On the mysterious, widespread ignorance of transgender variance
It's weird enough that LGBT is considered a single thing, but even grouping all trans people together reveals serious naiveté.
It’s common when reading about trans issues to see everyone in that “community” lumped together as a single, unified group. This isn’t really surprising given the deep-seated incoherence of LGBT taxonomy; it’s weird enough that lesbians and homosexuals are categorized with trans people considering that their sole shared characteristic is a nonconforming sexual orientation. Trans issues being as prominent as they are in the culture wars, it’s interesting that people continue to view all these players as fighting the same battle and motivated by the same things. If nothing else it’s a fascinating peek into the incuriosity of the general population.
Female-to-Male Transgenderism
Over the last few years, trans culture war discourse has been dominated by two distinct groups. The first group comprises girls who “identify” as boys. These girls tend to be quite young, usually in their teens. Abigail Shrier wrote extensively about this group in her 2020 book Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters. In ever greater numbers, they are signing up to take male hormones, have their breasts cut off, and be sterilized.
It is often claimed that without access to such hormones and surgical procedures these girls are at high risk to kill themselves. But how could any sensible adult, let alone a medical professional, actually believe this? If such a claim were true, human art and culture spanning from Socratic dialogues and Khmer bas-reliefs to German Romanticism and Yasujirō Ozu films would be dominated by themes relating to the mystifying tragedy of gender dysphoria-induced child suicide. It would be as universal a part of the human condition as love, death, and religion. If the treatments for such dysphoria really did reduce the risk of suicide by 70%, as some activists assert, it would imply a human past littered with the corpses of millions of children who killed themselves because they were “born in the wrong body”. But this didn’t happen. There is nothing natural or biological about this. We are dealing with an entirely new, social phenomenon.
Despite what transgender activists say, female-to-male transgenderism hasn’t been around long enough to know that “[puberty] blockers are reversible”. One recent Guardian article claimed that “research has shown that only a small fraction of trans people later detransition” (i.e., regret “transitioning” and go back to living according to their biological sex). The research they link to is from 2015—in other words, hopelessly out of date. In 2012 the NHS in England had about 250 cases of transgenderism, most of them male. By 2021 that number had skyrocketed to about 5,000, with two thirds being female. Young girls are sensitive—something as truthful as telling an overweight teenager she’s fat can be emotionally devastating—but they’re also deeply impressionable. Suicides spiked 12% the year after Marilyn Monroe killed herself. This is classic social contagion, and probably a distant relative of the mysterious Dancing Plague of 1518, when hundreds of people in Alsace danced for weeks until they succumbed to exhaustion.
One possible explanation as to why this is happening is that young, white women—who were the most cosseted demographic to have ever existed until quite recently—resent the lowly position they’ve inherited in our identity-based zeitgeist. It’s easy to create in teenagers a sense of self-loathing, and the anti-white blood libel of intersectionality almost certainly encourages a small number of weak-minded girls to assume an identity that generates socially beneficial victimhood points. This helps put conceptual space between themselves and straight white men; it’s surely not a coincidence that almost all the academics who’ve cosplayed as a different race have been white women.
There’s also the matter of pornography. This is the first generation of women to have grown up in a world of ubiquitous, online porn. Pornography has been widely available domestically for decades, but as recently as the 1990s, acquiring pornography meant having to actively search it out in brick-and-mortar stores. It cost money. It was relatively rare. Unless exposed to it through parental carelessness or occasional curiosity, young women seldom encountered it. All of that changed with the invention of smartphones in the late 2000s. Today’s 16-year-olds were born the same year the iPhone launched, and not one of them has known a world in which everyone didn’t have a device in their pocket with constant access to explicit sexual content. Given that many will have been unwillingly exposed to such content, is it surprising that so many of them recoil from femininity and heterosexuality when they’re seeing gangbangs and bukkakes before they’ve even started puberty?
Homosexual Transsexuals
The sex researcher Ray Blanchard divided males who are transsexuals into two groups: homosexual transsexuals and autogynephilic transsexuals. Anyone familiar with Blanchard’s typology will immediately recognize them as two groups with different motivations, but this distinction is rarely acknowledged publicly.
People who have travelled to Thailand will be acquainted with the first of these groups: homosexual transsexuals. In Thailand these men are known as ladyboys (not a derogatory term), or in Thai, kathoey. To your average Oberlin sophomore, whose arrival in Ohio was likely the first time they left their state, ladyboys are transgender in the same way US military figures like Charlotte Clymer and Rachel Levine are transgender. The differences are stark, however. Ladyboys are overwhelmingly homosexual—that is to say they are men who are attracted to other men. They are stereotypically female in their interests and seldom found in university engineering departments, fighting to compete against women in sports, or serving in the military. This is not to say that women don’t sometimes pursue these things, but the average woman has less interest in things and more interest in people. (A striking illustration of this phenomenon is observed in “gender equal” societies like Norway, where women exhibit less inclination towards mathematics and engineering and display greater interest in people-oriented domains like psychology and education. The obvious reason for this is that in countries like India there is economic pressure on smart women to choose a career that guarantees the highest possible salary, whereas in Norway no such pressure exists—an Oslo woman can spend her twenties doing a PhD on the most esoteric anthropological topic imaginable and still live the rest of her life like a French monarch by virtue of having been born in 21st century Norway. Ultimately, women in rich countries are free to study what they’re really interested in.)
Thai ladyboys generally have interests similar to those of the average western female (note that I said average; I’m not talking about Marxist-feminist trans activists with LLMs in human rights law). They like fashion, celebrity gossip, and have a natural disinclination for sport. I once saw a comment on Reddit by a westerner who claimed that, despite appearances, Thailand is actually quite backwards when it comes to trans rights. Why? Ladyboys can’t join the military there, he replied. This neatly summarizes the general ignorance of the differences between these two groups. The idea of a ladyboy wanting to join the military is as ludicrous as someone like Paris Hilton wanting to join the military. But because autogynephiles dominate the narrative and have convinced people that they belong in the same category as homosexual transsexuals, people conflate both groups and assume that highly effeminate male homosexuals would want to be soldiers. The truth is that no ladyboy would ever want to join the military; they view their reprieve from military service as a major benefit of their condition.
Autogynephilic Transsexuals
Autogynephilic transsexuals are a different breed altogether, and are practically non-existent in Thailand. Autogynephilia is defined as “a male's propensity to be sexually aroused by the thought of himself as a female…and is theorized to underlie transvestism and some forms of male-to-female transsexualism”. The absence of autogynephiles in Bangkok’s vibrant LGBT scene is particularly interesting when one considers the argument that transsexualism is biological, for if one could be “trapped in the wrong body”, Thailand would surely have a significant community of autogynephiles in addition to its many homosexual transsexuals. But the fact is that autogynephilia, for whatever reason, is virtually unique to western culture and to white men in particular.
Autogynephiles typically “transition” at an older age than girls do, again suggesting that transgenderism is a social phenomenon rather than a biological one; if gender dysphoria were indeed biological rather than social it would presumably trigger in both sexes at the same age.
If homosexual transsexuals are typically effeminate in their behavior, autogynephiles retain the kind of interests typically associated with the male brain. (I assume most of my readers acknowledge the reality of natural selection on the evolution of our species, which has resulted in hardwired psychological differences between the sexes). When Chelsea Manning and Caitlyn Jenner first announced that they were “transitioning” it struck me as utterly bizarre that a computer hacker and gold medal-winning Olympian would have any interest in being women. Growing up, I never met any girls who wanted to be either computer hackers or decathletes, let alone weightlifters or admirals. I am old enough to have seen Hackers (1995) in the movie theater, and when Angelina Jolie was revealed as the talented hacker Acid Burn my friend and I turned to each other and laughed at the absurdity of it all.
I had never heard of autogynephilia back then. But as more have surfaced in recent years, a pattern has emerged. These men are almost always involved in things that no little girl ever dreams of doing. They are MMA fighters, computer scientists, military officers, and electronic musicians. If they aren’t particularly successful, they exhibit incel/weeaboo tendencies, and seem interested in things that high IQ nerds are into; find a Dungeons & Dragons community online and any women present are more than likely just autogynephilic males.
Years ago men like this were called transvestites—guys who dressed up in their mothers’ and sisters’ Sunday dresses and graduated to secretly wearing their wives’ underwear to work. In Tim Burton’s superb biopic Ed Wood (1994), the following exchange takes place:
Weiss: On the phone you said you had some "special qualifications"?
Ed: Mister Weiss... I have never told anyone what I'm about to tell you. But I really want this job. [pauses, takes a deep breath] I like to wear women's clothing.
Weiss: You're a fruit?
Ed: No, not at all. I love women. Wearing their clothes makes me feel closer to them.
Weiss: You're not a fruit?
Ed: No, I'm all man. I even fought in World War II. Of course, I was wearing women's undergarments under my uniform.
No doubt if Ed Wood were alive today he’d dress in women’s clothes all the time and be regarded as extremely brave for doing so. Wood, as dorky science-fiction director, fit the archetype perfectly.
The above photograph illustrates the striking visual difference between a typical autogynephile and a homosexual transsexual. Clymer identifies as a lesbian, meaning he is a heterosexual man who has a sexual fetish conflated with gender dysphoria. That this can be celebrated is great news for men with a sexual compulsion that would have been viewed as shameful, embarrassing, and indicative of mental illness just a few years ago. But western civilization is now years deep into the mass delusion that men can be women, and autogynephiles are extremely resistant to let reality burst the bubble. As with any fantasy, the more believable it is, the better it is. That’s where the aggression comes in. Autogynephiles are notoriously aggressive in pushing their agenda and have an army of credulous footsoldiers composed primarily of young women who’ve been duped into believing they’re involved in some kind of civil rights battle.
As someone who’s been online since the mid-1990s, I have always been aware of a certain maleness in the spaces I inhabited. As with most heterosexual men, I like watching sports, but I’m also interested in avant-garde music, military grand strategy games like Europa Universalis IV, and classic cinema. It would be fair to say my hobbies lean nerdy. For years there was no indication that any women enjoyed these things, or at least that they had any interest in talking about them online with strangers. Recently, though, I’ve noticed more and more “women” contributing to these spaces. Reddit posts ask questions like, “Are there any other women who play EU4 or other grand strategy games?”, but upon closer inspection the people asking the questions and replying in the comments are almost always autogynephiles. I’ve been using the music and film cataloging website RateYourMusic for over 15 years and autogynephiles outnumber women perhaps 50 to 1. I have encountered maybe two or three actual women on the site in all that time, but hundreds of men cosplaying as women. I’ve always found it curious that autogynephiles dress up as a nerd’s idea of an attractive woman while retaining the stereotypically male interests they had before they “transitioned”. Even more curious is that I’ve never come across a single female-to-male transgender in any of the online spaces I frequent. Even after “becoming” men, women demonstrate no more interest in World War II simulators or 1970s European free jazz than they did when they were girls.
Why does any of this matter? Because transgenderism is harming our civilization. The kind affecting young girls is clearly social in etiology and requires a focused response. Autogynephiles aren’t necessarily suffering from any physical illness, but demand validation for their sordid fetish in the same way paedophiles would if given the opportunity by an increasingly tolerant public. I have some sympathy for homosexual transsexuals, who I believe are probably the only one of these three major groups that come close to meeting the definition of gender dysphoria. However, only by recognizing that each group is motivated by different things can we come close to solving the problems presented by them.
I have a solution to the problem presented by the entire spectrum of transgender/transexualism, but it might be viewed as rather too... terminal for most tastes.