Hi everyone! This was originally one, much longer essay, in which I went through both the history of this contradiction and its current politics—I was nearing 4000 words with a lot left in the tank when I decided to split it in two. This is the first part, in which I detail the history of this controversy up until 2023 or so. The second part should be out soon.

As a former trans activist (2018-2023), I feel I should share some of my insider knowledge from my time in the movement. This controversy, which I will refer to as the transmedicalist/tucute schism, was one of the most brutal internal fights that I ever witnessed while inside, and bizarrely, it’s been almost entirely forgotten both outside and inside of the movement.

Believe it or not, back in the late 2010s, there was something of a schism brewing in the trans movement. The doctrinal contradiction it was centred on has been present for decades, but it all finally came to a bitter, brutal head in the years leading up to the Covid-19 lockdowns.

The controversy was centred on a simple question: do you need gender dysphoria to be trans? On one side stood those who called themselves transsexuals and transmedicalists, who argued that yes, of course you need dysphoria to be trans, and anyone without a diagnosis was just pretending to be trans for attention—a “transtrender”. Blaire White was probably the most famous of the advocates for this position, making quite a career on YouTube as a “reasonable transsexual”. Alongside him were figures like Buck Angel and Kalvin Garrah, the latter of whom has since disavowed her former position.

On the other side were those who usually referred to themselves as “tucutes” and their transmedicalist opponents as “truscum”, reflecting, more than anything else, their average age. They argued that the transmedicalists pathologise trans identity, making it inherently painful and sorrowful. They point out, as Natalie Wynn does in his surprisingly good video essay “'Transtrenders'”, that the fact that there is no physiological marker of being “true trans” means that, while transsexuals argue that their diagnosis legitimises their identity, that diagnosis is just a more elaborate version of self-ID. There is no brain scan, no blood test that diagnoses you with gender dysphoria. It’s essentially all based on the patient’s say-so. Even if you’ve said so over a longer period of time at more therapy sessions, it’s still basically unfalsifiable. Tucutes correctly recognise that, at the end of the day, there is no objective way to determine whether someone is “really” trans. They just take it in a different direction than us TERFs and say that that means that we have to take everyone at their word.

Therefore, the tucute position is this: a woman is anyone who says they’re a woman. A man is anyone who says they’re a man. Non-binary is real and valid. That’s it. They are self-ID fundamentalists. This is where you get the incredibly hyper feminine girly girls wearing tons of makeup and lace claiming to be trans boys on TikTok—or the people on BlueSky correcting you on ChrisChan’s pronouns when you bring up the fact that he (ALLEGEDLY) raped his own mother. While they operate with the assumptions of the performative theory, fundamentally, gender is linguistic for them. You are what you say you are. The words woman and man literally do not mean anything to them other than mental vibe. Whatever combination of appearance, pronouns, gender identity, and level of medical intervention feels like it fits your current vibe best is fine. I think the college girls who microdose testosterone and get double mastectomies while exclusively wearing frilly crop tops and long skirts epitomise this ideology in terms of the physical implications of it, while the ever-present he/him lesbian discourse on Tumblr epitomises its philosophical implications.

This question of whether dysphoria was necessary to be trans became so contested because it is reflects the fundamental clash between the twin origins of the trans movement: the medical (including both those seeking to “fix” distressed homosexuals, and autogynephiles looking to legitimise their fetish in public life), and the academic/political (queer theorists, mostly). The medical side justifies sex trait modification as being absolutely essential to the treatment of a mental disorder called gender identity disorder or gender dysphoria today. The more philosophical side has its origins in queer theory and sees sex trait modification as part of a postmodern political project to break down the boundaries of male and female and deconstruct sex altogether.

For a long time, these groups worked together in relative peace towards their shared goals of falsifying government documents and expanding male access to female-only spaces. Once they had achieved most of their shared objectives, though, cracks started to appear.

The queer theorists wanted to push further, allowing people not just to change their sex marker to that of the opposite sex, but to a neuter X. They wanted full gender self-identification in all circumstances, pushing for males to be inserted into women’s sports with little to no medical interventions, the erasure of sex-specific language in women’s healthcare (think pregnant people, chestfeeding and the especially dehumanising black birthing bodies) and “embodiment goals” to be the focus of sex trait modification, rather than distress reduction (do not Google “nullification” surgery under any circumstances do NOT).

The transmedicalists responded to this in horror, wisely seeing that these policies would be insanely unpopular among normal people and would likely result in greater scepticism toward the earlier gains, potentially resulting in their full reversal. Blaire White was relatively early in calling them out, alerting the public to the fact that these self-ID policies would result in big hulking male creeps like Jonathan Yaniv being allowed in women’s toilets (unlike White, who is dainty and feminine and flips his hair a lot and therefore should be allowed in). This position is far more common among older trans people who often genuinely did have to jump through hoops in order to medically transition. Queer theory types will point out, somewhat fairly, that transmedicalists seem to have a sense of stolen valour about younger trans-identifying people who are frequently able to get cross sex hormones and surgeries practically on demand. They feel as though access to the spaces of the opposite sex is something they’ve earned through years of work and suffering; the fact that these 16 year old no-T transtrenders in their Hatsune Miku binders and sparkly makeup can just call themselves boys now and get their documents changed with ease must feel like a mockery of their years of struggle.

You probably can able to tell that, of these two positions, I find the tucute position…I don’t want to say better, but maybe less unacceptably incoherent. When I was a trans activist, this was the branch I subscribed to. The tucute position makes no claims of a hard science behind transgenderism; in this way, I think it’s actually much closer to the gender critical position than the transmedicalist position. The transmedicalists make up scientific rigour where there is none; this group is responsible for a lot of the bunk studies that make up the citation cartel that provides the “evidence” backing these interventions. The tucutes can at least see that this is far more social than medical; they just arrived a different conclusion than we did.

I find transmedicalist arguments to often be quite sexist and homophobic in their assumptions; most of the diagnostic criteria for gender dysphoria is bog standard gender nonconformity, and many of the arguments transmedicalist advocates make for male inclusion in female spaces are based around appearance and attractiveness. I don’t think that “woman” should mean “person straight men find fuckable” any more than I think it should mean “person who identifies as a woman”. I think both positions are nonsensical, but transmedicalism does a better job at hiding its nonsense and appearing respectable, because it plays into the same sexist assumptions that feminists have been fighting against for generations. It merely puts a bandaid on the issue by giving those most harmed by those assumptions (masculine women, effeminate men and women with sexual trauma) an out—an out which will destroy their health and has little to no evidence backing its claims to reduce mental distress. Queer theory, as maddening and also sexist as it is, at least gives young people who identify as trans breathing space to experiment with that identity without feeling obligated to medicalise. It’s also more obviously ridiculous to the average person, making it easier to root out.

Anyway, in the late 2010s, once the overlapping goals of the transmedicalists and the tucutes had basically been achieved, the groups began to splinter. I witnessed this mostly on YouTube, though I know it also took place on Tumblr, Reddit, Pinterest, Twitter and every other online cesspool you can think of (well, probably not 4Chan, but all the others). Transmedicalist YouTubers like White and Garrah made careers of making fun of dumb videos by teenage girls with neopronouns and creepy old men in skirts. Any trans identifying public figure suspected of being a transmedicalist was hounded by trans Twitter, including the aforementioned Natalie Wynn (who is definitely not a transmedicalist), who left the Internet for months due to harassment following his collaboration with Buck Angel on a 2019 video. The split had some correlation with age, with younger, more radical activists falling more on the tucute side (again, their very labels reflect this) and older activists wishing to stay the course and protect their gains on the transmedicalist front. It began to split the loud, agitated college-aged vanguard from their wealthy, more conservative backers. This schism frankly threatened to rip the entire movement asunder…if not for what happened next.

What happened next, of course, was the Covid lockdowns. Suddenly, millions of teenagers and young adults were forced out of school, social interactions and jobs and into their childhood bedrooms for 20 hours a day for months on end. We all turned to the Internet to fill the time, and many, many of my peers adopted a trans identity as a result. Anecdotally, I saw an explosion of trans ideation amongst my classmates during this time, and my current friends report similar things at their schools. I had tons and tons of friends flirting with they/them pronouns, and one who ended up getting a double mastectomy on her 18th birthday, less than a year after our lockdown ended. She started taking testosterone at age 16 or 17, within months of announcing her new identity. She has since disappeared off the internet. Another friend from this time still calls herself they/them, but has backed off her previous they/he pronouns and seems to have gotten through college alright.

Another important aspect of this was the explosion of TikTok’s popularity as a social media platform. When Musical.ly was first rebranded as TikTok in 2018, it was the butt of jokes. By late 2019, though, TikTok took off, and it fully entered the mainstream once we were all locked down in spring 2020. Up until that point, the YouTube algorithm had been incentivising longer and longer videos, Tumblr had no character limit, and people were writing threads dozens of tweets long on Twitter. Longform content was still pretty common. TikTok’s format shortened attention spans and incentivised creators to keep it as brief, shallow and entertaining as possible. It’s very difficult to explain a complex philosophical controversy in under a minute, especially when you’re on an app created essentially to be a slot machine for toddlers.

This massive, largely TikTok-based influx of fresh meat into the movement essentially flattened the schism. The new people hadn’t been around to get to know the deep questions at the heart of the ideology; they had gotten their trans identity from watching 15,000 20-second videos a week by young women with stick-and-poke tattoos and funky haircuts talk about non-binary crochet projects and do lesbian thirst traps (…not that I’m speaking from experience or anything). They were not interested in philosophy. They were finding their true authentic selves and trying to find a politically correct way to cope with the trauma of being legally deprived of developmentally appropriate opportunities for differentiation by their overzealous local politicians (for example, my high school was fully closed from March 2020 to March 2021, and anyone who complained about that in our local community was treated as a crazed MAGA loon). They were rebels who had finally found their cause, and the issues which led to the schism were too nuanced to be discussed via their preferred online platform.

The old question of whether someone needs dysphoria to be trans was no longer widely discussed, as far as I’m aware. It was no longer understood to be important. Ever since 2020, there seems to be far less interest in teasing out the philosophy of trans. The views on YouTube videos discussing the topic are way down since last decade (PhilosophyTube has yet to crack a million views on any video he’s posted in the past year, Mia Mulder’s subscriber count has been flatlining for years, and ContraPoints hasn’t made a video explicitly defending it since literally 2020). There just doesn’t seem to be much of an appetite for it any more. Some of the transmedicalists of the previous era, most notably Blaire White and Buck Angel, still distinguish their position from the queer theorists, but they’ve become so far removed from the mainstream trans movement that they’re now better known outside it than within it.

The result of all this is a sort of big-tent trans movement that attempts to hold both positions simultaneously and simply refuses to recognise the contradiction. This is how you end up arguing with activists who will tell you in one breath that genitals have no gender, but trans-identifying people need have surgery on their genitals on demand and for free, or they’ll kill themselves. They’ll tell you that a woman is anyone who says they’re a woman, but also that male sex offenders who claim to be women are faking it and that it’s insulting to say that we can’t tell the difference. The contradiction is plain as day to anyone following the logic, but logic is no longer a concern to the movement. It used to be (at least to a certain extent), but those days are long over.

The injection of tons and tons of relatively mentally stable but intellectually incurious middle class kids into the movement may have also saved it from collapse, at least for a few more years. By basically ending the infighting, it allowed the movement to become basically united, giving it more lobbying power. It also brought in a whole new class of supporters: left-leaning affluent adults. These kids often took their parents along for the ride, which has given us this class of bizarrely activist 40- and 50-somethings at school board meetings backing policies destroying girls’ sports. These normal, functional young people made it so that everyone had a non-binary niece and knew that she was doing basically fine. They made this mainstream within middle class Democrat and Labour communities. None of these people even knew what puberty blockers were in 2019; now they’re pushing for them as some sort of fundamental human right, thanks to the Covid wave.

It is very interesting to me how quickly this controversy, which was enormous in online trans activist spaces for years, seemingly evaporated during the lockdowns. There’s been a lot of discussion of the Covid wave of young people identifying as trans, but it’s mostly been from the point of view of someone outside the movement, usually the concerned parent of one of those young people. The internal impact of this wave is hardly discussed at all within trans activist spaces, as far as I can tell, because to do so requires one to acknowledge that there even was a wave, and that those caught up in that wave were of a somewhat different demographic than those who were involved prior to it. That would be read as invalidating their identities, so no discussion of this is permissible.

I think the internal impact of this wave is that the trans movement is now, in general, more emotional and less concerned with philosophy and logical coherence. That is not to say they were coolly rational prior to it, but the strain within the movement which wanted to be that was largely drowned out in the flood. This does not appear to be at odds with the increased respectability among those middle class parents, though. If anything, it gives it broader appeal. No longer did newcomers feel obligated to read complex postmodern gender theory in order to determine which sect they subscribed to, nor did they need to even worry about logical coherence at all. No one seemed concerned with that after 2020. It also meant that anyone involved could use any of the talking points associated with either sect, since it didn’t matter anymore. This made the movement look more bizarre to outsiders, but to insiders, it meant there was an emotionally satisfying answer to every question. If the tucute position felt a bit weak on a given topic, the transmedicalist line was adopted, and vice versa. None of this was conscious, as far as I’m aware. It was just the natural consequence of, frankly, dumbing down the ideology.

In the second part of this essay, I’ll explore how this controversy has evolved in recent years as the trans movement has started to lose ground. It has come back, but in a different form: much of the discussion now takes place outside of the movement, rather than within it.

While I will be focusing on the issue of sex and gender here, as that is what the debate was about, I believe the problem I’m seeing applies far more broadly within the progressive/woke world than just to this issue.

While there were many illustrative moments during the debate, the exchange that evening which is the most interesting to me took place immediately afterwards. The cameras stopped rolling, people were making their way towards the exit to vote, and the group I’d come with were regrouping by the dais and celebrating how well it had all gone. A young man made his way through the crowd over to me, whose voice I recognised as belonging to the person who’d given a floor speech immediately before me.

If you’ve seen the full debate (which unfortunately has now been restricted to “Members Only” on YouTube by the Union), you’ll know that before I began my speech, I referenced the passing similarity of my position bore to that of the speaker before me. I used his name in order to do so, which was, to me, a matter of politeness; in my days as a Model UN kid, it was just decorum. The young man in question did not take it this way, though, which is why I am not using his name in this piece.

Immediately following the debate, he came up to me with the tight-lipped, passive aggressive smile I’ve come to associate with a trans activist who really, really wishes he could punch you in the face but is restraining himself because it would hurt his chances at getting a nice corporate job after graduation.

He made some quick comment complimenting me on my speaking, briefly making me hope this would be a chill, I-think-you’re-an-evil-nazi-but-I-support-your-right-to-speak-type of exchange. While they are essentially the woke equivalent of “love the sinner, hate the sin”, those interactions are still far more pleasant than the open belligerence trans activists more often treat us with. Alas, dear reader, my hopes were dashed when he immediately followed the civil comment with a diatribe featuring the repeated use of the phrase, “I do not appreciate you trying to associate yourself with me.” I was baffled and responded, in what was perhaps not my finest moment, by giving him a look of mock-sympathy and made a comment about how difficult the climate on campus was these days (i.e. implying that he agreed with me and was just worried I was putting him in danger of being cancelled), to which he responded by getting even closer to me and repeating his mantra louder and more aggressively. I told him I didn’t appreciate him coming up to me and to have a nice evening, and eventually he left me alone.

This exchange, though silly and brief, came back to me a few days later. At the time, my bafflement had primarily been at the fact that this person I’d literally never heard of nor seen before in my life seemed to think I was clout-chasing with his name. I was just amused by the ego of the average Cambridge Union member and didn’t think more of it. When I recalled it, though, I started to wonder more about why he thought I’d want to be associated with him. The way he’d said it had also implied that I was trying to launder my beliefs through his—as if I thought my beliefs were somehow unacceptable or unpalatable. You know, the way that he thinks about my beliefs.

It goes without saying that not only do I not think my own beliefs are unpalatable and in need of disguise, I also think that the beliefs of the young man who confronted me are stupid at best and morally bankrupt at worst. He was arguing against the resolution, but from the point of view that LGBTQ+ activism was not doing enough for TQ+ people of colour and queer women (to my recollection—as stated above, I can’t actually view the full debate on YouTube anymore). The vitriol with which he confronted me suggests to me that he quite strongly supports the sterilisation and mutilation1 of gender nonconforming children; the absolute destruction of the single-sex spaces and sports that women spent decades fighting for; the erasure of homosexuality and pressuring of lesbians and gay men, and, in particular, young lesbians to submit to unwanted heterosexual sex in the name of being “good allies”; and the attempted silencing and threatening of anyone, especially women, who dares to speak out about the reality of this situation. If he is not aware of the full implications of the ideology he professes, that is a failure on his part to research and think through what it is he is saying before he says it, a practice which a Cambridge education should presumably be encouraging (though, in many humanities faculties these days, I doubt it). If he does understand these implications and continues to advocate for this ideology, then he is a monster. I tend to assume by default that the former is true of most who disagree with me (with the notable exception of a certain she-who-shall-not-be-named who also spoke at the debate) because that was the case with me when I was a TRA. Either way, this is not a person whose position is worthy of respect, much less any attempt to emulate, of which I have been accused.

Moral rant out of the way, I want to spend some time looking at what this interaction suggests about the inner workings of the young progressive mind. As stated above, this young man seemed to assume that I have the same moral understanding of gender critical beliefs that he does; i.e. that I, too, believe that I am evil.

I worry that we’ve reached a point where young people are regularly reaching adulthood without developing a robust theory of mind, continuing in the childhood belief that the way that everyone understands the world exactly as they do. The world is divided into good guys, who always have good intentions, and bad guys, who always have ill intent. As long as your heart is pure, you can be sure you’re in the right. No need to interrogate your beliefs and their consequences; you have the undisputed moral high ground by virtue of how you feel about what you believe. Those who oppose you do so not because they also believe they are right and good, but because they hate love and friendship or something. It’s an appealing worldview, one which has fuelled many atrocities across human history. It also seems to be increasingly prevalent among young people on all sides of the political smorgasbord, something which I think may owe to the rise of social media as the primary medium for political discussion and debate and the subsequent drop off in in-person, face-to-face conversations with those we disagree with.2

I was lucky in this respect. I went to middle and high schools with exceptionally good Holocaust education curricula, where I was made to read and analyse not only Nazi propaganda and speeches, but also internal party documents revealing the true feelings of the perpetrators of one of the worst atrocities in human history. Once you understand that even the Nazis—a group so obviously evil that they’ve literally been stock cartoon villains ever since their defeat—believed in the moral valour and justice of their actions, you realise that almost everyone views her- or himself as the hero of the story. This is a very disquieting realisation, because it brings with it the discovery that you, too, have the capacity to do great evil, even (and perhaps especially) with the best of intentions. Without this knowledge, though, we risk carrying the logic of My Little Pony or Phineas and Ferb into adulthood, giving us enormous blindspots to our own moral fallibility.

The only way this young man could become convinced that I was seeking to launder my beliefs is if he believed that we shared the same moral assumptions about the world and that I was just morally or intellectually deficient, rendering me unable to reach the dizzying heights of the superior position. That somehow my friends and I think we are just as deviant as he thinks we are, and we simply enjoy being deviant. That we just hate all that is good in the world and go through our lives seeking to harm others. I wonder if some of my fellow students would imagine CUSW meetings with us steepling our fingers and cackling maniacally as we relish in how evil we are, like Doctor Doofenshmirtz.

Actual footage of me meeting my girlfriend

Many are shocked when they confront Maeve and Thea, expecting evil witches, to be faced with ordinary, decent young women (I’ve actually yet to have anyone come up to me on the street—I think I look a bit more anonymous than they do, especially as I’ve been growing out my hair this year). We intentionally went public with images of ourselves in an effort to prevent people from writing us off as strange and aberrant. The three of us all look like normal university students because we are normal university students. Unfortunately, this appears not to have worked quite as well as we would have hoped, and this strange assumption about us persists. When the Cambridge Students’ Union approved CUSW’s registration in December, one of the three (3!) statements3 put out by the elected (…in an election with 18% turnout) SU officers on the official website included an insinuation that they expected us to harass trans-identifying students at Cambridge in the future.4

There seems to be a pervasive sense among young progressive activists that those of us who disagree with them do so not because we think that they’re wrong about the best way to run a society (…or about their idea that men can become women if they really, really want to), but because we are fundamentally hateful, evil people who enjoy hurting others.

It has occurred to me that this unnamed young man at the Cambridge Union is quite literally the only person of his persuasion who has confronted me for my stance on transgenderism since October, and the only person ever to do so in real life. I have a lot of thoughts as to why this may be the case, which I plan on writing about in the future, but this utter lack of interaction with us, and therefore with our ideas and reasoning behind them, is clearly very helpful in maintaining the delusion that we just go through life snarling and scowling at all things joyful and beautiful, and that’s why we don’t want men in women’s toilets.

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I think that’s also part of why they claim that our very presence makes them feel “unsafe”. Despite the fact that there has not been a single case of a gender critical woman physically attacking a trans-identifying person, or the fact that the average activist in our movement is a middle-aged lesbian (no disrespect here to middle-aged lesbians, of course—thank you for your service), they claim that we are unbearably menacing, on par with actual skinheads. I think a lot of this is just a convenient excuse for the leaders of this movement to keep us and our very threatening ideas far away from their flock, lest we corrupt them—but I think for some of them, especially the younger ones, the fear is very real. As others have written about elsewhere, there is a real issue of phobia-indoctrination within the trans movement, through which vulnerable young people are systemically convinced that there are tons of people out there who literally want them dead. I think, perhaps, this reduced of theory of mind is a byproduct of, or at least related to, the induced phobias in this population.

I wonder if this situation was/is the motivation for #NoDebate, or if it has come about as a result. The decreased of theory of mind and the fear of debate creates a positive feedback loop which makes the trans movement intellectually weaker with each pass. #NoDebate creates an environment in which you never hear your opponent’s perspective, much less our arguments, preventing you from understanding where we’re coming from. Their underdeveloped theories of mind means that younger activists are absolutely terrified of us, leading them to insist on #NoDebate out of fear of being confronted with evil incarnate, which then further isolates them from the rather peaceable and calm reality of gender critical ideas and activists. They have been spiralling through this feedback loop for years. No wonder they’ve arrived at such a bizarre worldview.

I find it darkly ironic that this interaction happened at the Cambridge Union, established in direct opposition to Cambridge University’s restrictions on freedom of speech in the early 19th century. How is it that a member of what was once one of the world’s premier debating societies could be so ignorant of interior worlds different from his own? This is an activist movement which preaches empathy, and yet its foot soldiers cannot put themselves in the shoes of someone who sees the world through a different lens—an ability which is the very foundation of empathy. How can one debate effectively if one cannot even conceptualise one’s opponent’s position, much less her worldview? Unfortunately, the quality of debate I have witnessed in that chamber reflects the destruction this weakness has wrought on quality debate. The recorded debate could hardly be called such, given the general lack of any back-and-forth, and the unrecorded debate on the future of the Labour Party which preceded it was unwatchably bad. Students were frequently unable to project their voices, speak without reading off their phones, or construct a basic line of argument without unrelated personal anecdotes or references to their own emotions in place of evidence.

Given how traditionally close to political power the Cambridge Union has been, I am very concerned for what this might indicate for the future of politics in this country (the Oxford Union as well—they’re not much better). Exceedingly few of the student speeches I’ve seen have been remotely fit for purpose, and I know there is a powerful group within the Union student committee who strongly oppose the inclusion of any voice which truly dissents to the current progressive orthodoxy. The worst part is that I don’t think a lot of these students realise just how poor their debating skills are, or how intellectually impoverished the Union is making them. They are told that what they are getting from the Union is rigorous debate and free enquiry, but to anyone outside the progressive bubble, it’s embarrassingly clear that that isn’t the case.

Without change, I think the Union and the broader progressive/woke movement will continue their spiral into low standards and censorship. Whether this will result in their becoming so fringe and isolated that they lose any power in society, or in their achieving the kind of horrible woke future this new iteration of the Green Party seeks for us, only time will tell. I just hope our attempts to open up more discussions can help start to disrupt the intellectual death spiral and bring back proper debate to the key issues of our time—and save the students themselves from these severe misunderstandings of the world around them.

Many thanks to for this transcript of my speech!

CORRECTION 23/5/2026: I’ve received some messages from readers concerning a factual error I made in this speech: there does not appear to have been a connection between Charlotte Reed and Patricia Wright, the lesbian couple murdered by Dana Rivers, and Michfest; I’m not sure where I got that from! The minimal planning I did for this speech, given largely off the cuff, was done without internet access, as I did not have my smartphone with me at the time. Thank you to those who reached out, and I apologise for any confusion or upset my mistake has caused.

I would like to argue in favour of abstention from this motion because I believe the construct of the LGBTQ+ community is incoherent.

** Applause. **

This is a community that does not, and it actively opposes, the rights of lesbians to this day—and I want to just list a few examples from the past few years that illustrate this point: that the “L” in the LGBTQ+ is never really part of the “LGBTQ+”.

In Australia, for years now, lesbians have not been able to legally gather in lesbian-only events. They have been required to include men who “identify” as lesbians in those events, thus making these events hostile to many women, and making them no longer lesbian-only events. Lesbian dating apps are full of men. I’m telling you—these apps are terrible—and you cannot filter. If you try to filter, you will be banned. “Cotton ceiling” rhetoric in the past decade and a half: this notion that it is somehow the final frontier for trans-identified men who call themselves lesbians to sleep with real lesbians. This is some kind of civil rights struggle, to have sexual access to women who are not interested in them. The Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival was cancelled about a decade ago. This is a primarily lesbian-organised and lesbian-attended event. Two prominent organisers of this event, a lesbian couple [and their son] were murdered by a trans-identified man who was upset about the fact that he was not allowed to attend the festival. His name is Dana Rivers. He is in a women’s prison in California.

And just to demonstrate the fact that lesbians do oppose this: we are vastly overrepresented amongst the women, who are also vastly overrepresented, in the struggle to preserve women’s rights. Because we are not only lesbians—we are women too. Women such as Julie Bindel, Magdalen Burns, Joanna Cherry, Lizzy Pitt, Kate Barker, Jamie Reed, and two of the co-founders of the Cambridge Society of Women—Thea and myself: all lesbians.

** Sammy McDonald, second speaker for the opposition, requests a Point of Information. **

I’m still going.

There are currently no lesbian bars in London that are only lesbians; they all accept men. It is almost impossible to organise lesbian events without them being picketed [or] protested by the LGBTQ+. This is clearly a community that is opposed to lesbian rights—

** Applause. **

—and I think it’s really important that we recognise that this is not a coherent category, and we should abstain from the motion because it is nonsensical.

Links to both the video of my speech and the full debate:

Thank you all for the support for Part 1! I hoped to publish Part 2 sooner but somehow managed to catch two viruses while writing it, in addition to finishing up Michaelmas Term here and dealing with the sun setting at 3:45pm (!!!). Here it is.

I mentioned in my last essay that I know for a fact that I am not the only young woman who has been subjected to sharing a dorm room with a man. While this is partially due to the fact that many universities have the same housing policies as UO, I say this mainly because after I left, Sam was given another female roommate. I found out via a mutual acquaintance a few weeks after I left. I never learned her name, but I think about her all the time. I wish I’d made an effort to reach out and warn her, to try to let her know who she was dealing with, but I didn’t. I’m not sure it would have made much of a difference—but I’m also not sure it wouldn’t have.

I need to introduce a new figure into this story, a neighbour of Sam and I, who I will call Avery (not her real name): she and I had been good friends the previous term, and it was the loss of that relationship that was one of the worst aspects of the move. She identified as non-binary, but it was in a much more chill way compared to most trans-identifying people I know (I remember her sending me a picture of a funny Christmas card her grandmother had sent her that happened to address her as “granddaughter”; Avery didn’t care about that and just wanted to share the joke). I knew she had had a tough childhood, especially her teenage years, and she broke up with her longterm high school girlfriend over Winter Break. Within days of Winter Term starting, as I was secretly in the process of leaving the room, Sam proudly informed me, to my shock, that he was now in a “complicated relationship” with Avery. I barely registered it at the time in my stressed-out haze, but I was suddenly reminded of it when Avery reached out to me a week or so after I left, asking to talk. I said yes.

There’s a lot I could speculate about Avery and Sam’s relationship here. I won’t, as I don’t know how it progressed after January 2023, and it feels needlessly intrusive towards Avery. Hell, for all I know, they’re still together.

Avery and I met up in my new dorm room on January 27, according to a note from my Notes app I’ve only just discovered in the past few days since I posted Part 1. I barely remember the conversation, but in that note I have the statement I prepared to deliver to her justifying my decision to leave the room. I’ve provided parts of it below, with names redacted for privacy. It corroborates a lot of the details I shared last week, and adds some new ones that I clearly had forgotten. It also provides an insight into where my head was at in the time between my leaving and my peaking.

[sam] is…a lot. she is a very intense person to be around. at first, i liked that. i liked having someone so open about everything. but that openness was soon revealed to me as a lack of boundaries and a complete lack of respect for the boundaries of others.

to [sam], i was exactly what she needed me to be, or at least what she wanted me to be, and nothing more. she said over and over again that i was the perfect roommate, that i got her like few people did. that made me feel good about myself and prevented me from realizing i was a little too perfect.

[…]

the things were small. nothing crazy, nothing i thought anyone would care about. but they drove me fucking crazy. i thought i was just a bad friend, or that it was that time of the month, or that maybe i was transphobic.

i started to lean in to my uncomfortableness though. i wanted to get to the source of it.

this was months in the making. i remember back in september walking down the hall and wishing i had picked literally anyone else as my roommate. maybe not [known heroin addict in our hall]. but anyone else.

she was sucking the life out of me. every day, whatever went wrong, whatever thought she had, it was all my problem. i had to fix it. i had to be perfect.

[…]

it’s not her fault that her adhd is making her transition so slow. but it’s also not my fault, but it was my problem. every suggestion i made, every thing i did to try to help her, got shot down or was somehow the wrong thing to say.

some things were ok to say. some things were not. some things, as i found out repeatedly, were ok to say some times and not others, and i had no way of discerning any of this until the mistake had been made and my life became a living nightmare.

crying, yelling, the silent treatment, suicidal threats, insults to my family, my mother, my appearance, my goals, nothing was off the table. as soon as the switch flipped, i was the enemy.

it never felt bad enough. nothing happened that felt like enough for someone to believe me, for someone to get me the hell out of there. i didn’t tell anyone because i fully believed i would lose everyone.

it got to the point where i was losing sleep, where i couldn’t get my work done, where i would pack every conceivable thing i could need for the day just to avoid heading back to the room.

[…]

i’m not even sure what i was afraid of. i just held this feeling of existential dread thinking about her, and especially thinking about spending twice as much time with her as i already had.

on friday of week one [of winter term], it finally clicked. something i had been fantasizing about for months finally felt possible. i filled out the room change request. i started to believe myself. maybe i wasn’t crazy, maybe i wasn’t a horrible person, maybe it wasn’t that time of the month. maybe [sam] was just a shitty roommate and friend. maybe i wasn’t the problem like i had believed for so long.

submitting that request, i was terrified. i literally wrote in it that i was prepared to lose all of my friends but doing it. i didn’t know who i could talk to, but in a moment of impulsiveness, i told [the girls mentioned in part 1]. to my complete and utter relief, they believed me. they comforted me. because they had been seeing the same things in [sam].

[one of the girls] actually apologized to me for not telling me sooner about her own issues with [sam]. [two of the other girls] made jokes about how strong they had to be in their boundaries with her, and told me that they could never have done it if they were living in a shoebox bean room with her.

i felt so relieved.

[…]

i didn’t tell you because that was the night that [sam] told me about your “complicated relationship”, and i figured you just wouldn’t believe me, or tell [sam], or try to convince me to stay, or all three.

[…]

i’ve told you more here than i’ve told anyone else. i feel like since you’re the closest to [sam], you deserve to know the most. i’m sorry i didn’t tell you sooner. it was nothing personal. you were one of my closest friends, but your closeness to [sam] made me feel that it was impossible to tell you.

While I have very little recollection of the specifics of that conversation, I remember Avery being very defensive of the relationship and basically trying to convince me that what I had experienced wasn’t as bad as I thought it was. It was bizarre and really difficult to deal with from someone I had considered one of my best friends just weeks prior.

Avery, if you’re somehow reading this, I hope you’re doing alright. I’m sure you know you’re the one the pseudonym refers to. I hope you’ve gotten away from him. I wish you all the best. My inbox is always open to you.

As I was in the process of leaving that room, I saw on Instagram that a few of the university’s sororities were doing Winter Term COB (Continuously Open Bidding—mid-year recruitment of new members). I had had a vague interest in joining one at the start of the year, but I realised upon arrival that it was very un-woke and uncool, so I didn’t. Now that I was leaving, the idea of a female-only space really appealed to me. I signed up for a few recruitment events and ended up getting a bid from Gamma Phi Beta. I took it.

I’m going to be completely honest here: the sorority was fantastic. Even though I had lost almost all of my old friends, I suddenly had a ton of new ones. I could just pretend that Fall Term hadn’t happened and enjoy being a part of a women’s society, going to dances, camping retreats, and charity basketball games as if everything were normal. Being in that single-sex space did wonders for my nervous system; even though I was afraid walking around campus that I would run into Sam, at the off-campus house, I felt safe. Contrary to popular portrayals, most of the girls in my sorority didn’t live in the house (it was way too small for all 150 of us). I remained in my new dorm, but most of my social life took place in the house. It was wonderful. Yes, they had some silly policies around “trans inclusion”, but there weren’t any men there at the time, so I thought I could overlook that. I certainly didn’t tell anyone about my change of heart, but it really didn’t ever come up.

In May, everything changed. The Biden administration was trying to gut Title IX, the federal statute banning sex discrimination in state-funded educational institutions, by defining the word sex to mean “gender identity”. My university’s Title IX office is where I eventually ended up reporting my experience with Sam. If sex means gender identity, what happened to me was between two women. It was not. The public comment period closed on May 15, 2023, and I wanted to try to do something about it.

I had barely been able to speak to anyone about what happened with Sam; I had a therapist at the time, but she would only let me refer to him as a woman, so I generally tried not to talk about it. My best friend at the time would let me talk about the abuse sometimes, but her aunt and uncle were transitioning her 7-year-old cousin, so she didn’t like it when I brought it up. I hadn’t even told my parents, unsure how one even begins to broach that sort of topic. They knew that I’d moved out, but I hadn’t told them why. I had just been trying to pretend that it hadn’t happened for months.

In May, though, I hoped, foolishly, that since my perspective had been changed so much by experiencing what I had, maybe telling other people about it would change their perspectives, too. I wrote my first of many pieces detailing what happened in the room, using sex-based language in order to better convey the reality of the situation, and posted it to Medium with the tongue-in-cheek title “Cancelling Myself” on the evening of Monday, May 15. I then shared a post from the Independent Women’s Forum about Title IX on my Instagram story defending the definition of sex and inviting people to read my Medium piece, which I linked in my bio.

Within minutes, my follower count was dropping by the dozens. Within hours, I was receiving horrible DMs from people I’d once called friends. The next morning, I was afraid to go outside. It felt like everyone I’d ever known was messaging me; this wasn’t actually true, but the way that social media platforms work, even a small backlash feels enormous. I was accused of being brainwashed, far-right, racist, wanting to deny indigenous women healthcare, told “congratulations, no one cares about your abuse because you were transphobic”, lectured over and over again about the fact that while something bad had maybe happened to me, I was far worse because I was a bigot.

I never even named Sam. I never have.

On Wednesday, May 17, I posted a follow-up, entitled “The Response”, trying to clarify my beliefs. To no one’s surprise, it did nothing to calm the mob.

On Thursday, May 18, I finally received an email from my sorority. It was a computer generated message summoning me to a disciplinary hearing for violating their non-discrimination policy.

My sorority had not reached out to me in any way to ask if I was okay prior to that. Remember, one of their members had just spoken up about being abused. That was the first piece of communication I had received from them since coming forward.

When I get anxious, I tend to obsessively research what’s coming next. I treated this situation no differently. I found Gamma Phi Beta’s disciplinary procedures on their website, and I started reading. I found out that they were generally meant to summon members under investigation first to a lesser hearing before escalating to a disciplinary hearing (what I had been invited to). They were only meant to begin with a disciplinary hearing in the most extreme cases; all of the examples provided in the documents were situations where the member had committed a crime. My offence? I had called a man who abused me “he”.

At this disciplinary hearing, there were meant to be three members of the executive (exec) committee present, including the president of the sorority. The exec committee is made up of seven elected student members of the sorority, typically in their third year of their undergraduate degree. They were all about 21 at the time of my hearing. Remember this rule. It will come up later.

I also found out that I had a right to see the “incident reports” that had been filed against me, which were required in order for the sorority in order to initiate the disciplinary process. I requested these and received a PDF of five reports. They had been filed by exec members but also by a girl I was friends with. The strangely consistent wording across them, as well as a curious mistake in the dating of the reports (a few of them dated May 16 complained about my May 17 essay), highly suggest to me that this was a coordinated effort between these young women. I’ve seen this same behaviour more recently among young women at my college in Cambridge in their (largely unsuccessful) efforts to re-cancel me the past few weeks.

These documents also informed me that I had a right to make a statement at the hearing, and, most importantly, that I had the right to an audio recording of the proceedings.

The disciplinary hearing was held in the basement of the house, which, due to its strange floor-plan meant I had to walk through the entire ground floor to reach it, encountering numerous members of the sorority, shocked to see me in the house, en route. I held my head high and stared straight ahead. I would not be a spectacle for them. I would not lash out at them, nor would I grovel.

This all makes me sound very cool and badass. An important bit of context here is that I had broken both of my wrists two months prior in a cycling accident. One of them was still in a cast, the other was still quite weak. Because I had lost the use of both of my hands for several weeks, including in the shower, I had shaved my head recently to avoid having to pay a hair salon a ridiculous amount of money to wash my hair for me. I walked in as a severely injured bald girl with the puffiest eyes you can imagine from days of crying as my social life collapsed around me. I was quite the pathetic figure.

I walked into the hearing room to find the entire seven-woman exec committee with their “chapter advisor” (a woman in her late twenties with a lot of training in PR) on Zoom. I knew this was a blatant violation of their own policies, but it was my word against eight, including a real adult. I cut my losses and immediately requested that the hearing be recorded. The president agreed immediately and, to her credit, placed her phone in the center of the table for all of us to see it was recording for the duration.

What followed was one of the worst hours of my life. I began with my prepared statement, which I had practiced over and over again on the 5 mile walks I had started taking daily to fill my time now that I had no friends. I was sobbing through the whole thing.

I have the recording on my computer. I had to put a lot of pressure on the president to get my copy of it, but I got it in the end. I’ve thought about publishing it, but it’s truly awful. I’ve listened to it three times; once immediately after I got it, once a year later, and once a few months ago. It’s become very clear to me upon the last two re-listenings that I had them all scared out of their minds. The entire thing is just an extensive exercise in ass-covering. The chapter advisor kept repeating over and over that “it’s not that you talked about the abuse, it’s the words you used to describe it that we have a problem with”. That’s right: I was being too mean. Why couldn’t I just be kinder?

They even got me to admit that I’d broken their non-discrimination policy. I didn’t. They claimed that I’d discriminated against Sam because of his “gender identity”. I didn’t. You could claim that I discriminated against him because of his sex—but that is not a characteristic protected under Gamma Phi Beta International’s non-discrimination policy.

They asked me how I thought my comments made any trans-identified male (“trans girl”) members of the sorority feel; I reminded them that there weren’t any, to which they asked how I could tell. I gave them a look, like, Are you serious? They conceded the point, but then asked how I would feel if such a person wanted to join the sorority. I told them I would feel very uncomfortable, especially given what had happened at Kappa Kappa Gamma at the University of Wyoming earlier that same year (click for an absolutely nightmarish story). They didn’t seem to know what I was talking about, concerningly.

The meeting concluded with them asking me if I saw any future for myself in the sorority. I told them that the treatment I had experienced from the women who had claimed to be my “sisters” just a week prior was so horrible I couldn’t imagine ever returning. They just nodded and later took this as proof that they should kick me out. The president stopped recording. I walked out a side door and out of the sorority that had provided enormous solace for me, forever.

I received an email later that day requesting for me to resign my membership. I said I would do so just as soon as the president sent me her recording. Thankfully, I saved both the recording and the PDF of the incident reports to my OneDrive, not just my Apple Files, as within a few weeks of the debacle the PDF was mysteriously corrupted on both my Gmail and in my Files app—but not the copy in OneDrive. Bizarrely, the five different incident reports in the PDF became five copies of the president’s incident report. I have no idea how this happened. Perhaps it was a simple technical glitch. I’m glad I have the originals.

By the day of that meeting, May 19, I had also been banned from Medium for violating their policies on hate speech. That was actually the day I opened this Substack account, seeking a more open environment. I’ve flirted with starting this many times in the two and half years since I was banned; this time I’ve finally done it. Thanks, Medium!

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(If I’m being honest, this was something of a blessing in disguise. The worst part about my cancellation, if we’re going to call it that, was that the essays I wrote weren’t even that good! That’s why I’m not reproducing them here—I’m a bit embarrassed by them.)

So. May 20, 2023. I am friendless, sorority-less, and mildly afraid to leave my room. I still had a month left to go in the school year. Thankfully, my roommate, who definitely despised me, recognised that we still had to live in quite close quarters together and kept things civil. I took to calling my parents daily, if not twice a day. As I said above, I would walk about five miles every day around Alton Baker Park, which quickly became the highlight of my day. I still had nearly a month left until I moved out.

My only moments of normalcy were from 10:00am to 10:50am, Monday through Friday, when I had my Arabic classes. The other students in that class were far too socially removed from me to know what had happened; they were also the sort of students who took Arabic, so I’m not sure how many of them would’ve cared if they’d known. The University of Oregon was pretty mediocre for subjects, but thanks to my wonderful professor, their Arabic program was exceptionally good.

It was also thanks to that incredible professor that, on the same day I received that first email from my sorority, I also received an email from the study abroad program in Amman, Jordan I had applied to for Fall Semester 2023. I was supposed to live in the chapter house the following school year, so when I got kicked out, I also lost my housing at school the next year. Thankfully, I no longer needed to worry about that. I was going to the Middle East.

When I was packing to leave Eugene in June, I still planned on coming back after my semester abroad. As I sat on the plane, watching the unspeakably beautiful place that had been my home for nine months get further and further away, I got the strange feeling that I would never return, or at least not for a long, long time.

I still haven’t.

Part of why I wanted to share is that, while it is very important to pay attention to and condemn the high-profile cancellations that have taken place over the years, I also want to make it clear to people that those are far from the only ones that have happened. Not all of us get national press coverage, get invited to cool speakeasy parties, get book deals. I’m not trying to go after the people whose stories are picked up by the media and get access to the heretical social scene—they’ve certainly not had an easy time of it either—but I want to make clear the reality of cancellation for what I would hazard is most of us: it happens, no one hears about it, and we disappear.

I spoke to about this a few months ago, and she quoted me on X:

People who claim that cancel culture has had no victims, that it’s just “accountability”, that it doesn’t really do anything to people’s lives because some people are able to recover afterwards—you don’t know the half of it.

I’ve been very lucky. I’ve been able to overcome my cancellation, reapplying to a different university and making it work. I now even have the privilege of being able to speak about it publicly. I’ve even become part of the heretical social scene I mentioned above. I guarantee you that this is not the case for the vast majority of people who have been put through this kind of persecution.

It is hard to remember that there are cases that we never hear about (largely because we never hear about them), but it is important to remember that this social phenomenon has had far more victims than we can ever know.

There’s one more thing I want to say—something I have been wanting to say for a long time. During my time both inside and out of the TERF closet, I spent far too much time on radfem Tumblr and GC Twitter. They were my lifelines. If you were an even semi-prominent GC woman on Twitter in spring 2023, or an active radfem Tumblr user, I very likely followed you. To those women: you will never know just how much of an impact you had and continue to have on those of us in the shadows. The things you posted, the jokes you made, the analysis you did—I cannot overstate how much all of it meant to me. You had no idea who I was, but believe me when I tell you that you all got me through that time. It was almost all British women back then, especially the ones who weren’t anonymous, and even though you all were half a world away from me, just knowing that somewhere, somehow, there were women who thought like me, who had experiences like mine, and who were able to speak about that publicly with their names attached—it gave me hope. You have been my North Star, my guiding light, my heroines through all of this. I’m no longer half a world away from you all; I’ve even had the pleasure of meeting many of you. It’s incredible. There are far too many of you to name, but please know that I will be forever grateful to all of you. Thank you. Thank you so, so much.

This is the story of a devout 18-year-old trans activist so mislead by her belief system that she agreed to share a 142 square foot dorm room (13.19 square meters for you non-Americans) with a “trans woman” (biological male) for weeks. This is a story about the importance of being able to name reality, even if it’s only in your own mind, and the dangers of conditioning yourself to accept the delusions of others as incontrovertible fact. This story is a warning, a cautionary tale about the importance of institutional safeguarding and of single-sex spaces. I know for a fact that I am not the only young woman who has experienced something like this. I want to apologise to the others for not speaking out sooner.

I don’t like talking about what happened in that room. I’ll joke endlessly about the absurdity of my later cancellation, of the way that former friends acted towards me, of the way my sorority quaked in fear of a 19-year-old girl with two broken wrists and no hair. The room, though? I tend to skate around it, using vague descriptions of the type of behaviour I was subjected to, to avoid having to remind myself of the specifics. Every time I allow myself to delve into the details, I am quite unpleasantly plunged back into that little dorm in Justice Bean Hall, into the mind of the scared teenager who lived there. I’m reminded of just how dire it was, and of the fact that I was, much to my chagrin, the girl who stayed. I’m not proud of anything from that time. I don’t like thinking about it. Still, I think it is important for me to speak specifically here—if nothing else, to set the record straight, so I never have to again.

I want to note also here that most of what I’m going to describe is based on my writing in the months immediately after leaving; quite scarily, I don’t remember most of that time. I have moments, images really, but not much else. I know there are things that happened that I’ve completely forgotten, and that I’d even forgotten by the time I got to writing about what happened. I am quite unsettled by that. What follows is, to the best of my notes and recollection, an account of that time.

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The first time I met Sam* was in a coffee shop just off campus. We were both due to move in the next morning, and we figured it would be a good idea to meet before living together. When I walked into the coffee shop, two very tall men stood up to greet me, clearly a young man and his father. I suddenly realised that the young man was, in fact, the “trans girl” I’d been speaking to on Snapchat and iMessage for a few months (we were put in contact via the university’s housing portal—he was listed under my “same-gender” roommate options). At 6’5”, he was a full foot taller than me and was, frankly, making negative effort to pass. His hair was slightly longer than was maybe typical for a guy, but nothing terribly out of the ordinary for a town like Eugene. I believe he was just wearing a basic flannel and jeans. If I didn’t already know him from the Internet, there would have been absolutely no way for me to distinguish him as “trans”. He just looked like a normal dude.

I remember wanting to cry, to run out the door back to the Airbnb my mother was staying in and tell her I was making a huge mistake and to help me out of this. But this was my decision. I was an adult now. I’d already had an argument with my parents about rooming with him; I didn’t want to look like a fool in front of them, reneging last minute. I was a proud to a fault, and I felt it was my responsibility to live out the consequences of a decision I had made. Anyway, it was horribly transphobic of me to think these thoughts of this “girl”. Imagine if I had a black girl for a roommate and ducked out last minute—how horrible would that be for her? I had been conditioned to believe that it would be the same to do so to this man.

I swallowed my fear and dread and shook his hand. Welcome to the real world, Serena.

From the very first night we moved in to our room, Sam treated me as an unpaid, untrained therapist. He would keep me up for hours every night telling me everything that had happened that day, especially as it pertained to his transition. Every time someone called him a man, every time he had to use a public restroom (thankfully, he was too “scared” to use the women’s), every little apprehension he had, it all was my responsibility to help him process it before I could sleep. Every. Single. Night. After about a month, I was absolutely exhausted and started occasionally pretending to be asleep when he tried to start our nightly session. He did not take this well. The following day, he would passive aggressively imply that I was a bad roommate, that I was transphobic, that I needed to be more attune to the feelings of others, always not-so-subtly reminding me of how high the trans suicide rate supposedly was. He would disappear while we were out with friends, leaving me responsible for tracking him down, out of fear I would be blamed if he were to do something to himself. He took to loudly sobbing on the nights I would pretend to sleep. One night, I was feeling particularly homesick and cried a bit myself. He pointedly pretended to be asleep. In the morning, he told me that we needed to set better boundaries in our roommate relationship and that he couldn’t be expected to always help when I had a problem. At least he stopped forcing me to be his therapist after that.

To be fair, on occasion I would ask him for help with something I was dealing with. He was always quick with advice; usually, it was my mother’s fault and I should really consider cutting her off. I told him that I was thinking of changing my major to journalism; he helpfully informed me I wasn’t nearly good enough of a writer for that. When I shared my ambitions to one day work in the Middle East, due to my love of the Arabic language classes that were the only good part of my life at that point, he begged me to reconsider, as it wouldn’t be safe there for him, a heterosexual man who had a fetish for being a woman. My homosexuality, atheism, and femaleness would keep me safe and sound in the region, of course.

Let’s talk a bit more about that fetish of his. I remember every week while picking up my clothes to do my laundry, I would inevitably find a dirty pair of his women’s underwear on my side of the room. Somehow, at the time, I wrote this off as an accident, despite the fact that I had quite literally never done that. Within days of moving in, he forced me, despite my repeated refusals, to take the BDSM Test. This is an online questionnaire in which users answer questions about various fetishes and paraphilia they have. It’s like a worse version of the Rice Purity Test. Sam was absolutely obsessed with his results, taking every opportunity to remind me that he was breaking the stereotype of the “submissive transfem”. I took every opportunity to ask if we could please change the subject. Strangely, he seemed not to pick up on my discomfort.

During one of our nightly sessions, he got upset that when he hung out with me and our mutual female friends, they wouldn’t act like he was “one of the girls” or do “girl talk”. I’m still not entirely sure what he meant by this. My best guess is he had a sort of pornified image of tween girl slumber parties that he wanted to experience. Maybe also something to do with talking about boys, which I myself have very little experience with, for obvious reasons. Whatever it was he meant, I misinterpreted it. The next time we all hung out, we got on the topic of our first periods. Girl talk, right? Wrong! He got even more upset that night. I don’t remember the details, but I do remember the fear I felt, and the volume of his deep voice. The room was tiny, and he was huge. He could lie in his bed and quite easily reach my bed with his arm across the room. When he’d finally calmed down, he told me about how the idea of menstruating gave him “ew-phoria”—something “gross” that would give him “gender euphoria”. Having now read what many of the men on r/MTF—a forum he frequented—consider “gender euphoria”, I think he meant that he got off on it.

He would constantly make comments about my body. On reflection, I think he was trying to get me to sleep with him; after all, sleeping with a lesbian is the ultimate “validation” for these men. At the time, I brushed it off, telling myself that I needed to “grow up” and that this is how adults talk to each other. Last year, I found a copy of my later explanation to the university why I wanted to move out of the room. In it, I wrote, “She is very physically clingy, which is something I have told her I do not appreciate, yet she still does it.” I had no recollection of that previously. That detail continues to concern me.

Sam told me he was bisexual, but the way he talked about his attraction to men was a textbook case of what Ray Blanchard calls “pseudobisexuality”—he believed that sleeping with a man would make him feel more feminine, not experiencing genuine attraction. He had only been involved with women when I knew him.

I bought my parents fun tea collections for Christmas. The one for my dad was Harry Potter-themed, because we love watching the movies together. They went missing sometime before I left to go home for Christmas. Sam feigned ignorance when I asked if he knew where they’d gone. I assumed they must have just gotten lost somewhere in my things. Upon moving out, I realised that he’d stolen them, presumably due to his hatred of J.K. Rowling.

Through all of this, every time I felt uncomfortable with his behaviour, every time I accidentally thought of him as a man, every time I felt my skin crawl with that deep unease that all women know, I was consumed with guilt. I couldn’t believe how horrible of a person I was. Years and years of listening to trans voices, of working hard on my cis privilege, of trying to be the best ally I could be, and I still couldn’t get myself to view this person they way I would a woman. I felt like I was equivalent to a racist, being intolerant to a “women” just because she was different to me. Every time I’d mentally misgender him (I never actually did out loud—I was far too conditioned for that), I would follow the advice I’d gotten from trans people on Tumblr and Pinterest: come up with 3-5 sentences in my head in which I used his preferred pronouns. Given that he was 6’5”, I slipped up a lot. The mental work of defending against it was exhausting.

Still, I desperately wanted to be free of him. I knew I couldn’t go on like this forever. I set my sights on sophomore year, trying to scheme some way to make sure I didn’t have to live with him again, where I could just let the friendship fade and finally get rid of him. I realised that I wouldn’t be able to do that without coming across as transphobic—unless there was a structural reason why I couldn’t see him. The only way I could come up with to fully leave with my moral standing intact was to transfer universities. I started filling out applications for various schools back home in the Midwest and on the East Coast, though I never submitted any.

Winter Break came, my saving grace. Over a month out of Eugene back with my family. It reset my subconscious understanding of what was normal. The frog had been taken out of the heating pot and put back in her nice, cool pond.

I moved back in in early January for Winter Term. I arrived a few days before Sam, allowing me to adjust to a normal level of stress. When he came back on the Monday, I could no longer handle it. I started waking up at 5:30am to be out of the room by 6 with a bag fully packed with everything I could possibly need for the day. I would return at 8pm and immediately pretend to go to asleep so I wouldn’t have to deal with him. In between, I would do my academic work, but there wasn’t much of it. Most of my time was spent wandering aimlessly around the neighbourhoods around campus listening to music, mind blank with the stress.

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On Friday night, I cracked.

I logged in to the University of Oregon housing portal and took a look at the roommate change request form—just out of curiosity, I told myself. Said curiosity ended with me tearfully filling it out alone in my hall’s common room, suddenly realising that if I didn’t leave soon, something bad would happen. What exactly, I wasn’t quite sure yet, but something bad. By the time I submitted the form, the sun had long since set, and I sat in the dark and cried, feeling like the worst person on Earth. No one would ever understand why I had to do what I had to do. I was convinced I was going to lose all my friends.

I calmed myself down eventually and headed across the street to grab dinner. When there, I ran into some old friends from the start of the year. They’d drifted away from my roommate and I for reasons I hadn’t quite understood at the time. Importantly, they were all female. We chatted idly about the new term, catching up on what we’d done over the break. It was nice. Eventually, though, the weight of what I’d just done that evening made me blurt out that I was moving dorms. Immediately, a look passed throughout the group. They knew why. One of them even apologised for the fact that they’d drifted and lost touch with me—it had been for the same reasons I was leaving. Still, when I tried to talk more about what was going on, largely in an effort to figure what the hell was going on, they were uninterested. They knew this was radioactive.

I’d unfortunately made the crucial mistake of filling out the change request at 5pm on the Friday before Martin Luther King Jr day; the housing office was closed until Tuesday morning. This meant I was stuck in the room for at least another three days. Theoretically I should’ve gone to my resident assistant (RA). Of course, she was a they/she (“but I’ll love you forever if you only use they!”) who was quite sycophantic about Sam and his transition. It didn’t even occur to me to go to her. She would’ve called me a bigot and washed her hands of it. Instead, I hastily packed a suitcase and holed up in my friend’s girlfriend’s dorm for the weekend. Whatever came after, I will forever be grateful to her and her roommates for that kindness.

Tuesday came and I called the university housing office. Sitting in the field behind the university’s main library, I dialled the number, hands shaking from the January chill and the fear. An annoyed, “We really don’t process these requests until Week 3. Are you really sure you want to escalate this?” was all the response I got. I don’t remember what I said next, but I remember receiving an email with a new housing option two hours later. I looked up the new roommate on Instagram, saw that she was female, and hit accept. I emailed my professors to let them know I wouldn’t be in class the next day.

I knew Sam’s schedule, so I knew I had a four hour block where he wouldn’t be home in the middle of the day. I moved all of my things in three hours, almost running back and forth with a dolly. A few of my old friends agreed to help. While I enormously appreciate their aid, I never heard from them again after. The fear I felt while moving was like nothing I’d ever felt before or since.

I remember the moment my friends left and I was alone in my new room. I collapsed onto my new bed, cluttered with all of my things piled on top of it, crying in relief. Whatever the hell had happened in the previous months had ended. It was over. I was safe. My God, I was safe.

My new roommate didn’t leave her dirty underwear on my side of the room. She and I weren’t really friends, but we coexisted peacefully, living parallel lives in the same space. She never kept me up for hours ranting about how unfair the world was to her. She never raged at me for perfectly innocuous comments she had decided were somehow bigoted towards her. I never heard any of her sexual fantasies. She never stole from me. Even when things soured later in the year, I was never afraid to come home. The very normal feeling of security I had in that room felt like such a luxury after the months that had come before.

I spent the next few weeks reeling. What happened? Why had I left? While I no longer felt like a bad person for leaving, given how much relief it had given me, I was still puzzled by why. I again turned to wandering the streets of my college town, though this time I was pondering, not disassociating. After a few days, I realised that he had abused me. That in itself was a revelation. Still, as I was mulling over various memories from that room, it felt like I was missing several pieces. Something wasn’t adding up. I kept walking.

Towards the end of the month, I had a very scary idea. Glancing around me to make sure no one was watching (I was alone aside from a few stoners getting high on a bench), I thought to myself, for the first time, He’s such an asshole. Immediately, I whipped my head around, making sure that mind reading was not in fact real. The stoners hadn’t even noticed I was there. My next thought was, You have got to be kidding me. I couldn’t believe it. Were the TERFs right all along?

See, back in 2018 when I was 14 and first came across the word “TERF” on the Internet, I had initially been intrigued. Raised by parents who encouraged me to read every opinion I could find on any given issue, I wanted to hear them out. I started reading radical feminist Tumblr posts eviscerating the concept of gender identity as a sexist, homophobic farce. As far as I was concerned, those ladies had a point! Still, in my investigation, I realised that while some randos on Tumblr were making great arguments, all of the famous adults online who I usually trusted to have the right opinions not only disagreed with them, but saw them as fascists. In my efforts to find out why, I watched hours and hours of video essays proclaiming to explain why the TERFs were wrong, but try as I might, I could not understand them. It always felt like I had missed the part of the video where they made their devastating argument. Unfortunately, I came to the conclusion that I must just be too stupid, or perhaps too immoral, to understand why they were correct. After all, who was I, a random 14-year-old girl, to go against the word of adults with PhDs? Clearly, there was some deficiency in me. I committed myself to trying to understand the mystery of faith and, in the meantime, living as though it were true.

It was at this moment, at 19, that I realised that I should’ve stuck to my guns. I was smarter at 14 than those PhDs were in their thirties. I had wasted five years of my young life trying to logic my way to understanding a false premise. You can imagine my frustration. I know many of you have felt it yourselves.

More disturbing than that, though, was the horror of realising that the person I had been sharing a room with for months was a man. This may sound crazy—after all, he was 6’5” and made negative effort to pass—but I had conditioned myself to think of him as a woman. I truly believed it. To realise that he was a man brought on a sense of violation I still feel whenever I think too much about what happened.

A few weeks later, coincidentally, I was meeting my mother in Phoenix, Arizona, for a weekend away in the sun. In Eugene, I was deep in the Trans Bible Belt; I didn’t feel comfortable looking at TERF posts just yet. I can’t point to any real reason why other than a general climate of orthodoxy. In purple Arizona, though, I did. I redownloaded Tumblr and started revisiting what the radical feminists had to say. I told myself I would just take a look to be sure; if they were horrible and bigoted and illogical, then I’d know I had been right all along to see them as fascists.

Of course, they were not horrible and bigoted and illogical. I instead found a community of intelligent, compassionate, and extremely funny women of all ages from around the world. As I scrolled through those first few posts, I felt the cognitive dissonance that had plagued me for almost five years finally resolve. Their arguments were clear, simple, and unassailable. I suddenly realised why I had been told for years to “block and report to stay safe”; if I’d known anything about the women I was demonising, I never would have done it.

My next thought after that was that I was totally and utterly screwed.

*Not his real name. He goes by a similarly unisex nickname for a longer woman’s name.

This piece is already far too long, so I will be splitting this story into two parts. Part 2 will be posted next weekend. Thank you all again for your incredible support <3

On Tuesday 11 November 2025, the Newnham College JCR (Junior Common Room—a college-specific undergraduate student union) LGBT Officer hosted a talk by Good Law Project founder Jolyon Maugham. This was quite transparently in response to the announcement by my friends Maeve Halligan and Thea Sewell and I of the launch of our new society, the Cambridge University Society of Women, a single-sex organisation for women to speak freely on our issues. I figured there was a good chance of us being mentioned, and, given that I am a lesbian undergraduate student of Newnham College, I had every right to attend, I decided to show up and take some notes. While we did not come up as a society, what was discussed was still utterly bizarre. What follows is my report.

I should preface this by saying I knew very little about who the hell Jolyon Maugham was before showing up to this event. All I knew was that someone on Twitter had reached out to us a few weeks ago warning that he may try some silliness against us as a society. Aside from that, he was a total stranger to me. Maeve and Thea had to correct me on my pronunciation of his name multiple times, my American upbringing making anything remotely Celtic a total mystery to me.

I arrived a few minutes past the scheduled start, coming from a language class across the street. My nervousness steadily increased as I neared my college; by the time I reached the area outside the Lucia Windsor Room, I took a moment to think through what I was doing. Steeling my nerves, I rushed into the room before I could talk myself down, immediately taking a seat near the back in a section no one was sitting in.

The room was relatively full; there were more attendees at this event than the briefing from the college’s governing officials last month detailing Newnham’s epic plan to keep admitting men with lady feels. There were probably about 50 people in all, including the current president-elect of the Cambridge Union, Christopher Lorde. The small section in the back where I sat was avoided like the plague by most people who walked in after me; they’d veer over, seeing empty seats, before noticing me. They’d then recoil and take a seat in the other, more crowded sections. This happened a few times.

After a few minutes, our LGBT Officer picked up her microphone and the event began. She introduced both herself and her co-host, the LGBT Officer the year before her, filling in for the Trans and Non-Binary Officer (a separate position). She explained that this event would have time for audience questions at the end…which had to have been submitted ahead of time to her, and which she would select. The floor was then given to Maugham.

Maugham began with a brief overview of himself and his work. Much of this was done in a sort of cringey “how do you do, fellow kids” way—at one point he even implied he was gay—that I see often in woke middle aged men. He talked about how difficult experiences in his youth inspired a hatred of bullies. There was a moment when he tried to awkwardly explain away his previous work as a lawyer helping people avoid paying tax as a kind of anti-capitalist action. He talked about the Brexit cases he took, humbly crediting himself with Labour’s July 2024 election win over the desiccated husk of the Conservative Party. His audience of septum-pierced 19-year-olds was starting to get bored through this, though, so Maugham then turned to the main event.

Framing the Good Law Project as an organisation interested in “communities affected by authoritarianism”, he mused that “trans rights is a canary in the coal mine for fascism” before launching into a rant about the For Women Scotland decision at the Supreme Court in April of this year—or as he calls the eminent women’s organisation, “For Some Women Scotland”. He refused to use its real name for the entire talk. He complained that when Theresa May announced the consultation on changing the Gender Recognition Act to allow for self identification back in 2018, “literally no one cared”. Now, of course, we have a an “unprecedented” decision from the Supreme Court—an “unexpected outcome”. He lamented how Stonewall and Mermaids were “essentially killed” by the Charity Commission after being forced to fight legal challenges. These challenges were implicitly deemed illegitimate, for reasons not explained. He then boasted of his utmost confidence in the Good Law Project’s challenge to the FWS decision which was being heard in court the following day, Wednesday 12 November.

These are not the only cases the GLP is pursuing. Maugham also spoke of challenging the exclusion zone for protest outside of EHRC office in London following intimidation attempts this year; suing England and Wales Cricket for their “blanket ban of trans people in sports”; challenging the UK government’s keeping of records of trans-identified people’s sex as a violating of GDPR protections in European human rights court; challenging coroners recording the sex of trans-identified teenage girls who have taken their own lives; and wishing to somehow challenge the Cass Review itself.

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Maugham has very strong opinions on men’s inclusion in women’s sports. “I’ve always thought that trans inclusion in sport is…the north face of this.” “I don’t think that [the ruling] allows the blanket banning” (he quite likes that phrase “blanket banning”). “Where is the evidence that the inclusion of trans women in sports is unfair?” he asked flippantly. During this section of the talk I gave up on trying to be calm and just stared him down with the intensity of a 10-year-old trying to set someone’s hair on fire with her mind.

He then turned to bathrooms, pointing to a badge on his bag and asking the room, “Where is the evidence that there is any negative affect at all from allowing trans women to use the right bathrooms?” He had the audacity to follow that with this whammy of a DARVO attempt: “You have to have the courage to declare the absence of clothing on the emperor, and it’s difficult because the discourse, however independently minded you are, however intellectually sentient you think you are, it’s still very easy to be gaslit by the discourse into thinking that there are problems where there are not problems.”

(At this point I was scribbling away furiously in my notebook, in shock from the absolute absurdity of what I was witnessing.)

Maugham tried to get into other topics, like data privacy, which did actually sound quite interesting, but again, the room grew bored. The LGBT Officer steered him back into more crowd-pleasing territory by asking him about that line I mentioned earlier—how are trans rights the canary in the coal mine?

This got Maugham onto what I now understand to be one of his favourite topics: attacking J.K. Rowling. He claimed that people who “become obsessed with attacking trans rights” inevitably change their other politics. His evidence? Some of J.K. Rowling’s followers on Twitter voted for Brexit. He also pointed out that “she’s become very very pro-Israeli and she frequently retweets accounts that I would consider fascist.” Maugham is, of course, the world’s best arbiter of what is and is not fascist. In addition to her fascisticly defending the world’s only Jewish state, J.K. Rowling is also fascist because she regularly threatens Maugham with defamation lawsuits. He neglected to mention that he regularly says things that could be considered defamatory about her.

Maugham then, seemingly unprompted, mentioned that while 20 years ago he did some work on violence against women and girls, he now feels very negative towards any account he sees online speaking about feminism because he associates us with “transphobia”. After all, “people who are transphobes become fascist adjacent”.

Next up was Maugham’s 100% unbiased, totally fair assessment of the judiciary in this country: “the judiciary, look at as a monolith, is hostile to trans rights.” He said that the FWS judgement is “appalling” and “reflects the personal judgements of people”, not what is legally correct. He spoke of how difficult his job is for him: “you lose cases you should win”. He was very upset on behalf of activists Stephen Whittle and Victoria McCloud, whose irrelevant requests to be intervenors on the case were rejected.

Towards the end, he mentioned that the GLP is trying to set up associations within UK universities, hopefully starting in the new year, as “centres of resistance”. He claimed that the reason why the “right wing” was writing about the woke takeover of Oxbridge so much was because they recognise these two universities as “good sites of resistance”.

As he concluded, he mused whether Martin Luther King Jr, the American civil rights campaigner who was assassinated by a white supremacist for advocating for the end of racial segregation he had faced his entire life, if he were alive today, would re-evaluate his claim that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice” (King was actually quoting transcendentalist Theodore Parker, and Maugham misquoted him, but I want to focus on the fact that King did in fact live (and die!) in far worse conditions than any Cambridge student in 2025).

Just before the talk ended, the LGBT Officer allowed one question from the audience—about the awkward fact that the GLP announced in 2024 that it would no longer take cases to do with transgenderism. Maugham, shifting uncomfortably, made some excuses about just how hard the work is, and that while he of course always wanted to keep doing it, there was some nebulous “internal division” that resulted in the announcement. Then the talk ended, and that was that.

I found this final moment quite telling, as it reminded me of how during the Newnham admissions briefing last month, while I was silently reeling from the fact that my college had just announced their intention to continue to openly break the law, other students became incensed with the fact that Newnham’s junior fellowships would not continue to be open to men who want to be women. Even when you’re lying through your teeth, spinning fiction into fact, expressing misogynistic positions that would’ve been utterly unacceptable just 15 years ago, you still can never be enough for the zealots. No matter what you do, no matter how many women you hurt, no matter how creative your lies, there will always be something for them to come after you for. You cannot win. Any deviation from orthodoxy will be noted and brought up for the rest of your life.

I hope more people learn that lesson.