paint the people behind wokeness as heroes, whose acts of extremism were merely noble sacrifices “to break down doors” for the greater good of progress.

To which, and I absolutely hope that someone manages to get this in front of Gaby Hinsliff so that you, Gaby, can read these words yourself:

Fuck you.

The woke activists who sent death threats to , to JK Rowling, and to countless other women for simply speaking their minds and telling the truth? They are not heroes, Gaby. They do not deserve praise for “breaking down doors.” Some of these activists literally wanted to kill women.

The countless vulnerable young people — often gay, autistic or both — who were coaxed by woke people to undergo unnecessary, experimental, irreversible body modification surgeries? They’re victims, Gaby. Their victimhoods, their stories, are what need to take historical precedence above all else.

You blithely dismiss the victims’ plight, the ongoing pain that they will suffer for the rest of their lives, as collateral damage.

And there are so many more victims — too many to list them all, but here are some: women residing in prisons and shelters; women who just want to use public washrooms and changing rooms in peace, dignity and safety. Lesbians and gay men who just want to socialize as a community and maintain their sexual boundaries. Academics who dare to raise questions. Employees in all kinds of workplaces, afraid to say the “wrong” thing, or fired for having done so. , for fearlessly saying what needs to be said, when almost no other celebrity or media figure has had the guts to.

And me. I’m a victim, too. I won’t be getting my friends back, the ones who threw me out of their lives in my most difficult time of need, after I spoke up for gay rights. And I won’t be returning to work in the gay community or the arts community, both of which I was a part of for so long.

You spit in all of our faces when you characterize our woke tormentors as the real heroes.

This is surely just the beginning of a widespread attempt to put a positive spin on the woke cult’s dying legacy by those who were complicit in its ugly doings.

The Guardian always turned a blind eye to the savagery routinely deployed by the woke against perfectly decent people — the paper still employs the profoundly detestable Owen Jones, for example. The cruelties doled out by men and women like Jones never served the noble causes they purported to; they were always mere ploys to put themselves in a more advantageous position on the woke playing field.

I think everyone’s starting to see that now. I don’t think the spin doctoring ploy is going to fly. No one’s going to look back at “woke” with any fondness or gratitude.

If anything, people will want to move on and forget it ever happened. I can understand that.

But me, I have a different plans. I don’t intend to let people ever forget the victims or the culprits of this mass psychosis.

To the woke assholes who were so cruel in their performative commitment to “social justice”: you’re going to have to face some social justice of your own, some day soon.

You can listen to me read this piece, plus you can read a supplemental companion piece, here.

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My Substack is relatively new, but I’ve been writing online about the gender mess under the nom de plume “Arty Morty” since at least 2019, and I’d certainly been following it since long before that — and living in it! I’ve worked in the gay community since the ‘90s.

Here is a collection of excerpts from my writings elsewhere, pertaining to the gender mess. Feel free to browse. If there’s anything that tickles your fancy, there are links to read the whole pieces at their original places of publication. You’ll notice that a lot of it appears at Butterflies and Wheels. I cannot recommend that website highly enough.

If you see anything you feel like sharing or restacking, by all means do.

Enjoy!

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Graham Linehan’s Gender Blasphemy Exposes the Fear that Stifles the Trans Debate

On progressives’ ongoing fears and anxieties regarding the gender debate.

The first problem for gender heretics when they get accused of things like “misgendering” is that even acknowledging the act requires the accused to play along with gender belief. Like sin, if you don’t believe in it, you can’t really agree or disagree that you’ve committed it. So addressing such accusations comes with burdensome conceptual unpacking work right from the start.

One side — my side — starts with the foundational assumption that everyone, trans or not, is first and foremost to be treated as an individual, no more or less equally deserving of respect than any other individual, and then builds from there. Of course I understand how much sensitivity there is in the transgender community about, say, pronouns. I’m a gay man; I’m deeply embedded in the gay community. I even worked at a trans bar back in the day. But I don’t take it as religious doctrine that anyone who simply claims to be a transgender woman is one — I don’t believe in gender religion and I reserve the right to have my own beliefs about anyone — and I don’t take it as law that I have to abide anyone’s pronouns. I aim to be respectful, but it’s case-by-case, and I’m the judge.

But the other side, the one that sees Jesus in the toast, starts out with the foundational assumption that anyone who identifies as transgender belongs to a special kind of people who are, to true believers at least, almost supernaturally vulnerable. There are lots of problems with that, but the big one is that “trans” is a label anyone can freely adopt, and the doctrine that once you call yourself trans you’re no longer seen first-and-foremost as an individual but instead you’re now first-and-foremost a member of a special class — this is ripe for exploitation. And us gender heretics are watching it get exploited like crazy, and we’re tearing our hair out in frustration because the other side, the ones who can only picture Jesus whenever they hear the word “trans,” seem completely oblivious, no matter how loud we yell.

Transgender is an active faultline in the culture right now. When Graham Linehan published those images of males with highly dubious claims to being lesbians (to put it generously), what he was doing was creating a little earthquake: tension was building because lesbians were angry and frustrated that they were constantly being intruded upon by straight men, and no one was listening. […] We need more of these little earthquakes to release the growing tensions around trans and open up the debate so we can actually make some progress. Indisputably there are serious conflicts between gender ideology and women’s rights, gay rights, and freedom of speech. The gender ideologues declared it taboo to talk about these issues. But unless more people start breaking these taboos, the tensions will keep building up and we’re gonna get The Big One, a massive and ugly backlash which could do terrible harm to the entire LGBT community.

Read the rest here.

The New Yorker Has Fallen

On Lia Thomas, and the disgraceful decline of the New Yorker’s editorial standards:

The benefits of testosterone are indeed well-established, and it’s well-established that they aren’t the only benefits male bodies have.

There’s no maybe about it. If a few months without testosterone literally rearranged a man’s pelvic bones, we’d have heard about it by now.

No bills have ever restricted transgender people’s access to sports. In your own piece, you said that Lia Thomas continued to swim on the men’s team after he came out as transgender and even after he began hormone therapy. Thomas chose to switch to the women’s team after the hormones he voluntarily chose to take in order to indulge his gender identity began slowing him down. This is in your piece.

Healthy PEOPLE don’t compete in women’s sports. Healthy WOMEN compete in women’s sports. Unbelievable that you think women’s sports should be available to ALL PEOPLE who want to play in them. Unbelievable that you’re pondering whether it’s “ethical” for women’s sports to be for women — adult human females. Just nuts.

Read the rest here.

They Pull The Lever Anyway

On “virtue signalling”:

I think the term “virtue signalling” can be susceptible to overuse in something like the way “critical race theory” is. Signalling virtue in itself isn’t a bad thing, because virtue isn’t a bad thing; “virtue signalling” as a pejorative is meant to refer to a cynical or vacuous performance of a kind of artificial morality. Likewise, critical academic analysis of race in itself isn’t a bad thing, but “critical race theory” is a specific strand of academic theory which is a hot mess. The terms’ lack of clarity make them susceptible to being co-opted or misunderstood.

But we definitely need some kind of term for the phenomenon we’re seeing everywhere, which is that the relationship between incentive and moral behaviour has been warped. Everywhere I look, I see examples of people choosing to signal their allegiance to various groups or causes in ways that actually harm them. A thousand Trolley Problems, and everyone’s pulling the lever to drive the trolley over the victims because it gives the lever-pullers a short-term dose of social credibility.

People make a big show of embracing gender extremism because they want to appear aligned with gays and lesbians, even after we show them that it’s harmful to gays and lesbians. People make a big show of saying “trans women are women” because they want to appear as though they’re on the cutting edge of women’s rights and breaking gender stereotypes, even when it’s crystal clear that trans-identifying males are gutting women’s rights. People make a big show out of supporting ayurveda and other pseudoscience because they want to make a big show of how racially and culturally open-hearted they are, even though “alternative medicine” hurts many of the very people they’re signalling their allegiance with.

On and on. They pull the lever anyway.

Read the rest here.

A Pyramid Scheme Where the Product is “Progressive Values”

On why supposed progressives embrace regressive gender fundamentalism:

Ironically, the appeal of gender ideology is its unpopularity — most people don’t actually like it.

All the civil rights movements started out unpopular, and only became popular through arduous campaigning and struggle. This pattern repeated itself enough times that everyone absorbed three things:

1. The eventual outcome for all civil rights movements is success and widespread adoption by society. Why should the next one turn out any different than all the ones that have come before it?

2. The eventual outcome for those who oppose civil rights is social shame. For this reason, overt opposition to sex equality, racial equality, sexual orientation equality, disability rights, etc, has largely quieted down. (I may still have anti-gay colleagues, but no one’s said anything overtly homophobic to me in a workplace for 20 years because they know they can’t anymore.)

3. The eventual outcome for those who embrace civil rights is social capital: virtue. The earlier someone joins a new civil rights movement, the more virtue she will eventually receive. The very earliest adopters of civil rights eventually get statues and holidays in their honour.

This pattern suggests that the more overt opposition a (supposed) rights movement has, the earlier it is in its inevitable trajectory to widespread adoption, and the greater the virtue will be amassed by those noble souls who were the earliest to heed the calling of progress. It’s counter-intuitive, but it’s the same pattern of human behaviour that has driven people to join religious sects. Call it the economics of religion.

It’s kind of like a pyramid scheme where the product is “progressive values” and the reward is “virtue.” It doesn’t actually matter what you’re selling; the point is that you always have to have more people below you to sell it to, or the whole thing collapses. The other civil rights causes have lost their usefulness precisely because they no longer have a huge pool of outspoken opponents. There isn’t an anti-gay or anti-Black equivalent of JK Rowling, and by progressive logic today, that’s a weakness for those movements, not a selling point.

Read the rest here.

Military Men Dress Up in Women’s Clothing

On the unusually high rates of autogynephilic crossdressers with military backgrounds:

I’m not entirely surprised the army is so hostile to gender-critical views, considering the military is lousy with crossdressers. For reasons still not quite understood, military men are far more likely to become transvestites than men in any other profession. The trope of the secretly-crossdressing general has been around since at least the 18th century. It’s incredible how many of the most famous trans activists of the 20th and 21st centuries were soldiers:

• Private Bradley “Chelsea” Manning, famed Wikileaks whistleblower.

• Admiral Richard “Rachel” Levine, Assistant Secretary of Health.

• Sergeant First Class James “Jamie/Ellie Rae” Shupe, first legally-recognized “nonbinary” American.

• Lieutenant Colonel James “Jennifer” Pritzker, founder of the Pritzker Military Library.

• G.I. George “Christine” Jorgensen, the first famous transsexual.

• Lance Corporal James “Jan” Morris, CBE, journalist and bestselling author; famed for accompanying Hillary on his Everest expedition.

Read the rest here.

The Kinky Elephant In The Room

On the irksome acronym “LGBTQ+”:

“LGBTQ+” is an example of a term that gives us less information than we had when the individual letters were broken out into separate attributes. And I suspect that’s a large part of LGBTQ+’s appeal.

LGBTQ+ basically just means “different in a sex and gender kind of way.” Which is deliberately more vague than “sexually attracted to persons of the same sex.”

Deliberately more vague is appealing to lazy journalists who don’t want to bother being specific.

Deliberately more vague is appealing to formerly-LGB-focused lobby groups who want to capture a broader demographic.

Deliberately more vague is appealing to straight people who aren’t actually sexually attracted to persons of the same sex, but who want to claim a place in the rainbow parade now that it’s got cachet.

Deliberately more vague is appealing to men for whom their specific “sex and gender” difference constitutes having sexual paraphilias that they’re too embarrassed to openly admit to; and it’s more appealing to the people who have to interact with these paraphilic men in their family or work life, who would rather not have to address head-on the kinky elephant in the room.

And deliberately more vague is most appealing to the many young people who are struggling to reconcile themselves with the bodies they inhabit, which each come equipped with a sex and a sexual orientation of their own, outside of their inhabitants’ control, and often ill-fitting with the identities these young people are trying to curate online so that they can fit in with their peers.

Read the rest here.

This Is So Not a Leap Forward

On the medical profession’s complicity in the gender scandal:

This is the only area of medicine I can think of that believes “an overabundance of caution” means caution about offending activists instead of caution about the health of vulnerable patients. It was out of an overabundance of caution over fears of being perceived as transphobic that they rushed to greenlight experimental treatments on vulnerable adolescents before they had any good data to back them up, and in the face of overwhelming data that shows none of this treatment is entirely necessary, plus a growing body of data that shows most of it may in fact be harmful.

“Gender dysphoria” is being defined ever more broadly, and treated more aggressively at the same time. Fifteen years ago it was “gender identity disorder” —a full-blown debilitating mental disorder. Now it’s just a feeling of distress. And plans are already underway to redefine it again, this time as “gender incongruence” — nothing more than a preference to be one sex over the other. But these softer thresholds aren’t being matched with softer treatments. It’s full-on sex changes for everyone; the more the better. So there it is, the underlying ideal, a bizarre new “human right”: sex is a choice.

Read the rest here.

Not an Allegiance, but a Hostile Takeover

On the “LGBTQ+” Borg’s attempt to assimilate abortion rights into gender ideology:

I detect a strong tone of bullying subjugation in HRC’s statement. I could be wrong, but I doubt other groups’ advocacy orgs are putting out tweets with such wording that could be interpreted as claiming ownership over abortion rights. But that’s par for the course for the gender movement: its objective is to annex and then dismantle anything that has to do with biological sex. First, they took over gay rights orgs, which, save for LGB Alliance, have been completely assimilated by the Gender Borg and are now overtly hostile to actual homosexuals like me. Now it’s abortion’s turn.

Any marginalized group that counts women within its population has an overlap with abortion rights, so of course it’s reasonable that advocates for those groups would state an allegiance with abortion rights. In that sense, abortion rights are African American women’s rights, disabled women’s rights, women labourers’ rights. But because abortion is centrally about biological sex, gender lobbies see this issue as a threat and a territory that must be conquered. It’s not an allegiance; it’s a hostile takeover, and that shows in the wording these groups are using. Abortion can’t be seen as about women’s rights because sex must never be acknowledged, so abortion must be seen as inseparable from and central to the gender movement instead. And look how far they’ve already gotten: by now almost no one will dare use the words “woman” or “women” when talking in public about abortion rights, thereby putting the concept of people’s made-up gender identities firmly in the centre and pushing biological sex off to the side in terms of which people are most affected by abortion restrictions. Abortion rights are LGBTQ+ rights, NOT women’s rights. By omitting the word women altogether, the emphasis is shifted.

Read the rest here.

When Politics Becomes Identity

On the Overton Window, and the left’s lurch to extremism:

All across the left, we’re seeing this. It’s because the left have conceptualized the causes we hold dear — the environment, gay rights, anti-racism, women’s reproductive rights — not as fixed, external objectives we’re trying to achieve at this point in time in political history (reduction in greenhouse gases, equal rights for sexual and racial minorities, access to contraception and abortion, etc.) but as relative, internalized political identities on an ever-shifting political spectrum. When a progressive cause gains ground and enters the mainstream zeitgeist, it’s not seen as a victory but a loss: the cause is no longer appealing to the activists who championed it because it doesn’t line up with their internal political identity as being more progressive relative to the mainstream.

This is our old friend the Overton Window of course. But there are two extra effects at play here. One is a sort-of feedback loop that develops between the zeitgeist and progressive politics; it seems to be a repeating pattern in history: the point where progressivism suddenly and rapidly melts down into totalitarianism. (I suppose you could call it a “China Syndrome” in more ways than one?) It goes something like this: progressive cause succeeds in shifting the zeitgeist. The zeitgeist now sees that the progressive side is probably correct, and decides that in future it will be quicker to adopt the progressive position. Progressives now see that their cause is no longer progressive, so they quickly shift to a more progressive position. The zeitgeist moves even faster this time to incorporate the progressive position; the progressive wing moves even faster to an even more hardline-progressive position, yadda yadda the feedback loop has a meltdown and we end up with totalitarianism.

The other effect at play is that the “extremification” of the left isn’t just becoming more hardline about progressive causes, it eventually turns hostile to the very causes it started with. In the end, the Chinese Communist Revolution did the exact opposite of abolishing the ruling class and ushering in equality and freedom. Trans is an especially good (bad) example, because it is fundamentally about an inversion: flipping the sexes, thus flipping the polarity of the power structure behind sexism and homophobia, literally putting men and straights (even misogynist men and anti-gay straights) at the forefront of women’s rights and gay rights. Lots of people have pointed out that some of the more extreme “anti-racist” positions around things like cultural appropriation are sounding more and more like old-fashioned segregationism.

Read the rest here.

What Kind of Experts?

On the media’s gullible reliance on gender “experts,” who I compare to Scientologists:

This drives me crazy. What kind of “experts”? The journalistic principle in play should be to weigh the testimony of “experts” against the possibility of influence by a religious belief system that’s applying pressure on the debate.

If you’re talking about any other religious belief — say, Scientology — it becomes very clear that there’s two kinds of “experts” about it: believers themselves, and those who look at the belief system from the outside. Everyone on the inside will of course have nothing but good things to say about it because they have to. It’s people on the outside, who at least ostensibly have more freedom to look at it critically, who journalists should seek out for comment.

So the press really has to take the social pressure aspect into account any time they cite “experts.”

L. Ron Hubbard, crazy as he was, had shrewd insights into how to spread his cult, one of them being to glom his beliefs onto the glitz and glamour of Hollywood, because that’s what had the most appeal to Americans at the time. It wasn’t just a new science, it was a new science that made you glamourous and successful! In just the same way, the pseudoscience of trans ideology has been yoked to the virtues of progressive politics: gay and lesbian rights; identity politics; the civil rights movement. In a way that’s even more fiendishly clever, because its appeal is deeper than aspirations to fame and fortune: it’s morally righteous. Righteousness is stubborn as an ox, and prone to blindness. Blind righteousness is dangerous.

Read the rest here.

They Love Women’s Bodies but They Hate Women’s Souls

On why so many men hate women and claim to be women at the same time:

It’s like a jumbled kind of mind-body dualism deployed in service of misogyny: they love women’s bodies but they hate women’s souls.

I think many trans-identified men are like many other men in that they’re preoccupied with women’s bodies, but not keen on the female people who “inhabit” them. Damn that pesky business of women as autonomous persons who are different from men, and who are in control of their own bodies — the ones men want so badly to possess and control.

It’s surprising how many trans activists more-or-less come right out and say this: a “woman’s” body inhabited by a male soul is therefore the ideal woman to be, and a woman’s body inhabited by a female soul who is obedient to your demands is the ideal woman to have. Your soul is male so you can possess a woman’s body if you bloody well say so, and her soul is female, so you need to keep her under control.

You can see why so many misogynistic trans-identifying males call themselves “lesbians”.

Read the rest here.

And of course, there’s plenty more of my writing right here at my Substack. Thanks for being a subscriber!

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Which is a shame, because I’ve developed a terrible habit: I tend to pull the trigger on the “send” function prematurely: not when my editor’s eye calmly decides a piece has passed review and is ready for publication, but when my antsy nerves decide they just can’t wait a second longer to get the piece out there.

I get so excited as a piece starts to come together. When I think it’s just about ready, I spend a good couple hours in an almost delirious state, fussing, re-reading and tweaking, until I can’t contain my excitement any longer, and then I smash the big button and set it free.

But invariably it’s only after I press the publish button that I’m able to read my essay with a new perspective, imagining as I read it that I’m actually you as you open your inbox and read it freshly. And then I find a million more tweaks and changes that I want to make.

In the case of my latest essay, I think I pressed “send” much too soon, or perhaps much too late, because it was well past midnight last night when I fired it off. This morning I awoke, calm, refreshed, and ready to read it through your imaginary eyes, and what I found was that it needed a bit more work —an extra paragraph or two to clarify my points and better unify my overarching themes as I segue from one section to the next.

So, dear subscriber, if you haven’t yet read the piece that you found in your inbox this morning, might I suggest you read the version that is hosted live at my Substack online, instead of the copy that’s inside that email? If you did read some or all of the version I sent out last night, I think you’ll find that my revisions from today make it much easier to follow and my segues between points are clearer. I even changed the title!

Voilà: The Circle of Horror Must Be Broken (v. 2.0)

And for paid subscribers… behold, my Imaginary Ted Talk!

Thank you again for your support. You’re helping me immensely as I struggle to keep the roof over my head. For you, read on, and find the audio recording of my essay (the 2.0 version). Plus, read about my imaginary Ted Talk. Enjoy!

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