Trans-ideology

WARNING: In the spirit of brutal but necessary honesty, this article contains graphic and disturbing descriptions and images.

I wrote a book once, called Borderline, in which I explored the transhistorical, recursive, and co-developmental relation between war and masculinity constructed as domination and conquest. The background research involved a comprehensive exploration of feminist thought, the point being that this gender business is something I’ve sat with for a good long while . . . decades, in fact. I can, like anyone given the right circumstances, talk out of my ass about things, but on this account I’ve done the homework.

The terms masculinity and femininity have traditionally referred to a set of sex-aligned forms of responsibility, dress, mannerism, speech, tools, jobs, interests, and so forth. This complementary gendered relation, while manifest in different forms, has been a constant in all human societies. I’ve watched a Haitian woman butcher a goat, but I’ll wager most American women wouldn’t count this as feminine practice. Haitians are, nonetheless, very much steeped in a set of complementary gender beliefs, manners, and practices.

Binary gender complementarity remains even today a constant in late/post/modern societies, where certain bourgeois strata attempt to undermine it as a form of virtue signalling and aesthetic one-up-man-ship. It’s not as attention-seeking as its bourgeois subversions, but it’s there (almost counter-cultural now) even in the face of the powerful cultural production apparatuses and industries that promote is as aesthetic virtue, caring for “the marginal” or even pretending to be marginal without giving up an ounce of power . . . and, in fact, profiting from “concern.” The “concerned” bourgeois, based on the latest fashion in performative solicitude, has long collected pets to care for from among the “marginal.” Ivan Illich once noted that “care reform” is a growth industry.

In most human societies, there’s always been an acknowledgement that some women will sometimes dress, speak, have interests, and take actions that are more commonly associated with men, and vice-versa — men who might exhibit “feminine” behavior, affect, and so forth. Even in the Hebrew Scriptures — which have been around for millennia — we encounter Deborah, Jael, Miriam, Abigail, Judith, and Esther, women who were warriors, which is a practice that’s at the hard masculine end of the masculine-feminine spectrum in pretty much all cultures.

Getting to my point, which I’m putting right at the front of a much longer argument, in none of these cases where men or women step outside the norms and expectations of masculinity or femininity did people assume that these atypical actions somehow disappeared, invalidated, or switched the actual physical sex of the person involved. It was not assumed, in other words, and with good reason, that any of them was “born into the wrong body.” That idea is part of a dernier cri superstition that’s taken root in the West over the past three decades.

Everyone everywhere has always known that there’s a wide range of personality, and that there are sometimes atypical overlaps on any fuzzy-edged “masculinity-femininity” scale. And most people, even today as we are immersed in a deranged ideological gender project, know that the very idea of being born as a body makes the notion of being born into the wrong body preposterous. So when a “professional” tells you that, you can bet they’re standing by to sell you a new body.

Let’s take a few steps back and get a good run at this.

The trouble with Gender Trouble

. . . So that we might not be infants, wave-tossed and carried about by every wind of teaching . . .

-Ephesians 4:14

… … …

Perhaps the text . . . that marked me most deeply was another End of History-era work, Judith Butler’s immensely influential 1990 work Gender Trouble. Here, Butler argued that neither sex (our embodied, dimorphic, reproductive biology) nor ‘gender’ (our social roles, putatively rooted in sex dimorphism) exist pre-politically, but are instead both to an equal extent social constructs. It is not that biological processes don’t exist, but how we make sense of them is inescapably social, meaning the clear distinction between ‘natural’ sex and ‘cultural’ gender is in truth muddier than we believe.

— Mary Harrington, Feminism Against Progress, p. 7

Apologies in advance here, but we have to load up with an esoteric mixture of philosophical, historical-critical, psychological, and linguistic impedimenta to get where we’re going.

The deranged ideological project under review here is an ongoing demonstration of the law of unintended consequences. In this case, the ways in which people can take a fashionable academic treatise and transform it into an ideology adopted by an influential social class. That treatise is a 1990 book by Judith Butler — a Professor in the Department of Comparative Literature and the Program of Critical Theory at Berkeley. That book was Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity.

The first unintended consequence is apparent in the title. Butler argues for the subversion of what she calls “identity,” writing that her goal was for “cultural configurations of sex and gender [to] proliferate.” And yet the outworking of her inexact (and sometimes plain wrong) appropriations of Lévi-Strauss, Foucault, Derrida, Lacan, Kristeva, and Wittig, from the Academy, through the chattering class, and now into urban youth culture, has reified and deified precisely the idea (of identity) that she set out to undermine in her signature work. What internally post-Nietzschean philosophical coherence her thesis once had (not a great deal) has transmuted, in the post-Butlerian milieu, into a terminally incoherent wad-knot of logical and linguistic mystification.

Let’s lay out the fields under review. There’s (a) Butler and her actual thesis, (b) the counter-thesis (which I’ll do my best to represent), and (c) the ways in which post-Butler pop-religion (or trans ideology) has become manifest in the larger culture and in its “culture wars.” Butler herself admits of this ramifying plasticity, writing in the 1999 “Preface to the New Edition,” “. . . both sides of the debate sometimes miss the point that the face of theory has changed precisely through its cultural appropriations.” (I have the 1999 New Edition here at hand.) The counter-thesis is that Butler’s post-Nietzscheanism, more generally, represents what David Bentley Hart has called the postmodern sect of “comfortable nihilism.”

Butler had the good fortune to be teaching and writing in a period where even the CIA was promoting certain continental “postmodern” philosophers (as an antidote to Marxism), which is not to say — like the incurably incongruent Jordan Peterson — that everyone who’s been assigned the highly elastic postmodernist label is part of a plot-hatching coven of sinister “cultural Marxists” doing the dastardly will of their diabolical high priests, Marx, Foucault, and Derrida.

Butler herself admitted that “French theory” is an American idea. What’s interesting, as Christopher Lord has pointed out, is that “French theory” continues to be a distinctly American intellectual/academic fetish. French intellectuals aren’t half as interested Foucault, Derrida, et al, as Americans of a certain class, the latter of whom need stylish designer labels to neutralize their longstanding cultural inferiority complex. (I’m not dissing Continental philosophy writ large; I read some of it myself.)

Butler attributes her whole theory of gender performance to Derrida’s linguistic expeditions — as impenetrably dense and ultimately banal as much of Butler — on “performative” speech. A priest who repeats the words of the liturgy, for example, or a couple exchanging wedding vows. Butler took this idea — of performance (like an actor reading her lines) — generalized it to all human action, then applied it to her repurposed idea of gender. This is her preoccupation with drag shows, where men dress in often highly stylized women’s clothing — women and a cartoonish version of femininity are therein re-coupled after the second wave’s heroic efforts to disentangle them — and men play the part of hyper-femmes. Butler seems to have missed the memo that women — adult human females — very often do not themselves behave in typically “feminine” ways, or that femininity itself is a very culturally specific notion.

Butler is famous for a style of writing which cannot be understood, and this has served her well. But in 2016 she was pinned down on Derrida specifically when she was asked to write an Introduction for the 40th anniversary special edition of the Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s English translation of De la Grammatologie. This more than any other text established the term “deconstruction” in the English-speaking world, linking it forever with Derrida. But Butler’s introduction, while slipping away into incomprehensibility when possible, nevertheless raises the question of how much of the book she has understood (one could even wonder if she has actually read it), as she makes basic errors about key concepts. (Christopher Lord)

I want to make a distinction here before I go any further, between intellectuals and academics, even if there is considerable overlap. Intellectuals need not necessarily be academics, nor vice versa. Which is to say, there is an inhering danger to sound intellection in the Academy — loss of contact with with the messy complexity and often unforgiving material necessities of the world beyond the Academy. The fact that this detachment has long been decried, often in the service of vulgar or politically opportunistic anti-intellectualism, doesn’t lessen its importance in those instances when academic detachment, at best, loses its relevance and, at worst, manifests in bad ideas given force by bad leadership with enough power to do considerable damage to the surrounding society.

Butler falls firmly into the bad intellection category, inasmuch as her ideas can find no application or operation in the real world, apart perhaps from the inherently deceptive (performative) fields of pretentious entertainment, sales, and public relations, and most recently in the highly lucrative and cult-stylish gender trade.

[Butler] has perhaps unwittingly created is the monster of naïve post-structuralism, which now seems to be the dominant form of this belief in American academic circles, outside the narrow group of experts in Continental Philosophy who actually know what they are talking about. (Lord)

She is referred to in biographical summaries like Wikipedia, Berkeley’s faculty pages, and other captives of gender ideology as “they/them,” as if she’s, amoeba-like, bifurcated into two persons. (For merely saying this and refusing to refer to her in the plural, I could be accused — in today’s batshit crazy climate — of being some kind of violent fascist, or a murderer.) This plural pronoun thing, in the imaginary world where linguistics precedes reality, is one of the ways in which she “troubles” gender, which she describes as “an interior essence that might be disclosed as an expectation that ends up producing the very phenomenon that it anticipates . . . the performativity of gender revolves around this metalepsis, the way in which the anticipation of a gendered essence produces that which it posits as outside itself.” (Butler won an award for bad writing.)

There is some clumsy crypto-Lacanian mojo at work here, which might be better summarized as (a) we think we need something, which (b) we then make up, then (c) we start to think the made up thing is real. This kind of mental masturbation is what she calls “troubling” a concept or norm or idea. Gender trouble, get it? Since Butler achieved academic guru status, “troubling” has become a kind of academic cottage industry. You get points for every “category” you “trouble.”

Perhaps trouble need not carry such a negative valence. To make trouble was, within the reigning discourse of my childhood, something one should never do precisely because that would get one in trouble. The rebellion and its reprimand seemed to be caught up in the same terms, a phenomenon that gave rise to my first critical insight into the subtle ruse of power: the prevailing law threatened one with trouble, even put one in trouble, all to keep one out of trouble. Hence, I concluded that trouble is inevitable and the task, how best to make it, what best way to be in it. (Butler, Gender Trouble, xxvii)

The advantage of this form of infinitely reflexive “post-metaphysical” metaphysics — apart from lucrative academic careers atop Andean cordilleras of indecipherable verbiage — is that because it never arrives at any conclusion, it evades all responsibility. It can’t be dis-proven, because it never finally says anything. Nonetheless, the cultural mavens who’ve picked it up and run with it have drawn conclusions, even though they are spectacularly, ludicrously wrong.

Somehow or another, we’ve arrived at the surpassingly weird latitude and longitude where it’s being inscribed (to use a fave pop-post-structuralist term) in law that men can be counted as women in formerly sex-segregated female spaces based on the given man in question simply saying he’s a woman. I imagine myself now, back among my cohort of horny high school lads in the 1960s, learning that we could invade the girls’ locker rooms based on this claim.

I mean it is (ahem) quite troubling. Not in a good way. Butler’s coagulous writings have been “culturally appropriated” and transformed now by at least three generations of college-educated Americans (and via the US Academy exported to several other unfortunate nations). The visible, the apparent, that which has obvious external referents, is being denied, as if we’d all forgotten the fable about the naked emperor’s clothes in a bugged out collective act of mass disingenuity.

It’s the “post-metaphysicalism” of Butler et al, that will give pause to those who’ve bothered to look into what the post-metaphysicalists mean by that. David Bentley Hart in one of his characteristically astringent remarks compares “post-metaphysicalism” to “post-atmospheric air.”

More to the point, the claim to have escaped the metaphysical seems to me inevitably to reiterate (or maybe I should say “reinscribe”) the most imperious of classic metaphysical gestures: that of the transcendental vantage that has, through some sublime moral and dialectical labor of spirit, achieved the privileged vantage of a transcendental surveillance of all stories other than one’s own. To me, this is simply the repetition — albeit transcribed into a particular social and ideological key, and inflected with a particular sensibility — of the late modern story of an enlightened reason inhabiting no perspective at all and therefore entitled and able to dissolve all merely local narratives into provisional, mythical, tribal chatter. (Hart)

What that guy said.

Metaphysics begins with the assumption that something, everything, is real prior to our attention being directed at it, and prior to Judith Butler, et al, bringing it into existence through language (like God, ex nihilo, speaking Creation into existence). Why abandon metaphysics, you may ask. Because, it turns out, according to the neo-Nietzscheans, metaphysics is just a “species of power” permeating a linguistically-constructed universe — a form of violence, because it underwrites hostility toward those falling outside our norms.

Butler, on page 14 of GT, denounces metaphysics as the “metaphysics of substance.” In a tediously wordy multi-page passage, Butler riffs on both Irigaray and Beauvoir. (It’s that French thing again . . . I would recommend Toril Moi to readers who want a more readable and more faithful account of Beauvoir.) In these linguistic analyses, Irigaray shows how women are represented as “lack,” and with Beauvoir, as “other” — perfectly valid explorations of representations in language. Butler complicates this as “modalities of phallogocentric language.” We ought to be reminded here, they were still talking about women as adult human females.

Clearly, no woman can without bad faith be situated beyond her sex.

— Simone de Beauvoir

Even Butler is talking about women, actual women. (Sorry, ideologues!)

She jumps the shark, though, with her “phallogocentric metaphysics of substance,” when she performs a conceptual two-step: she shrinks metaphysics to the human subject, and she puts an equal sign between consciousness and language. (Ideology is always all about excluding anything that calls its assumptions into question.)

Butler puts herself above her own imperfect insight that we are in some degree formed by our personal situation (time, place, culture, history, technology), as if she were magically immune. Her subjectification of metaphysics, genealogically speaking, is a reflective outgrowth of modern atomization. Her focus on “performance” resonates in a culture that has for decades been inundated by the simulacra of manipulative, mass produced advertising and entertainment. As I myself have advanced from childhood into my seventies, I’ve noticed how people increasingly talk and act like people they’ve modeled on from ads, movies, television, and now social media (which sifts ad, cinema, and television moments into click-shareable “memes”).

The underlying (and inconsistent) assumption of Butler’s performativity thesis is that human beings (she is actually blind to most of humanity from her perch in the ivory tower) are essentially inauthentic. We are all actors, who learn our lines, lines which are aimed at an audience who has suspended its unbelief. She doesn’t understand human development. She doesn’t understand mimesis in the sense of that described by Christophe Wulf (or even fellow Lacanian and one-time co-author, Slavoj Žižek). She doesn’t understand habituation in the Aristotelian sense, or how the trialectic of mimetic learning, habituation, and social relations form the so-called self, or, if you like, one’s identity (self-understanding).

But, alas, this is a somewhat metaphysical critique, and Butler has ostensibly rejected the “metaphysics of substance.”

By substance, she means:

In the first instance, humanist conceptions of the subject tend to assume a substantive person who is the bearer of various essential and nonessential attributes. A humanist feminist position might understand gender as an attribute of a person who is characterized essentially as a pregendered substance or “core,” called the person, denoting a universal capacity for reason, moral deliberation, or language. The universal conception of the person, however, is displaced as a point of departure for a social theory of gender by those historical and anthropological positions that understand gender as a relation among socially constituted subjects in specifiable contexts. This relational or contextual point of view suggests that what the person “is,” and, indeed, what gender “is,” is always relative to the constructed relations in which it is determined. As a shifting and contextual phenomenon, gender does not denote a substantive being, but a relative point of convergence among culturally and historically specific sets of relations. (Butler, GT, pp. 14–5)

Let’s start with the fact that this is a false representation of metaphysical “substance.” Substance is neither the human subject nor consciousness nor language. Substance, in metaphysics — “the branch of philosophy that examines the nature of reality, including the relationship between mind and matter, substance and attribute, fact and value” — is anything that persists long enough to be recognized, has an identifiable form, and to which we can attribute particular qualities. An academic might not be able to identify the species of tree from which a board is made by seeing the color and the patterns of the grain . . . but a cabinet maker can. The cabinet maker also knows that you can’t treat a power saw as if it were a linguistic construction without risking the loss of some pre-linguistically constructed fingers. (That same cabinet maker, alas, may have scarce interest in the “constitution of the subject.”)

Butler herself still retains, despite her protestations, a metaphysics of substance (or we should say, just metaphysics), only in the post-Marxian and neo-Nietzschean guise of the “linguistic turn” in twentieth century philosophy. The new substances (persistent and definable) are language and signifying social practice. It took pop-Butlerism to add, against Butler herself, identity.

Michael Elred writes, forgiving him his ignorant conflation of post-structuralist feminism with all feminism:

Butler’s metaphysics of signifying practices [follow] in the footsteps of Marx and Nietzsche, casts an ontology in which signifying practices serve as the subject. Butler’s understanding of ontology as a philosophical discourse of naturalized being, as if being were outside history, is a narrow and outmoded view. Rather, her own discourse implicitly casts, and that very insistently, an understanding of being in which signifying practices assume the foundational position underlying all else. Butler’s writing strategy of putting scare quotes around certain words derived from ‘to be’ and claiming that certain nouns are not nouns (substantives in an older terminology) does nothing at all to free her from the strictures of the metaphysics of substance, but rather indicates how helplessly and unknowingly she is entangled within such strictures. Butler is not alone in this entanglement, and despite all the gestures of progressiveness and cutting-edgedness put on display by feminist theory in its parades of obfuscating jargon, it instantiates nevertheless the metaphysics of substance it derides, even when, on the other hand, it pretends to be down-to-earth and gets sociological.

Metaphysics and ontology both have a history and both do not at all necessarily assert a naturalness of being beyond or independent of what Butler calls culture. Butler’s metaphysics of signifying practices is situated unwittingly within this Western history of metaphysics and is not free of it. If her implicit metaphysics were to be made explicit, then it would be confronted with questions which feminist theory consistently fails and refuses to see. The principal question in this regard is that concerning the being of social practices. It is simply repeated dogmatically like a mantra that social (including cultural) practices must be the starting-point for any theory of gender, since gender, it is claimed, is “socially constructed”. But what is society? [my emphasis added, SG]

Metaphysics is an arcane pole of Butler criticism, I admit, but its the ground of many errors. Narrowing the focus back to the whole kerfuffle regarding sex, gender, the sex-gender distinction, even those who share her “linguistic” philosophical homefront have shown where she’s gone wrong from within her own interpretational framework.

I would refer specifically here to Bernice Hausman, who has taken Butler to task in a book called Changing Sex (Chapter 6, “Semiotics of Sex, Gender, and the Body”). Hausman shares none of my Catholic metaphysical convictions, as far as I know (and as many readers likewise may not), but she’s an honest and thorough scholar who did a great deal of homework before blithely accepting what has now become post-Butlerian academic dogma in “gender studies” departments.

Hausman begins with Butler’s own attempt to correct the “misunderstandings” (gross inconsistencies?) in Gender Trouble with another book, Bodies That Matter. Hausman is very diplomatic in her critique of a fellow Foucauldian, but the critique still has teeth. Butler et al, Hausman points out throughout her book, seems to have overlooked, in their genealogical “interrogations,” the genealogy of Foucault himself and of the overdetermining role of medical technology in their interpretations of the (historically contingent) sex-gender distinction. Hausman’s whole title is Changing Sex: Transsexualism, Technology, and the Idea of Gender.

Butler would argue that we cannot wish ourselves outside of the existing ideological field in which sex and gender are understood as separate but linked phenomena. The presentation of these two terms — “sex” and “gender” — as the inevitable categories in play, however, is possible only because Butler disregards the historical production of the idea of gender as identity. Her lack of historical analysis results in the presentation of these two terms as inevitable; subversion must engage them because they are (always already) what is (and has been) available. If, however, it is acknowledged that “gender” was produced at a specific historical moment in response to particular circumstances, and that this introduction into medical and popular discourses had measurable effects in the conceptualization of sexed subjectivity, then it would be possible to investigate what were perceived as the articulations of sex prior to the introduction of “gender” and to examine the possibility of returning to and “redeploying” sex — not as the natural body, but as a conceptual apparatus designating the body and representing it in medical and other discourses. (Hausman, p. 179)

Butler’s argument that “gender” mediates sex, a perfectly plausible account thus far, breaks up on the rocks of her own metaphysical (read transhistorical) account of gender itself, which she regards, a la Foucault, as a discursive species of power. But the sex-gender distinction itself is relatively new, beginning in the 1950s with physicians at Johns Hopkins University who were trying to reconcile their own sketchy medical experiments with cases of “intersexuality” and trying to determine which was the “best sex” for patients who wanted surgical/endocrinological interventions to establish some sense of normalcy. What criteria might be used? And so speculation turned to the association of an internally experienced sense of sexual identity and outward “performances” that might be classified as (according to the norms surrounding Johns Hopkins University in the 1950s) masculine or feminine.

Gender, as such, wasn’t discovered like a protozoa or an Amazonian beetle; it was invented. And the whole business of whether and how gender should be “troubled” and “subverted” was and is based on the questionable Nietzschean assumption that this invention, retrojected onto its own prehistory, is nothing more or less than a politically undesirable (or, for Nietzsche, resentful) exercise of power.

The high ground to be taken in the war on gender, according to pop-post-structuralist devotees, is . . . The Binary.

Binary = Bad. (The inescapable transhistorical “binary” is the fact that everyone of us has a mother — a human female with a functioning uterus — and a father who contributed a gamete.)

Butler’s “subjects” are remarkably infertile. The nine times in Gender Trouble where the term motherhood (and one mention of childbirth) is used are all about a very symbolic “maternal body” in the context of her criticisms of Kristeva, Freud, and Lacan (with their mommy issues). This has been one of the sins of feminism ever since the second wave, this aversion to, or at least, disinclination to discuss the fact that women have babies, and every one of us was at one time a baby — in most cases, being nurtured by a mother. This anti-natal or natalophobic tendency has been apparent even across the warring tribes of feminism — liberal, radical, Marxist, poststructuralist — since their popular emergence from the 1960s through 1990s. What’s seldom noticed is how this corresponds to the introduction of hormonal birth control and legal elective abortion — medical technology, in other words. Prior to these developments, being a woman, for the overwhelming majority, meant there was a highly consequential relation between sex and pregnancy.

The same medico-technological dependency holds true for transgenderism and transgender ideology, both direct outgrowths of “medical” technology and sustainable only through it. There are people now who insist that there is some kind of natural right to “change sex,” which isn’t changing sex at all but changing appearance (often with grotesquely unconvincing results) and disrupting perfectly functional endocrine systems. This directly implies a “right” to something — medical technology and drugs — that exists, in fact, only as a fairly recent commercial product. I should insist on my right to a Land Cruiser or a lifetime supply of Glenlivet Scotch.

Hausman points, in her critique of Butler, at what many of us, unbridled by the academic fetish of the linguistic turn, intuit quite naturally. Yes, sexually embodied beings may come into consciousness via the mediation of culture (a fairly pedestrian insight), but that doesn’t mean that consciousness “constructs” (like some efficient cause) either sex or “the” body. Props to Bernice Hausman, even if I don’t share her metaphysical assumptions.

The reason neither academics nor the naively arrogant cohort of the professional-managerial class has been able to convince many of the rest of us is (a) we know “binary” sex is real, necessary, essential, and an animal trait shared beyond our own species, and (b) the rebuttals to that simple knowledge are either impenetrable insider language, passive-aggression, or hypertensive ad hominem bellowing — altogether as unconvincing as the proverbial emperor’s non-existent clothes. What’s remarkable, and not in a good way, is how effectively the ideological bullies have deterred people from speaking this simple truth.

Sorry to have gone this far down the rabbit hole, but it was a necessary preface. Any time bad philosophy (or bad theory) gains a foothold in modern culture, it will eventually become worse for the wear. Lessons from my days as a Marxist, when I was exposed to the lunacies of the Fourth International and the Maoist International Movement (thankfully, neither of which I joined). The problem with pop-Butlerism, however, is that it has been picked up by both the market and capital’s retainer class, who’ve monetized it and thus given it roots.

I admit I still resent Butler and the so-called third (and fourth) wave for somehow appropriating the label, feminist. There’s a hell of a lot of valuable work out there that goes under the sign of feminism, buy which I mean work that studies various social, political, cultural, and psychological phenomena from the specific standpoints of women, with an eye to the unique interests of women who are the subjects of such studies. Working with this definition, I am still — as I have been for some time now — pro-feminist, just as I’m still very “leftist,” with strong ecological tendencies, in my beliefs about political economy.

What began as cultural appropriation of Butler, the interpretational slippage that constitutes pop-post-structuralism — has become liberal political dogma which is increasingly being forced on people. It’s being taught to school children and propagated through prime time television, as a hostile and alien set of pseudo-values, and increasingly by force of law. People have lost their jobs and had their children taken away. Women-only spaces have been invaded. It’s no longer just an arcane argument.

The lost island of Essentialism

Before we delve directly into ideology, we have to make a pit stop. I don’t hear that much about “essentialism” these days, so I’m assuming it’s gone by the wayside like beanie babies, Harlem shake videos, and (hopefully soon) the renascence of false eyelashes (why, why, why?).

Earlier gender ideologues employed this term — essentialism — as marker for a kind of communicable disease that had to be diagnosed and socially quarantined. Some of us called the pop-post-structuralist McCarthyites “essentialism hunters.”

The word — essentialism — has more than one meaning, even if the ideologues changed them all to suit their purposes. Cambridge defines it two ways, first in classical philosophical terms — the essence of a thing is ascertainable by its form, function, and purpose, and second, “the belief that groups of people, such as men and women, have different basic characteristics that cannot be changed.” Context and intent of use can provide additional layers of intricacy and elaboration.

Gender ideologues used it inappropriately in the latter sense, ignoring the ways in which certain basic male and female characteristics certainly are inherent — anatomically, endocrinologically, and statistically (men on average are bigger and stronger than women, e.g.). The essentialism that essentialism-hunters were out to get was any association between sex and gender — two things that were separated only recently. I myself bought this distinction, as the fifteen readers of Borderline might remember, but, for reasons I won’t meander off into now . . . not so much anymore. What was peculiar about the essentialist-stalking trend was, again, the way the word’s meaning was re-reconstructed in popular use.

Classical, or pre-modern, essentialism recognized both anatomical and enculturated difference between men and women generally, but their thinking was not situated around these two reductive categories. Anatomy and culture were part of a larger whole, one manifestation of an entire universe comprised of the yin and yang of masculine and feminine essence — the reason many languages still have gendered articles. Even in mostly gender-neutral English, we still refer to ships with feminine pronouns. We Catholics refer to the Church as “she” and the Holy Mother.

When fractions of second-wave feminism took on the issue — before the pop-post-structuralist third-wave came to dismiss second-wavers as essentialists — the second-wavers referred to the stereotypical, culture-bound expectations and roles placed on (physical) men and women as gender. This is how many radical feminists became “gender-abolitionists.” They acknowledged physical difference, but wanted to forge a new world within which we all became more androgynous . . . men and women could be freed of gendered expectations, or sex roles. They didn’t say there was no difference, but that the difference shouldn’t be the epistemological foundation for a structure of frequently unjust, and sometimes even violent, male power — legal and extralegal — over women.

There were certainly elements of ahistorical naivete in this trend of thought, and some pushed their speculations to absurd limits, but it was an inevitable path of feminist enquiry which was, in its historical context, absolutely and justifiably legible, and with some good outcomes. Males should be held accountable when they behave like sexual predators; it’s a good thing that some women have access to all forms of higher education and the professions; husbands should not be able to legally rape their wives. On the other hand, there was also a trend within the trend to valorize women acting like the very men who, in the old system, were amoral, irresponsible, and sometimes violent. Another side trail we’ll forego here (read my book, Tough Gynes).

When feminists challenged the roles assigned to sex, they took umbrage at the portrayal of the superficial markers of femininity as somehow welded onto one’s natal sex. Natal sex is real (not “assigned”), they said — a common sense postulate — but that doesn’t mean we should treat girls or women as less-than when they take an interest in things considered by many to be part of the masculine domain. In other words, being butch or femme didn’t “change your sex” or in any way suggest there was something wrong with you . . . something amiss with “your” body per se. Gender, in other words, meant gendered expectations or norms.

Third-wavers, who’d abandoned common sense and the law of non-contradiction, came to accuse the second-wavers of essentialism for claiming that women are still physically women. Fatuous nonsense, of course, but, again, the term was used in a kind of “stone the leper” key.

Because it was so entirely illogical that it undermined gender ideology itself, essentialism and essentialist-stalking became passé. Now, trans ideology has flipped second-wave insight back into a quasi-classical form of essentialism (combining it with radically atomized individualism), without calling it that (because they are now the essentialists!). How else can we stand by the claim that someone is “born into the wrong body” because he or she has interests and attractions that are more typically associated with the complementary sex? The magic of these latter ideologues is not merely to have re-integrated sex and gender, but to have gender swallow sex whole. In a weird faux-Platonic twist, essence no longer precedes existence, but trumps it.

In a recent forum, Kathleen Stock, a professor who I’d count in the gender-critical camp, and who has fallen afoul of the gender ideologues for suggesting that male prisoners might not ought to be granted transfers into female prisons based on the claim they are themselves “women,” provoked an interesting (and revelatory) remark by an audience member who appeared to be sympathetic to the claim that being male or female is a psychological, not physical, state. This young woman challenged the notion — popular among trans ideologues — that the “gender binary” is a bad thing. Some trans people, the young woman said, are very much invested in the binary (Aha!). The student was actually more insightful than the majority of trans ideological cops. She recognized, albeit incompletely, and acknowledged that the whole notion of being a man or a woman based on one’s feelings (or the power of suggestion from without) is absolutely predicated upon the very gendered expectations and norms (of masculinity and femininity) that the second-wave was a such pains to denounce. Even Judith Butler understood this in her critique of “identity,” which is why she went for drag performance as emblematic of her hopeless politics. The drag queen is displaying a kind of late modern hyper-femininity, but as parody. It’s not an essence, but the butt of a joke, this performance depending entirely on the gender “binary.”

Perhaps the most stunning confirmation of the re-entry of essentialism into trans-ideology discourse is the recent book by trans author, Andrea Long Chu, in his book, Females. Chu is what some would call a troll, who has made his/“her” street rep by being as “transgressive” as possible. But as Mary Harrington recently pointed out, with her usual unusual insight, Chu has “said the quiet part out loud.” Chu proudly asserts that he was “turned trans” by something called “sissy porn.”

Chu inverts decades of feminist campaigning against porn, theorising pornography not as an attack on women but a metaphor for the subject’s construction as female. In Did Sissy Porn Make Me Trans?, a 2018 essay whose themes are incorporated in Females, Chu argues that “to watch pornography is essentially to have the burden of desiring taken out of your hands”. Thus, to watch pornography is to be relieved of desiring, and in this way to “make room for the desires of another”: that is, to become female.

In case this wasn’t inflammatory enough, Chu then embraces the feminist accusation that trans identities are rooted in porn-induced sexual fetish — only to suggests that far from being a criticism, this highlights our universal femaleness. Females argues that “sissy porn”, a genre that dramatises and eroticises the forced, humiliating feminisation of males, encapsulates the ambivalent cocktail of fear and desire aroused in males by the prospect of castration. Employing the visual language employed to depict the “female”, of “wilting faces, trembling legs, eyes rolled back into heads”, sissy porn stages a feminisation that is, Chu argues, common to us all.

And sissy porn further feminizes, in that it evacuates the viewer’s own desire in favor of this ambivalently eroticised castration-fantasy. It is thus a kind of “metapornography”: that is, “porn about what happens to you when you watch porn”. And, Chu asserts, this “metapornography” is highly effective: “Sissy porn did make me trans”. (Mary Harrington)

Females often seek “transition” based on peer contagion and the challenges and dangers of being female. Males often seek “transition” based on eroticism. A longer story, and another path we’ll bypass for now.

What’s interesting to me, as a Catholic, about Chu’s eroticization of receptivity as essentially feminine, is not only its inherent misogyny, but how gender ideology more generally is part of a self-invention paradigm — a paradigm of control (masculine) — as opposed to the Catholic/Christian paradigm of us all being creatures who receive our existence and essence from a Creator — in other words, a receptive paradigm (feminine). That, too, is a longer story.

Ideology

An ideology is quite literally what its name indicates: it is the logic of an idea … As soon as logic as a movement of thought — and not as a necessary control of thinking — is applied to an idea, the idea is transformed into a premise [and] a whole line of thought can be initiated, and forced upon the mind, by drawing conclusions in the manner of mere argumentation. This argumentative process could be interrupted neither by a new idea (which would have been another premise with a different set of consequences) nor by a new experience. Ideologies always assume that one idea is sufficient to explain everything in the development from the premise, and that no experience can teach anything because everything is comprehended in this consistent process of logical deduction. The danger in exchanging the necessary insecurity of philosophical thought for the explanation of an ideology and its Weltanschaaung is not even so much the risk of falling for some usually vulgar, always uncritical assumption, as of exchanging the freedom inherent in man’s capacity to think for the straight jacket of logic with which man can force himself almost as violently as he is forced by some outside power.

— Hannah Arendt

I neither hate nor fear people who consider themselves to be “transgendered,” any more than I hate people who think quartz crystals have magical curative properties, that Donald Trump was God’s instrument, or that climate change isn’t real. I once believed Ayn Rand, so I’m a firm believer in overlooking one another’s errors and flaws (who is without sin, cast the first stone) and treating people with mutual respect and common decency. There are certainly deluded premises at work in many of these cases, but people believe all sorts of things with which I disagree and for which I bear them no malice. Live and let live, I say.

Transgender ideology, however, is another matter, because of its outworking consequences . . . fallout that’s genuinely dangerous and destructive (more often than not to those very people who’ve been convinced by this cancerous ideology that they’re “transgendered”).

The term transgender didn’t show up in the English language until 1974, and it didn’t take on its current meaning until the late 1990s. When Bernice Hausman published her book on the history of medical intervention for gender dysphoria in 1995, the popular term was still transsexual. The evolution of the term—and the idea—is instructive.

As a medical term, it’s restricted to the field of psychiatry, because there’s no demonstrable constellation of causative physical signs and-or laboratory diagnoses; the “disorder” is based purely on self-reported psychological symptoms.

As to intersex (or intersexuality), there is basically no one such thing. It’s a little like many fellow Southerners I know who refer to ten different species of panfish (spotted sunfish, pumpkinseed, dollar sunfish, bluegill, longear sunfish, orange spotted sunfish, shellcracker, green sunfish, redbreast, and warmouth) as “bream” (pronounced brim).

A lot of bullshit has been written about this deceptive term, intersex, beginning with Havelock Ellis’ first use of it in the early twentieth century to refer to homosexuality. One of the main forms of bullshit is this notion that sex itself is not binary, but “a spectrum.”

No, it’s not.

One author, Anne Fausto-Sterling, oft cited in gender studies departments, claimed that 1.7 percent of human beings were “intersex.” The suggestions here are (1) that there is some range of sex between male and female (yes, those procreative categories which facilitated even Judith Butler’s existence), and (2) that the existence of these intersexed people disproves sexual dimorphism. In fact, this category used by Fausto-Sterling included no fewer than thirty different diagnoses under the rubric of “disorders of sex development.” The five most frequent she cites involve not one scintilla of procreative ambiguity; and when these five categories are eliminated, the number of people who really are sexually ambiguous (a congenital defect) is less than 2 in 1,000. (Hat tip to Abigail Favale) Simple logic reveals that these exceptions do not disprove a rule — in fact, they are identified and measured against the rule! Nonetheless, Fausto-Sterling insists there are no fewer than five sexes, even though the term sex has, until the psilocybin sunrise of gender ideology, referred to the procreative potential inhering in all sexually dimorphic species.

Trans-ideology proponents — who’ve successfully won over an avaricious medical establishment, who now profit handsomely from it — simultaneously claim that “being transgendered” (a subjective self-report) is also some kind of inborn trait (a putatively “objective,” faux-Platonic essentialist claim), while also a matter of self-invention and “choice” (a libertarian, anti-essentialist claim). Even the medical establishment, which has for rapacious reasons come to go along with this ideology and enshrine it in “medical literature,” refuses to recognize and deal with these logically contradictory premises.

The three features of ideology that constitute ideologies as self-enclosed systems are partiality, abstraction, and some co-constituent antagonism. Ideology first reduces the subject (person, society, etc.) to some part of its whole (race, class, nationality, sexuality, gender, etc.). Then it filters out, by means of abstraction, any and all characteristics that might challenge the totalization of that partiality, creating a “pure logic.” That “pure logic” is itself always grounded in, and constitutionally dependent upon, some central conflict (co-constituent antagonism) between the ideology itself and who or what it opposes, an enemy without which the ideology would lose its raison d’etre. In this case, the “hegemonic cis-heteronormative gender binary” or some other such monstrous linguistic contortion.

“Gender identity,” the sine qua non of trans-ideology (Butler’s opposition to “identities” aside), is a comparatively recent invention that doesn’t clear what should be the lowest bar of scientific or medical claim; that is, it is not falsifiable by new empirical evidence. No physician would accept what I said, as a full grown (old) man, if I came into her office and told her, “I think I have throat cancer.” She would put my self-report in the “subjective” section of her notes, but her diagnosis, yea or nay, would be withheld until she did a physical exam, ordered a series of tests, and examined the “objective” signs (test results, exam observations, etc.) alongside the “reported” symptoms.

During the diagnostic process, she would go through a protocol for “ruling out,” in other words, other known pathologies that might present with the same symptoms. This is basic due diligence. Gender medicine instead jumps to its conclusions without this “ruling out” protocol.

“Gender identity” is defined as “a person’s internal sense of being male, female, some combination of male and female, or neither male nor female.” There was no such thing as this form of identity until the gruesome John William Money started using the term in the late 1950s. It didn’t show up in the DSM until 1980, under the heading “gender identity disorders,” the main symptom of which was another linguistic invention — gender dysphoria.

The word dysphoria, when referring to pathologies, means a state of dissatisfaction or unease. Gender dysphoria means unease with one’s gender, though in this sense the modifier “gender” reverts to its older correspondence with physical sex. I would note in passing that, especially in late modernity with mass communications and the ad industry selling insecurity, people feel all manner of unease about their bodies without these apprehensions being chiseled into the DSM. How many thirteen year old girls do you know who don’t say they “hate” some aspect of their own bodies? This is a generalized cultural pathology — not a medical one — which prevails within a paradigm that not only says one can create oneself, but must do so before the altar of commercially-assisted self-optimization.

Did the eventual realignment of the medical establishment come about as a result of scientific research? No. It emerged in contradiction to observable, species-essential, sexual dimorphism that can be proven using everyday as well as laboratory observation, i.e., a person’s body type and genitalia, gamete production, and (with technological assistance) his or her chromosomes, endocrinological profile, and so on (men neither menstruate nor ovulate nor pass through menopause, and women don’t have prostate cancer).

Ideology is self-contained, hermetically sealed inside its own grammars. Gender is a choice; gender is inborn (as some “authentic self”). Okay, which is it? That question externalized, because it would blow up the ideology.

And where or what is this “authentic self”? What exactly constitutes this “authenticity”? Is not the mere fact of existence authentic? Is this mysterious authenticity definable or accessible with no reference to a set of social relations? Or is it downstream from a social crisis wherein stable social relations are dissolving before the depredations of The Holy Fucking Market? Is the search for an “authentic self” just another saleable palliative for our loneliness and alienation?

Liberalism set this up with its proprietary body — property in oneself. If one is a body, how can one have a body? If one is born as a body, how can anyone, ever, be “born into the wrong body”?

What or who is this second possessive entity seeking the cosmic customer service return window to exchange their Levis for Wranglers?

It’s an unfortunate reality that perfectly absurd ideas can gain traction in influential academic circles. This is almost certainly a function of an arrogant, out-of-touch groupthink which can take over among those who, in their leafy, well-kept campuses filled with un-anchored abstractions, compete with one another in a jungle war for publication novelty — fought with wine and bad faith instead of machetes.

The academic ideological transmission belt was once more buffered, culturally and technologically. But with ever more corporate modeling, technocratic rule, lightning speed communications, clique-sorting platforms, and the progressive integration of academic life with the attention economy, ideological transmission from academy to society is now nearly friction-free. Hospital staff are required to refer to women who are having babies as “birthing persons,” because someone might be offended by calling a woman a woman.

With the proliferation of ideologies, how are we to discern what’s true, untrue, relevant, good, bad, right, wrong? One litmus test is at least available to all. When someone refuses to have the conversation or engage in principled debate, they’re full of shit. You can spot an ideology by when its proponents no longer feel the need to actually debate its merits, but instead “rebut” critics based on an enemy identity, an insider epithet. TERF, for example.

By writing this piece, for example, I will have inflamed the linguistic skin-barrier of trans ideology; and the ideology-typical response will not be some detailed rebuttal using counter-evidence, but my dismissal as a “transphobe.” For the most ardent of ideologues, even that won’t be enough. Via a series of bogus equal signs between terms and false equivalencies and incongruous claims of “harm,” I will have become a “fascist.” If I had a job, they might try to get me fired. (I’m well retired, so fuckem.)

Harebrained ‘affirmation’

The trans-phobic accusation which buttresses this ideology has a Reiffian “triumph of the therapeutic” vocabulary: phobia, irrational fear, a mental “disease.” This transposition from the arena of ideas and reason to pop-psychoanalysis is the ideological turnout, switching us onto the ad hominem track.

This is necessary as a discursive tactic, because ideology can’t survive reasonable challenges from outside its quarantine bubble. Consider the contradictions when “medical professionals,” who we’d think should be hard-boiled, effective-cause materialists, at least in their own fields, take vulgar-essentialist atypicality in “gender preferences” (a girl who likes to wear “male” clothes, e.g.) as “evidence” that some kid is “inhabiting the wrong body,” based on the kid’s (now, often coached) self-reporting of “unease”!

Is there a diagnostic “ruling out” protocol? No.

This is a kid who has social anxiety in most cases, and who’s been shut up in her room with a laptop. She’s been hooked into a kind of online grooming cult. By the time she shows up at the doctor’s office, she’s been advised on how to describe her symptoms to the doc, and likewise coached on how to make veiled (or open) threats of suicide if she doesn’t get what she wants. No one is any longer investigating the host of factors — not the least of which is internet grooming — that might lead an adolescent, oftentimes a prepubescent (!) kid, to “present” (or describe in an obviously [online] entrained language) with something as vague as “gender dysphoria.” I wrote a whole book based on my discomfort with a particular construction of masculinity (as violence and conquest), one which I’d pursued earnestly for decades and come to reject. Was I experiencing “gender dysphoria”? Uhhh, nope.

In the name of “affirming” (reflexively co-signing the self diagnosis of a patient — which should just be called “criminal malpractice”), all other lines of investigation are closed. No one is trying to determine where this “dysphoria” came from.

Trauma? Sexual abuse? Physical or psychological co-morbidities? Being bullied? Dysfunctional families? Ad propaganda? Internet contagion? Some kid’s favorite television series? The desire to be cool? Maladaptive socialization in a sick society (what girl hasn’t been subjected to body image bullshit . . . nowadays, in the gym rat era, what boy?)?

None of the above!

The MD now more-or-less “affirms,” by immediately referring this troubled kid along to a “gender clinic,” the on-ramp for the autobahn to irreversible endocrinological and surgical interventions by a “medical” establishment which is simultaneously the captive of and parasitic profiteer upon gender ideology. What the hell ever happened to a precautionary principle in medicine?!

Mary Harrington put her finger on this (highly profitable) shift in medicine that marks what she calls the beginning of “the cyborg era”: “We shifted from a restorative to a meliorist medical paradigm.” Medical “professionals” expanded from fixing things that were wrong to re-engineering things that were perfectly okay to begin with. The old stand-by, “If it ain’t fucked up, don’t fix it,” went by the wayside. Hormone therapy to change normal hormonal functions! Elective cosmetic surgery. Puberty blockers. Fifteen year old girls being sent to have their breasts amputated! This is not “affirmation”; it’s child abuse!

Without “affirmation,” according to one study, by the time these kids reach adulthood, only two percent will continue to insist they are transgendered, while most will come to understand themselves as either atypical (“feminine” male/”masculine” female) or gay.

This ideology is now being taught widely in public schools. To children! This is likely to have the greatest effect on some of the brightest kids, the ones who have the early glimmerings of philosophical imagination. I can speak to that danger as once one of those restless souls. I was drawn to the Big Topics, I had an aptitude for language, and I was at the same time alienated and bored. Then I got hold of an author who was writing at a level just a hair beyond me; this is the most attractive kind of study for these kids, something that seems a little challenging, a growth opportunity, and which appears to reveal expansive things. For me, a pre-pubescent kid who read well above his grade-level, that author was cult leader Ayn Rand. This was a disastrous turn for me, one with knock-on effects for years, the worst of which was “affirming” my most narcissistic attitudes as somehow virtuous; but at least no one “affirmed” me by putting me on endocrine drugs and-or surgically sterilizing me before I was eligible to vote.

Ideology, now given to your children — with or without your knowledge — at a school near you.

On affirmation. If I “affirm” what I’m about to say in court, I’m saying it’s true.

“Were you at home at 8 PM on the 4th of January?”

“Yes.”

Affirmation is assenting to something as the truth. It can be corroborated with objective evidence. I was observed by witnesses to be home. There is a record of my computer activity. The GPS on my phone shows it was in my home. Neighbors saw my car there, and one of them saw me walking the dog at 8:06.

On the other hand, what I say could be false, and evidence can also falsify my statement. There was CCTV of me 33 miles away at ten ’til eight. Nine people remember me starting a fight in a nearby bar . . . and so on.

“Gender affirmation,” however, is not affirmation in this sense. It requires that we all “play along” with things that are falsified by objective evidence. Like Lia Thomas — someone born with male genitalia and XY chromosomes — being a “woman.” He now “wins” women’s swimming championships against actual women who’ve worked their asses off to compete against other women . . . women who are, on average, smaller, weaker, and slower than men (the very reason we have [had] women’s sports).

Playing along with the whole notion of trans-children, who have neither the developmental capacity nor the experience to make critical life choices is, in my view, somewhere along the spectrum between radical naivete and criminal stupidity. That this has been normalized, especially among people with “higher education,” is a pretty grave prognostic indicator for the trajectory of this whole society.

If you want to know why people in my own farm town have no respect any longer for public figures and so-called intellectuals, look no further than the fact that they can’t give a straight answer to the question, “What is a woman?” And look no further than the contempt these public figures have for people who refuse to say the naked emperor is clothed.

“Gender dysphoria” is defined as a “mismatch” between one’s observable sex and that person’s “perceived gender identity.” This, of course, assumes there is such a thing as “identity” as it’s used here. Certainly, the idea of identity exists; but some thing — no matter how immaterial (since I am not a strict materialist) — conceived of as identity? Identity is more commonly and less ideologically understood as self-understanding. Ideological identity is a culture-bound phenomenon, not a natural one. It had to be conceived prior to its existence. No one, 500 years ago, carried around this particular form of “identity” in their heads, because no one was yet deluded enough to believe in the modern version of “self,” much less some independent “authentic self.” People understood themselves as given (created), morally active, and belonging, not some isolated inner essence. (This “authenticity” is an invention of Neitzsche, who saw our socialization in Judeo-Christian-inflected society as an impediment to our authentic desires — like violent conquest, one of his favorite examples.)

At the center of all these noble races we cannot fail to see the blond beast of prey, the magnificent blond beast avidly prowling round for spoil and victory; this hidden center needs release from time to time, the beast must out again, must return to the wild.

— Nietzsche

Authenticity, dude.

The cancellation of co-morbidities

When I was a child, I “exhibited behaviors” that would now be diagnosed alternately as ADHD and/or autism (“on the spectrum”). The claim that the meteoric rise of self-reported gender dysphoria among pre-teens and teens (especially girls) is merely a case of having the diagnosis to hand for something that was already there, “like ADHD and autism,” fails on three accounts. First of all, these are dissimilar conditions. Second of all, diagnosis neither rules out nor necessarily identifies possible or probable causative factors. Finally, there is no corresponding rise in other age cohorts alongside the adolescent/young adult surge (especially among females) over the last decade.

ADHD is not autism, and neither is gender dysphoria. The first two are separate diagnoses (I am highly suspicious of the ADHD “diagnosis,” btw), and the last is listed as symptom. As to causes, with none of them being clear, we do not know if those causes are hereditary, environmental, social, or combinations of the three. Certainly heredity provides certain predispositions, but many of these are only actualized in particular social environments. Just as certainly, we are learning all the time about environmental hazards. I was exposed to all manner of untested manufactured products (including “food”), as well as waste dumps, DDT spraying, and God knows what else during my childhood. We lived for a time behind an enormous commercial vineyard, where we swiped grapes and ate them right off the (sprayed) vines. We drank out of water hoses, and smoked corn silk. We didn’t know any better, and neither did our parents.

Gender dysphoria is a result, a symptom, but of what? A headache might indicate dehydration, caffeine withdrawal, bad posture, malaria, a brain tumor . . . with GD, we don’t do differential diagnosis. We affirm, drug, and cut.

The causative factors for GD are likely numerous and certainly not well-understood, and there’s an ideological reluctance to even study this question (because “affirmation” ideologues come down on their enemies like a ton of bricks, and now “affirmation” has been given the force of law). Much of the “research” has been steered by this ideology, and so when doing “studies” of GD, which are barren of causal research designs, there are few if any controls for prior mental health conditions.

Say it again for the folks in back. Gender dysphoria is a symptom of various precipitating conditions.

Autism is just one (starkly illuminating) example of a precipitating morbidity for juvenile gender dysphoria. There is a very substantial overlap between youngsters with autism and reports of gender dysphoria. Autism is a developmental abnormality which, like other major health problems, causes suffering; and as with other health problems, there are therapeutic interventions that can alleviate that suffering. The suffering is apart from “stigma.” Bullying and the like can accompany the pathology, but its still based on some organic dysfunction.

Yes, the category itself is still protean, the last amendment to autism’s definition in the DSM posted in 2013; and it does include a somewhat imprecise array of sub-categories. Setting that aside, though, what is known — what makes autism a problem for people who suffer from it (and they do suffer) — is that it entails a range of developmental disconnects. Over-development of some skills and under-development of others, sensory deprivations, sensory and social developmental anomalies, developmental paths that are not integrated in the normal way, over- and under-connectivities with strange attractions and aversions (I know an autistic kid who gets extremely agitated by the color green), and so on. These anomalies lead early on to difficulties with social interaction, which leads to social “errors” — especially with regard to male-female interactions (gender) — which can in turn give rise to social anxiety, depression, self harm, etc.

Consider for a moment the many ways in which gendered expectations for girls, in particular, are accompanied by confusion and anxiety, beginning with the fact that when a girl begins to develop adult physical qualities, she experiences dramatic differences in how she is perceived by both males and other females. It’s also a phase when girls become aware that with maturity, they begin to be sexually objectified, which carries real dangers that exacerbate natural female vulnerability vis-à-vis stronger, more aggressive males. Now add autism: a girl on the autism spectrum already has difficulty reading social cues (autistic adults report how they learn to interact through imitation, at first, even though they often fail to grasp the why of a social exchange).

Autistic kids have difficulty recognizing (intuiting) which people are and are not trustworthy, leaving them particularly vulnerable to exploitation, manipulation, and abuse. This sets a kid up, especially one with signs of autism, to be sucked into ideological “online communities” with a superficially plausible ideology, one that tells them the root cause of all their confusion and anxiety can be cured by “changing sex” — meaning not a real change, but taking dangerous endocrine drugs and doing things like being sterilized and having one’s breasts amputated.

(For a good discussion by two women with autism, click here.)

What girl, at some point, when encountering the issues confronting women, hasn’t imagined how much easier (and safer) it might be to become a boy?

What age group is targeted by this?

Most autism support groups and advocacy NGOs are unfortunately now fully bought into trans-ideology. This means that not only is this pernicious ideology lying in ambush for those seeking relief, but so is an entirely unethical corporate and medical establishment, ready to reap the profit from drugged and cut living bodies. Only the victims will be left in the future to bear the regrets. The prescribers and cutters will be sipping mojitos on the beach, while they monitor their portfolios on smart phones.

Peer contagion

As with autism, there’s a long menu of mental health issues, any one of which, given the right context, could generate a predisposition to “gender dysphoria.” One of those issues — however one wants to slot it into some category — is media/online “contagion.”

Do readers remember the social contagions (“epidemic modeling,” of which an important subset is “peer contagion”) associated with eating disorders and self-cutting? While it’s not “disordered” in itself, one social contagion phenomenon was teen girls competing to get pregnant. Kids were sucked into these “communities,” where carrying their disordered behaviors to greater extremes netted them higher esteem and status within these cult-like online formations. In these cases (eating disorders, cutting, getting pregnant), most of us were pretty clear that one factor which played into these destructive social relations was cognitive and psychological immaturity — developmental realities that we routinely take into account in education, social policy, law, and parenting. Pre-adolescents and adolescents (and often enough young adults, though they’ve now passed beyond the eyes of the law) quite simply lack the native as well as experiential capacity to make sound decisions. This is not an ideological claim, but a developmental one.

In the 1990s, after spates of mimetic suicide (especially among young people) following lurid and detailed reports of celebrity suicides, the mainstream media agreed to stop detailed reporting about celebrities who took their own lives. The rates of mimetic suicide fell in response.

Since then, ideology and profit have trumped this responsible decision. The proliferation of the internet has made things far worse, because it renders users susceptible to cognitive silo-ing, and because the algorithms serve as a kind of social contagion force-multiplier. One of the metastasizing phenomena in the United States is mass shootings.

Zeynep Tufekci, writing for Scientific American in 2019, noted that 20 percent of all mass shootings in the US over the last fifty years had occurred in the last five years. Yes, he wrote, we have a gun problem in America; and yes, we have a mental health crisis and the proliferation of violent ideology; but there’s another variable at work in the increasing temporal concentration of mass shootings — media and social media. These shooters are modeling on the shooters who came before, seeking to share in their infamy (in the new attention economy). Any recognition is better than none. Would that mass media take some responsibility as old media did with celebrity suicides!

The point, of course, is that it is as obvious as it is ideologically inconvenient that media-fueled mimesis is a real thing. I’m reminded of porn apologists who refuse to engage (and even disingenuously deny) the fact that men are ever more — as reported by women — asking their sexual partners to do painful, degrading, and sometimes dangerous things during sex, things which these men have picked up from online pornography. And yes, some people have become impotent for actual sexual encounters as a result of porn saturation. And yes, some violent sexual criminals feed on ever more extreme porn. But to say so is tantamount — in the minds of ideologues — to promoting censorship.

Free speech should include discussions of these problems, but ideologues create a no-fly zone around these discussions by claiming the supreme, slippery-slope peril is “censorship.” Ironic, I know. The specter of censorship becomes a protective shell for ideology, sealing it off from the threat of awkward questions. We’re going there now, though—uncensored — to discuss the internet.

We know that the internet is more than merely some public forum. We know we have to protect children from predators there. We know it’s a highly secretive and manipulative marketplace. We know it’s populated by thieves and hucksters. We know that it’s a site for peer contagion.

One recent hypothesis about the explosion in the numbers of adolescents who are suddenly claiming to be gender dysphoric is that of Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria (ROGD).

ROGD was first hypothesized by Dr. Lisa Littman, of Brown University, who developed her hypothesis based on a study she published with PLOS One in August 2018, called “Parent reports of adolescents and young adults perceived to show signs of a rapid onset of gender dysphoria.” 256 families were involved with the study of adolescents/young adults (AYA) who had declared themselves gender dysphoric after immersion with “online communities.” The mean age was 16 years, and eight out of ten of the AYA reported were natal females. The signature presentation of ROGD is an AYA, with no childhood history of gender dysphoria, suddenly claims to suffer from it and identifies as transgendered as a result. Littman emphasizes that this is a working hypothesis and not yet a clinical diagnosis.

Speaking for myself on the responses it has received from other parents, on the observable dynamic of social/peer contagion, especially with the introduction of social media, on the existing science of human development, on my own experience as an adolescent and with other adolescents, having raised four of them, and having observed (at least) hundreds of them . . . is that this is a very plausible hypothesis, which will likely be borne out — even in the face of ideological resistance — by further study as well as reporting from other families and by adults who come to regret their adolescent experience of it after often having mutilated themselves while in the throes of psycho-affective discomfort, peer contagion, and ideology.

In March, 2023, Archives of Sexual Behavior published a further study by Suzanna Diaz and J. Michael Bailey, entitled “Study of 1,655 Cases Supports the “Rapid-Onset Gender Dysphoria” Hypothesis,” in which 1,655 AYA between the ages of 11 and 21 years, which strongly supported the findings of the Littman report. Littman explained her interest and concerns in a 2019 interview:

I was surprised that no one had yet explored potential contributors to the recent dramatic demographic and clinical changes in adolescents seeking care for gender dysphoria. I believe that when a population seeking care for a condition drastically changes, it is the responsibility of the clinicians and researchers to start asking questions. Why is this change happening? Is the condition in the new population different from the condition in past populations? Without research to explore these questions, we don’t know if the treatments used for previous populations will be helpful or harmful to this new population. In other words, given that these changes are occurring, we should be working to figure out how best to treat this new population. Unfortunately, I’ve heard a few clinicians take the opposite approach — rationalizing these demographic changes in a way to assume the changes are irrelevant and that transition is the treatment regardless. I find this concerning because it seemed that these assumptions were being made in the absence of systematic study. This approach is bound to lead to confirmation bias that can mask clinically relevant phenomena.

“confirmation bias that can mask clinically relevant phenomena” (hello-o-o-o-o?!)

The ROGD hypothesis was swiftly and comprehensively attacked by transgender ideologues and activists, as well as medical “professionals” who specialize in the highly lucrative field of “gender [pseudo] medicine.” Their main rebuttal to the surge in AYAs reporting gender dysphoria was the claim that this surge — which is well-documented — was not an actual increase in gender dysphoria, but a response to the lifting of a stigma; that young people have been gender dysphoric at these rates all along, but for various reasons — including the lack of “affirmative” care — had “closeted” themselves. One problem with this reactive counter-hypothesis is that no corresponding surge has been observed in other age groups. Every attack on the ROGD hypothesis which I have read — and I have scoured the internet — has in some manner misrepresented Littman’s publication and-or (more recently) the Diaz-Bailey study. The censorship-ideology complex has gone into hyperdrive. Every deviation from this ever more hegemonic PMC-culture ideology has to be ruthlessly stamped out.

Excluded from this ideology is the way in which people seeking a diagnosis (for whatever reason, including to fit themselves to an in-group) can and do study the diagnosis in advance of seeking medical intervention. (When I was a teenager, and my own in-group wanted amphetamines to party with, we’d have our friends who were fat girls go to the doctor to get a “diet pill” prescription. Spinning the medical profession is not new.)

Richard Docter (yep, his name, with the e) studied gender dysphoria back in 1988 after being asked, as a Doctor of psychology, to assess “transssexual” patients seeking surgical intervention. The problem with “affirmation,” he pointed out, was that these patients were studying for their interviews like they were studying for the Bar exam to have the “right answers” at hand.

Confounding the problem of assessing gender dysphoria is the fact that transsexual applicants are typically very much aware of the gender dysphoria thesis and seize upon this as a causal attribution to explain their own behavior. Their proclamations, if accepted at face value without external validation, may constitute misleading statements in the gender history. It’s obvious that the clinician as well as the researcher must be sensitive to this potential distortion. (Docter, Transvestites and Transsexuals, p. 32)

Obvious. Or not. This “sensitivity to distortion” is now virtually absent on the gender transition super-highway. One of those distortions is rehearsal of suicidality.

The suicide gambit

Perhaps the most egregious aspect of online gender ideology cults is what I’ll call “suicide extortion.” As someone whose own family has a history of suicide, as well as mental conditions out of which we extorted one other with threats of suicide, I find the well-rehearsed and ready-at-hand claim that failing to “affirm” youth gender dysphoria (as “being born the wrong sex”) will lead them to kill themselves to be an especially reprehensible ideological gambit.

Suicide extortion converts “gender affirmative” medicine from a discussion and debate into a “tempo task.” I wrote a good deal about the tempo task as it was employed in the early 2000s to grease the wheels for the “global war on terror.” The term tempo task was first used by film director Sergei Eisenstein in an article called “Film Form”: “the ‘tempo task’ is a film convention in which the protagonist is forced by impending peril to forego the rules (and all deliberative thought) to get the job done and save lives.”

“You’re with us, or you’re with the terrorists” has transubstantiated into “You ‘affirm,’ or you’re killing teenagers.”

There are two assumptions underwriting this extortion racket: (a) that suicidal tendencies and gender dysphoria are linked in some singular causative sense (which excludes co-comorbidities), and (b) that “transition” is preventative or curative of suicidal thoughts. Neither of these assumptions can be confirmed by evidence.

We have heard repeatedly that “48 percent of trans youth have attempted suicide.” This “fact” came from one source, the RaRE Study, promoted dishonestly by the scandal-ridden British “transgender children’s charity,” Mermaids, that involved nothing but self-selecting subjects. How many were youth identifying as trans?

Buckle your seat belts: 27.

Solicitation for the study was done in such a way as to attract the most troubled people in the self-selecting group. Thirteen reported — without specifics, histories, or co-comorbidities — having attempted suicide at least once. We don’t even know if the suicide attempts occurred, or if they occurred before or after social or medical transition! We do know that gay, lesbian, and bisexual people — as determined by more robust studies — also have higher than average suicidality (34%); and even then again, there is no account for co-morbidities, family dynamics, social situations, etc.

A similar recent media phenomenon involved the “lab leak” hypothesis with regard to the Covid-19 pandemic, when on March 17, 2021, “The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2,” co-authored by Kristian Andersen, Andrew Rambaut, Ian Lipkin, Edward Holmes, and Robert Garry, was published in NatureMedicine; and it quickly became the go-to technocrat-media reference driving the slander that anyone proposing the lab-leak hypothesis was guilty of promoting “conspiracy theories.” One article — now shown to have been a bald piece of propaganda contradicted by its own authors’ private communications — which then spawned an ideological “fact” repeated henceforth uncritically in thousands of subsequent articles.

Exactly what happened with the RaRE study on trans suicidality. One highly questionable “source” was replicated through media meshworks far beyond that one source, whereupon it took on the aspect of offcially-sanctioned, indisputable proof — a truism that was very far from having been established as true.

Kids with anorexia, depression, and autism — three frequent co-comorbidities with youth GD and probable cases of ROGD — have similar rates of sucidality apart from GD. Yes, any threat of suicide has to be taken seriously; but with no other medical presentation besides GD would physicians allow any suicidal patient to dictate his or her “treatment”?

The more expansive sampling in the 2016 University of Cambridge/Stonewall report, reported similar “trans-suicide” findings, albeit with even less precision about who qualified as “transgendered,” and with no identification of respondents natal sex, even though there are substantial differences in results of similar sampling between natal females and natal males. A 2018 study published in Pediatrics included natal sex and found that girls had substantially higher rates of suicidality than boys (though adult men have substantially higher suicide rates than adult women).

I have two close relatives who shall remain anonymous — lesbians — who between them have mental health problems associated with childhood sexual abuse, bipolarity, and addiction, any one of which can be correlated with suicidality (not speaking here of them specifically). If a lesbian is counted as a lesbian in a study of suicidality, she will be included in that 34 percent, even if and when her sexual orientation (both these women are elderly now and asexual in practice) has absolutely nothing to do with her report of having at some point had suicidal ideas.

My problems with these studies are not the ways in which they have limitations (some similar to the Littman study); but in the difference between the way that the Littman study was represented in the media (emphasizing so-called limitations that the author herself cited) and the way the RaRE and Stonewall studies were represented (as scientific gospel). Littman is always identified as the source, and all the limitations are most often presented “proof” of the study being “fatally flawed.” But Littman herself has never made anything beyond hypothetical claims and has been scrupulous in reminding readers when and how her ideas are still scientifically speculative. Transgender ideologues repeats the RaRE/Stonewall “results,” generally without attribution, as if they were proven, scientifically sound, unadulterated facts, usually in support of “transition” whether social or endocrinological/surgical, as prophylaxis against suicidality —an absolute non sequitur.

Since it’s a life or death issue, a tempo task, all professional prudence and all ethical concerns can be abandoned to “save lives.” The fact that there is no reduction in suicidality after transition doesn’t seem to merit consideration. That’s ideology!

The propaganda is only one half of the gender ideology two-step. Its promotion by “influencers,” the PMC, entertainment media, et al, is being backed up now by medical institutions and governments. And yes, they are propagandizing children in public schools behind their parents’ backs.

An especially horrifying account is that of Doctor Wallace Wong, who I’ve come to think of as the Josef Mengele of British Columbia. Wong is not an MD, but a psychologist licensed in BC and California, with a “gender therapy practice.” (Hat tip to Stuart Parker for alerting me to this character.)

Wallace Wong (not the celebrity chef)

To begin with on Wong, this charlatan has counseled children and “affirming” parents — per Richard Docter’s symptom-manipulation descriptions — to exaggerate their symptoms to move further ahead of the line for puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and life-altering surgery . . . including rehearsed threats of suicide.

“So what you need,” he said in one presentation, “is, you know what? Pull a stunt. Suicide, every time, [then] they will give you what you need.” He added that trans-identified kids “learn that. They learn it very fast,” not in a cautionary, but in an approving tone.

Wong began his “gender practice” quackery in 2000 with four kids. Now, he is “treating” well over a thousand. The boost in numbers was largely down to his convincing the Canadian government to pass kids along to him from the foster care system; that is, kids who are already confused, often depressed, and always vulnerable, especially to suggestion. The lion’s share of these kids in Canada are, of course, poor and indigenous. In my book, the man is a predator. He admits — with ghoulish pride — that his “patients” are getting younger and younger. He had one patient who, according to him, “presented with gender dysphoria” at the ripe old age of 2 years and 9 months. This is batshit crazy! If you listen to his presentation, linked above, you may be taken aback by the rambling incoherence of his drivel; but I was even more taken aback by hearing zombie coos of approval from actual parents of actual children.

As to suicide extortion, this has to be met — at least in the field of public debate — with three words: “Oh, hell no!” Because it’s blackmail and a reflection of the sorry state of affairs in which we find ourselves.

There is no evidence that suicidality among those who are reported to be gender dysphoric is reduced by transition. None!

Environmental hazard

Jacques Ellul noted some decades past that we live in a society that breeds mental illness. We don’t fix the causative agent — the “deathwork” cultures of late modernity. We monetize this fact by throwing new drugs at its manifestations in individual persons.

Man was made to do his daily work with his muscles; but see him now, like a fly on flypaper, seated for eight hours, motionless at a desk. Fifteen minutes of exercise cannot make up for eight hours of absence. The human being was made to breathe the good air of nature, but what he breathes is an obscure compound of acids and coal tars. He was created for a living environment, but he dwells in a lunar world of stone, cement, asphalt, glass, cast iron, and steel. The trees wilt and blanch among sterile and blind stone facades. Cats and dogs disappear little by little from the city, going the way of the horse. Only rats and men remain to populate a dead world. Man was created to have room to move about in, to gaze into far distances, to live in rooms which, even when they were tiny, opened out on fields. See him now, enclosed by the rules and architectural necessities imposed by crowded population in a twelve-by-twelve closet opening out on an anonymous world of city streets.

Every man is in this fix, not merely the proletariat, and nothing can be done about it. What was once the abnormal has become the usual, standard condition of things. Even so, the human being is ill at ease in this strange new environment, and the tension demanded of him weighs heavily on his life and being. He seeks to flee — and tumbles into the snare of dreams; he tries to comply and falls into the life of organizations; he feels maladjusted — and becomes a hypochondriac. But the new technological society has foresight and ability enough to anticipate these human reactions. It has undertaken, with the help of techniques of every kind, to make supportable what was not previously so, and not, indeed, by modifying anything in man’s environment but by taking action upon man himself. Psychology is resorted to more and more, everybody knows how important morale is! Man can support the harshest and most inhumane living conditions, provided his morale holds. Innumerable psychological examples and experiments confirm this.

In a world where technique demands the utmost of men, this maximum cannot be attained, maintained, or surpassed — as sometimes is required — except by a will that is always steady and taut. Man does not by nature possess such a will. He is by no means naturally prepared for such a sublime condition, and if he sometimes does attain to it naturally, the exaltation endures only a few moments. Yet it must be prolonged. Psychological conditions must be created to enable the individual to give his utmost . . . and to resist prostration and discouragement in the face of the dreadful conditions of life into which technique has forced him.

— Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society, pp. 321–2

As Ellul noted, in late modern society, each of us is “stretched to the limit of our resistance, like a steel cable which may break at any moment.”

Gender dysphoria, spiritual fads, ADHD, autism, obsessive-compulsive disorders, depression, unfocused anxiety . . . the fact that we’re all incorporating plastic into our tissues now, that we eat low-quality food, that we rush-rush-rush to get things done — read the Sapolsky-Share primate studies on the physiological effects of “stress” — that our intimate bonds are being replaced by disembodied ones, that we’re the slaves of institutions and metrics and money, that we’re subjected to a constant barrage of noise and distraction that whips our attention to and fro like the end of an escaped fire hose, that our lives are mediated for hours each day by electronic screens, that our daily experience is often devoid of the complex web of life which has been destroyed to make the built environment . . . that 66 percent of Americans are using prescription drugs, and that doesn’t even count how many of us are self-medicating with alcohol, marijuana, and the rest. It’s a wonder, a testament to human resilience really, that we’re not all crazy as a bag of squirrels, that we still manage to occasionally be attentive, reflective, rational, loving, honest, ethical, and creative in the face of all this distortion, perversion, and damage. Trans-ideology is but one manifestation of our material, metaphysical, and spiritual crisis.

Does it surprise anyone that being human in such a state, now normalized and naturalized, might be attracted to the imaginary solace of trans-humanism? We are living, walking, talking symptoms of the world in a most precarious state of disorder disguised as super-order. Hell yes, people want to escape. We live in bubbles of simulacra and lies, cut off from the very nature of which we’re a part.

Trans-ideology is but one instantiation of the way in which modernity has made us mad as hatters. That very saying comes from a period in which hat makers were exposed day in and day out to chemicals that at away at their brains — the environmental hazard of their time. Our environmental hazards are material like chemicals, to be sure, but also manifesting a terrible spiritual deficiency, a scurvy of the soul which includes a hatred of the body and the disordered will to rip it apart and rebuild it.

The costs of ‘transition’

When a young person has been convinced he or she has been born into the wrong body, or that (as Butler insists in stark contradiction to the “wrong body” thesis) gender is a pure choice, and that young person opts for medical transition, what exactly are the effects of puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and “transition” surgeries?

Frankly, they’re horrifying and should be banned from medical practice, full stop. Any medical paradigm that pathologizes normal puberty has strayed far afield of anything that rightly deserves the name medicine.

When you remove the suicide extortion scam from the equation, the main thing to remember is that none of the pharmaceuticals, practices, and procedures that follow are necessary. Moreover, a body’s tissues and organs are going to defy these “modifications” by behaving the way natural tissues and organs behave in unnatural circumstances . . . with a kind of house-of-horrors menu of “complications” (read: predictable responses to doing unhinged things to a normal, healthy body).

WARNING, GRAPHICALLY DISTURBING DESCRIPTIONS AND IMAGES AHEAD!!!

Tucking, packing, binding

We all remember the “tucking” scene in the film Silence of the Lambs. This may be the most benign practice, because tucking one’s male genitals between the legs to give the appearance of not having male genitals is easily reversible. But the kinds of tucking used by many trans identifying males involves more than merely holding ones package between the thighs — uncomfortable enough on its own, and probably not healthy for extended periods. I mean you wouldn’t wrap rubber bands around your fingers for hours on end, and plain tucking for extended periods is similarly constrictive, restricting blood flow and everything that follows from that. It’s also difficult to walk around with a plain tuck. Try it guys; you’ll walk like a ruptured duck. So many of these boys and young men use tape or ultra-tight underwear to maintain the appearance. Many use a gaff — a kind of heavy-duty panty-girdle that flattens and smooths the appearance. Some people go so far as to push their testicles up inside their inguinal canals, a practice that often causes itching, rashes, aching balls, penis pain, and topical infections and which increases the risks of infertility, testicular torsion, and testicular cancer.

Less risky is the practice of “packing,” when females put a fake penis in their underwear to create the appearance of being male.

The more problematic mechanical sham for females is breast binding. It’s just what it sounds like — tightly wrapping the breasts to create the appearance of no breasts. We long ago denounced the practice of foot binding; but apparently doing this to one’s breasts is just fine. We also denounced corsets for all their ill-effects, but binding with compression bras, tape, and bandaging is exactly the same except for being directly over the girl or young woman’s lungs. Ninety-seven percent of females who bind report one or more of twenty-eight different negative side effects. 74% experienced pain in the chest, shoulders, back, or abdomen. 47% experienced musculoskeletal injuries, including rib fractures, spinal deformity, joint “popping,” and muscle wasting. 41% reported numbness, headache, and dizziness. 18% had digestive difficulties and heartburn. 61% had overheating, fatigue, and general weakness. Over half had respiratory difficulties, including infections. 76% had dermatological issues. A third reported breast tenderness and changes in the breasts. No one has yet studied the cardiovascular outcomes or binding’s possible carcinogenesis.

And this is just the non-pharmaceutical, non-surgical arena.

Facial hair removal

We’ll start with the least scary procedure. The two most effective methods are laser hair removal and electrolysis. Either a laser or a needle is inserted into each follicle, so the “treatment” typically goes on for months. Each costs thousands of dollars. Each hurts like hell, with every application of the laser or needle to every follicle producing an intense burning stab. There are from 5,000 to 5 million follicles in a beard. Enjoy!

Puberty blockers

Before we begin on this, we need to do a thumbnail sketch, for those who may not know, of the human endocrine system. The endocrine system as it was first explained to me during my anatomy and physiology training as a Special Forces medic, back when dinosaurs roamed the earth, is an integrated network of chemical feedback mechanisms. The chemicals are hormones, and they basically tells all our cells what to do, with regard to day-to-day maintenance/stability and longer-range developmental actions. Hormones are produced by organs (hypothalamus, pituitary gland, thyroid, parathyroid, adrenals, pancreas, etc.) and by tissues that receive commands from other hormones. The main point here is that the integration of the various organs, substances, and actions is so intricate that when you mess around with even one small part of the overall system, the effects ramify throughout the endocrine system, and through endocrine processes throughout the entire body. You cannot “cheat” this system without consequences.

The human being is a body — not merely a collection of parts, but an irreducible whole.

Ask any woman between menarche and menopause if the effects of these command-chemicals aren’t real and observable. Ask the many women who’ve quit taking birth control pills because of the miserable side effects. Ask anyone who’s used anabolic steroids (synthetic male sex hormones). Ask anyone whose been startled and felt that surge of adrenaline.

The next thing we have to point out is that there have not as yet been any randomized control trials studying the effects, short-term or long-term, of “puberty blockers” (hormones, see below) on prepubescent children. In 2021, England’s National Health Service reviewed all the scientific literature on puberty blockers to date, and concluded that all current “evidence” for any known benefit was of “very low certainty.” In other words, the widening use of these extremely potent endocrine disruptors is untested and unregulated. We have no idea beyond the anecdotal and rationally speculative about what the effects are now or in the future; which means they are being used (without FDA approval in the US, which requires testing) experimentally with zero attention paid to anything resembling a precautionary principle. There are already provisional correlations between puberty blockers and depression, suicidal ideation, osteoporosous, mood disorders, seizures, cognitive impairment, and sterility (sterility is far more than a correlation; it’s a well-established “side effect”).

It’s bad enough that the age of onset for puberty has over past decades fallen due (probably) to environmental factors we don’t fully understand — pollution, pharmaceuticals, obesity, food additives, God knows. Now we are going to go directly at the process to “block” it?

What, then, is a “puberty blocker”?

Gonadotropin-releasing hormone agonists (GnRHa) were originally developed for the treatment of certain forms of infertility and cancer. Some were used to chemically castrate animals. Some were used to treat uterine fibroids. Some were used to induce ovulation in mares. Then someone discovered, by using them to treat precocious puberty (abnormal puberty in the very young), that they can be used to “block” the natural process of sexual maturation in physically non-pathological children. Like that might be a good thing (it’s certainly a lucrative thing).

We do know what normal puberty does, so it is fairly safe to speculate about what kinds of things quit happening when GnRHa’s are given to children. We all know about axial, pubic, and facial/body hair, breast development, widening shoulders in boys and widening hips in girls, growth spurts, voice changes, growth/development of the genitals, and so on. But there are some less obvious changes, too, like brain development and bone density accretion.

As noted above, none of these processes advances independent of all the others. It’s a concert, not individual instruments playing in different rooms. When we use these powerful antagonists, they are not merely “pausing” the the procession, as ideologues have been trying to gaslight us into believing. This is the kind of thing a child might believe, but not anyone remotely familiar with human physiology. Puberty is not some linear, arithmetical mechanism; and we have not done the kind of testing necessary to make educated guesses about the effects of these chemicals. Moreover, nearly 100 percent of kids put on puberty blockers will advance down the Transition Autobahn to cross-sex hormones and surgery. This is no “pause,” it’s putting kids on a conveyor belt to irreversible physical changes, sterility, and lifelong dependence on pharmaceuticals.

There is already suggestive evidence that GnRHa’s may result in lifelong decreases in bone density (osteoporosis) and cognitive capacity. In the latter case, we are already dealing with children who haven’t the developmental capacity to “consent” in any meaningful legal sense, and we are risking make them even less capable of informed choices as they accelerate — with ideologically-bewildered parents in the driver’s seat — down the Transition Autobahn.

Puberty blockers have even led to a big complication for future surgical “transition.” Boys’ penises are so underdeveloped that when they undergo the surgery to build a fake vagina — which “normally” involves scooping the flesh out of the penis and inverting the skin to create a hole, there is insufficient skin for the hole. So they now use a bit of the intestine, or pig tissue, or fish tissue, to “make the hole.”

Making a healthy body unhealthy

We already know that, at least in modern age-segregated societies, the physiological changes associated with puberty can be disconcerting for kids. Left alone to get through this natural stage, kids grow out of that confusion; but now with children being trained to associate these disorientations with “gender dysphoria,” we have effectively pathologized normal human development, which in the modern context almost always includes this temporary disorientation.

Most cases of early childhood-onset gender dysphoria self-resolve. Eleven out of 11 studies that followed the trajectory of gender-variant youth show that the most common outcome is natural resolution of gender dysphoria around or after puberty. Among those diagnosed as having gender identity disorder, 67% no longer met the diagnostic criteria as adults; among those subthreshold for diagnosis, 93% were not gender dysphoric as adults. Gender dysphoria in childhood is a far better predictor of future homosexuality than of future trans identity. (link)

There is reason to believe — certainly in any precautionary sense — that these chemicals will render children permanently infertile (yes, we are sterilizing kids for an ideology) as well as incapable of sexual desire or orgasm. The reason it’s difficult at this stage to determine whether these some outcomes can be decisively laid at the door of GnRHa’s is because the overwhelming majority of kids who are administered these hormone blockers go on to the next step, cross-sex hormones.

Cross-sex hormones

In very simple lay terms, cross-sex hormones are estrogen for boys and testosterone for girls, the Frankensteinian purpose being to masculinize the girls and feminize the boys. Just as with GnHRa’s, there have been no in-depth, long-term, scientifically valid studies to assess the broad use of these hormones on kids, much less kids who have likely preceded the administration of cross-sex hormones with the extensive use of puberty blockers, and often a cocktail of other psychoactive drugs. The aim of their use is ostensibly to “improve mental health, quality of life and body image,” but alas . . . there are no studies that demonstrate this is the general outcome.

A study published in the Nordic Journal of Psychiatry showed that medical transition has no effect on the mental health of transitioners. Those who had psychological co-morbidities prior to transition continued to exhibit the co-morbidities afterwards. (More than three-quarters of the surge cases in recent years had and have co-morbidities, described earlier in this article.)

Neither social nor medical transition improve the mental health status of gender dysphoric people of any age. They improve the bottom line of quack therapists, surgeons, and drug companies.

As to side effects immediately and over time, one major assessment difficulty, apart from the general paucity of research, is the variety of cross-sex hormones prescribed. Another obstacle to certainty is that individuals who are taking these hormones may, as a group, have higher than average or lower than average extraneous practices and habits. There is some indication that women taking male hormones may have a higher risk of cardiovascular events (strokes, infarctions, other thromboembolitic events), but if that same population, say, smokes cigarettes at higher rates than the general population, we can’t safely conclude that the hormones are causing these CVEs. Likewise, cross-sex hormones are likely to react differently on a sixteen year old boy who has been on or is still on puberty blockers, a thirty-five year old FTM trans, and a sixty year old post-menopausal woman. One large cohort study (6,793 individuals), published in 2019, suggests that the risk of CVEs goes up with cross-sex hormones, with women being at greater risk than men, but the same study also noted that their target population had higher than average rates of smoking and greater social stressors, both of which may contribute to cardiovascular problems.

Feminizing hormone “replacement therapy” begins with the administration of powerful diuretics followed by tablets, injections, or patches with female hormones. The warnings on these “medications” themselves tell patients to look out for “blood clots in a deep vein (also known as deep vein thrombosis) or in your lungs, high levels of triglycerides, weight gain, high potassium levels, high blood pressure, reduced libido, and the risk of permanent infertility.” (Yay.)

Masculinizing “treatment” (injections, gels, patches, or subdermal pellets) carry warnings for overproduction of red blood cells, blood clots in deep veins or lungs, weight gain, pelvic pain, sleep apnea, abnormal cholesterol levels, high blood pressure, and elevated risk for type-2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, pregnancy complications, and permanent infertility.

Children as young as eight years old are now receiving cross-sex hormones.

Excursus: bodies and brains

The skirmishes over the term essentialism inevitably aim us back to the sophomoric nature-nurture debates. This separation itself is a kind of question-begging that assumes the validity of the categories which precede the things to which they’re applied. To my mind — admitting that I have a special antipathy to this framing — this puts the nature-true-believers and nurture-true-believers in the same category, both victims of the same reifying categorical inversion. In spite of this being one of my bugbears, that horse left the barn a long while ago. Pretty much everyone thinks with these categories now, meaning even curmudgeons like me are forced to employ this artificial dualism within which certain debates have already been corralled. In our prior and subsequent discussions wherein we cite physiology and social-psychology side-by-side, we inevitably bump that fence and agitate the livestock.

One instantiation of this conceit in trans-ideology is this brain-body business, to wit, male and-or female brains that fail to match male and-or female bodies. Yes, there’s a post-Cartesian mind-body issue here, too, but The Essentialism Files touch just as directly on the business of biological determinism. So why insert this into a discussion of cross-sex hormones?

First, let’s address the fallacy of exception and get that out of the way. Gender ideologues are fond of citing exceptions to the norm with the mistaken background assumption — again, childlike thinking — that exceptions disprove norms. One ideological fave is the “intersexed,” whose existence is taken to mean the sexual binary (that one that gave each of us our existence) is somehow an illusion (or a mere power move). I refer readers back to the fallacious account of intersexuality in the sub-section, Ideology. Exceptions do not disprove the norms. This is the kind of argument employed by a four-year-old.

Louise Perry and Mary Harrington have made a point of challenging the second-wave contention (to which I adhered for some time) that human brains are sexually neutral and somehow separable from the body (as if it were a separate and brain-free entity). As Harrington says, sex isn’t only from the neck down. I have to concur based on what I’ve just written about endocrinology. This claim is precariously adjacent, however, to the slippery slope of biological determinism, but with the same care we use to walk in dangerous terrain, I think we can safely discuss this without losing our footing. We can say that both dualisms — nature-nurture and brain-body — are deceptive, and still address the irrational claim about brains not “matching” bodies with its downstream fallacy that the cure to this mismatch is to re-engineer the body to fit the brain.

Crude ahistorical essentialism is at play here . . . if you want “girly” things, then you are a girl. But more to the point, and just getting this out of the way, a brain is not some separable component of the person, as it is portrayed in fantasy scenarios where people’s brains are exchanged. It is a neurological and endocrinological Grand Central Station; and just like GCS, it is situated in a particular place (living body) without which it would be just so much matter — an isolated ruin. Your GCS is not independent. It is characterized not merely by its existence, but by what flows into and out of it, by what exchanges take place there, from where and to where, and its very esse is synonymously dependent upon its connections to everything else going on in the body as a whole. Each brain is also irreducibly unique, as is every embodied person of which a brain is an integral component. Even our “thinking” and “experience” are not confined to the brain, as a child might imagine. Everyone has experienced muscle memory, as one example.

It’s well-established that one cause of sexual anomalies is pre-natal or perinatal exposure to hormones. When in utero females are exposed to high levels of testosterone, this can result in an anomaly called congenital adrenal hyperplasia. It doesn’t result in phenotypical abnormalities (these girls have all girl parts), but it has been strongly associated with these girls having very male-typical preferences, interests, and behaviors. And yet — with this “male brain,” to put it in childish terms — they very seldom experience gender dysphoria. Now if any kid was going to be gender dysphoric based purely on the imaginary brain-body mismatch, you’d think it would be her. But the fact is, brain-body separation is — to put it in highly technical terms — bullshit. The endocrine system is emblematic of all the ways neither can exist independent of the other. A human being is irreducible to this dichotomy until he or she is autopsied, at which point he or she has discontinued being a viable human being. Even at the genetic level, it is well-known that there are no direct effective causes between individual “genes” and either phenotypes or behaviors. Again, it’s a concert.

No, sex isn’t only from the neck down, but “sex” itself is not independent except as a category. Human beings — with our highly adaptive plasticity — are biologically determined to not be biologically determined, Yes, there are general differences between male and female that transcend what we learn. Brains and bodies can’t be separated. Neither can “nature” and “nurture.” (Neither can sex and gender, but that’s another long article.)

I actually prefer to think about it in a more Catholic way (of course). Men and women (boys and girls) are alike and different in ways which can be mapped along three axes, general, specific, and particular. One: our common humanity. Two: our gender-specific differences. Three: our personal particularity within the general and (sex) specific.

Finally, a brain is not a mind. That’s like calling a train a trip.

Phalloplasty/scrotoplasty

These elective surgeries are performed to construct fake male genitals on women. In “Genital Mutilation for the Masses,” TT Exulansic calls them “surgical simulacra.” Skin is surgically removed from the forearm or abdomen and used to construct the simulation. They’ve tried using leg skin, but it often resulted in excessive girth (like beer can girth), which requires follow-up liposuction surgery to “de-girth.” Constant in all these transition surgeries is that they take a long time to heal, have high rates of post-op complications, and high rates of subsequent surgeries to correct all the things that go wrong when “physicians” try to re-engineer perfectly normal human bodies.

With phalloplasty/socrotoplasty, the transplanted skin often scars, shrinks, and changes shape, becoming susceptible to pressure lesions, strictures, chronic inflammation, urethral blockage, and other marvels of iatrogenic medicine. The phalloplasty/scrotoplasty is generally performed after a metoidioplasty (detaching the clitoris), vaginectomy (removing the vagina), and hysterectomy (removal of womb and ovaries). With metoidioplasty and phalloplasty, an extension is grafted onto the urethra which is then subject to infection and often requires the use of catheters for this unfortunate person to urinate . . . which in its turn introduces bladder infections and bladder stones. Sometimes these tissue grafts result in fistulas — little unwanted ducts or channels — between the neo-urethra and the colon, creating a superhighway for gut bacteria to pay visits to the urinary tract. In one case I read about, doctors had to install a colostomy bag on a patient to reroute the feces before it could reach the fistula. (Line up now to be the first on your block.)

Phalloplasty complications range from 60–100 percent for women, depending on which complication you pick. There are no criteria yet agreed upon for phalloplasty patient risk profiles, though it’s generally agreed that obesity is a contraindication for surgery. A body mass index of 30 or less is often required. Surgeons also recommend smoking cessation, because blood flow and oxygenation are big issues when grafting tissues.

Before the procedure, the patient has to undergo electrolysis to remove all hair from the skin that is about to be excised and transplanted. No one wants hair growing out of her simulated penis.

The procedure itself proceeds in phases (think “vaginectomy, urethral lengthening, perineoplasty and scrotoplasty as perineal masculinization”), and each phase requires a its own recovery period. You won’t sleep much, because your excisions and new appendage require hourly checks throughout your hospital stay to ensure it that tissue death (necrosis) and-or infections don’t kill you. Think twelve weeks, before you can go home and try to pee standing up. Which is another complication. Dribbling, blockage, and having to “milk” the urine are common.

Yep, where do I sign up?

When the clitoris has been detached and pulled into the pseudophallus, the idea is to allow for future satisfying sexual encounters (in fact, sensation is dramatically reduced). But now there’s the whole business of pseudo-erections with which to deal. This requires — here’s that technological dependence again — “devices.” One can opt for a pump device that you activate by squeezing a pseudo-testicle (one pump nut, one silicone nut) or for a pop-out rod device, which one author compared to a little futon.

In the unsettling picture above, tattooed skin is used for the pseudo-phallus. Some people, seeking that authentic look, will have penile veins tattooed onto the addendum.

Second stage perineal masculinization with a pedicled ALT flap phallus. ALT, anterolateral-thigh.

Complications include full phallic loss (necrosis, it dies), partial phallic loss, infection, hematoma, wound dehiscence (splitting open), urinary fistula, strictures, loss of all sensation, and retained vaginal mucosa (oops, “revision surgeries” required).

In both phalloplasty and metoidioplasty, patients are increasingly asking that their vaginas be left open and accessible, known as a “vagina-sparing” procedures. One metoidioplasty patient had her vagina “spared,” and subsequently, she became pregnant from having heterosexual intercourse with her male husband. She expressed in a video, “we did not think it was possible and were very shocked,” because in her mind, she was a gay man having sex with another man. Her baby was exposed prenatally to her cosmetic testosterone use, which she resumed against medical advice shortly after her infant had to be born prematurely. Her daughter has had developmental issues, including apparent motor and speech delays, as well as plagiocephaly (misshapen head), which required a prescription helmet. (Exulansic, ibid.)

Welcome to the brave new world.

Let’s also take into account that grafting tissue takes the grafted tissue from somewhere: leg, abdomen, arm, or mouth (when mucosal tissues are required). There are frequent complications from these excisions themselves as well as the places onto which the tissues are grafted.

Metoidioplasty

Detachment (“release”) of the hormonally-enlarged clitoris from surrounding tissue is sometimes a stand-alone elective procedure to build a small pseudophallus, sometimes in conjunction with full phalloplasty (enlargement, seen above). Metoidioplasty can be conducted with or without vaginectomy (removal of all or part of the vagina) or colpocleisis (removal of mucosa and surgical closing of the vagina — sometimes a treatment for non-sexually-active women with severe prolapse). Women have had the procedure, retained a vagina, and gone on to get pregnant, and there have been complications for the newborns, who have been exposed in utero to high levels of testosterone. (The three types of metoidioplasty are simple, ring, and Belgrade. You can read up on them here.)

One stated reason many FTM people seek this procedure is so they can pee standing up. . . . . . . . . . that’s it. I just bought a gadget called a P-style so my granddaughter can take a leak while we’re in the boat fishing (standing up, without exposing herself). It cost twelve dollars, and involves no drugs, cutting, or recovery periods. (Note to female readers: also handy for camping, filthy service station bathrooms, and emergency roadside stops.)

Ideologically-sustained surgeons getting rich as hell taking advantage of people with mental disturbances

Complications of metoidioplasty include hematomas, infection, necrosis (dying transplanted tissue), dribbling and spraying, urethral structures and fistulas, and implanted pseudo-testicles either displacing (crawling out of the pseudo-scrotum) or being rejected.

Vaginoplasty

Vaginoplasty is the surgical construction of a pseudo-vagina. If you thought phalloplasty/meoidioplasty were risky procedures for no sound medical reason, buckle your seat belts for vaginoplasty, which makes the preceding procedures and potential outcomes look like a walk in the park. This is the procedure publicized in I Am Jazz, perhaps the most irresponsible “reality” TV program ever broadcast (about a boy whose delirious parents co-signed a “diagnosis” of gender dysphoria at age 4 (!), and followed through with formative “affirmations,” — including drugs and surgeries [and lucrative fame, of course] — through childhood and adolescence, and into pseudo-female adulthood).

Steps in the procedure — each a full-blown surgical scenario — are listed as (a) orchiectomy (castration), (b) penile disassembly, (c) clitoroplasty and dorsal nerve dissection, (d) urethroplasty, (e) perineal flap augmentation of “vaginal” introitus, (f) creation of “vaginal” cavity, (g) augmentation of the “neovagina” (scare quotes because it’s not a vagina at all, much less a new one), and (h) labiaplasty.

Before any of that begins, all the hair has to be removed from any tissues that will be pushed back inside the man’s body to serve as a pseudo-vagina. Yep, electrolysis or laser removal again (let the pain begin). Failure to remove every single follicle can result in not only irritating hairs inside the pseudoagina, but hairballs . . . that’s what I said, hairballs — which can gather all manner of ick and debris that lead to severe infections.

In the preoperative phase, patient and “physician” have to be on the watch for venous thromboembolism (VTE — blood clots in the veins). For starters, the recipient of this string of surgeries is already on estrogen, which increases the chance of VTE all on its own. But secondly, the patient is going to spend a hell of a lot of time in what’s called the lithotomy position, well know to women who’ve had pelvic exams.

Lithotomy position

In other words, countless hours with one’s hips and back pressed onto a hospital table that restricts blood flow. Some of us older folks have been counseled to get out of airplane seats on long flights and walk about, because prolonged sitting can enable the formation of blood clots. Same principle here.

“Doctors” who perform these surgeries disagree a great deal on what the best preoperative protocols should be, in large part because there have been no decent studies produced to date. So, you can call around and hope you get the cutter who’s right, because there are no consistent objective criteria to guide you. Some say don’t stop the estrogen. Some say stop it for this period, others for that period. Some say use thromboprophylactic drugs (like heparin), other say these cause hematomas. Some say prolonged bedrest, others say this might cause pulmonary complications. Here’s a nice set of dice. Give them a toss and decide before you undergo months of high risk and pain, and a lifetime of potential complications, for your pseudo-vagina.

Orchiectomies have been around for some time. The castrati of medieval fame, for example, or eunuchs. More recently as a way of slowing down prostate cancer. I performed one on one of our dogs years ago when I had access to the anesthetic drugs and surgical kits. The main thing to say about it, given that this procedure is well-researched, is that it’s a double point of no return. One doesn’t merely lose fertility (vasectomies do that, too), but one removes an organ that makes testosterone.

The next multi-step phase — penile disassembly, clitoroplasty, and dorsal nerve dissection — is a much thornier path. In the preoperative photograph below, the enriched, ideologically-enabled flesh-carvers have marked where they’ll cut (there will be more marks on the scrotum, and a big cut will be made to push a bunch of these external tissues inside). Basically, they’re going to make the frenum — much damaged—into a pseudo-clitoris, by cutting out the corpus (erectile flesh in the penis) and folding the nerves and the fremun itself, up against the pubic symphysis.

One NIH article on these procedures also warns, “Adequate proximal dissection is necessary or patients can experience an erection of their corporal stump, which is undesired.”

slash for cash

These “doctors” also disagree about the best way to cut, because one way carries a high risk of neurological damage to one area, and a different way carries a high risk of damage to a different area. Flip a coin.

The new “clitoris” is sutured into place over the symphysis, and a bit of penis flap is sewed in such a way as to simulate a clitoral hood.

Next comes “urethroplasty.” Surgeons have cut the internal flesh of the penis away from the male-length urethra, discarding the flesh and leaving a long, unattached “tube.” Tracing back between the frenum’s original distance from the pubis to it’s new position, surgeons encounter the bulbospongiosus muscle, which differs between males and females. It’s that muscle you use to “squeeze out the last drops” during urination, but it also participates in both male and female erections, as well as that rhythmic “jolting” during orgasm. On women, it’s totally internal and surrounds the distal vagina. On men, it extends into the basal shaft of the penis. When constructing a pseudo-vagina for a man, this “externality” becomes an issue. “Management” of this problem is, again, a subject of disagreement among the surgeons who perform vaginoplasties. Where to “release” from surrounding tissues. How to ensure sufficient vascularization to prevent necrosis. How to avoid rectal injuries. Hard to remember that this is a problem based on the simple need to urinate.

Just inferior to the perineal body, a 2 cm × 2 cm posteriorly based triangular shaped flap is made, which will later create a posterior fourchette and connected to the midline inferior edge of the penile skin tube. We generally place some sutures to prevent this area from prolapsing in the postoperative period and creating an undesired fullness in the posterior fourchette.

As to the creation of the “vaginal cavity,” there is an option for either “full” or “limited” depth. Let’s do a long excerpt:

The most daunting step of a vaginoplasty is the creation of the neovaginal canal given the risk of rectal and urethral injury. Preoperatively, all patients should be counseled regarding the possibility of “limited depth” vaginoplasty, which entails dissection to the membranous urethra. Patients who are not interested in penetrative forms of sex, higher perioperative risk or are not willing to commit to lifelong douching and dilating should be considered ideal candidates for limited depth vaginoplasty. This leaves the patient with an externally feminine genitalia with a very short vaginal canal of just a few centimeters inadequate for penetrative intercourse. However, it mitigates the risk of rectal and urethral injury, obviates the need for supplemental grafts or flaps for additional vaginal length (and thus hair removal needs), and shortens the operative time.

Standard perineal approach to neovaginal canal creation involves dissection of the bulbospongiosus muscle. We generally prefer to detach this muscle laterally and leave it attached posteriorly to allow it to be used as an interposition flap if a rectal injury is made later. Dissection continues to the central tendon, which is divided transversely. This allows mobility to the bulbar urethra. We prefer to place a lubricated rectal condom drape to allow sterile finger guidance to perirectal dissection.

Establishing the correct plane at this point is critical. We prefer sharp dissection using Metzenbaum scissors while finding a plane just anterior to Denonvilliers’ fascia with intermittent reassessment of depth of tissue to the finger in the rectum and urethral catheter palpation. Some authors describe using additional retractors in the urethra, such as a Lowsley, but we have found such instruments can alter the usual anatomic configuration. It is very easy at this point to mistakenly traverse the prostatic capsule and dissect in an intraprostatic fashion. If this occurs, the dissection will become difficult and the catheter will be palpated very closely. Full dissection of a canal will not be possible until the surgeon reestablishes the plane external to the prostatic capsule. Urethral injury is possible if dissection continues in an intraprostatic plane, though usually a two-layer closure leads to no significant consequence. Denonvilliers’ fascia (or the rectoprostatic fascia) should be left intact during this dissection. Inadvertent traversing of Denonvilliers’ will lead to dissection in mesorectal fat, which should be obvious to the surgeon. Longitudinal rectal fibers may also be seen, which should prompt the surgeon to re-establish the correct plane. Once the plane on the prostatic capsule is identified, blunt dissection often promptly leads the surgeon to the peritoneal reflection, ending the dissection. At the end of dissection, a purple Soul Source #7 vaginal dilator should be accommodated in the cavity with minimal effort. This dilator measures 5–1/2 inches in length and 1–7/16 inches in diameter.

This is from proponents and practitioners! “Lifelong douching and dilating.” “Risk of rectal and urethral injury.” “Need for supplemental grafts or flaps.” “Hair removal.” “Mistakenly traverse the prostatic capsule and dissect in an intraprostatic fashion.” “Urethral injury.” Go team!

The same article goes on to swoon over some of the creative “advances,” such as peritoneal flaps being used for scrotal skin grafts and how “laparoscopic and robotic approaches have decreased the morbidity of peritoneal flap harvest.” Whoa! All praise progress! Using a bit of intestine for the “neovagina” was a great thing, because it “self-lubricated” (Just like the real thing, Gwendoline!), but it’s “fallen out of favor” for some “trans-women,” because . . . . well . . . there were lots of complications from the “bowel harvest” (Who knew that cutting out a big piece of one’s healthy intestine might result in “accidental morbidities”?) or that the intestinal pseudo-vaginas might smell a lot like shit.

Some people don’t get a satisfactory simulation by making scrotal tissue into pseudo-labia, so to make more lifelike simulations the cutters can “harvest” a bit of skin from the hollowed out penis for the labia minora and use more scrotal skin for the labia majora.

Postoperative care for the pseudo-vagina is a lifelong affair. Tissues have been removed, dissected, transplanted, inverted, and so on; and these tissues are not the same as real vaginas. Real vaginas are supple. They have a high stretch factor. Pseudo-vaginas don’t. The surgeons have sewn this inversion to the pelvic wall in order to force scarring, but repeated attempts to stretch the pseudo-vagina, which lacks the pliability of a real one, results in micro-scarring and calcification. So, inflammation and infection are perennial problems for recipients of this radical body modification. And, of course, there’s the aforementioned lubrication problem. Real vaginas work in this regard, especially well between menarche and menopause. Fake one’s don’t. Not an issue for those who’ve foregone penetrative sex for a lifetime, but for those who do (and their sexual partners), two things are required. The lubricants, of course (which have to be thoroughly douched out after sex to prevent infections, because the pseudo-vagina is not self-cleaning like real ones), and the frequent self-dilation of the canal using . . . rods.

stretching didoes, or “dilation rods”

This process is extremely time consuming, and dilation regimens seem to vary greatly from patient to patient, ranging from one hour a few times a week to multiple hour-long sessions per day. This process is typically painful and may be ineffective. Like the strictures that form in the skin tube neo-urethra of the neo-phallus, this penile-inverted skin tube was not designed to be resting against itself for long periods. This is, however, unavoidable. Therefore, the tissue within this tube is prone to strictures, or what doctors will call “vaginal stenosis” to get insurance to pay for the revision as a result of pressure necrosis (the tendency of tissue is to inflame, die, and scar to surrounding tissue as a result of extended periods of pressure).

This can make dilation impossible, resulting in a warm, moist, non-self-cleaning pocket that is an ideal environment for bacteria which is now adjacent to a shortened urethra, capable of causing chronic infections and sepsis. Additionally, dilation, which is sometimes performed by physicians under anesthesia so that more force can be used, may cause tears or fistulas between the neo-vagina and other structures such as the urethra or rectum. One unfortunate vaginoplasty recipient I covered learned he had a recto-”vaginal” fistula when he farted through it. This fistula was allegedly caused by the anesthesia-enabled, surgeon-performed dilation. (Exulansic, ibid.)

Great. A real medical miracle.

All these issues mean that “revision” surgeries are often required. Depending on which “design” is used, revision rates range from 27 percent to 60 percent.

I’ll wind this up with a list of complications listed on a site that supports the surgeries (God knows why, I don’t.):

Most serious

Death

• You could die. Some of the complications below are potentially fatal.

Fistula

• This is when a hole develops in the wall between the colon and the vagina. Read a patient report about her fistula.

Blood loss

• Some patients have had massive hemorrhaging after vaginoplasty, requiring many units of blood (up to 15 in one patient’s case). There is an additional small risk that donor blood could carry an infectious disease. Steps to avoid this: stop all drugs that affect clotting at the time recommended by your surgeon. Some surgeons recommend banking your own blood prior to surgery.

Blood clots

• These can lead to heart attack, stroke. Steps to avoid this: stop all drugs and hormones at the time recommended by the surgeon. Stop smoking.

Infection

• This can result from the surgical procedure or from improper postoperative care. This could affect your recovery time, your surgical outcome, and in extreme cases could possibly kill you. Steps to avoid this: be very diligent out hygiene postoperatively, especially regarding bowel movements and dilation.

Pneumonia

• Fluid in the lungs is sometimes contracted after surgery. Steps to avoid this: Stop smoking. Get in shape. Use an incentive respirator after surgery or do breathing exercises. Walk or at least sit up as much as possible after surgery.

Necrosis

• Death of tissue. This can be caused by infection, tissue rejection, or loss of blood supply to tissue.

Vaginal collapse

• In severe cases of stenosis, the entire new vagina can cave in, which may lead to reconstruction and in severe cases removal.

Paralysis

• Caused by stroke from a blood clot, or a severed nerve. Extremely rare.

Allergic reaction

• Severe allergic reactions can cause your air passage to close or send you into shock. Reactions can be from anesthesia, certain drugs such as penicillin. Non-fatal reactions include rashes and hives.

Exceretory

Bowel problems

• You could have permanent problems, especially if you have a fistula or get vaginoplasty involving a bowel segment (sigmoid vaginoplasty).

Urinary problems

• You could have permanent urinary problems, from urine stream direction and spraying to problems with incontinence or painful urination. Your urethra can be very wide, which may cause problems in intimate situations, or it may stick out or have unremoved spongy penile tissue around it, which can cause irritation when sitting or walking.

Sexual function

Inorgasmic

• You may never have an orgasm again. Ever.

Depth problems

• You may end up with a vagina too shallow for standard sexual function.

Stenosis (width problems)

• You may have a vagina too narrow or standard sexual function

Lubrication

• You will probably need some sort of lubrication for any penetrative sexual activity. Some people achieve moderate amounts of prostatic lubrication, but usually must supplement it. Conversely, those who have sigmoid vaginoplasty sometimes secrete so much mucus from the bowel segment in their vagina that they must wear maxi pads at all times.

Numbness

• You may have numbness in some or all parts of your genitals, which limits your pleasure and increases the chance of injury from your lack of sensation during vigorous activity.

Pain

• You may have permanent pain in some areas from a severed nerve, etc.

Hypersensitivity

• You may find some areas too sensitive to be touched. Hypersensitive areas can also cause discomfort from just walking or sitting.

Cosmetic

Scarring

• Some people have noticeable scarring that is discolored or raised.

Graft

• Some patients require a skin graft, which can mean additional scars.

Keloids

• Some (notably among African-derived patients) get this unusual type of raised red scars

Hair

• Some patients have reported hair growth inside the vagina and around the opening. This is difficult to remove after vaginoplasty, and is the reason many advise getting electrolysis prior to vaginoplasty.

Clitoris size

• Some women have had clitoris that is much larger than a typical female’s. Others have had one that is too small.

Shape

• Asymmetrical outcomes are not uncommon, especially in one-stage procedures.

Labia

• Sometimes labia are different shapes or positioned differently.

Urethra

• Some have a urine stream that points in an unusual direction. Others have had a urethra opening that was big enough that partner mistook it for her vaginal opening.

Positioning

• Some have reported the entire vulva is too high or too low, or that there is too much or too little space between the clitoris and the vaginal opening.

Yeast infection/douching

• Some have temporary, and in some cases, chronic problems with yeast infections or unpleasant smell following surgery.

Psychological

Fatigue

• Vaginoplasty takes a lot out of you, and many find that they tire easily in the months following surgery.

Depression

• Many find that completion of vaginoplasty leaves them feeling a bit lost, especially if they had expectations that vaginoplasty would make a major difference in their day-to-day existence. It won’t.

Regret (didn’t put in proper thought)

• In rare cases, patients have decided that vaginoplasty wasn’t the solution to their unhappiness.

• Some people with regret may also modify their gender identity and/or gender expression after vaginoplasty. This may be due to pressures from work, school, faith, family, etc. [or realizing what they’ve done is mad -SG]

Temporary

Evacuation

• Many have problems going to the bathroom for a while after surgery, from constipation and hemorrhoids, to inability to control their bladder, sometimes requiring incontinence pads. This usually resolves itself in a few months.

Mild bleeding

• Many have mild bleeding, especially around sutures or after dilation, which requires the use of a sanitary pad for a few months.

Bed sores

• Those who do not move around enough sometimes get bed sores, which can take a while to heal.

Ripped suture

• Occasionally someone might tear a suture from certain types of movement. While usually not a serious problem, it can cause a small scar.

Clitoral scab

• Many report they have a scab over their clitoris following surgery. In some cases, when this falls off,m there is very little protruding clitoral tissue remaining. This can be corrected during labiaplasty if desired.

Shocks

• Many report a sensation of electrical “shocks” as nerves in the surgical site regenerate. This is especially common in the legs near the pelvis.

Bruising

• You can expect bruising ranging from mild to significant, which can take many weeks to resolve.

Nausea

• Following anesthesia, many get nauseated. This can also be caused by the antibiotics, or the hospital food! ;

Allergic reaction (drugs, leg things, etc)

• Some patients get contact dermatitis from the leg compression stockings, the catheter, or from other vaginoplasty related items.

. . .

Let’s move on now from what are summarized as “bottom” surgeries in deceptively benign child-speak, to what is, in child-speak, called “top” surgery.

Double mastectomy (aka “masculinizing chest reconstruction”)

The surgical amputation of women’s breasts has been refined in response to cancer. In some cases where breast cancer is already bilateral and aggressively on the move, the only tactical retrenchment left to prolong the woman’s life is double amputation. When plastic surgery has been involved in the case of cancer patients (implants), it has been to treat the disfigurement of the surgery. Some women opt for implants (which carry their own potential complications), and some women don’t.

The use of the term amputation has become controversial because ideologues don’t like the sound of it. The definition of amputation, however, is:

• The act of amputating; especially, the operation of cutting off a limb or other part of the body, or a portion of it.

• The act of amputating; esp. the operation of cutting off a limb or projecting part of the body.

Even the more specifically latinate medical term mastectomy has been replaced by “masculinizing chest reconstruction.” Before I go further, I ask the reader’s indulgence of a brief excerpt from my book on gender and war, Borderline.

In 1984, Carol Cohn — now the director of the Consortium on Gender, Security and Human Rights in Boston — was invited along with forty-seven other college teachers to attend a summer workshop on “nuclear doctrine,” featuring a host of “defense intellectuals.” (After the war, in 1949, the War Department had changed its name to the Department of Defense, suggesting that every military action taken by the United States is defensive in nature.) Cohn was one of ten women who attended.

She writes that the gathering threw her into a state of disequilibrium. The “defense intellectuals” were affable, likeable men, who discussed “scenarios” that anticipated the deaths of millions of people, in a language that was simultaneously sexual and technical, never mentioning that human beings would be killed in these scenarios. She became so fascinated by this dissonance that she continued working with these “defense intellectuals” for a year to better understand them and her reaction to them. After a time, listening to lectures and panels and engaging in debates, she was surprised to find that her original sense of shock at the “extraordinary abstraction and removal from what I knew as reality” was not increased during her year with these men, but that she found herself becoming comfortable with the language and concepts they used:

“As I learned their language, as I became more and more engaged with their information and their arguments, I found that my own thinking was changing. Soon, I could no longer cling to the comfort of studying an external and objectified “them.” I had to confront a new question: How can I think this way?”

She termed their language “technostrategic.” It is characterized by bloodless terms like “throw weights,” “counterforce exchanges,” and “deterrent postures.” Bombs are called “clean” if they leave behind less radiation hazard. These defense intellectuals coined the term collateral damage. There are no bodies, no wounds; there is no agony or grief. One nuclear missile is actually named “The Peacekeeper.” (Goff, Borderline, pp. 356–7)

“Masculinizing chest reconstruction” is a perfect example of neutrally abstract terminology — this technostrategic language — used to conceal enough of the reality of the practice to make it benignly acceptable. As Carol Cohn pointed out, her own use of this technostrategic language, these grammatical and lexical modifications of discourse — in spite of her acknowledgement of the horrors the “defense” intellectuals were evasively discussing — began to change the way she thought.

Cohn admitted that she learned to enjoy using technostrategic language. Its terms were “racy, sexy, snappy.” Upon reflection she realized that she enjoyed “the thrill of being able to manipulate an arcane language, the power of entering the secret kingdom, being someone in the know.” Cohn said that using the language made her feel in control and that her mastery of it made her feel that the “whole thing” of nuclear weapons and nuclear war is therefore “under control”:

“The more conversations I participated in using this language, the less frightened I was of nuclear war. . . . Structurally, speaking technostrategic language removes [us] from the position of victim, and puts [us] in the position of the planner, the user, the actor.” (Ibid., 358)

(I didn’t kill anyone when I was in the Army. I “neutralized threats.” No reason to get on my knees every night over that.)

“Masculinizing chest reconstruction.” Okay, then.

There’s no need, given the frequency of double mastectomies, to review the dangers, or “complications.” A five minute web search will yield everything you might want to know. A down and dirty complications summary of 72 patients who had double mastectomies to look more like men:

Major complications

Hematoma (return to OR) 3/72

Hematoma (IR drain) 1/72

Abscess 1/72

Postoperative atelectasis 1/72

Minor complications

Seroma 3/72

Delayed wound healing 1/72

Superficial thrombophlebitis 1/72

Dog-ear 6/72

Hypertrophic scarring 4/72

Nipple complications

Nipple areolar complex sloughing 6/69

Nipple areolar complex loss 1/69

Nipple hypopigmentation 4/69

Revision procedures

Return to OR 3/72

Revision performed in office 1/72

Instead I want to focus on the irreversibility of breast amputation. Here again, we run into the ideological lies, i.e., the claim that this procedure can be “reversed” (with implant surgery), as if breasts were a tattoo that can be removed and replaced at will. Breasts, in fact, like genitalia and the rest of our procreative organs, have a well-known and well-understood purpose. They’re not superficially aesthetic features like the fins on my first car (a hard-bitten 1959 Plymouth Savoy I bought for $100). They’re not primarily there to sexually stimulate adolescent boys. They’re there to feed babies.

“Top surgeries” are being performed on thirteen-year-olds. This requires the parents’ collusion and an ethics-free surgeon. My thirteen-year-old granddaughter is staying with us as this is written. Her body is maturing rapidly, but when you talk with her or do things with her— I took her fishing this week — it becomes glaringly obvious that she hasn’t the capacity to consent yet. We still have to monitor her food intake, because left to her own devices — like any early adolescent — she would eat nothing but junk. It’s bad enough how technomanagerial liberalism has deskilled and infantilized most of the adults in this society; but any responsible parent knows damn well that kids, even those whose bodies are developing toward normal adulthood, have not yet developed the capacity to recognize the origins of their desires, to understand that failure to fulfill a desire is not the end of the world, to judge the possible and probable consequences of those desires, or to have yet gained sufficient self-mastery over those desires.

Certainly, absent lifesaving measures for cancer, no one in their right minds would have this done to a thirteen-year-old:

Anyone — parent or surgeon — who conspires to have this done to a teenager needs to be horse-whipped.

I don’t know a single soul over the age of thirty who doesn’t regret something they did as a teen or even into their early adulthood. That’s because we learn from experience, and our perspectives change. This is one you can’t take back. If you want to have a child and breastfeed him or her, that door’s been closed and bolted.

I guarantee you that in most of those ever more frequent cases when parents have “supported” an early teen having her breasts amputated, there’s been some suicide-extortion involved, because all kids learn early the power of manipulation, and they’re now exposed online and among peers to some evil shit. Parenting has become increasingly challenging; but giving in to this is beyond the pale.

Facial plastic surgery (aka “facial feminization”)

Men (and now some boys) who want to transition into pseudo-women now have access to facial plastic surgery, which has been re-named facial feminization to make it appear to be something other than what it is — surgical simulacra. The risks are well-known, and often observable among aging celebrities who’ve been cut and stretched so many times they’ve become cat-faced. Once again, this is not surgery to correct for deformity or disfigurement. It’s elective.

“Facial feminization” is actually several surgeries, often conducted in phases to allow healing times in between: frontal sinus removal/setback, brow lift, scalp/hairline advancement, cheek augmentation, lip lift/augmentation, mandible contouring, genioplasty (chin surgery), and tracheal shave.

Let’s tranlsate these clinical terms into everyday speech. They involve slicing the skin away from the face, breaking and removing bits of facial bone, carving away flesh, and in the case of the “tracheal shave” or reduction thyrochondroplasty, cutting the patient’s throat to gain access to their voicebox and slicing off some of the cartilage to make an “Adam’s apple” smaller. If the patient’s mental illness leads that patient to seek it, then “voice feminization surgery” is also available, wherein the surgeon actually stitches together the cricoid and thyroid cartilage, or uses a laser to destroy portions of the vocal chords.

The censorious mob

Ideologies always serve some function. They are aimed at something. They seek to control the cultural temperament. Gender ideology is no different from other ideologies that spawn their own paradoxes. The paradox, apart from the contradictions above, of gender ideology its adoption of “freedom” talk to justify a new Puritanism.

I don’t mean that as a perfunctory metaphor. The parallels are more than skin deep. Puritanism was a movement to “purify” Protestants of any vestige of Catholic tradition. The New Puritanism is all about razing traditions. Puritans were Calvinists, who saw the world divided between the “elect” and the rest of us who are impossible reprobates — the elect being confirmatively visible by way of their adherence to a set of cultural codes. The New Puritans identify one another (and those of us who are the non-elect), likewise, by the adoption and acceptance of special fashions and insider language.

Natal sex is not “assigned,” for example, but observed; nonetheless, even physicians will now use this Trojan horse term. Insider language. Question-begging language. Deceitful language.

Those of us who ignore or refuse said fashions and insider language are obviously apostates; and there is no hesitation — in fact, hesitation might suggest one is not among the elect — to suppress and punish the non-elect.

The Puritans were zealous witch hunters, and they wanted women out of public life, beginning with the destruction of Marian theology. The New Puritans, who’ve stolen the mantle of feminism, are both on the hunt for witches and profoundly misogynistic — to the point of denying women’s natural existence, and (with regrettable political success) now aiming at actual women’s erasure in politics and law.

When the Puritans achieved political power, they were enthusiastic enforcers and censors. Today’s New Puritans are now imposing themselves through law and blacklists in politics, medicine, “journalism,” entertainment, “human resources” departments, and education, and they have a Jacobean mob presence on social media.

This dogma — and here is what’s so remarkable about it — gets away with saying things, and having those things widely accepted, that are just obviously not fucking true. Neither is a man a woman, nor is a woman a man. But this cultural schizophrenia has, with the aid of a savagely effective propaganda machine, advanced so successfully that people who recognize the absurdity of these claims are increasingly afraid to state these obvious truths in public. Children in public schools are being indoctrinated into this dogma; and opposing them will summarily result one being shunned as a “fascist,” of all things. Public figures being physically attacked. People being forced out of their jobs. Speakers being shouted down by disruptive mobs. I hesitate to mention “human resources,” only because that term itself is part of the larger problem, but HR departments now routinely warn employees in briefings not to use terms like “pregnant woman.” You cannot make this shit up. Stephen Adubato calls it “liberal pietism du jour.”

Men punching women. The new improved feminism.

Holly Lawford-Smith is an Associate Professor in Political Philosophy at the University of Melbourne, Australia. She gave a speech earlier this year at a Let Women Speak rally, when she was off the clock, and within days the campus of her employer was papered with posters calling her a fascist.

Even the Dean of her own school, under pressure from ideologues, resorted to associating her with neo-Nazis.

The longer game here is to drive anyone who questions this ideology out of every public space except where the ideologues haven’t yet gained power, which are often “conservative,” then to brand the offenders as right-wing for speaking to the only people who will give them an audience. I’ll be accused of this most likely, and I’ve been a public socialist (not the “national” kind) of one sort or another for over thirty years.

Wedge issues and political reshuffling

The so-called political right sees trans-ideology as a gift, but it’s a transient gift, and you can separate those who are right-ideologues and opportunists from those who are honest and principled “conservatives” with one simple test. Do they deploy “science” against trans-ideology and still embrace climate change denial? This is my own red-line of determination about whether I should take seriously anyone who says he or she is of the “right” or anyone who has been assigned that label by others. I’ll overlook ignorance about climate science and the more general biospheric catastrophe that’s unfolding around us. Most people don’t have the time or interpretive tools to deep-dive these issues, and so they’re vulnerable to distortion, disinformation, and demagogues. Confirmation bias is a enduring temptation. But when someone with influence and an education is feeding that confirmation bias out of desire to advance a more general political program (especially for big business), I’m going to point the finger and say, “J’accuse!” You’re not honest. You’re just another cheap polemicist, an obedient foot soldier for your party.

I’ll say the same thing about those who want to weld trans-ideology to a more general “woke panic” program, conflating this issue with race, for example. The restoration of white supremacy has been a key organizing principle for portions of the US Republican Party ever since Nixon’s Southern Strategy, so when I hear these conflations, I know I am hearing from someone who is either ignorant of the history or every bit as much an ideologue as the most rabid gender cop.

I won’t divert down the path here of racial opportunism on the left or the racial identitarianism that corresponds to gender liberalism — real things, too, which empower the right by giving them the stick to beat the rest of us. I’m just saying, when a topic under discussion becomes programmatically conflated in a partisan menu, as opposed to sticking to the debate topic, we are dealing with a power-seeking agenda and not a principled interlocutor. Here is neither good will nor good faith. The gravitational field of partisan politics is always a danger to principled debate, because it inevitably becomes tactical and instrumental . . . manipulative, in other words. It no longer about seeking the truth together. Manipulation is so much the water we swim in that we seldom recognize how this Machiavellian consequentialism has become an ethical default.

All that said, in recognition of this default as a social reality, and in pursuit of some kind of general account of our political terrain in the here and now, we have to acknowledge what an excellent wedge issue we are dealing with. In the US, this woke-panic (there is no such thing as “wokeism,” y’all) — with gender ideology as its battle banner — is the main thing assisting the continued survival of the Republican Party, which has devolved in all other respects — against the backdrop of a Democratic Party that is corrupt all the way down and now the vanguard of technocratic managerial despotism — into a squabbling cacophony of old guard capitalists, social conservatives, economic interests (like small businesses and big oil), evangelical millennarians, libertarians, gun nuts, conspiracy theorists, patriotic fantasists, and hard-boiled racists.

This is an effective wedge issue, because gender ideology is as described above — and it’s really, actually becoming politically powerful. When the perceived threat of any ideology on the march is to our children, it has crossed the Rubicon, and the fightback is inevitable. That is precisely why this “issue” has taken on the aspect of civil war. In war, as the saying goes, we see strange allies.

I am a Magnificat socialist. As a long standing member of the economic left — and by that I mean for me Barack Obama is a right wing Democrat and a Reagan Republican — who will continue to side with the precarious and the poor against the rich who prey upon them (us), I am chagrined at the disappearance of any genuine left, which has now been swallowed whole by trans-ideology and all the metaphysical assumptions that are smuggled in with it. As someone gratefully tutored by leftist feminists (not the fun kind) — who recognized out of the gate how thoroughly misogynistic were the fuzzy “feminists” of what Abigail Favale (whose book I just received) calls “trickle down Butlerism,” with their ardent defenses of the woman hating porn industry, the woman hating prostitution industry, and the woman-erasing trans-activism movement — I am equally chagrined by liberals’ power-grabbing attempts to establish a dangerous and offensive medicalized biopolitical regime which wants to speak a transhumanist incumbency into existence and police our language to advance their agenda with all the censorious enthusiasm of a Saudi despot.

My flirtation with the Democratic Socialists of America during the Sanders campaign was soured early by my experience of three meetings, where the first thing one encountered was the threat of being browbeaten if one failed to proclaim one’s pronouns on one’s name tags. I was am sixty-four-year old man with a beard, wearing the same grunge-clothing I’ve favored all my life. Everyone knew goddam well I was a “he-him,” but failure to put these pronouns on a piece of sticky paper and wear it on my chest led people to keep their distance and give me the side-eye, even though I’d had more political experience than pretty much anyone else in the room.

This, of course, exposes a perennial fracture in the left (who’da thunk it?) between the Prometheans, whose metaphysical convictions align closely with transhumanism and technomanagerial rule, and the ecologic-economic left that spans from ecocommunists to agrarian social democrats to subsistence socialists to degrowthers to distributists. They’ve all been sidelined by the fantasy-left who still dream of some techno-utopia, including one that surgically re-engineers healthy bodies.

Canadian activist and eco-socialist Stuart Parker, who has roundly and very convincingly confronted this bullshit, was driven out of public spaces with malignant glee by the gender Stasi. In a recent Facebook post, he said:

In my thirty-six years as a climate activist, no conservative who has disagreed with me on climate has ever tried to destroy my career, my home, my relationship, my friendships, my social media accounts, my radio shows, my podcasts or my recreational activities.

People working in the fossil fuel industry who feel my efforts are destroying their employment prospects, people who think climate change is a hoax, a fraud I am helping to perpetrate, people who falsely believe I receive money from shadowy European interests: none of these people have felt entitled to go after my ability to earn a living or have a romantic partner.

In my three years of opposing genderwang, dozens, likely hundreds of progressives (many of whom I considered comrades and/or friends) have felt it totally appropriate to engage in unapologetic concerted public efforts to destroy these things, to even come after my fortnightly tabletop Runequest games and try to stop those.

In a social partition of contemporary North America, I would rather be in a conservative society, even if it were significantly more on fire, because I wouldn’t feel unsafe disagreeing with my neighbours.

EDIT: Ultimately, I am not choosing to be a conservative. I am realizing that it is easier to be a Marxist eco-socialist among conservatives than among progressives.

You want to know why some of us are talking with conservatives. That’s fucking why. That, and because they target children, and we’re not having it. Kids ar not going to be sacrificed on the altar of ideology, full fucking stop.

I’ve joined this fight, because the state, with its immense power, is now an active ally in the indoctrination of children with an ideology that will lead them to disfigure and disable themselves for the rest of their lives, throughout which they will have been made drug dependents — ATMs for so-called professionals and corporations. Parents are having their children taken away by courts for refusing to “affirm” these “identities.” State schools are putting these ideas into their heads. No, I don’t want a drag queen — in drag — teaching my children. Twenty years ago, a fraction of one percent of kids identified as trans. Now, it’s almost one in ten.

This is an emergency. It’s a medical emergency. It’s a cultural emergency. It’s a political emergency. It’s a spiritual emergency.

I’ll leave readers, especially parents, with a link to an articled called “A State of Parental Dysphoria,” which says, among other things . . .

Parental dysphoria involves the extended state of having to stay silent about something that you know will lead to tragedy, because you don’t want to lose your child, your friends, your extended family, and your marriage — everything you’ve worked to build. You do this to preserve some small chance of having an impact, to keep your child close enough to eventually help them find their way out of this delusion. It’s living with fear — fear of loss, fear of estrangement, fear of losing your own mind, fear of losing your integrity by denying your own instincts. Those who suffer from this condition, myself included, know this to be the most awful feeling you’ve ever experienced in your life.

If you suffer from parental dysphoria, you wish to say, “You were not ‘born in the wrong body’ — that’s impossible.” But you also know your child wants so badly to believe this that you aren’t sure whether to lie or tell the truth about how you see things. So, instead, you say very little and pray every day that your child will find peace in their own body before it is too late, before your child denies and destroys their own sexual function and fertility, and poisons their body with synthetic hormones.

It’s the tears you choke back as you do your best to support your child despite their best efforts to push you away. It’s holding your breath, not even knowing how you can carry on. It’s a feeling of hopelessness you have never felt before.

It’s the horror of being told by your other child, the one who serves as the pronoun police in your home, that you are the one who isn’t loving and supportive. It’s the shame of realizing that you’ve lost your ability to be the adult in the room. It’s feeling that the liberal, progressive values you instilled in your children are being used against you in a way you could never have seen coming. It’s disheartening, destabilizing, and destructive.

Parental dysphoria is what follows when you’re advised by a professional to call your child by a new name, one that represents to you a symbol of their deep pain, a name that is more likely to have its origins in Pokémon than in the family heritage you tried to pass on to them.

It’s the dissonance of having to validate a decision to transition at school made by a child going through a confusing and difficult time in their life. It’s the out-of-body experience of hearing your child say, “I am not the person you raised — I am someone else entirely.” It’s the loneliness of being the only person who thinks all of this is damaging to your child, rather than it being “brave” and “liberating.”

It’s insane, actually, this parental dysphoria. It’s insane to live with and to live through. It makes you gradually lose your own tether to reality, bit by bit, day by day.

We should all want to know why so many kids are declaring a trans identity. We should not simply accept this as normal, and we should certainly not teach it, nor enshrine it into law, until someone can demonstrate through unassailable longitudinal studies that any of it is valid in the first place. Many of these young people are being led astray by the very people who are supposed to protect them. Doctors and psychologists are no longer experts to be trusted.

Here is a documentary, called “Affirmation Generation.” Watch it. Share it. Share this article with those who like to read long-form rants.

What can we learn from Ivan Illich?

In the second introductory paragraph, I gave a very brief summary of the traditional gender as “a set of sex-aligned forms of responsibility, dress, mannerism, speech, tools, jobs, interests, and so forth. This complementary gendered relation, while manifest in different forms, has been a constant in all human societies.” In this sense, gender — in roughly the way some second-wavers meant it — has always been “fluid”; but it’s always been “binary” and complementary, too.

That’s because — as we said before — this whole gender lunacy is utterly dependent upon modern “medicine” and technology. Someone who had plenty to say about liberal modernity and its injurious institutions — energy, technology, medicine, education — was Ivan Illich, a twentieth century polymath, priest, scholar, philosopher, historian, and social critic.

In 1982, Illich published Gender, the book that crashed his popularity on the left when his deeply Christian metaphysical commitments became clear. It wasn’t as if he had been hiding them; but people cherry pick authors the same way agenda-driven exegetes proof text the Scriptures.

So what did Illich say about what he called “the sad loss of gender”?

For starters, Illich didn’t attack the problem of gender from the perspective of tradition versus progress, but from the perspective of the regime of gender versus the regime of scarcity. Absent a full appreciation of what Illich meant by this, the rest of what he said about gender will be re-routed, by our own late/post/modern preconceptions which arise out of the tradition-versus-progress frame, onto a categorical false trail. In his very opening sentences of the book, Gender, he compares what he is doing with gender to post-Hegelians studying decisive historical breaks, like the transition from feudalism to capitalism. In fact, he’s analyzing the rise of capitalism . . . as a regime of scarcity. He is not looking, however, at macroeconomics, but at what has happens at the level of the household when a society is organized around economic coercion centered on monetary dependency, money being the necessary but “scarce resource.” In particular, he’s looking at the ways in which this regime of scarcity, which tends toward deskilling, de-localization, atomization, and a “war on subsistence” undermines gender — as traditionally and locally understood and practiced — as an essential step along the path of establishing and sustaining capitalism. Capitalism tends toward the enclosure of all things within economics.

In order to perfect the liberal political fiction of the autonomous individual and perfect the liberal metaphysical fantasy of that autonomous individual “inventing” him- or herself, the fiction has to become genderless so it can compete for the scarce resources of money, education, technology, consumer goods, and jobs. Language itself has to make a transition from the “vernacular” — Illich’s word for local, organic, embedded language, that is also gendered — to the technical — like the bloodless and genderless [or maybe “technostrategic”] language of economists, clinicians, managers, and military officers. In those HR briefings we discussed earlier, there’s an explicit prohibition in workplaces now from using anything but gender-neutral terms. This is how a woman on her period becomes a “menstruating person.” Illich called this “the unisex postulate.”

Every modern institution, from school to family and from union to courtroom, incorporates this assumption of scarcity, thereby dispersing its constitutive unisex postulate throughout society. For example, men and women have always grown up; now they need “education” to do so. In traditional societies, they matured without the conditions for growth being perceived as scarce. Now, educational institutions teach them that desirable learning and competence are scarce good for which men and women must compete. Thus education turns into the name for learning to live under the assumption of scarcity. But education, considered as an example of a typical modern need, entails more: it teaches that he or she who experiences its process is primarily a human being in need of a genderless education . . . What Karl Polanyi has called the “disembedding” of a formal market economy, I am describing, anthropologically, as the transmogrification of gender to sex. (Gender, pp. 10–12)

Illich did “genealogy” far better than Butler or her model, Foucault, because he didn’t try to impose his own experience on other cultures and times as metaphysical universals, and because he was not a Nietzschean who couldn’t see past his own obsession with power. Illich identifies the cultural/historical genesis of modern “sex,” and with it, “sexism,” as an artifact of modernity. By sexism, Illich did not mean merely discrimination against women, but the reduction of the expansive and deeply embedded understanding of gender to “economic sex.” It was only with this move that the eventual redefinitions of gender, based upon the so-called sex-gender distinction, became possible. Butler merely took the last abstractive and wholly ideological step of suggesting that even the given-ness of our embodiment is a social construction.

Illich covered much of the same ground as Foucault, but as a Catholic and not a Nietzschean. Gandalf returns from death in Lord of the Rings and says, “I am Saruman [the greatest of the wizards], or Saruman as he was meant to be.” Illich was Foucault, or Foucault as he was meant to be. Illich’s critique of modernity is qualitatively more robust than Foucault or his disciple, Bulter.

Illich never denied that the world was broken or that people seek power. It’s right there in Genesis. Nor did he deny that under vernacular gender arrangements, women often got a raw deal. His main point was not to deny that women often get the nasty end of the stick; Gender was his engagement with the second wave concerns in the air at the time of its writing. His theses on “shadow work” as a particularly late modern instantiation of women getting the shitty end is well worth the effort to get one’s head around. His “unisex postulate” was describing what he saw with the rise of technology and the way it leveled the old complementarities based on household production, the relative physical gifts of men and women, and child rearing/nursing.

What may have triggered his critics — it certainly triggered me at first, as someone schooled in the post-Marxian fraction of the second wave — was (1) his exposure of the blemishes on our prior ideological commitments, and (2) his attention to class.

Up to now, wherever equal rights were enacted and enforced, wherever partnership between th sexes became stylish, these innovations gave a sense of accomplishment to the elites who proposed and obtained them, but left the majority of women untouched, if not worse off than before. (p. 17)

Interestingly, I have recently come across feminist women thinkers — like Mary Harrington, Louise Perry, Christine Emba, and (in the past week) Abigail Favale — who are (re)discovering the ways in which Illich was prescient. Before I go further, let me clarify what I mean when I say “feminism,” and why the aforementioned writers are still “feminists.”

Feminism has become a loaded word, one that suggests agendas and doctrines, as opposed to a practice. This is unfortunate, in one sense, because it conceals the variability of feminism, and in another, because the doctrinal understanding, as opposed to the practical, vectors in unnecessary political antagonisms. I’ll start with the practical first by defining feminism as the practice of focusing within an existing field of study on the unique standpoints, experiences, and interests of women. This doesn’t require the person conducting the study to stake out political ground. When Carole Pateman looked at women’s standpoints, experiences, and interests, she was doing so within her research on contract theory. When Carolyn Merchant was looking at women’s standpoints, experiences, and interests, she was doing so in an historical review of the impacts of Descartes and Bacon on our more general attitude toward nature. When Maria Mies undertook her canonical work, she was standpointing women from within world-system theory. These examples were both additive and corrective — additive in expanding our understanding of the fields under review, and corrective of any earlier unacknowledged male myopia, bias, or oversight.

The variability of feminism, which gives the lie to generalizations by either advocates or antagonists, is based on the fact that, seen thus as a practical endeavor, “feminism” does not, on its own, have any inherent doctrinal content. Even when it has drifted toward doctrine, it has drifted in many directions, because it’s additive and not original. Something that might be true of liberal feminism or post-structuralist feminism can be anathema to a radical feminist or a Catholic feminist or a Marxist feminist. Judith Butler would find little in common with Vandana Shiva. Feminism is not any one doctrine, so being reflexively for or against “feminism” is polemical (or, more often just ignorant of the body of feminist work), not rational. Ignoring it as a practice, however, a practice which has produced many valuable insights, is mule-headed stupidity . . . or a political agenda (I’m tempted to say I’ve been redundant). And yes, there are a fair number of very public and self-professed “anti-feminists” who are misogynistic mountebanks. And no, not all. My point is, finally, that these things have to be taken on a case by case basis.

Mary Harrington, in particular, has resuscitated the (Illichian) understanding of all the ways in which feminist practice and thought, as well as all other forms of practice and thought, are historically embedded in a trialectic between technology, culture, and prevailing ideology. What Illich ran afoul of with the left was the progress narrative, one which regards all technological innovation as morally neutral and potentially beneficial. I’ll recommend Harrington to readers, and with that leave her to explain herself.

This jeremaid you are reading now has already done what it can to describe exactly and comprehensively how insanely fucked up certain new innovations (and their ideological correlatives) can, in fact, be.

Harrington’s recent hobby horse has been endocrine contraceptives and how they produced a tectonic shift in the terrain of gender. Favale, if I’m reading her correctly on my first cursory pass, is saying esentially the same thing. Where Illich was on about economics, work, dismebedding, and technology, Harrington and Favale are talking about sex between the sexes, and how that’s been renegotiated post-pill. The pill has not been liberatory for women , except for those with means. In many respects, it heightened the sexual objectification and exploitation of women.

It’s a feminist point to make that the first big advocates for tinkering around with women’s endocrine systems to increase their sexual availability . . . were dudes. Hugh Hefner — a world class pimp and abuser who made a fortune objectifying vulnerable young women — was among the pill’s early public champions.

Women, on the other hand, got higher rates of cancer and cardiovascular disease, a huge spike in unwanted pregnancies (resulting in a corresponding abortion spike), feeling like shit half the time, a reduction in actual libido, and increased social pressure to engage in sex when they didn’t really want to. Christine Emba’s book, Rethinking Sex, is replete with accounts of young women doing things they didn’t want to do, but went along with because it was expected. The most teling example was one young woman asking Emba if it was okay to feel “discomfort” about her boyfriend’s porn-fueled desire to choke her during sex. Liberation. Yay.

How does this tie in to trans-ideology?

It’s a mastery-of-nature progress ideology. It’s Jurassic Park (the book), where Ian Malcolm says of scientific arrogance and overreach, “now science is the belief system that is hundreds of years old. And, like the medieval system before it, science is starting not to fit the world any more. Science has attained so much power that its practical limits begin to be apparent. Largely through science, billions of us live in one small world, densely packed and intercommunicating. But science cannot help us decide what to do with that world, or how to live. Science can make a nuclear reactor, but it cannot tell us not to build it. Science can make pesticide, but cannot tell us not to use it. And our world starts to seem polluted in fundamental ways — air, and water, and land — because of ungovernable science.”

The problem, of course, is that we don’t seem to have attained Malcolm’s insight, and now we’re doing these monstrous experiments on our young people. The pill was the beginning of the transhumanist revolution. That revolution tried to conquer culture. It’s now entered into its final, dissolution-phase with people hacking at their very bodies in pursuit of self-invention in a thoroughly irrational, pornografied, manipulative, and transactional culture.

Never fear, though. All this can be monetized.

Christine Emba writes,

When it comes to the sort of independence [advertized], we have actually bought into an illusion: that the choices we’re making — in favor of autonomy, privacy, and extreme flexibility — are themselves independently arrived at, that this particular preference has emerged fully out of the vacuum of our own personality. Yet (and sorry in advance for getting meta) even our own vision of the level of privacy we desire is itself not independently constructed. It’s still shaped by a larger, communal norm that we didn’t necessarily choose for ourselves.

“Capitalism frames our modern lives so completely that we’re liable to forget that it’s even there.

Are you listening, Judith?

Compassion for persons, opposition to ideology, contempt for profiteers

Little wonder that kids and adults are having “dysphoria” of all kinds, that is, “uncomfortable with their bodies.” Corporations and their ad men have been selling us hatred of our own bodies for decades. Women, in particular, have been taught body/self-hatred; and this has been combined with all the dangers — real and imagined — of being embodied female. Sexual molestation and assault correlate strongly with body dysmorphia and eating disorders, but body dysmorphia is now routinely described and diagnosed as gender dysphoria.

Trans-ideology has been welcomed by the technocratic poobahs who now run society, because it makes shit-tons of money, and more of it every year — especially in the US where the absolute worst health care system in the developed world is a daily cash harvest of iatrogenic ills. The US health care and pharmaceutical industries are making a killing on this, as are their retainers among so-called professionals-turned-high-end-charlatans. There’s a special place in Hell.

Profiteers profit from selling you non-self-acceptance; and the very first thing that trans-ideology withdraws from the young people who are sucked into its vortex is self-acceptance. What a monstrous thing to tell or “affirm” in a child, an adolescent, or a young adult is that you (a body) are “in” the wrong body. The profiteers need to be tarred, feathered, and exiled to Chernobyl.

In pop media and society in general, even in prisons, there’s a special contempt for child predators. We are scandalized and enraged by that man who molests a child; but we now have indoctrinated, fearful, credulous parents willingly turning their children over to profit predators who are indoctrinating, drugging, and mutilating their kids.

As with any young victim, even those who have been sold the bill of goods that says these psychological, chemcial, and surgical mutilations are salvific, youth who have been and are being preyed upon need loving guidance (not “affirmation”), the discipline of self-acceptance, things to do offline, metaphysical alternatives . . . and love, agape. Regaining these in the face of this growing cult of self-reinvention will be no easy task. It will take a deep self-examination, because we ourselves — even those of us who recognize the calamitous absurdity of this ideology in action — are wearing the very philsophical fabric of liberalism’s denial that we are creatures (given, not self-made) first and always.

I’m a bad Christian

That may be true of all Christians. Jesus said he came for the reprobates. We’re a gathering of reprobates, constantly in need of confession, repentance, atonement, and forgiveness. Christ surfaces again and again, against all odds, in the power-playing and sclerotic bureuacracies we call church, appearing not between candles but in and among our moral squalor.

My language and temperament throughout this screed has not always been one hundred percent charitable. I’m a hypocrite, too, because I myself have been the beneficary of great forgiveness, having been an imperial legionnaire for over two decades. Our rabble-rabbi-prophet-King was hardest of all on hypocrites.

The antiwar movement welcomed me with open arms, when my past had been entirely detestable. I owe that beneficience on to others. I wouldn’t actually tar and feather anyone, okay, tempting as it may be. But as Christian, even a pretty bad one, I’m obliged to hold out, even for the worst of us who’ve forgotten or never known we are image-bearers, the possibility of redemption.

When they confess and repent, I hope I’m as charitable as those people who accepted me. That’s one reason I have a soft spot for repenters, and not just because they are valuable witnesses . . . and they are. Sometimes the most important witnesses of all, because they can speak to motive.

I say this as a soldier who turned full-force against militarism, because, as much as I hated being a kind of public figure who was exhaustingly trotted out by a movement for several years as a witness, my witness had teeth. I was reporting out from the belly of the beast, inoculated against those who would say I didn’t know what I was talking about.

One class of repenter (or regretter) is the destransitioner, the person who has come to regret their decision to “transition,” and as far as possible tried to reverse it. Another is the medical professional who’s either turned around themselves or decided to face the censorious mob, often at great cost. The last are the parents who overcome the human tendency to rationalize more feverishly the greater the error of their ways and admit they led their young ones down the path of often irreversible damage.

When these prodigals return home, we need to turn on a dime to welcome them home, embrace them, and defend them.

One mother (“Rose”) who repented said she had, paradoxically, allowed her child to lead her with the claim he was a girl, whereupon she and her spouse — also a captive of ideology — then led the child down the “affirmation” fast track to transition, to “concretize that cross-sex identity and medicalize it.” She said that upon admitting her mistake she felt as if she were leaving a cult.

When I look back at this, it is almost too much to write about. The grief and the shock of what we did is so deep, so wide, so sharp and penetrating. How could a mother do this to her child? To her children? I truly believed that what I was doing was pure, right and good, only to later realize with horror what it could have lead to for my child. This horror still shakes me to my core. (“Rose”)

In February 2023, Jamie Reed — self-described as “queer and left,” a former case manager at the Washington University Transgender Center at St. Louis Children’s Hospital (you read that right, a “transgender center” at a “children’s hospital”), penned an article for The Free Press (because other outlets wouldn’t publish her) called “I Thought I Was Saving Trans Kids. Now I’m Blowing the Whistle.” In her four years at the center, she saw over a thousand children come through, and the overwhelming majority who came in self-reporting gender dysphoria were unquestioningly put on hormones “that can have life-altering consequences — including sterility.”

What she didn’t see there was a single formal protocol for treatment. Hormone prescriptions were filled almost automatically. She also saw the ROGD shift.

At first, the patient population was tipped toward what used to be the “traditional” instance of a child with gender dysphoria: a boy, often quite young, who wanted to present as — who wanted to be — a girl.

Until 2015 or so, a very small number of these boys comprised the population of pediatric gender dysphoria cases. Then, across the Western world, there began to be a dramatic increase in a new population: Teenage girls, many with no previous history of gender distress, suddenly declared they were transgender and demanded immediate treatment with testosterone.

I certainly saw this at the center. One of my jobs was to do intake for new patients and their families. When I started there were probably 10 such calls a month. When I left there were 50, and about 70 percent of the new patients were girls. Sometimes clusters of girls arrived from the same high school.

Co-morbidities, such as ADHD, depression, anxiety, eating disorders, and autism, were ignored or put down as the effects of gender dysphoria. She also saw clusters of peer contagion “disorders,” kids who didn’t have, but believed they had, Tourettes or multiple personalities. When she took her concerns to the physicans, she was dismissed with the questionalble claim that gender dysphoria was not only the problem, but that it was innate! Can’t stop that money train — get aboard or get out of the way. The center even assisted with letters to therapists to get these kids through the first gate to hormone prescriptions.

Reed began soudning the alarm at the side effects and the lack of capacity these kids had for “consent.”

Many encounters with patients emphasized to me how little these young people understood the profound impacts changing gender would have on their bodies and minds. But the center downplayed the negative consequences, and emphasized the need for transition. As the center’s website said, “Left untreated, gender dysphoria has any number of consequences, from self-harm to suicide. But when you take away the gender dysphoria by allowing a child to be who he or she is, we’re noticing that goes away. The studies we have show these kids often wind up functioning psychosocially as well as or better than their peers.”

There are no reliable studies showing this. Indeed, the experiences of many of the center’s patients prove how false these assertions are.

In one particuarly disturbing example . . .

[W]e received [a call] at the center in 2020 from a 17-year-old biological female patient who was on testosterone. She said she was bleeding from the vagina. In less than an hour she had soaked through an extra heavy pad, her jeans, and a towel she had wrapped around her waist. The nurse at the center told her to go to the emergency room right away.

We found out later this girl had had intercourse, and because testosterone thins the vaginal tissues, her vaginal canal had ripped open. She had to be sedated and given surgery to repair the damage. She wasn’t the only vaginal laceration case we heard about.

Vaginal laceration!

The center also took in children from a psychiatric center, often already on a drug cocktail for things like schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. “This was tragic,” wrote Reed, “but unsurprising given the profound trauma some had been through. Yet no matter how much suffering or pain a child had endured, or how little treatment and love they had received, our doctors viewed gender transition — even with all the expense and hardship it entailed — as the solution.” [my emphasis added]

When conflicts between parents landed them in court, the center consistently testified for the “affirming” parent, which sometimes resulted in loss of custody.

All this led to Reed’s alienation from the heads of staff. In 2021, she began receiving questionable negative performance reviews. By 2022, she was told “Get on board, or get out.” This from the same highly-enriched bosses who admitted behind closed doors, “We are building the plane while we are flying it.”

If you want to hear the tragic stories of detransitioners, just put “detrantioner stories” into a search engine. They are many, and the fact is that the numbers are underreported, because (a) they are inconvenient to the ideology, (b) the data are collected from gender centers who lose contact with most of the patients once those patients decide they’ve made a mistake.

This decision can take years, because all of us are susceptible to “in for a penny, in for a pound” thinking — that resistance to admitting to ourselves and others that we made a huge investiment, and it was a pig in a poke. Patients, yes, and parents in particular, will be prone to double down in the face of self-doubts and incipient guilt. Likewise, when one’s network of relations is comprised of fellow captives of the same ideology, the fear of rejection (and now even reprisal) is real and powerful. Already, there is a concerted effort among trans ideologues to conceal, misrepresent, and discredit anything and anyone who denies the divinity of their golden calf.

Courage to the witnesses . . . and respect. That’s all this bad Christian has to say.