From Dictionary of the Khazars (Male Edition pages 293-94, Milorad Pavic, New York: Knopf, 1988:

And he gave me a few of the Xeroxed sheets of paper lying on the table in front of him. I could have pulled the trigger then and there. There wouldn't be a better moment. There was only one lone witness present in the garden--and he was a child. But that's not what happened. I reached out and took those exciting sheets of paper, which I enclose in this letter. Taking them instead of firing my gun, I looked at those Saracen fingers with their nails like hazelnuts and I thought of the tree Halevi mentions in his book on the Khazars. I thought how each and every one of us is just such a tree: the taller we grow toward the sky, through the wind and rain toward God, the deeper we must sink our roots through the mud and subterranean waters toward hell. With these thoughts in my mind, I read the pages given me by the green-eyed Saracen. They shattered me, and in disbelief I asked Dr. Muawia where he had got them.

Corresponding paragraphs from the Female Edition:

And he gave me a few of the Xeroxed sheets of paper lying on the table in front of him. As he passed them to me, his thumb brushed mine and I trembled from the touch. I had the sensation that our past and our future were in our fingers and that they had touched. And so, when I began to read the proffered pages, I at one moment lost the train of thought in the text and drowned it in my own feelings. In these seconds of absence and self-oblivion, centuries passed with every read but uncomprehended and unabsorbed line, and when, after a few moments, I came to and re-established contact with the text, I knew that the reader who returns from the open sea a short while ago. I gained and learned more by not reading than by reading those pages, and when I asked Dr. Muawia where he had got them he said something that astonished me even more.

Diamonds still cut glass regardless of your word for “diamond,” and “cut,” and “glass.”~Ken Wilber

Truth matters. Words matter. What is objectively the case matters. And insofar as our words and concepts can be about the objective world at all, then the shared set of words and meanings that we collectively use and are permitted to use to describe, navigate, and refer to that objective world matters. Such is the case for any society worth defending. The growing rash of instances of threats, intimidation, social cancelling, and violence in the name of creeping gender ideology within academia and beyond drastically threatens this shared set of goods and values and marks the beginning of what will be a steep and rapid descent into institutionalized tyranny if left unopposed.

At first glance, this appears to be quite a hyperbolic and even alarmist claim. After all, what is wrong with referring to “Stephen” as “Stephanie” if that is his prerogative? On the surface, such linguistic accommodations appear to be perfectly reasonable and minimally costly to most language users. This surface question of proper names, however, dramatically obscures the underlying conceptual tensions, moral values, and metaphysical commitments fundamentally at stake. Indeed, as claims of “misgendering” have swelled from being regarded as instances of impoliteness, to disrespect, to phobia, to hate, to intentional harassment, to threats, to actual violence, to warranting official legal penalty, to “human rights” violations (language previously reserved for exclusive use in reference to torture, genocide, atrocity, and crimes against humanity), the moral and metaphysical landscape and the linguistic and social institutions presumably about that landscape have been run over roughshod in public discourse with alarming speed and scarce pause for serious philosophical reflection.

This article therefore sets out to make better philosophical sense of the concepts of “gender,” “transgender,” and “transgender rights.” Contra arguments espoused by gender ideology advocates, I argue that, by the starting premises of their own argumentation, the notions of both “gender” and “transgender” are either incoherent or vacuous and therefore cannot be the conceptual grounds by which persons derive actual positive or negative rights claims. On the contrary, such false “rights” claims actually amount to severe rights violations of the vast majority of everyday language-users and citizens and cause irreparable damage to the set of shared social and linguistic practices necessary for coordinating the basic public goods of a free, flourishing, and truth-preserving society.

The social and political consequence of allowing such false rights claims to swell unopposed to the level of positive rights claims, eventually codifying into actual state-compelled law (as is already the case with Canada’s Bill C-16 and soon to be with America’s Equality Act) will be nothing less than the legal sanctioning of a new priest class of magical people who speak all of reality into existence, and then the rest of society who must simply obey. Consequently, I argue that such passive-aggressive tyranny warrants strong and vocal public rejection and opposition by American lawmakers, politicians, academics, and citizens alike with the greatest of urgency.

Truth

For at least 3,000 years now, philosophers, theologians, and scholars alike have debated the nature of truth. Bracketing contemporary theories of truth such as Paul Horwich’s deflationary theory of truth and Michael Lynch’s plural theory of truth, and bracketing pragmatist theories of truth espoused by folks like James, Dewey, and Pierce, theories of truth largely fall into two main camps; the correspondence theory of truth and the coherence theory of truth.

The correspondence theory of truth posits that a sentence or proposition is true if and only if it shares some sort of correspondence relationship with the mind-independent, objective world. Hence, the proposition that “the cat is on the mat” is true if and only if the cat is indeed on the mat. If the cat is not on the mat, then the proposition “the cat is on the mat” is false. Put another way, the proposition “the cat is on the mat” is made true by the truth-maker and state of affairs of the cat actually being on the mat. All true propositions we refer to as facts. Alternatively, the coherence theory of truth posits that truth is fundamentally a relationship of maximal coherence and internal consistency between and among a web of other propositions (i.e., truth-bearers) and not a relationship between truth-bearers reaching out to make contact with mind-independent, objective truth-makers (i.e., the contours of the objective world).

Another important distinction within discourse on truth is Kant’s famous analytic/synthetic distinction. An analytic proposition, such as “a bachelor is an unmarried man” or “a male is a creature with an XY chromosome pair,” is one whose truth depends wholly upon the meanings of its constituent terms. Conversely, a synthetic proposition, such as “John is a bachelor” or “John is a man” is true in virtue of some feature of the observable objective world. Put another way, we can know the truth of analytic propositions merely by knowing the meanings of their constituent terms, whereas for synthetic propositions we have to look out into the objective world in order to determine whether or not they are true.

Meaning

Another indispensable contribution to discourse on truth is that made by Ludwig Wittgenstein in his Philosophical Investigations. In his now famous “private language argument,” Wittgenstein entertained the conceptual possibility of a completely private language. Since definitions within any language, like rules within a game, require fixity in order for the game to hang together at all, and since a wholly private language would have no such checks and balances to keep definitions fixed and stable (the private language user could just amend definitions in perpetuity with no restrictions), Wittgenstein concluded that a wholly private language was conceptually impossible and that for terms and definitions to have any fixed meaning at all required checks and balances provided by other language users. Later expanding on this insight, Hilary Putnam, in his essay “The Meaning of Meaning,” advanced his theory of meaning known as semantic externalism, famously concluding that “meaning ain’t in the head.”

To this day, the vast majority of contemporary philosophers accept this account of how meaning and language fundamentally operates. Put another way, meaning and language is fundamentally public. What’s more, language and meaning (and indeed the collective knowledge passed between generations via language) is not merely public with respect to just present persons but is also constituted by the deep, rich, and networked storehouse of meanings passed on from one generation of language-users to the next. As Gottlob Frege noted in his essay “Sense and Reference,” “For it cannot well be denied that mankind possesses a common treasure of thoughts which is transmitted from generation to generation.”

And while proper names such as “Bruce” or “Caitlyn” do technically fall within the purview of private determination and personal prerogative, indexicals within a language, such as “he” or “she” indirectly connote and refer to fixed meanings deep within our overall shared network of public meanings and are not similarly revisable according to individual personal preference. Insofar as our collective meanings are about our shared storehouse of collective human knowledge and/or about the objective world in some sense, such indexical terms are effectively “load-bearing” terms that do not or simply cannot be moved or amended so easily without logically entailing a complete and total overhaul of the entire network of meaning, every proposition within that network, and every referent in the objective world that each term ostensibly refers to.

Accordingly, indexical terms like “he” and “she,” or generic terms like “male” and “female” for that matter, are held relatively fixed within our shared network of nested meanings either in virtue of the restraints of logic, conceptual consistency, and interrelatedness (on a coherence theory of truth), the contours and joints of objective reality (on a correspondence theory of truth), or some combination of the two. Hence, when it comes to truth claims about nearly anything and everything under the sun, big and small, like it or not, logic has a say in the matter, other language users have a say in the matter, language itself has a say in the matter, and the objective world itself has a say in the matter.

Rights and duties

Another important set of concepts within the present gender debate is the notion of rights and duties. Scholars often cash out the notion of rights and duties as two sides of the same conceptual coin. To say that I have a “right to X” is conceptually equivalent to saying that someone else has a corresponding duty to me as it pertains to X. Scholars make the further distinction between negative rights and duties and positive rights and duties. Negative rights, sometimes referred to as liberties, are freedoms from something. Freedom from slavery, freedom from censorship, and freedom from religious persecution are all canonical examples of negative rights. They engender for others corresponding negative duties of inaction and non-interference.

Positive rights, on the other hand, sometimes referred to as entitlements, are freedoms to something. Freedom to healthcare, freedom to easy rescue, and freedom to education are all examples of positive rights claims. These positive rights claims engender corresponding positive duties of action upon others. Since many positive duties arguably cannot be discharged individually but only collectively, so the argument goes, the state is therefore required as the institutional proxy to ensure, through law and threat of coercion, that citizens discharge their many individual positive duties to one another (most often in the form of taxes). While liberals and conservatives generally agree over negative rights and duties, there has been long and heated debate between both sides as to the scope and content of persons’ actual positive rights and duties and how those duties ought to be best discharged.

Another near universal notion within ethics, philosophy, and law is the claim that “ought implies can.” In other words, if one tells me that I have a duty or an obligation to do X, then the implication is that it is physically or at the very least logically possible for me to do X. Put another way, it makes no logical or conceptual sense to say that I have impossible duties. I do not have a duty to walk to the moon, because I physically cannot. I do not have a duty to conceive of a three-sided square, because I logically cannot. Conceptual conceivability is therefore a prerequisite for any legitimate rights claim or corresponding duty claim.

The incoherence of special transgender “rights” claims

Given this basic understanding of positive and negative rights and duties as well as the assumption that “ought implies can,” and given our understanding about theories of truth as well as the fundamentally public nature of terms like “male” and “female” and “he” and “she” within our shared network of public meanings, let us now investigate the coherence, intelligibility, and content of so-called “transgender rights” claims.

To understand the coherence and moral import of transgender rights claims, we must first define what it is that we mean by “transgender.” To understand its meaning, however, we must first discern what exactly we mean by “gender” proper. The Stanford Encyclopedia for Philosophy entry on “Feminist Perspectives on Sex and Gender,” for instance, captures the conceptual distinction between “sex” and “gender” as follows:

Many feminists have historically disagreed and have endorsed the sex/gender distinction. Provisionally: ‘sex’ denotes human females and males depending on biological features (chromosomes, sex organs, hormones and other physical features); ‘gender’ denotes women and men depending on social factors (social role, position, behaviour or identity). The main feminist motivation for making this distinction was to counter biological determinism or the view that biology is destiny.

Judith Butler, in her famous Gender Trouble echoes this distinction writing that, “Gender is not to culture as sex is to nature; gender is also the discursive/cultural means by which ‘sexed nature’ or ‘a natural sex’ is produced and established as ‘prediscursive,’ prior to culture, a politically neutral surface on which culture acts.”

And lastly, the World Health Organization re-articulates this conceptual distinction between “sex” and “gender” making the further distinction between “gender” and “gender identity.” They write:

Gender refers to the characteristics of women, men, girls and boys that are socially constructed. This includes norms, behaviours and roles associated with being a woman, man, girl or boy, as well as relationships with each other. As a social construct, gender varies from society to society and can change over time … Gender interacts with but is different from sex, which refers to the different biological and physiological characteristics of females, males and intersex persons, such as chromosomes, hormones and reproductive organs. Gender and sex are related to but different from gender identity. Gender identity refers to a person’s deeply felt, internal and individual experience of gender, which may or may not correspond to the person’s physiology or designated sex at birth.

Given these definitions, the first source of confusion within the present transgender debate comes from scholars frequently conflating (biologically-determined) “sex,” (socially-determined) “gender,” (privately-determined) “gender identity,” sexual preference, and biological instances of intersex (such as Klinefelter’s and Turner syndrome) all under the same canopy term “gender.”

The second source and primary culprit of confusion within the present transgender debate, however, is the notion of “gender identity.” This is so since “gender identity,” on the gender theorist’s own account, is defined entirely by one’s own wholly subjective determination. Much like Wittgenstein’s hypothetical private language, this wholly subjective and internal pointing to some referent accessible only to the speaker, fundamentally severs the connection of the linguistic term (i.e., “he”) from both its publicly agreed upon analytic meaning (i.e., “a male” is, by definition, “a living organism with an XY chromosome pair”) as well as its publicly agreed upon synthetic definition out there in the world (i.e., “that particular guy over there is a man,” “that particular cluster of things under the microscope is an XY chromosome pair”). In so doing, this wholly subjective turn renders the meaning of the speaker’s utterance (i.e., “he”) completely meaningless, in terms of its analytic and synthetic definition, or, alternatively, completely vacuous.

Catholic political commentator, Matt Walsh, captures the confusion well [stating the following:

The Left tells us that “gender” is a social construct. They reject the idea that women must necessarily have any particular feeling, or thought, or taste, or preference. If “gender” is an artificial construct and our physical features have no bearing on our identity as man or woman, then what the hell is a “woman” anyway? A “woman,” in that case, would not be defined by her feelings, her thoughts, her ideas, her preferences, her body, her reproductive organs, her DNA, her chromosomes. Well what is she defined by? What is she? When a man says that he is a woman, he now makes it that that phrase means nothing, and it doesn’t mean anything to be a woman. He might as well say that he is a whos-a-whats-it or a thing-a-ma-doodle.”

This re-defining of publicly shared meanings like “male” and “female” solely in terms of a speaker’s own subjective feelings generates a host of internal contradictions, intractable questions, and system-wide confusion.

• It is a grave wrong to not first ask for a person’s personal pronouns. It also is a grave wrong to ask for a person’s personal pronouns because it is too personal and invasive.
• What do the indexicals “Ze” and “Zir” even connote or refer to?
• If one can be trans-gender then why can’t one be trans-racial, trans-age, trans-height, trans-species, or trans-Napoleon?
• If gender identity has nothing to do with biological sex whatsoever, then, similarly, why can’t one’s gender identity simply be Latino, 6’3’’, a giraffe, or 87 years old?
• What does it mean for a speaker to report subjectively feeling “like a man” when the stipulated definition of the term “man” is determined wholly by the speaker?
• If gender identity is wholly determined by the speaker’s subjective determination, then why would cosmetic surgery or arbitrary levels of hormone treatment have any bearing whatsoever on affecting or changing that person’s gender identity?
• If gender identity is wholly determined by each person’s subjective state, then how can parents get to decide that their child is “non-binary” or “gender-fluid”?
• If gender identity is wholly subjective and inaccessible to others’ knowledge, then how can so-called “trans” people know that they are actually standing in solidarity with real trans persons versus fake trans persons?
• If a woman stipulates that she has transitioned from a woman to a man, and we are therefore obligated to retroactively change all records of the past to report that she was always a man, then if she was always a man, what did she transition from?
• Furthermore, if this very same woman who claims to be a man was therefore always a man, and this person is a US citizen, does that mean she/he has failed to sign up for selective service all these years and can be retroactively charged as a felon?
• If gender identity is wholly subjectively determined, then how can an individual ever be said to be mistaken about his or her own wholly privately and internally stipulated definitions as in reports of persons being so-called “ex trans” or “former trans”?
• And if such persons themselves can be so fundamentally mistaken about their own internally-stipulated gender identity, then how on Earth can we possibly have laws and legal penalties that require everyone else to know such a thing and to adjust their behavior accordingly, moment by moment by moment?

This confusion culminates in the simple question that each and every one of us can pose to the gender theorist: “what do you mean by male?” And it is here where they will not be able to give either a substantive analytic or synthetic definition of the term without risking their claim’s truth conditions being evaluable under some set of public criteria. All they will ever be able to say is that “it is the thing that I feel that I am.” Which is to say nothing at all.

For claims or propositions to be true or false at all, they must first be “truth-apt” and therefore must rise to a level of basic intelligibility in order for us to be capable of evaluating them as true or false. Accordingly, claims about special transgender rights do not get off the ground to begin with, because claims about “gender identity” don’t get off the ground to begin with, since such claims fail to rise to the level of being truth-apt or minimally coherent. Claims about transgender rights are therefore as intelligible and truth-apt as claims about “flipl-flopl” rights, or “Jabberwocky” rights, or “schmerkle” rights. And just because someone happens to utter the noise “rights” after a particular word or set of words, doesn’t mean that such claims actually grip the moral or metaphysical joints of the world. Consequently, if ought implies can, and we cannot conceptually make basic sense of the concept of “gender identity,” then such blatant conceptual incoherence cannot be the proper grounding of our actual rights or duties.

To be clear, this isn’t to make light of or to suggest that persons suffering from actual mental disorders in this arena are lying, pretending, or acting in bad faith. Indeed, there are many medical reports of persons suffering from gender dysphoria who report the sense of “being in the wrong body” or not feeling like their internal sense of self was in alignment with the social behavioral norms of their biological sex. This felt sense of something being perpetually “off” has, according to the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, led to over 40 percent of gender dysphoric men and women in the US having attempted to take their own life, nearly 10 times the national average. What’s more, according to the most thorough follow-up study of post sex-reassignment surgeries to date, extending over 30 years in Sweden, the suicide rate of persons who had undergone such surgery rose to 20 times that of comparable peers. I do not therefore deny or question the internal mental anguish such persons suffering from these very real mental disorders are facing. Rather, the point that I am driving at here is not one concerning persons with actual, diagnosable gender dysphoria, but instead a critique of the necessary and possible metaphysical commitments and moral demandingness present-day gender ideology seems to entail. And as we have seen here, nothing less than system-wide incoherence and a radical breakdown in public meaning seems to result from persons indexing the definition of “gender identity” to their own moment by moment, wholly private subjectivity.

Political, social, and legal implications

As we have noted, language and meaning are deeply networked, deeply public, and held in place by things like history, collective knowledge, linguistic precedent, logical consistency, and the contours of the objective world (i.e., truth). To claim total control over one proposition within such a network is therefore to control them all. For the state to attempt to grant monopolistic control over both the analytic and synthetic definitions of terms like “he” and “she,” to a privileged and exclusive class of language-users, terms perhaps no more fundamental to the human condition, would be, in essence, to attempt to grant control over truth itself.

The logical implications of the passing of the US Equality Act would therefore constitute nothing less than the legal canonization of a new priest class of magical persons who speak all of reality into existence and a subordinate class of everyday citizens held hostage by state compulsion to be unwilling stage-actors in their never-ending, incoherent game of pretend. What is at stake here is therefore not simply one of politeness and etiquette having to do with proper names. Rather, what is fundamentally at stake are the very reasons we ought to regard claims about reality as being true or false at all.

There is perhaps no greater evidence of this newly emerging priest class than in the recent case of actress, Elliot Page. For Elliot, she merely stipulates that she is a biological male and we must regard her as a biological male in all respects. Record of the past must be amended to reflect that she was always a biological male. All historical records, biomedical records, biomedical theory, all notions of health, social institutions, etiquette, law, public meanings, and objective reality itself must be gerrymandered around the fixed pivot point of her moment-by-moment subjective prerogative. That is, until she changes her mind. Then, at such a point, the frantic process of revising each and every proposition under the sun, past and present, must begin anew for us proles lest we offend. But for that young man in Georgia who must sign up for selective service the moment he turns 18, biological essentialism suddenly and strictly applies to him. Such are the metaphysics of this brave new world.

Such a legal canonization of a protected class of magical “trans” people would actually constitute a severe violation of the actual rights of everyone else not fortunate enough to be let into this new exclusive club. Indeed, the logical implications of such wrong-headed legislation would be totalizing in scope, affecting nearly every law, institution, social practice, linguistic practice, area of knowledge, custom, record, word, concept, and thought that directly or indirectly related to the concepts of “he” and “she,” “male” and “female.” In other words, it would affect nearly all of our shared propositions about reality.

In biology, we would have to change the definition of “human,” “male,” and “female,” as well as amend our taxonomy for all sexed organisms. In medicine, we would have to overhaul all theories and practices of what constituted “health” and “function” for human males and females, boys and girls. In law we would have to adjust all legislation that specifically referenced men and women. In language, we would have to overhaul or abolish all languages, to include all romance languages, that had gendered conjugations. With respect to freedom of religion, all religions, especially Abrahamic religions, would have to subordinate or abandon their theological commitments concerning man and woman’s special and divinely created nature. With respect to freedom of association, all previously-exclusive men and women’s groups would have to open their membership to such new magic persons. With respect to women’s sports, biological males would now have to be allowed to compete if they simply believed themselves to be female, effectively ending all women’s sports.

With respect to feminism, all legal and social progress ostensibly made by and exclusively for women (i.e., protective laws, exclusive spaces, business loans, scholarships, educational opportunities, etc.) would all effectively have to be undone. With respect to penitentiary assignments, men could simply declare themselves to be women and would have to be moved to female jails or, alternatively, have their own personal jails built for them on account of the unique gender. With respect to the military draft, all men of fighting age could opt out of selective service simply by deciding that they are a woman on their 18th birthday. With respect to the nuclear family, the language of “father,” “mother,” “daughter,” “son,” “sister,” “brother,” “uncle,” “aunt,” “grandfather,” “grandmother,” would have to be phased out since they connote offensive biological essentialist categories. And with respect to all recorded history and all social knowledge, any and all truth claims that directly or indirectly reference males or females would have to be placed in a perpetual state of indetermination, contingent exclusively upon the final say the special “trans” speakers.

The coup de grace of such madness of course, of legally sanctioning this special caste of persons who can enter and exit all social and legal groups at will, is when they themselves slam shut the door of entry in the faces of the uninitiated, announcing stridently, “we can tell, you aren’t really trans!” It is here where the loop of the metaphysical encirclement fully closes and The Party now gets to tell us commoners both the contents of our outer world in its entirety and the contents of the private inner world of our own heads as well.

The above claims are neither hyperbole nor slippery slope alarmism, nor hypothetical conjecture. Indeed, in just the past few years we have already begun to see the tragic and unjust fallout of such conceptual incoherence playing out under the illogic baked into Canada’s Bill C-16. From a BC man being held in jail for objecting to his teenage daughter’s gender transition, to a “transgender” female inmate sexually assaulting other inmates at an all-female penitentiary, to “trans” female, Jessica Yaniv, taking more than a dozen esthetician businesses to a Human Rights Tribunal for refusing to Brazilian wax his scrotum, the madness of this incoherent ideology is only just beginning.

Rest assured, under the logical implications of Bill C-16, the cinching of the rainbow police state will only tighten and the situation in Canada for the average citizens will only worsen in the coming years. And so will be the case in the United States if the Equality Act passes. In essence, the legal implications of such a bill will be nothing less than making it illegal for one to say true things, consistent things, logical things, or even to attempt. Conversely it will make use of hard state power to compel persons to say or believe things that are patently false, incoherent, or conceptually impossible. It will be political correctness on steroids, on a fast road to communist dystopia. To quote Theodore Dalrymple:

Political correctness is communist propaganda writ small. In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, not to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is in some small way to become evil oneself. One’s standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to.

This is how you subvert a nation and a people.

Conclusion

A single line of code, buried within millions or even billions of lines of code, can turn any computer program, no matter how sophisticated, completely inoperable or completely upside down. Such is the case with the present discussion and legislation surrounding so-called “transgender rights.” As we have noted here, despite the utterance of the sound “rights,” it turns out that no matter how much one subjectively feels that he or she is being disrespected, attacked, or oppressed, one simply does not have a legitimate rights claim that the objective world is what he or she says it is. Rather, it turns out that the objective world just pushes back.

If we are to understand transgender rights claims to be meaningful utterances at all, capable of being true or false, then on the most charitable of interpretations we should regard such claims to be at most nothing more than linguistic short-hand for the negative right of freedom of expression and freedom of religion already protected under the First Amendment of the US Constitution. Accordingly, we should regard such ideological expressions as a kind of secular religion reserved exclusively to the private sphere; not something publicly imposed, in all domains of human activity, by state compulsion and threat of force. Otherwise, we should treat such claims as evidence of conceptual confusion, dishonesty, pretending, or a genuine case of gender dysphoria warranting proper medical treatment and counseling.

Or, perhaps I am totally wrong here and there is a huge error and blind spot in my argumentation that I have completely overlooked. I challenge and encourage any advocate of gender ideology to explain to me where exactly I’ve made an error in my argumentation and I look forward to future debate and discourse on the matter. If I’m wrong, then show me where I’m wrong. Regardless, even if I am wrong and mistaken in my reasoning, I and every other citizen in this country should be allowed the freedom to make such mistakes openly; to strive to know truth, to seek truth, and to speak truth, in earnest, however clumsily and however imperfectly.

That being said, this pernicious and deeply wrong-headed ideology will not suddenly stop on its own if people remain silent and complicit. This can only be achieved if people find the courage to speak out publicly, to keep speaking, and to remember, above all, that they are not alone. For there has never been a time in human history when Traditional Catholics, to Protestants, to Muslims, to Jews, to Black Panthers, to Libertarians, to 3rd Wave Feminists have found such common agreement over something so obvious, and when stating the obvious was so very simple. For if freedom is to mean anything at all, it is the ability to worship freely, to live freely, and to speak freely. It is the ability to openly say, without fear, that 2+2=4, that there are only two sexes, that “gender” is a nonsensical concept, that The Party is mistaken, and that the Emperor indeed has no clothes.

• Dr. Michael Robillard is an independent scholar, philosopher, and US Army veteran. He has held prior academic appointments at the University of Notre Dame, the University of Oxford, and the US Naval Academy. His past writings have focused on issues concerning free speech in academia, civil/military relations, veterans issues, and the ethics of automated technology. For more information, visit his personal website, follow him on Twitter @Dr_M_Robillard, and read his Substack.

Somewhere over the Rainbow, something went terribly wrong... That is the title of my embroidery which you can see at the top of this page. Being a visual artist, I don't often explain my ideas and concepts in detail, leaving interpretations mostly up to the viewer. I found it necessary however to accompany my art with words on this occasion.

I’ve started and finished this post many times. Had friends read over and edit it, took a break to digest, then scrapped half of it. I have tried to replace anger with compassion and, finally, this is the version I feel ready to share with everybody who’d like to read it.

My hope is that this will help you, the reader, the viewer, to understand my conclusions about this subject. And I will tell you them candidly so no mistake can be made in misunderstanding or misrepresenting me.

--

I stumbled across the subject of gender identity ideology somewhat out of the blue about seven months ago and, after some initial research into it, I became really rather alarmed by the rise of accusations of bigotry and hatred aimed towards people who don’t buy into it.

‘It’ being the idea of a gender spectrum and sex as a social construct, rather than a biological reality. An Idea that seems to have gained a rather fanatical following and high visibility via social media over the past few years.

I had also been blissfully unaware of last year’s consultations by the English and Scottish Governments regarding the GRA (Gender Recognition Act) reform in respect of ‘self-ID’ (self identification) and the potential legal and human rights ramifications for women and girls. The implication being that if one can simply self-ID into womanhood, the single-sex protections of the 2010 equality act become completely null and void.

And so the issue has collided with my understanding of feminism and simply by being a feminist or part of certain circles, incorrect assumptions about my political beliefs are being made. With this post I seek to articulate my personal beliefs, so that I can defend and advocate for them.

I feel no animosity towards people who hold different beliefs to me, be they religious, gender identity ideology or any other kind of faith, and I hope you can extend the same courtesy to me.

Terminology

Definitions matter. Respecting people, matters. Criticising bad ideas also matters.

To express my convictions as clearly as possible, I have made a list of key words and their definitions as I understand them to be correct and have used in this essay.

A woman, is an adult human female. (Not an identity or feeling.)

Female is the sex of an organism that produces non-mobile ova (egg cells).

The word female comes from the Latin femella, the diminutive form of femina, meaning "woman". Barring rare medical conditions (DSD or Intersex), female humans have two X chromosomes.

Intersex is not transgender or non-binary. It is a rare medical condition. (Not an identity or a feeling.) In some current arguments Intersex conditions are being used to legitimise the idea of ‘being born in the wrong body’. However, most Intersex individuals do not wish to be included under the ‘trans-umbrella’. The aim of Intersex supporting charities is to demedicalise the condition, whereas Transgender support groups seek to gain easier and ever earlier access to medications and surgeries.

Cis [-gender] is a term invented to describe a person not struggling with their gender identity. Personally, I reject this prefix. Firstly, because I don’t have a ‘gender identity’ (as I do not believe in such a concept), and, secondly, describing me simply as a woman or female will suffice.

Sex is either of the two categories (male and female) into which humans and most other living things are divided on the basis of their reproductive functions.

It is not ‘assigned’, but rather observed at birth or often already in utero, based on external sex characteristics. Sex (not gender identity) is a protected characteristic under the law.

Humans can not change sex. If we ignore sex, we ignore sexism. This is important, particularly for women, living in sexist societies.

Femininity & masculinity refer to traits or characteristics typically associated with being female or male, respectively. Individuals usually possess both what are considered feminine and masculine attributes to various degrees, regardless of their sex.

Gender is the range of characteristics pertaining to, and differentiating between, femininity and masculinity.

Gender dysphoria (or ‘GD’) is a distressed mental state arising from a conflict between a person's perceived gender identity and the biological sex of the person.

Transwomen are biological males that choose to live as a woman, or believe they actually are women. There are similar examples in other cultures such as the fa'afafine in samoa - literally meaning ‘in the manner of’ (fa’a) ‘woman’ (fafine) - or the Hijra in south asia, as well as ‘Two Spirit’ for Indigenous North Americans, though these are seen as a third gender, rather than as literally the same as the female sex.

Transmen are biological females that choose to live as a man, or believe they actually are men. There are far fewer, in fact barely any examples at all of transmen in other cultures the world over. (Although there has been an enormous, inexplicable steep increase of young women being referred to gender clinics in the western world over the past decade.)

Non-binary is a term used by people who believe that gender is a spectrum rather than a binary, and states that they fall anywhere on this spectrum, or even ‘outside’ of the male-female dichotomy (I am still curious to know what ‘outside’ means).

Though I know some wonderful people who have come to embrace and re-define themselves by these terms and this ideology, I struggle with it for many reasons.

I struggle with this need to further categorise people into boxes: non-binary, a-gender, pan-gender, genderqueer, genderfluid, demiboy, demigirl etc. Instead of freeing us from the constrictions of socially imposed stereotypes this new system of categorising people actually imposes yet more new ones.

You are a butch girl? Must be non-binary. Feminine boy? Non-binary, or maybe trans. There appears to be no room for masculinity in women and femininity in men, and I don't find that very progressive.

How are any of these new labels any different to terms used to describe ‘character’, ‘personality’ and ‘expression’?

The proposition that people who don’t call themselves non-binary are any less on a spectrum between feminine and masculine traits seems entirely strange to me. I don’t know anybody who is a hundred percent male or female in their expression. I don’t even think its possible.

Furthermore, the idea that to be described as cis is to be treated as being privileged seems completely misplaced. Especially when talking about biological females who cannot simply identify out of oppression precisely because they are female (which is not an identity or feeling).

To hold these definitions and beliefs now often gets pejoratively called “biological essentialism”, as well as mean and hurtful.

None of the previous is intended as, or even just 'is', unkind or judgemental towards anybody, let alone mean.

The immutable biological qualities of females and males should not and do not determine or dictate whether or not you can create and design your own life as you wish. Feminists have argued this for a very long time.

But I really struggle with the increasing demands of having to validate somebody's idea of themselves, which is solely based on subjective feelings rather than objective realities.

It strikes me as a bad idea to demand others to bend or discard the facts of biological science, in favour of unjustified imposed mantras such as “transwomen are women”.

I have no issue with somebody who feels more comfortable expressing themselves as if they are the other sex (or in whatever way they please for that matter). However, I can not accept people’s unsubstantiated assertions that they are in fact the opposite sex to when they were born and deserve to be extended the same rights as if they were born as such. And I do not believe that these beliefs should override existing protections that are in place as a result of the biological realities of women, since their purpose is to relieve oppression based on women’s physicalities and reproductive functions (not identity or feelings).

Feelings don’t have human rights. Humans do.

I am also completely at a loss over Stonewall’s (the LGBTQ lobby group) updated description of transgender, seeing that, by their logic, almost anybody would fall under this category, including those that don’t identify as trans.

screenshot of Stonewall website

How is it acceptable for one group to self-identify (such as trans, non-binary, queer etc.) while also denying that right to others, when people (such as myself) do not accept the label cis?

“That includes people who do not self-identify as transgender, but who are perceived as such by others…”

How is it okay for an organisation in Stonewall’s position to categorise somebody as transgender, even if that person doesn’t do so themselves?

The Doctrine

The whole concept of gender identity shifts the onus onto everybody else, rather than being the responsibility of the self.

One is now kindly asked to play along with the Ideology of Gender Identity in the form of an ever growing list of new pronouns, identities and the validation of nebulous ‘facts’, or else be seen and labelled as hateful and bigotted.

It is an ideology because it is rooted in faith. A faith that I do not share. Let me explain.

The Ideology of Gender Identity doctrine (as I understand it and gathered from social media and personal conversations with proponents) is as follows:

• Transwomen literally are women, transmen literally are men. (They have simply been assigned the wrong sex at birth. So a transwoman’s penis is therefore a female sexual organ, and vice versa for transmen and their vaginas)

• Non-binary people exist and are ‘valid’ (this is an often repeated mantra)

• The dictionary definition of ‘woman’ (“an adult human female”) is ‘problematic’ and transphobic

• Biology is transphobic and exclusionary

• Men can get pregnant and give birth

• Women can ejaculate sperm and fertilise eggs

• There are no physical advantages for transwomen over cis-women in sport

• Allowing people to self-ID will have no impact on women’s rights in any way. The loopholes that would be created for predatory men to take advantage of are a figment of hateful and bigoted women’s imaginations. (Men never go to great lengths to access vulnerable women and being a member of a marginalised group automatically precludes anyone in it from wanting to do harm to others)

• Gender Identity is an inherent immutable quality that everybody has and only oneself can determine (unless Stonewall dictates otherwise). If one doesn’t have it, one gets assigned the label cis

• Gender Identity can be fluid, meaning one day you can feel like a woman, another day like a man, and another day like neither. (None of this will create any issues for accurate data collection to tackle gender inequalities)

• ‘Woman’ is an identity or feeling rather than biological observable reality. ‘Man’ is an identity or feeling rather than biological observable reality. Therefore anybody should freely be able to access the services, changing rooms, toilets, sports teams, grants and shortlists, shelters and prison services that best correspond with their chosen gender, not sex. This won’t create any issues, because transpeople are literally the sex they say they are, and non-binary people can choose what suits them best

• Sex is a social construct that is arbitrarily assigned at birth

• Sex and gender are a spectrum

• Same sex attraction is trans-exclusionary

• Sexual attraction is based on socially constructed biases. Humans are attracted to genders, not to sex (alternatively, you are a vagina or penis fetishist and therefore transphobic)

• Transwomen who fancy women are lesbians

• Transmen who fancy men are gay

• Lesbians that don’t consider transwomen with a penis as a partner, are problematic and transphobic

• Misgendering is actual, literal violence

• Dead-naming (using a previous name of a person who has since changed their gender and name) is actual, literal violence

• Cis people have cis-privilege

• Transwomen are the most marginalised of all women

• Anybody who disagrees with any of these points, is a TERF - Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminist

• TERF’s are fascists and deserve to be hurt

• TERF’s are part of (or are funded by) the alt right

• TERF’s are not feminists

• Women who have concerns about sharing spaces and services designed for biological females, are actually, literally transphobic, exclusionary and elitist about the label women and are only hiding behind ‘concerns’ so that people can’t see how biggoted they really are. They don’t want transwomen to be part of their exclusive club

• Anybody who disagrees with any of these points is a transphobe who actually literally hates transpeople, and denies their existence

• To question any of these points is actual, literal violence, as questioning would erase somebody's existence

• No Debate!

I believe that is most of it but please correct me if I forgot something or misrepresented the doctrine in any way. This is my genuine attempt to rationalise and understand the code of belief.

The crux

I disagree with pretty much every single point of this doctrine. The conclusion of which for followers of the doctrine would be that I hate trans- and non-binary people. (I do not.)

That I am a narrow minded bigot. (I am not.)

That I am a facist; as bad as a Nazi; Tansphobic cis-scum; and deserve what’s coming my way if I don’t change my beliefs. (If twitter and other social media sites and their users are to be believed.)

Please, make your own conclusions.

But none of this will lead me to forgo and forget my human rights to assert my own personal boundaries and beliefs, without being ‘othered’ or name-called for doing so.

None of it stops me from worrying about what this entire reconstruction of words and meanings does for girls’ and women’s rights in particular.

None of it makes me worry less about the future of women's sports, because transwomen have an undeniable, proven physical advantage even after transitioning and hormone therapy. (There are obvious reasons for sex seggregation in sports, namely male physical advantage, which doesn’t go away with hormone treatment!)

None of it will stop me from worrying about the impact that normalising and validating the idea of being “born in the wrong body” has on young children and adolescents, who are being put on life-long medical paths and often rendered infertile due to puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and surgery due to this ideology.

And none of it will stop me from speaking out about this publicly, even though it may be detrimental to my opportunities as an artist, as well as some personal relationships.

It is not my intention to upset or limit the freedoms of friends, acquaintances or even strangers, nor do I wish to be ostracised, but I can not and will not compromise my artistic and personal integrity, in service of an oppressive and, increasingly, actually violent, dogmatic ideology.

When Ideas escalate

It’s clear that emotions run high and tribalism runs deep. And I find myself unable to go along with what now seems to be the only accepted narrative in ‘my circles’.

I find it quite concerning and, frankly, manipulative to read with increasing regularity of ‘gentle reminders’, or the insistence on ‘inclusive’ (or as I like to call it ‘reductive and dehumanising’) language.

The word women is replaced by ‘uterus-carriers’, ‘menstruators’, ‘vulva- havers’, ‘chest feeders’ and the absolute top-of-the-pops on my No Fucking Way list: ’NON-MEN’ (I wish that was a joke.)

It is uncannily reminiscent of black women’s history, when female slaves were dehumanised as ‘breeders’, or today’s billion dollar surrogate industry in India, where vulnerable women are literally used as incubators and called ‘carriers’.

I virtually never see anybody advocating for men, and transwomen by extension, to now be called ‘penis owner’, ‘people with penises’ or ‘prostate carrier’ and ‘ejaculator’ in the name of inclusion.

And here’s the rub: this entire issue is overwhelmingly asymmetric against one sex class.

A vocal British trans-rights advocate, born male, proclaimed that ‘centring’ reproductive systems (i.e. pussy hats, Big Swinging Ovaries accessories etc) at a women’s march is reductive and exclusionary (because transwomen do not have pussies or ovaries).

I disagree.

Women ‘centering’ and celebrating our reproductive organs is not only our right but, speaking as a woman myself, it is a way of reclaiming agency over body parts that are being legislated and shamed virtually everywhere in the world (for recent examples, see international abortion laws and Period shaming, though there are plenty more).

Meanwhile, T-shirts are being worn that say “Fuck TERFS”, “I punch TERFS” and even “KILL THE TERF”. Baseball bats and hammers adorned with the trans flag colours and signs saying “Fuck your pussy power” and “ DIE CIS SCUM” are being proudly waved around by proponents of the doctrine at those same women’s marches and pride parades.

These are predominantly groups of biological males threatening actual violence against women, with weapons.

There was even an exhibition of these paraphernalia at the San Francisco Public Library (you can check that out here).

It is unsettling to me that this has not only become acceptable but quite commonplace under the protective banner of the rainbow flag. What has gone wrong?

Lesbians are being told that - by new definitions - not considering a transwoman (who may still have a penis) as a potential partner is transphobic and exclusionary. Workshops are being run by organisations, such as Planned Parenthood, on “how to overcome the cotton ceiling”, a play on women breaking the glass ceiling, referring to the cotton of a lesbian woman’s underwear...

The “Degenerettes” have supplied me with ample inspiration for my embroidery, and their ‘activism’ seems by no means unusual anymore.

I find it disturbing and disturbed.

Transitioning children

This is another issue I am incredibly alarmed by.

I grew up with many gay and lesbian friends, and they all had one thing in common: adolescence was a bitch.

Now, that is a statement true for most of us, particularly those that behave and present in unconventional ways but for kids that grow up to be homosexual it’s particularly tough in a world that is still quite homophobic. Most only came to terms with and started to feel more comfortable within themselves around their mid to late 20’s. Some struggled for much longer still.

Gender Identity Ideology, suggests that kids who say they are the other gender or express themselves in stereotypical ways normally ascribed to the opposite sex are probably trans. There is no acknowledgement that adolescence is an awkward and very confusing time for all, and to question who you are and where you fit in society is part and parcel of it.

But the speed with which we as a society have embraced the ‘born in the wrong body’ narrative really scares me.

I believe it is the responsibility of adults to support children through the challenges of puberty, with love, understanding, acceptance and an approach of watchful waiting.

Instead some adults are now being pressured to unquestioningly accept the idea that a gender questioning child may have been ‘born in the wrong body’. Other parents are actively facilitating the wishes of a minor, who has no way of understanding the long term implications of things like puberty blockers, cross sex hormones and surgery.

A child who isn’t yet fully sexually developed, may very well wonder about who they are. Particularly if presented with ideas that conflict with common knoweledge, such as: it is actually possible to change sex through medical and surgical intervention, and; there is actually no need to change sex because you are the gender, and by extension, the sex that you feel you are. Sex is but an illusion and all that matters is your identity.

According to peer reviewed studies, in 80% of children who meet the criteria for GDC (gender dysphoria in childhood) the GD recedes with puberty. Rather, many of these adolescents will later identify as non-heterosexual.

There will be those for whom GD persists after puberty and it is paramount to help these individuals to gain easier access to psychological assistance.

But to downplay the long term effects of those medications and surgeries on young children, as many trans activists and proponents of the doctrine are, doesn’t seem kind to me at all. Physical changes during childhood can be irreversible as it is a crucial phase of development, especially in regard of the development of sex characteristics during adolescence.

Nowadays, many kids, particularly those that feel they don’t fit in with larger society, find refuge in online forums like Tumblr, reddit and other such online communities.

The social incentive for some to adopt new identities seems understandably enticing, but can also add to the feelings of discontent as well as dysphoria, according to many accounts of young people who had been part of these online groups and eventually fell out of them.

Benjamin A Boyce has a youtube channel that is a mix of investigative journalism, cultural criticism, and interviews. He has an ongoing series of interviews in which he speaks to transpeople (young and old), de-transitioners, psychologists and sexologists about many of the above mentioned concerns. Those interviews are very respectful, inquisitive and enlightening, and I absolutely recommend them to anybody who is interested. Here is the link.

Furthermore, a fantastic summary of current evidence in the treatment of gender dysphoric children and young people can be found here .

Misplaced compassion

I can see how the origins of this postmodern line of thinking arose from compassion towards people suffering from gender dysphoria who are struggling to come to terms with themselves in an environment that imposes traditional social gender roles on us from birth.

Trans and gender non-comforming individuals often face discrimination, stigmatisation and violence, and also have to deal with a myriad of other mental and physical health issues.

I genuinely feel deeply compassionate towards anybody who experiences any kind of internal struggle, and I believe that better access to, in particular, mental healthcare for people suffering from GD is paramount.

However, none of those reasons convince me to embrace the total denial of epistemological, objective scientific facts, which is a base requirement of this doctrine and a dangerous precedent.

For someone suffering severe depression who has suicidal ideation the compassionate and responsible medical response is not to facilitate their suicide. To promote such a response would be outrageous and illegal.

The same is true for other types of dysphoria such as apotemnophilia or body integrity dysphoria; a rare, infrequently studied condition in which there is a mismatch between the mental body image and the physical body (sound familiar?) characterised by an intense desire for amputation of one or more limbs, or to become blind or deaf. This fixation also often starts in early childhood or adolescence.

As a society, we try to help our fellow individuals. If their body causes them distress or they feel that they would be ‘complete’ if they were arm- or legless, we would not do that by cutting off healthy limbs or making them blind but by trying to find ways to alleviate the reasons for the dysphoria.

Similarly, for someone suffering GD who has the ideation that they must transition to resolve their anguish, I struggle to see how the compassionate and responsible response is the facilitation of the surgical removal of their healthy penis, breasts or ovaries and the ingestion of hormones (which will bring with them numerous future health problems). All without the guarantee of curing their dysphoria.

This should illicit equally as much concern as the others and yet we as a society seem to have embraced the ‘born in the wrong body’ tale fully.

Please watch this documentary and/or read this essay about body integrity dysphoria and explain to me if you can what the difference to gender dysphoria is, because I can not see it. Aside from one being fitted with a narrative and normalised in society, while the other remains ethically difficult and controversial.

A little perspective...

For those that don’t know me personally here’s a little introduction, which perhaps will help you understand why I couldn’t help but write this piece and stitch this embroidery.

While I have lived in London now for 15 years, I originally grew up in East Berlin, as it was until the wall came down in ’89 and Germany was reunified. This opened doors to six-year-little-old-me I never could have imagined, simply because I was unaware of the prison-like restrictions this wall and the communist state had inflicted on my life and that of everybody around me until that point.

The pre-school art folder I still possess is filled with red communist flags, peace doves and DDR (German Democratic Republic) flags crafted from paper cutouts, penciled illustrations and paint. Next to them, a childish drawing of three little girls holding hands: one white, one brown, one yellow; because under communism ‘everybody is equal’.

On face value, some aspects of East Germany seemed almost progressive, for women’s emancipation in particular. Retrospectively, it makes sense that neither of my grandmothers (both endured the Second World War and are still alive) nor my mother or aunties, all of whom spent their formative years trapped the east side of the Berlin Wall, would consider themselves a feminist, and yet I very much do.

I am from the weird in-between generation. I can still remember having to be cautious about what we would say and to whom. Even your closest friends, or so we were told, could turn out to be working for the Stasi, the East German State Security Service, which has been described as one of the most effective and repressive intelligence and secret police agencies ever to have existed.

Everyone may have been ‘equal’ but we certainly weren’t free to think and do what we wanted.

Certain TV programs from ‘The West’ were off limits, as was anything not in the ‘communist spirit’. If you were found to be guilty of ‘wrong think’, the consequences could be grave, including prison sentences or worse.

(If you know little of East Germany, I highly recommend watching “The Lives of Others” and “Goodbye Lenin”, both incredible films that will give you a good taste of what life was like then.)

The idea of ’wrong think’ is something that has, worryingly, returned to many aspects of the political spectrum and public discourse. And its increasing prevalence scares the shit out of me, frankly.

Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it.

Another important piece to my story is my father, who I have always been very close to. He is what can only be described as gender non-conforming, as you can see in the pictures below (which he has allowed me to use for the purpose of this essay). I want to talk about him to give context to my words and how close to home this feels to me.

My dad’s un-inhibited expression has always been a source of pride but also worry for me. I am all too aware that we live in a narrow-minded world that often fervently attempts to ostracise the ‘other’. Some individuals feel it’s acceptable to physically or verbally assault people who do not conform to their idea of ‘normal’. It should go without saying: this is wrong.

I abhor it and will speak out against such prejudices on behalf of everybody that wishes to express themselves outside of our social norms.

I have defended my father and every gender-non conforming person’s right to express themselves freely without fear of violence or discrimination, and have stood up against prejudiced individuals’ ideas of how people should dress and express themselves ‘appropriately’, and I continue to do so.

WIth everything said, I am genuinely deeply worried.

I worry that we have increasingly become a society where valid concerns regarding women’s rights, children's safeguarding and freedom of speech, are being classed as hate speech to stop any debate from happening.

I worry because this notion of ‘wrong think’ and wrong speak’ feels eerily reminiscent of my east german childhood, and that’s actually quite terrifying.

I worry because we should be having nuanced and respectful discussions about how to progress and make life more equal and fair for everybody: how to create more single sex as well as mixed sex facilities and shelters; how to create new trans shortlists in addition to women’s shortlists in political parties, scholarships and the like; how to create a level playing field in sports allowing individuals of all abilities and backgrounds to compete.

How can we support gender questioning children, without neglecting our safeguarding duties and condemning them to an often irreversible medical pathway for life?

Instead, this ideology, which is predominantly rooted in Queer theory and wishful thinking, surrounded by a potent dose of misogyny, homophobia and often also ageism, leaves no room for any debate at all.

Women and transpeople are both marginalised groups within society, and we need to find solutions for both of those groups, without overriding existing rights of women.

I worry because I fear that in the current political climate, and with the rise of populism internationally, women and transpeople will both lose out big time if we continue on this path.

Which begs the question: who really benefits from an imploding liberal and feminist movement?

It isn’t us.

On June 23rd, Britain’s Royal Academy of Arts put out a carefully worded five-paragraph media statement regarding German-born textile artist Jess de Wahls. “We have apologised to Jess de Wahls for the way we have treated her and do so again publicly now,” read the RA communiqué. “We had no right to judge her views … This betrayed our most important core value—the protection of free speech.”

The controverted speech in question was contained in a 2019 blog post, in which de Wahls wrote that “a woman is an adult human female (not an identity or feeling),” and that trans women are “biological males [who] choose to live as a woman, or believe they actually are women.” These are statements that almost every person knows to be true, but which have become unfashionable to say out loud in highly progressive subcultures. And so, when a handful of people raised a fuss about de Wahls’ work being sold in the RA gift shop, Academy officials not only purged de Wahl from their inventory earlier this month, but peacocked their reasons for doing so.

“Thank you to all those for bringing an item in the RA Shop by an artist expressing transphobic views to our attention,” read the June 17th post on RA’s Instagram feed. “We were unaware of [de Wahls’s] stated views, and their work will not be stocked in the future. We appreciate you holding us to account on this issue, and we would like to reiterate that we stand with the LGBTQ+ community.”

In backing down from its attempted cancelation of de Wahls, the RA now claims that “[a] plurality of voices, tolerance, and free thinking are at the core of what we stand for and seek to protect.” Whether or not this Road-to-Damascus conversion is sincere, these high-flown words glide over the fact that de Wahls’s views were never remotely “transphobic” to begin with, no matter what standard of “tolerance” one might choose to apply. Moreover, RA’s expressed conceit that punishing the artist had been a good-faith gesture intended to demonstrate solidarity with the “LGBTQ+ community” was always farcical: Some of the most prominent critics of progressive gender orthodoxy are themselves gay, lesbian, or trans.

De Wahls was fortunate: Her case attracted widespread sympathy, and the RA was attacked sharply on social media. (Even Britain’s ruling political party appeared to be on the artist’s side.) But the very fact that she had to defend her reputation in this way shows how deeply embedded gender dogma has become in the world of arts and letters. This includes journalism, too: Even after the Academy apologized to de Wahls, news reports described the artist as being marked by “accusations of transphobia,” without plainly noting that these accusations are baseless. And thanks to Google, these smears will follow de Wahls throughout her career.

In recent months, the issue of where to draw the line on trans rights has been front-page news thanks to the case of Laurel Hubbard, a formerly washed up 1990s-era junior-level New Zealand male weightlifter who transitioned to a female identity in 2012, and now is set to compete in this year’s Olympics—at age 43. The prospect of biological males making a mockery of female sports in this way has spurred many formerly cowed public figures to point out the abundantly obvious physical differences between biological women and biological men. And in some recent cases, as with scholar Grace Lavery at University of California, Berkeley, trans activists’ sweeping claims that we can alter our biological sex (or that the whole concept of biological sex is a mere myth) are now being properly ridiculed. Popular writers and podcasters such as Debra Soh, Abigail Shrier, Kathleen Stock, Graham Linehan, Helen Joyce, and Meghan Murphy have by now spent years raising the alarm against gender extremism, and there is some evidence their efforts are bearing fruit. A milestone of sorts was observed last month when even the New York Times, an early and regular signal booster of gender-bending maximalism, called out the ACLU (however gingerly) for its over-the-top trans jingoism. All secular movements built on pseudoscience persist on borrowed time, and this one is proving no exception.

But even amid the apparent decay of “gender supremacism” (to borrow a phrase from Quillette contributor Allan Stratton), its mantras remain embedded as holy writ in many professional subcultures—largely because gender activists have successfully entrenched themselves amid the various oversight bodies, trade associations, and unions that serve as gatekeepers in these fields. In many professions, these authorities possess the power to end a person’s career.

In the UK, for instance, a trans schoolteacher named Debbie Hayton was threatened with expulsion from the Trades Union Congress for acknowledging that trans women (such as Hayton, in fact) are biologically male. In Scotland, a whole slew of politicians and activists have been excommunicated by their own cadres following accusations of gender wrongthink. In British Columbia, a small group of lawyers operating within the bar association’s Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity Committee have rewritten court procedures so that lawyers are now effectively required to act out pronoun recitals as a condition to exercise their duties as litigators.

In the same province, a nurse is being dragged through a lengthy investigation process originally sparked by the fact that she’d publicly supported the erection of a billboard stating, “I Heart JK Rowling.” According to a report prepared by an investigator for the province’s College of Nurses and Midwives, “the Complainant [Alex Turriff] stated that this billboard was created to show support for author JK Rowling after she publicly came out with transphobic views,” and so casts into doubt “how [Hamm] can be trusted to provide safe, non-judgmental care, and wonders how transgender and gender diverse patients can be safe in her care.” This report is 332 pages long, and Hamm’s ordeal continues to this day, with her professional future resting, in part, on the question of whether a person can simultaneously be a competent medical professional and a fan of a woman who wrote popular children’s books. Hamm is represented legally by a group that supports constitutional freedoms, but others in her situation have had trouble finding a lawyer to take their cases: In the UK, as Maya Forstater has noted, some law firms have allegedly been encouraged to turn away non-ideologically compliant clients lest these firms lose their stamp of approval from trans activist groups such as Stonewall UK.

One reason these milieus have succumbed so readily to gender cultism is that activists have successfully weaponized a definition of “transphobia” that now encompasses virtually any acknowledgment of the biological facts concerning human sexual dimorphism. Moreover, their case often is made in apocalyptic terms, with whole legions of trans children allegedly being set on extinguishing themselves if even the slightest ideological deviation is permitted in public discourse. Through such rhetorical methods, even this essay can be regarded as dangerous (and perhaps even deadly) propaganda. One of the few liberal journalists who’s taken pains to map out these tactics, Jesse Singal, has been subject to a campaign of lies and personal attacks that resembles Scientologists’ treatment of “Suppressive Persons.”

Indeed, even tautological descriptions of biological reality now are cast as thought crimes. In 2017, world-renowned Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie told an interviewer: “When people talk about, ‘Are trans women women?’ my feeling is trans women are trans women.” This perfectly sensible statement was predictably denounced on that basis that, as Vox put it, “these remarks implied that trans women aren’t ‘real women’—a stereotype that transgender people constantly struggle against and find deeply offensive.” And in a searing June 15th essay, Adichie describes the Kafkaesque ordeal she’s endured in the four years since, during which time literary rivals (especially her former protégé, Akwaeke Emezi) have orchestrated an often sociopathic-seeming campaign of defamation—capped by Emezi’s ghoulish tweet expressing “trust that there are other people who will pick up machetes to protect us from the harm transphobes like Adichie & Rowling seek to perpetuate.”

As Adichie suggests, what started as a well-intentioned movement to fight actual transphobia has morphed into a viciously guarded orthodoxy that demands primacy over all other commitments and loyalties, including personal friendship. She catalogs the sadists who’ve come out to attack her as:

People who claim to love literature—the messy stories of our humanity—but are also monomaniacally obsessed with whatever is the prevailing ideological orthodoxy. People who demand that you denounce your friends for flimsy reasons in order to remain a member of the chosen puritan class. People who ask you to ‘educate’ yourself while not having actually read any books themselves, while not being able to intelligently defend their own ideological positions, because by “educate,” they actually mean “parrot what I say, flatten all nuance, wish away complexity.” People who do not recognize that what they call a sophisticated take is really a simplistic mix of abstraction and orthodoxy—sophistication in this case being a showing-off of how au fait they are on the current version of ideological orthodoxy. People who wield the words “violence” and “weaponize” like tarnished pitchforks.

Last month, Quillette broadcast a podcast interview with Bernard Lane, a writer and editor at the Australian who has documented the risks associated with rushing gender dysphoric children into aggressive medical treatments. In any other pediatric medical context, this kind of journalistic investigation would be seen as laudatory. But such is the ideological climate surrounding this issue that special rules apparently apply. On May 24th, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation presented viewers with what purported to be a profile of Michelle Telfer, head of the Royal Children’s Hospital Melbourne’s Gender Clinic, but whose main purpose seems to have been the denunciation of the Australian’s coverage of gender transition.

Telfer complains that the newspaper is “one-sided” and that it has quoted experts of whom Telfer disapproves. At one point in the feature, a public-health official attacks the Australian for having “continued to publish articles” that challenge the preferred narrative—thus echoing Telfer’s own public complaints about her work being criticized. The public broadcaster’s overall message is that the journalistic community should get on board with the received wisdom, and stop creating trouble for those seeking to reflexively “affirm” any child who claims to be born in the wrong body.

As Keira Bell’s stunning legal victory in the UK shows, the journalistic establishment has much to answer for when it comes to either ignoring, or even actively suppressing, well-founded concerns in this area. In Britain, Ms. Bell’s case and related developments have set in motion a much-needed process of soul-searching among policy-makers (with the UK government now severing ties with Stonewall UK’s infamously cynical diversity-training program). But this process is less advanced in other English-speaking countries such as Canada. In the United States, meanwhile, the policy landscape is increasingly polarized between progressives who seek total censorship of “gender-critical” viewpoints, and red-state social conservatives enacting overly broad laws that, in some cases, would go too far by banning transition therapies completely.

As for Lane and the Australian, they are now the subject of a 42-page complaint to the country’s Press Council, a fact implicitly celebrated by ABC’s producers, who film Telfer’s partner describing how “since putting in the complaint to the press council, she’s just felt in control now … less of a victim.” While the text of the complaint is not in the public domain, one can read Telfer’s 2020 submission to the Senate Standing Committees on Environment and Communications in regard to media diversity, in which she lists her complaints about the Australian at considerable length. In that submission, Telfer claims that rapid onset gender dysphoria, as described by Brown University scholar Lisa Littman in 2018, does not exist; blithely dismisses concerns over the growing ranks of detransitioners such as Bell; and downplays concerns about the experimental nature of puberty-blocking drugs—despite the fact these concerns had become the subject of scandal in the UK even by the time of Telfer’s 2020 submission.

The Australian has been one of the few media outlets that has dared challenge the approved narrative on gender. And Lane, in particular, often has been a lonely voice of reason. But theirs is an uphill battle that will likely continue for years, as gender ideologues draw from the tall stack of institutional cards they’ve accumulated in recent years. While each of the controversies discussed herein may seem small and inconsequential—the contents of a museum gift store, a deleted Twitter account, a canceled university event, a muzzled author—the larger issue at play is not. The “final, most essential command” of any coercive movement is, as George Orwell once put it, “to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears.” Once you sweep aside all the glitter showers, animated unicorns, and rainbow emojis, that is ultimately what gender supremacism is truly about.

Featured image: Art by Jess de Wahls

What follows is the seventh and final instalment of When Sons Become Daughters, a Quillette series that explores how parents react when a son announces he wants to be a girl—and explains why so many of these mothers and fathers believe they can’t discuss their fears and concerns with their own children, therapists, doctors, friends, and relatives. To find out more about how the author collected and reported information, please refer to his introductory essay in this series.

“What are your preferred pronouns?” I ask Rene Jax, somewhat in jest. The answer: “Your Imperial Majesty. Look, you call me what you want. I don’t care. My friends say I’m half this and half that.” Rene (a real name, unlike the pseudonyms I’ve generally been using to describe others) is a 60-year-old male-to-female post-operative transsexual who looks both like a woman (hair, clothing, style of glasses) and a man (hands, Adam’s apple, jawline). My question felt farcical to both of us because Rene has written openly about the pathway that led to transition—and then to regret.

I decide on “he,” since the more we talk, the more I become convinced that our points of agreement and dispute are grounded in the common experience of male sexuality. In some ways, it’s a coin toss. But he likes to tease me, and we’re becoming friends, so I think we can both live with the potential impoliteness of male pronouns.

Rene’s prolific output has included not only autobiographical fare, but also polemics on a wide array of subjects. Perhaps his most well-known work is Don’t Get on the Plane, a 2017 book that implores those toying with the idea of sex reassignment to accept the fundamentals of their biology. (The subtitle is “Why a sex change will ruin your life.”)

Rene even extends his mantra of biological determinism to homosexuality. (He tells me I should find myself a nice girl, which I find a little rude given that he hasn’t even met the more-than-nice guy I’ve already found.) On plenty of issues, we disagree, often profoundly. But if anything, I find our exchanges invigorating: we can both engage in these conceptual debates without taking offence, which is refreshing in an era of misgendering and hate speech. Rene also happens to be a gold mine of knowledge on transgenderism, having spoken to (by his count) more than 2,000 parents whose children were planning to take hormones and have surgery.

In progressive circles—and even among many doctors—it’s become taboo to mention the negative medical consequences of sex reassignment. American detransitioner Sydney Wright puts the situation in stark terms: “I tried my best to find books that discussed the issue critically and offered opposing views, but all I found were pro-transgender authors. That left me with the obvious conclusion: If all the ‘experts’ were in favor of transition, why not do it?” (A detransitioner is someone who reverses his or her former transgender identification or transition.)

Leigh, the female detransitioner who educated me on trans anime culture (as discussed in a previous essay in this series), told me that the clinicians who treat young people too often say little to nothing about the future hurdles they might encounter. In her case, she was told that a synthetic phallus is indistinguishable from its organic counterpart. Many interviewee parents told me that having a candid discussion with their sons regarding the risks and downsides associated with transition is almost impossible; as the sons’ baseline knowledge tends to come from Internet activists who prime teenagers to regard any form of hesitation or caution as thinly disguised transphobia.

When I ask Rene about what these risks entail, he does not trade in euphemisms. Transsexuals who have undergone vaginoplasty (the creation of an artificial vagina) often suffer fistula, the rupture of the colon. This can be triggered by vigorous sex, or simply by a bowel movement, and results in fecal matter being discharged via the neo-vagina. It is a serious medical problem that sometimes is discussed in the media in the context of obstetric fistulas, which typically afflict women in extremely poor areas of Africa and Asia; but whose gruesome details are very much off-message from the glamorous, made-to-order bodies that young men think about when they imagine their transition. How many of them would hesitate if they knew they might defecate—in extraordinary pain—from their neo-vaginas during sex?

The neo-vagina is made from the inverted skin of the penis, presenting another sexual problem: Unless the young man has been especially blessed by nature, there probably won’t be enough material to create an orifice with enough depth to accommodate the average man, making sex painful, even in the absence of a fistula. The neo-vagina lacks elasticity. Nor can transsexuals orgasm, unless the word “orgasm” is defined very abstractly as a general wave of sexual pleasure. Without the sense of release that accompanies ejaculation, the act of coitus can be not only agonizing but unsatisfying.

Then there’s the issue of breasts, which typically develop following the introduction of estrogen into a transitioner’s body. But they often don’t look like normal female breasts, and instead seem more like large swellings around the nipples. They also tend to be in the wrong place for breasts, being closer to the edges of the torso in men than they would be in women. (“They look okay in a sweater,” says Rene. “Not so much without one.”) And so many MtF (male-to-female) transsexuals then go on to get silicone implants, which come with their own costs and medical risks. Overall, the transsexual body tends to require constant attention, updates, and corrections. That’s why Rene wrote his book. “Why increase the chances of your body failing?” he asks.

In many—perhaps most—cases, it should be said, trans-identifying young men don’t have any interest in interfering with anything below the waistline. (An example here is Ellen’s son, Sam, whom I discussed way back in part two of this series.) But it isn’t just surgery that puts the body at risk. “I was speaking at an event with three male-to-females,” Rene recounts. “Every single one of us had a retina come loose at some point or another. It can’t be a coincidence.” He explains that estrogen doesn’t protect the male body from decay in the same way as it protects the female body. “It’s like putting gasoline in a diesel tank,” is his analogy.

Rene is now almost entirely blind in his left eye. He keeps an eyepatch in the glovebox of his car, as the blurry images from his left side are more a distraction than anything else. His retina has detached no fewer than five times; and each time, he’s needed a general anaesthetic to repair it. The process is invasive, and the period of recuperation painful. This isn’t an obvious consequence of reassignment (as opposed to, say, infertility). And it’s important to note that there haven’t yet been any long-range studies on the phenomenon, so the link I am reporting here is strictly anecdotal. But what’s notable is that 20- and 30-something influencers on YouTube don’t even seem to want more medical information. They aren’t thinking about fistulas or fading vision. After all, the most popular figures are the ones living through their early period of euphoric transition into exciting new, female forms. And in any case, young people (trans or not) tend to behave as though they’ll live forever.

Rene is scathing about the contradictions and hypocrisies at play here. “Half of these parents won’t even let their kids eat chickens reared on hormones,” he says. “But they’re seriously considering them for their kids.” He points out the risks of hypertension, which also happens to be a serious comorbidity factor when it comes to COVID-19. “You have to remember,” he says, “We’re dealing with [one of the rare] medical treatments that doesn’t try to return the body to its original state of health.” Cosmetic surgery is another exception, of course. But even in that case, the results are expected to be stable, and not to cause a lifetime of medical follow-up and pharmaceutical dependence.

Our conversation moves from the biological downsides to the social downsides, which, for Rene, are equally worrisome. The transsexual dating pool is vastly reduced; he believes that the resulting relationships are fragile, as they’re built on the knowledge that one of the two bodies is compromised. I find this point a bit bleak; but, as my interview with Menno showed (he was the 40-something gay Dutch man with the cheeky YouTube channel), many people just can’t find the physical form of the transsexual to be alluring, particularly once the underwear is off.

Rene urges me to delve deeper into the social downsides he lists, including the elevated rates of prostitution among transsexuals. But I can only cover so much ground, and many parents are too concerned with the urgent medical risks associated with transition to turn their mind to a child’s later romantic and professional life. But whether the risks we’re discussing are medical or sociological, the same principle applies: candid guidance is in short supply.

This marks out transgenderism as an outlier. Elsewhere in the practice of medicine, there is an expectation that all data will be considered before a patient makes a life-altering decision. Young men questioning their gender are therefore trapped between two extremes: true transphobes who dismiss them as freaks and deviants, and those who are so eager to “affirm” their trans identity that they skip over the health consequences. Each of these two groups poses a risk to trans-identified youth, and each deserves to be held to account.

* * *

Many of the parents I’ve spoken to describe their children as though they were becoming members of a different species. Their sons are renaming themselves after fictional anime characters, and planning to remodel their bodies in acts of homage. The language of transgenderism is often starkly spiritual, suggesting that we are disembodied spirits whose relationship to one’s body is that of mere tenant. Puberty has become a countable noun—“I don’t want to be put through a puberty I don’t want”—as though it’s the soup option on a table d’hôte menu. “If you didn’t like male puberty, what makes you think you’re gonna like the female version?” one mother asked her son. She never got an answer.

Teenagers are being told that puberty is a time for them to make decisions about sex and gender, this at a time when they have none of the life experience that would be necessary to make such existential choices. The fixation on identity labels, coupled with the social isolation and sexual delay that often go along with distress about gender, sometimes results in paralysis. Gender-questioning males who are “hyper-ruminative” (as I described them in the sixth instalment) are often perpetually stuck in setup mode, defensive in regard to whatever tentative decisions they’ve made, but never quite decisive enough to get on with the actual business of living the life they say they want.

This brittleness and delicacy isn’t confined to trans-identifying children, but is a defining quality of this whole generation. And who can blame them for being fearful in the social-media age? A girl in Utah tweets out a picture of herself in a Chinese-style dress and faces hundreds of thousands of micro-acts of disapproval in response. A Scottish teenage lad meets a girl online—except that it turns out not to be a girl. It turns out to be an online blackmail gang, which threatens to release compromising videos of him performing sexual acts on camera, and so he throws himself off a bridge, to his death. Even those of us who are still in our 30s and 40s—hardly senior citizens—will find it almost impossible to imagine what kind of pressures these children face.

Many of the parents I interviewed did manage to bridge the divide, and had relationships with their children which are mostly healthy. When they’re not talking about gender, these parents get along with their children, who inspire and entertain them, and are often great sources of pride. But even in these cases, the parents still feel an underlying sense of anger and frustration. They can’t take on their kids’ schools, even when the schools go against their wishes. They don’t feel like they’ll be fairly treated if they talk to a local journalist covering the gender beat. When their workplaces go in for LGBT consciousness-raising sessions, they’re walking on eggshells, even though none can be described as homophobic (nor anything-phobic, for that matter). They feel that there’s not much point in contacting their political representatives. Aside from anything else, they don’t want a lecture.

This fear can have terrible and unexpected consequences. A Scottish detransitioner called Sinéad Watson has recently written about the effect of her journey on her mother. While Sinéad was going through her original reassignment process, her mother was deep in grief, yet couldn’t articulate this, being afraid that their relationship might deteriorate if she did so. So Sinéad’s mother put a brave face on it, supporting her daughter even as she was doing what she believed was the wrong thing. As Sinéad writes:

She was a grieving mother with nobody and nowhere to turn to, because her grief was painted as transphobic and hateful, when in fact it was the opposite. It was unconditional love for her daughter that forced her to support me and stay by my side even though it hurt her. Nobody ever asked her how she was. Nobody ever checked in to see how she was handling the loss of her youngest daughter. People just kept saying “good for her,” while she cried herself to sleep after looking at my baby pictures. My mum didn’t question or challenge me because she didn’t want to lose me. [But] the gender clinic had no such pressure. It was their job to question and challenge me—to evaluate my (clearly) poor mental health and treat me accordingly. Instead, they handed me HRT [hormone replacement therapy] and surgery … The parents of trans people receive so little support or compassion. It is not transphobic for you to grieve, and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.

There seems to be little point in blaming either parent or child in this situation. If Sinéad and her mother had been living in a culture where the prospect of such drastic medical changes could be discussed freely, the outcome for their family—and for Sinéad’s body—might have been radically different.

In an online study I conducted, 185 parents answered a range of questions about their children, all of whom had declared a new gender identity of some kind, such as “trans,” “non-binary,” or “gender fluid.” This was a self-selecting group, I should note, as these were all parents who were at least somewhat sceptical enough of the received wisdom in this area, and had taken steps to seek out web resources to help them to understand the phenomenon. But the results are worrying nonetheless. Only 18 percent of parents answered no when asked whether they believed their children saw sexual relations and romantic love as separate or even unrelated concepts. Nearly half attributed their children’s changes in identity, at least in part, to a desire to be part of a positive social movement. Nearly half suspected that their children were trying to get attention. Four-fifths thought that their children had been influenced by spending too much time online. Parents have been complaining about their kids’ lifestyle choices and political convictions since the dawn of time, of course. But rarely have such choices involved committing oneself to the possibility of sterility and a lifetime of medical therapies.

The findings are striking when it comes to differences between males and females. On one hand, there was no statistically significant difference between the sexes in regard to the influence that parents attributed to pornography, sexual abuse, or eating disorders. But the parents of sons were far more likely to describe their child’s dysphoria as being linked, in some way, to online gaming culture. More than one young man told his parents he wanted to be a woman so he wouldn’t end up wielding straight male privilege. Of all the parents of boys who participated in the survey, only half thought their sons actually believed they could really become a member of the opposite sex; and the boys who did believe that such a literal transition was possible were significantly more likely to have received an autism-spectrum diagnosis. Overall, more than 80 percent of boys’ parents reported that their sons were typical boys—in terms of gender norms—in their earlier years, displaying no particularly effeminate traits. Neuro-atypicality, emotional detachment, and fear of sexual development are common characteristics. But contrary to some of the more lurid examples of trans women discussed on social media, these are not sex-obsessed males, let alone budding predators. Just the opposite: they seem terrified of sex.

The typical hyper-ruminative gender-questioning boy, as psychotherapist Stella O’Malley and I call him, is smart, with communication and intellect out of proportion to his social skills. He’s excellent at mathematics in particular, and often in academic pursuits more generally, although this isn’t always reflected in grades. As noted above, he’s likely to have a diagnosis of autism, Asperger’s syndrome or ADHD. He’s sometimes irritated by certain types of clothing; by people yelling; by ticking clocks or rustling noises. As puberty progresses, his psychosexual development lags. He’s very imaginative, and able to construct an alter-ego with extraordinary levels of detail. His Internet usage is even higher than that of his peers, and his online activity causes him to spend even more time thinking about himself. He’s obsessed with anime, and especially anime-themed gaming. But he’s also interested in big questions: Who am I? What could I be? What’s right and what’s wrong? He has a mixed-sex peer group, and often one particularly influential female friend who is even more motivated by social justice and gender revisionism than he is. He seeks approval, not only from friends and online contacts, but also from schoolteachers, counsellors, and therapists. He seems scared of sexual activity and exploration, and sometimes even scared of romance. Maybe he’s been bullied. And he wants an explanation for why he doesn’t fit in, especially one that comes in a form that his friends and classmates will readily understand. Not all of these features are present in every case, of course. But the prototype I am describing will ring true for most of the parents I’ve spoken with, all of whom have come to believe that instantly affirmed sex reassignment is the wrong pathway for their sons.

I stated in my introductory essay, back in early April, that my role was that of a “storyteller.” But in the story I am telling, I am also something of a protagonist manqué: Like Menno, I believe I would have been tempted to follow this same transition pathway had I been born a few decades later than I was.

I had strongly dysphoric feelings in my teenage years, as a consequence of the trauma of parental bereavement. These feelings took well over a decade to process, and perhaps even closer to two. For many years, I could not look in a mirror (I still shave with my eyes closed, by habit). Had the option of quitting my own sex been available to me when I was 14 or 15, I would—in Stella’s words—“have swum across seven oceans” to seize it. As a young man, my misguided efforts to understand what I was suffering took me into the most lightless corners of the Internet, where I made myself the target of grooming at the hands of older, predatory males who encouraged my self-destructive urges, much like Natalie’s son Luke (whom I described in the fourth instalment).

Over the years, I have seen remarkably little effort undertaken by tech giants to stamp out this phenomenon (even as they have moved with lightning speed to censure anyone accused of misgendering). It’s depressing to watch detransitioners who have been exposed to grooming—as well as their parents—doggedly reporting social media account after social media account while billionaires kick back their heels and pronounce themselves LGBT “allies.” It’s equally depressing to hear the political Right blame parents for their intelligent kids’ foolish adventures in the wild west of the online world. These days, a child’s academic success is increasingly predicated on Internet access. Several of the parents I’ve discussed in this series have tried to limit their sons’ online presence. It rarely worked out. (And when it did, the required effort was Herculean.)

There is no doubt that my own experiences biased my approach to the subjects I have explored—though I also think I have been forthright and self-aware about the nature of those biases. In any case, a blindness to the dangers of online grooming is only one of the many unforeseen consequences of affirming all things “trans” on a no-questions-asked basis. It isn’t just predatory behaviour in Internet communities that gets papered over by the most militant trans-advocacy groups; but also depression, anxiety, eating disorders, and early-years trauma, not to mention the profits made by surgeons and hormone providers.

When people who once had dysphoria interact with trans-rights activists, we often are told that we are “jealous” that we didn’t have the “courage” to change sex. To be instructed that the dysphoric ideas that stalked us for years were actually correct all along is insulting, especially coming from strangers: Not only does it imply that the bodies and faces we have come to love are indeed the “wrong” bodies and faces; it also speaks to the spirit of ruthless narcissism that animates many of these activists. Yet it is to these individuals that our media often turns when it is time to “celebrate trans lives.”

If you know parents going through this, talk to them. More importantly, listen to them; provide them with an opportunity to articulate, in Diane’s words, their right to their own souls. If you know a teacher or a doctor or a counsellor or a therapist who feels bound by affirmation dogmas, encourage them to read this series of essays, or Abigail Shrier’s Irreversible Damage, or any of the various excellent analyses that Quillette has made available to the public.

There is a middle ground between dismissing trans-identifying youths as “deviants” and celebrating invasive medical practices as though their consequences were trivial. I would urge everyone to help us reclaim this middle ground, a process that will involve putting aside differences of opinion about what is causing this surge in trans identification. Regardless of what one thinks about Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria, autogynephilia or any other related issues, one thing is becoming clear about the way we are addressing transgenderism among today’s teenage boys: We have made a mistake.

With thanks to Rene and everyone else who took the time to speak to me—and to Ioana for her help with data analysis. The choice of pronoun I made to refer to Rene in this essay turned out to be prophetic: since writing this final instalment, Rene has surgically detransitioned, and is starting to live again as a man.

Angus Fox (a pseudonym) is an academic working in an unrelated field of study. He can be contacted at gcri@protonmail.com.

Imagine a world where you can be jailed for attempting to protect your child from medical assault. A future where you can no longer object to your child being subjected to medicalized gay conversion ‘therapy.’ A country where the government can legally enforce a belief system and criminalize anyone who goes against that system of belief. No, I’m not talking about Iran… I’m talking about Canada.

On Friday, April 16, a father in Canada, Rob Hoogland, was sentenced to serve 6 months in jail for the crime of attempting to protect his child from medical assault, for speaking up, for refusing to abide by a legally enforced belief system — gender ideology. For parents in Canada, this is their new reality. And other countries, like the US, aren’t far behind.

The ordeal began several years ago, when Hoogland discovered that his 12-year-old daughter’s name had been changed in the 7th grade yearbook. From there, the truth unraveled — His child had been shown SOGI 123 ‘education’ videos (gender ideology indoctrination propaganda) at her school. She then decided she was a boy, the school ‘affirmed’ the child as a transexual and ‘socially transitioned’ her without informing her parents. The school kept this all a secret from the parents in accordance with the B.C. Ministry of Education’s Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity (SOGI) Policy, which dictates that parents have no right to know what their child’s “preferred sex, gender, or name” is at school.

The school sent the child to see a psychologist, Wallace Wong, who treats “transgender” children as young as 2, and who, at an event hosted by Vancouver Public Library, admitted that he advises kids to fake being suicidal. Wong sent the family to the endocrinology unit at the B.C. Children’s Hospital.

“So what you need is, you know what? Pull a stunt. Suicide, every time, [then] they will give you what you need…” — Wallace Wong

On their first visit to the endocrinology unit, the doctor laid out a plan to medically ‘change’ Hoogland’s, then 13-year-old, child’s sex (to male), including injections of testosterone. Hoogland wouldn’t sign off. He noted his child said she was a lesbian, prior to deciding she was a boy, and thought she might be going through a phase. He also noted his child had obsessive tendencies and mental issues — His daughter had been infatuated with 2 male teachers, to the extent the school had to intervene, and in the 8th grade, while being ‘affirmed’ as a boy, his daughter had attempted suicide.

When his daughter was 14, the hospital informed Hoogland that they would be medicalizing his child in accordance with the B.C. Infants Act, and that according to the B.C. Infants Act, they didn’t need parental consent to do so.

Young people do not reach full cognitive brain development till around the age of 25, yet the B.C. Infants Act says a minor can consent to medical treatments. While this makes sense in the context of life-saving surgery (where, for example, a Jehovah’s Witness can otherwise prevent a hospital from saving their child’s life), when it comes to something as serious as chemical castration or the surgical removal of a minor’s sex organs, a young person can not possibly give “informed consent.” The prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain that determines our ability to understand repercussions, consequences, and develops our sense of identity, among other things, simply isn’t fully developed until the mid-twenties.

Furthermore, most youth who are diagnosed with “gender dysphoria” would otherwise grow up to be LGB, if they are allowed to grow up — Statistically speaking, 75% would grow up to be LGB, and 85% would grow up to be LGB or straight. What’s being legally enforced is a massive human rights violation of gay and lesbian youth, and a human rights violation of youth in general. Not to mention a violation of every single adult forced, legally, to lie and go along with it.

In 2019, Judge Francesca Marzari convicted Hoogland of “family violence” for using female pronouns when speaking about his daughter, and signed an order authorizing the police to arrest him if he was caught using language in a way that acknowledged his child as biologically female.

In March, Hoogland was arrested and held behind bars without bail. Hoogland’s lawyer, Carey Linde, commented, “He’s been sitting out in a government-supplied bed cot, in a small cement cubicle with iron bars, for speaking his mind, and he will stay there until the trial starts at 2 p.m. on the 12th of April.”

On Friday, B.C. Supreme Court Justice Michael Tammen, said Hoogland had “blatantly, willfully and repeatedly” broken the rules, speaking out, and that a “strong denunciatory sentence” was necessary.

Hoogland has been ordered to serve six-months in jail. Additionally, the judge — noting the father’s crowdfunding website, which raised $56,000 to help him in this case — was ordered to donate $30,000 to Ronald McDonald House of B.C. and the Yukon, after he is released from jail.

Youtube: Rob Hoogland

On April 16, Chris Elston, a father and activist who sat in on the hearings, tweeted that Hoogland “pleaded guilty to violating the gag order by speaking out, naming the doctors involved, and publishing documents like this consent form that his daughter signed when she was only 13 years old,” commenting, “many young women get prophylactic hysterectomies after about 5 years on testosterone because the risk of cancer is so high. Prolonged testosterone use also causes abdominal pain, and vaginal and uterine atrophy, requiring hysterectomies. Can a 13-year-old girl consent to her own sterilization? The doctor at B.C. Children’s Hospital thought so after meeting with the child for just one hour.”

On April 14, Elton tweeted “Linde gets back to the Tavistock decision. The issue at the heart of this is whether a child can give informed consent. Seeing as we know very little about the long-term effects of these drugs, obviously they cannot.” However, it seems as though the judge wasn’t all too interested in whether or not a young person can give “informed consent.”

Landmark Case in the Fight to Protect Nonconforming Youth

Tavistock decision

While it may be clear, to anyone logical, that this father was speaking out in an attempt to protect his child from medical malpractice, the judge said he didn’t accept that the father’s “intention was otherwise than to attempt to undermine the authority of the courts and overall administration of justice.”

After the judge implied that he planned to inflict a longer jail term than the Crown recommended, the father took another turn on the stand and explained that during his time held in jail, he thought about his actions and realized he might’ve been used as a “pawn” and “played,” and influenced by new friends.

On Friday, the judge said he went with less jail time than he initially considered, due to the father’s last minute expression of remorse, his agreement to make efforts to remove information on his case from the internet, and the “eloquent” plea made on his behalf by Jenn Smith (a trans-identified advocate who publicly challenges gender ideology).

In recent years, a number of clinicians have come forward to say they left their jobs because their gender clinic was knowingly performing gay conversion therapy. A modest number of independent doctors have stepped up and spoken up as well.

In October, the Keira Bell (Tavistock) case demonstrated that young people have been subjected to medical malpractice. We have been seeing, and will be seeing a lot more, young people come out of this system feeling deeply violated. And rightly so… They’re being sexually and medically assaulted by the medical field.

Parents who send their kids to school, and let their kids access the internet, where gender ideologists run rampant, now run the risk of being forced to watch (or worse still, be jailed) as their children are ripped away, drugged, sterilized, and assaulted by the medical field — a field that’s forever been obsessed with pathologizing and medicalizing those who don’t conform.

In an August 2018 New Yorker article, Elizabeth Kolbert asks, “Are today’s donor classes solving problems or creating new ones?” Kolbert describes a form of charity that aims to not just help people but to improve them. This “improvement” aligns with the giver’s particular vision of what constitutes improvement, of course. And the people who need to be improved are treated as children—for whom the donor, naturally, gets to decide what is best.

Kolbert describes how this form of giving becomes exploitation. We might add: not just exploitation, but elite-driven, highly self-interested social engineering. We see these characteristics on brilliant display in the philanthropy behind the modern LGBT movement.

The gay-rights movements and organizations that emerged during America’s sexual revolution in the 1960s bear little resemblance to the behemoth LGBT NGO juggernauts operating today. What started out as grassroots support for the legal and social acceptance of same-sex relations has turned into an effort at full-blown social transformation, with the addition of a fetish of adult men, known as transsexualism, to the LGB human-rights rainbow banner. Along with the rebranding of transsexualism as transgenderism, this movement has also successfully colonized and utilized disorders of sexual development, otherwise known as intersex conditions to drive its agenda. We have come a long way from Stonewall.

Perhaps the most insidious idea to be advanced under the LGBT banner today is the amorphous concept of “gender identity.” Gender identity refers to the way people see themselves with respect to socially constructed sex-role stereotypes. But is not just a descriptive term; it is also prescriptive—one has the right, according to advocates, to force others to recognize one’s chosen identity. And one has the right to change one’s body medically so that it better maps on to one’s gender identity. Given that the pharmaceutical lobby is the largest in Congress, and given that some of the most important philanthropists behind the modern LGBT movement have close ties to Big Pharma, this medical component is important to note.

“Gender identity” and “transgender” ideology emerged on the Western cultural landscape not more than a decade ago, but they have spread across the globe with the speed and ferocity of the SARS COVID pandemic—and they have created nearly as much havoc. Yet the massive concomitant changes we have already seen in language, law, medical and crime statistics, women’s safety zones, sports, accomplishments and educational opportunities, the medicalization of healthy children’s bodies, and K–12 curricula have not been driven by grassroots enthusiasm. Quite the contrary. They have been driven by the philanthropic funding provided by billionaires who are themselves invested in this radical ideology’s greatest beneficiaries: Big Pharma. Many of the most important philanthropists behind the transgender and gender-identity movements stand to make huge profits from body dissociation and the commoditization of human sex into medical identities.

Take Martine Rothblatt, a self-described transsexual and transhumanist who was the first individual to create a legal document supporting the idea that feelings of dissociation from our sexed bodies is normal. This legal document, later to become the International Gender Bill of Rights, legally normalizes body dissociation. Rothblatt later went on to become the top earning CEO in the biopharmaceutical industry, using his money and influence to promote the ideology and normalization of transgenderism. He believes that sexual dimorphism is morally equivalent to South African apartheid and must be dismantled.

Jennifer Pritzker, along with his family, one of the wealthiest in the United States, has poured huge sums of money into American institutions in order to advance the concept of body dissociation under the euphemism of “gender identity.” The Pritzker family has made vast investments in the medical industrial complex.

In 2000, another billionaire, Jon Stryker, heir to a multi-billion-dollar medical corporation, created another mammoth LGBT NGO, the Arcus Foundation. Stryker created such a global goliath of philanthropic funding with the stocks from his medical corporation that he had to create another organization to keep track of it all. In 2006 Arcus funded the creation of MAP, or Movement Advancement Project, to track the complex system of advocacy and funding that had already developed as a way of insinuating gender identity and transgender ideology into the culture.

Arcus deploys millions of philanthropic dollars each year to filter gender identity and transgender ideology into American law through their training of leaders in political activism, political leadership, transgender law, religious liberty, education, and civil rights. Some of its favored organizations include the Victory Fund, the Center for American Progress, the ACLU the Council for Global Equality, the Transgender Law Center, Trans Justice Funding Project, OutRight Action International, Human Rights Watch, the United Nations, Amnesty International, and GLSEN. In fact, Arcus is recorded to have given more than $58.4 million to programs and organizations doing LGBT-related work between 2007 and 2010 alone (it is far more than that now), making it the largest LGBT funder in the world. Jon Stryker gave over $30 million to the foundation himself in that period, through his stock in Stryker Medical Corporation.

Translation: A medical corporation with a vested interest in encouraging people to identify as transgender is directly funneling money and assets to its philanthropic foundation so that the foundation will do that encouraging on its behalf, thereby bringing more money and more clients (for life) to that corporation.

Arcus has funneled millions into other philanthropy organizations, such as Tides, Proteus and Borealis. There is no way to track whether these organizations are using Arcus money for the purpose of normalizing transgenderism, but one might surmise that the cause so dear to Arcus’s heart is not entirely ignored.

Along with the Pritzker family, Arcus has sent hundreds of thousands of dollars to colleges and universities, including Columbia, Yale, Vanderbilt, the University of Chicago, the University of Southern California, the University of Washington, and many others. Arcus grants have gone to black coalitions in the U.S. and Africa, Latino organizations, Native American organizations, youth and teen organizations, the military, and Public Broadcasting Radio. Millions have been given to lesbian organizations, including in Africa, with the lion’s share going to Astrea Foundation for a special focus on its trans fund. Arcus funds sports organizations such as Athlete Alley and Youth Can Play. Hundreds of thousands have gone to Planned Parenthood. Arcus has made a significant grant to Johanna Olson-Kennedy, a dubious character in the transgender arena. The foundation has funded prison projects and immigration organizations with a focus on normalizing transgenderism in children. Arcus funds religious organizations across the world.

In 2015, together with the Novo Foundation, a philanthropic NGO run by Peter Buffet (son of Warren, who helped launch the project with a $90 million gift), Arcus earmarked $20 million for transgender causes specifically. In 2018 Arcus funded the Council For Global Equality, a coalition of 30 U.S. groups advocating for inclusion of LGBT issues in foreign affairs and development policies.

Whew. This is no small operation! And every Arcus grant is contingent upon the recipient’s affirmation of “diversity and inclusion policies”—policies that, of course, very much include the affirmation of gender-identity ideology and transgenderism.

Many more philanthropic actors are working to prop up the transgender and gender-identity movements, including Tim Gill and his Gill Foundation and George Soros and his Open Society Foundation. Like Martine Rothblatt, Jennifer Pritzker, and Jon Stryker, Gill, who is heavily invested in artificial intelligence, and Soros, who has broad investments in Big Pharma, stand to benefit financially from the demand for altered bodies and brains that they hope is the fruit of their philanthropic activity.

It is striking that this conflict of interest has been so little discussed. Even the American Psychological Association (APA), the leading scientific and professional organization representing psychology in the United States, with more than 118,000 members, is funded by Arcus philanthropy. In 2005 the APA created INET, to help member psychological organizations improve the well-being of sexual orientation and “gender diverse people.” Prior to the addition of gender identity and the arrival of Arcus money, the APA INET was solely focused on LGB issues. In 2008 the APA created the Task Force On Gender Identity and Gender Variance, and in 2015 it developed guidelines to assist psychologists in the provision of culturally competent, developmentally appropriate, and trans-affirmative psychological practice with “transgender” and “gender non-conforming” people. Psychologists were “encouraged“ to modify their understanding of gender, broadening the range of variation viewed as healthy and normative.

Can democracy withstand such philanthropy-driven “encouragement”? Can there be genuine democracy when, via the taxpayer-subsidized fig leaf of philanthropy, billionaires can so quickly and easily dismantle the reality of biological sex by suborning charities, politicians, researchers, and professional associations? We are in the midst of finding out.

Jennifer Bilek is an investigative journalist, artist, and concerned citizen. She has been following the money behind the transgender agenda for six years. She blogs at the 11th Hour.

Stryker Corporation and the Global Drive for Medical Identities

Jennifer Bilek

8-10 minutes

In 2017, Jon Stryker, heir to Stryker Medical corporation, a corporation worth nearly 15 billion dollars, funded his LGBT NGO, Arcus Foundation, 30 million dollars, from his corporate stocks, consistent with his giving in previous years. Overall, he has personally funded his LGBT NGO half a billion dollars.

With gay marriage and many successful supreme court rulings being secured for LGB individual’s rights, in many western cultures, the focus of modern LGBT NGOs, like Arcus Foundation, have shifted. The new LGB + "social justice movement" has centered on depathologizing body dissociation and creating profitable medical identities via a burgeoning new gender industry. The projected market growth for amputations of healthy sex organs & medically constructed faux sex organs is being reported at anywhere between 1.5 billion to 200 billion dollars, depending on who is doing the reporting,

The human body is being commoditized into parts for sale: “Based on body parts, the Male to Female 'transition' surgeries are classified into genital, facial, and breast surgeries. The genital surgery segment is further categorized into vaginoplasty, orchiectomy, and phallectomy,” writes one blogger for Cosmetic Surgery Reviews. What is driving the booming market, according to Expert Market Research analysis, can be attributed to the rise in the health insurance policies for sex reassignment procedures and the growing technological advancements and rise in awareness about these surgeries which have contributed to a huge boost in the market. Global Market Insights, confirm that favorable government policies associated with gender transition surgeries is one of the major factors driving the industry demand. For instance, The Affordable Care Act is the government policy in the U.S. that provides insurance to the “transgender” and gender non-conforming population. The Affordable Care Act was initiated by Obama, who was helped into office by Penny Pritzker, a member of the billionaire Pritzker family, with their own investments in both the medical industrial complex (MIC) and the gender market. Penny Pritzker’s cousin, Jennifer, is a man claiming womanhood for himself who has funded myriad gender programs in medical, military and educational institutions across the globe.

What Expert Market Research doesn’t tell us but is plainly obvious, is that everywhere we turn, “transgender” surgeries are being marketed as positive, progressive and normal through Hollywood, its stars, the fashion industry and the rest of the media, which interface heavily with the medical industrial complex. .

The gender industry is being promoted by the MIC to serve MIC profits.

Arcus Foundation, again, is funded by Jon Stryker’s family stocks. Stryker Medical corporation is an American multinational medical technologies corporation based in Kalamazoo, Michigan. Stryker's products include implants used in joint replacement and trauma surgeries; surgical equipment and surgical navigation systems; endoscopic and communications systems; patient handling and emergency medical equipment; neurosurgical, neurovascular and spinal devices; robotics, implants, as well as other medical device products used in a variety of medical specialties. Most of this equipment and these supplies are utilized in hospitals performing traumatic surgeries on young people’s sex organs. Are we to believe it is a coincidence that Stryker Medical Corporation and an LGBT NGO with a recent focus on transgenderism and medical idenitities, are so intergrally connected? We have all seen first-hand, through the opioid epidemic and the undue influence the Pharma Lobby has had over governments, just how far the medical industrial complex reach actually is and the machinations they use for profiteering.

In the United States, most of Stryker's products are marketed directly to doctors, hospitals and other healthcare facilities. Internationally, Stryker products are sold in over 100 countries through company-owned sales subsidiaries and branches as well as third-party dealers and distributors.

Arcus Foundation has created and funded a vast international political infrastructure to drive gender identity ideology - or disembodiment - globally, funding trans organizations, lgbt organizations, religious, cultural, legal, educational, sports, police, media, medical and psychiatric organizations, contingent on those organizations adopting gender identity ideology. The foundation has funded studies of children as young as three years old, with this purported, illusive “gender identity” at odds with their sexed bodies, that will set them on a lifetime path of medicalization.

There is no substantiating evidence that such a thing as gender identity exists. Yet, in all the countries promoting political bills which are erasing sex and replacing it with gender identity, Arcus Foundation’s footprint can be found in either direct funding to LGBT and "transgender" organizations pushing gender identity ideology, into schools and institutions in those countries, or through Stryker Medical which has 54 offices in 36 countries, across the world. Stryker employs 40,000 people worldwide, is one of America’s largest public companies and brings in vast revenues for the 75 countries where they sell their supplies and conduct research and development. Of the top ten countries using Stryker Medical supplies, at least eight of those countries are currently hotbeds of trans activism and political pressure driving gender identity laws, including the UK, Ireland, Canada, Germany, the Netherlands and Australia. America, home of Stryker Medical and it’s largest consumer base, along with Arcus Foundation, lead the pack. The next largest consumer base for Stryker Medical is the UK, where Arcus Foundation has another branch at Cambridge University.

Singapore is home to yet another branch of Stryker Medical. In Singapore, the subject of gender identity is heating up with their Minister of Education being accused of trying to interfere with student’s access to the use of wrong sex hormones and where he is calling for calm. As reported by Manchester University, Singapore is one of Asia’s most highly developed and successful free market economies, with a higher GDP than much of Europe. Multi-national corporations in Singapore include Bosch, Unilever, BMW, Walt Disney Company, Google, Facebook and Hewlett-Packard (All major corporate supporters of gender identity). Singapore is the Asian headquarters for these companies. The economy depends highly on exports of electronics, computer products and pharmaceuticals. Pharmaceutical companies that have their regional offices in Singapore include Ferring Pharmaceuticals, GlaxoSmithKline, Pfizer and Merck & Co.

Ferring Pharmaceuticals, whose global site is in Ireland, make, advocate for and fund the use of puberty blockers, along with TENI (Transgender Equality Network Ireland), even after the Irish College of GPs no longer claim puberty blockers and hormonal sex changes are reversible.

Ireland, home to TENI, is a boiling cauldron of Trans rights activism. TENI is funded by Transgender Europe, which is heavily funded by Arcus Foundation (read: Stryker Medical). It is home to three branches of Stryker Medical and 19 of the top 20 global pharmaceutical and biopharmaceutical companies.

Arcus Foundation, is posing as a human rights movement but it subsists on millions generated by Stryker Medical Corporation. Jon Stryker has strategically driven gender identity (body dissociation) as a positive progression and normal human expression, into our cultures, our institutions, our laws, and more importantly and dangerously, the global market place. Who else in the world, beyond the medical industrial complex could wield this much global power simultaneously? We cannot continue to avoid the elephant in the living room. Puberty blockers, wrong sex hormones, invasive surgeries on young people’s sex organs is not a human rights movement but driven by the medical industrial complex for profit. It doesn’t take a brain surgeon to understand this. The evidence is right in front of us. The question is, will we face it in time to stop it?

The media is selling disembodiment as expression, for profit and they are including free shipping.

In less than a decade, the “transgender” “human rights” “movement,” (I am already running out of quotation marks) has morphed from "born in the wrong body," to “gender identity disorder,” to “gender dysphoria,” to “gender incongruence,” to “gender identity,” to “gender expression,” complete with its own line of make-up, fashion and body scars.

Geeze, I wonder why this contagion of young women wanting to have their healthy breasts amputated has emerged. Is it possible they are absorbing the messages that promote body dysphoria as progressive, cool and edgy by media conglomerates selling this exact message?

The culture was primed for this contagion by the media, which we’re groomed to believe, in most western cultures, is a free and open source of information in democratic societies. Remember all those stories, seven years back, of poor children “born in the wrong body,” boys with a love of the color pink and hair ribbons, meant to rip at our heart strings? Story upon story of families with young children who like the stereotypical things of the opposite sex flooded the media, across western cultures, always with the same narrative: discovery of an unacceptable identity, initial anxiety within the child and the family and then all of them eventually overcoming the disruption. The families came to realize it is another “normal” way to be human. Everyone lived happily ever after. Yea, right. The media coincidently forgetting to mention all the medical risks and problems for the rest of the child's life. NO BIG DEAL.

Seven years later, we have an epidemic of young women and many young boys as well, threatening their parents with suicide if their parents do not agree to allow their children to take wrong sex hormones and have surgeries on their sex organs on demand, while medical professionals affirm children’s disordered thinking. Advertising is nothing if not insidious which is what makes it so effective.

On one front we have Johnson & Johnson marketing these procedures as totally normal “cosmetic” surgeries, surgeons smiling into cameras at gender clinics, cheerleading the most macabre reenigeering of healthy human sex organs (open that link at your own risk), reality TV shows and mainstream magazines celebrating the castration of young men.

Men are walking fashion runways in pregnancy prothesis and young women are being displayed in underwear ad campaigns, their surgery scars from the amputation of healthy breasts promoted as empowerment. Meanwhile, journalists, academics, those engaged in politics and policy are all being censored for attempting to critique this, by the same media. Is this supposed to be an organic development, across countries and media platforms simultaneously?

Hollywood stars “parade their children” who like to wear the clothing associated with the opposite sex, as little accessories in their fashionable lives, for the media. Others are feeding Kool Aide to young people from magazine spreads who then want their own surgeries.

While the media inundates us with these messages, tax payers are forced to fund operations through new health insurance policies, for surgeries on young people's bodies that are not sick or injured. All the while the transactivists and their NGOs supporting the construct of “gender medical expressions” are depathologizing this monstrosity and attempting to sell the public the idea that sex exists on a spectrum, that human sexual dimorphism is a construct and that expressing how you feel about yourself by having your sex organs surgically rearranged is progressive. Access to wrong sex hormones are being offered to students on university campuses without medical oversight or recommendation while LGBT organizations, who fund the media in exchange for the media supporting their delusions, scream "human rights!!”

Media platforms are owned by massive corporate, conglomerates which interface with the medical industrial complex (MIC). People think they are reading Glamour, Vogue, Vanity Fair, Wired and The New Yorker, when they are actually reading Conde’ Nast, a corporate conglomerate with a huge investment in the MIC and gender as medical identity. Ditto for Cosmopolitan, Esquire, Bazar, Good Housekeeping, Oprah, Seventeen, Women’s Health, etc. which are actually part of the Hearst media conglomerate, with their own vast investments in the MIC and the gender industry. Ditto for those watching ABC, ESPN and Touchstone Pictures (among hundreds of other media platforms) owned by Disney, yet another conglomerate with big investments in the MIC, including the gender industry. Disney holds high prestige with the LGBT Human Rights Commission for their "diversity & inclusion" policies which is really corporate speak for homogeneity of thought and has funded $100,000,000 to children's hospitals across the country, including Texas Children's Hospital and Children's Hospital of Los Angeles, both of which have gender clinics. Pity the children caught in this coporate profiteering matrix. Meredith Corporation owns People Magazine (who covered the celebration of a young man's castration party), Parents, In Style, Health, Shape, and until about two minutes ago, owned Time Magazine (Let’s not forget their famous cover of Laverne Cox). Meredith, as any other media conglomerate, has its own health platforms and investments in the MIC. Time Magazine (of recent Eliot Page fame) was purchased by billionaire ($57 billion), Marc Benioff in 2018. But don’t expect things to get any better for allowable critique of the gender medical industry at Benioff’s new platform purchase, because you’ll be out of luck fast. Benioff is all on board for the violation of privacy, safety and rights of women and girls and is jumping in where Disney left off, bestowing a whopping $100.000,000. to another California children’s hospital. And oh look, they just happen to have a youth gender clinic too!

There aren’t many media conglomerates feeding us information and it only fits within the allowable purview of their corporate interests. They are all on board the gender-as-medical-identity train, leading us to believe this uniformity of thought is organic acceptance by the populace which encourages group think acquiescence. In other words, people are being brainwashed into believing that disembodiment for profiteering is a human right and that most people agree with this - when most people don't know feck-all about what is actually happening because all they see are slick advertisements by the MIC controlled media and messages from the LGBT NGO front who tell the media what to say. The mainstream media is being controlled and trained by LGBT NGOs fronting for the MIC and functioning as the arbiters of nothing less than reality itself.

We have to get clear that this apparatus of the gender medical industry is being strategically driven by capital, technological developments and the MIC through all our institutions, corporations and governments. While we are all arguing about what identity means, as it is overlaid with sex role stereotypes, the elites are running away with human sex. They are violating the boundary between male and female, opening markets to which our essential humanity becomes a-sky-is the-limit market to be mined.

The March 1971 issue of Harper’s was one of the most famous—and notorious—that the magazine had published in its then-121-year history. Even now, 50 years later, it is still just as famous and just as notorious. The issue consisted almost entirely of a cover-story essay by Norman Mailer (then aged 48) entitled “The Prisoner of Sex,” that ran into tens of thousands of words and declared war on the movement then known as “women’s liberation.” Within two months, the essay appeared in slightly altered form as a book, also entitled The Prisoner of Sex, and shot to the top of the bestseller lists. Mailer was already infamous in feminist circles for such remarks during media interviews as “All women should be kept in cages” and “[T]he prime responsibility of a woman probably is to be on earth long enough to find the best possible mate for herself, and conceive children who will improve the species.” (He maintained that both statements were testimony to women’s powers.)

At the time “The Prisoner of Sex” appeared, Mailer had already burned through four of the six wives he would marry, and fathered six of his nine children, at least one by each of his spouses. In 1960, he had made headlines for stabbing his second wife, Adele Morales, during a rowdy all-night party in Greenwich Village. Morales fully recovered and declined to press charges (although the marriage stumbled to its end two years later), and Mailer was sent to New York’s Bellevue Hospital for psychiatric observation, then placed on three years’ probation. Over the ensuing months, “The Prisoner of Sex” became the subject of a sustained attack in print and on television by such public-intellectual luminaries as Germaine Greer and Gore Vidal.

Town Bloody Hall (C.Hegedus, D.A.Pennebaker -1971) - Youtube

Most notably, the essay was memorialized in a debate entitled “A Dialogue on Women’s Liberation.” The event was held on April 30th, 1971, at the Town Hall, a performance space in midtown Manhattan, and featured Mailer, Greer, the literary critic Diana Trilling, the president of the National Organization for Women (NOW)’s New York chapter Jacqueline Ceballos, and the lesbian polemicist Jill Johnston. The city’s intellectual-elite were all in attendance and the 1960s cinéma verité documentarian D.A. Pennebaker sneaked into the auditorium with two other cameramen to film the debate. It was rumored that Pennebaker’s involvement was at the instigation of the publicity-hungry Mailer, who had previously collaborated with the filmmaker on three avant-garde films. Pennebaker’s footage was eventually edited by Chris Hegedus (who later became his wife) and turned into a 1979 documentary entitled Town Bloody Hall. In 2017, the Wooster Group, an experimental theater company in Manhattan, restaged Town Bloody Hall as a Mailer-bashing play, The Town Hall Affair, that reminded the New Yorker writer Rebecca Mead of Donald Trump’s “arrogant objectification of women.”

“The Prisoner of Sex”—in both magazine and book form—was largely a baroque riposte to Kate Millett’s bestselling feminist polemic Sexual Politics. Published in 1970, Sexual Politics had been the academic salvo (although not the only representative) of a radical wing of second-wave feminism that managed to displace overnight in the public imagination the middle-class, “respectable” wing of the movement represented by Betty Friedan’s 1963 monograph, The Feminine Mystique. Friedan had argued that women’s emancipation should be pursued via legal changes that would help transform women from unpaid housewives into equal participants in economic and political life. Millett—whose unsmiling face was turned into an icon of women’s liberation by its appearance on a 1970 Time magazine cover—went many Marxist steps further, attacking “patriarchy” as a pervasive and brutal system of male domination intended to objectify women economically, politically, and personally.

Sexual Politics was an amplification of Millett’s doctoral dissertation in English literature at Columbia University, so it singled out three male 20th-century novelists for condemnation who had focused on explicitly sexual subjects—Henry Miller, D.H. Lawrence, and Mailer. Blasting past any aesthetic analysis of their works, she castigated all three as primarily “sexual politicians… concerned with a social order in which the female would be perfectly controlled.” Literature, she argued, is essentially an epiphenomenal manifestation of political power structures; in that sense she was among American academia’s first postmodern theorists. She was also perhaps the first cultural Marxist, defining the female sex as an oppressed class. Millett contrasted what she saw as themes of brutish male domination of women via sexual conquest in the work of these three men with the works of the French novelist and playwright Jean Genet, whose fictionalizations of his experiences as a petty criminal, homosexual prostitute, and career prisoner, she admired. Genet’s narratives of pimps, drag queens, and sadistic male-on-male prison sex, Millett argued, were actually instructional parodies of “the power structure of ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ as revealed by a homosexual, criminal world that mimics with brutal frankness the bourgeois heterosexual society.”

Millett denounced Miller’s sexually graphic (and long-banned) novels as exercises in “the pleasure of humiliation” of women, typically described in unappetizing detail. She accused Lawrence of indulging in “an increasing fondness of force” in certain of his novels that feature highly educated, artistically sensitive women surrendering to men of primitive masculinity (Lady Chatterley’s Lover was not Lawrence’s only foray into this topos). As for Mailer, Millett targeted his 1965 novel, An American Dream, in which the first-person narrator, Stephen Rojack—a Harvard-educated World War II veteran like Mailer himself—strangles his estranged wife after a quarrel in which she belittles him sexually. The murder is an existential catharsis for Rojack, who is transformed from his hollow previous life as college psychology professor and talk-show host into something more real and authentic, if decidedly violent—immediately after the crime he has rough anal sex with the housemaid in an act close to rape. Millett called Mailer “a prisoner of the virility cult” whose “powerful intellectual comprehension of what is most dangerous in the masculine sensibility is exceeded only by his attachment to the malaise.”

The Harper’s article and its subsequent book version were quintessential Mailer, with all the faults and virtues of that unique genre. During his early career, Mailer’s reputation had been mostly as a novelist of varying critical success. His widely acclaimed first novel, The Naked and the Dead, based on his World War II experiences in the Philippines, had made him a celebrity at the age of 25, but he followed it with several others that critics largely panned, including An American Dream. Between works of fiction, he led a boisterous and well-publicized personal life, helped found the Village Voice, dabbled in money-sucking avant-garde filmmaking, and in 1969 ran unsuccessfully for mayor of New York City. But almost inadvertently—in magazine articles for Esquire and other periodicals that paid more reliably than trying to write the Great American Novel—he became a pioneer of 1960s New Journalism, which used the techniques of fiction in nonfiction reporting. (He had dress-rehearsed this change of genre in a 1959 collection of essays as well as fiction, Advertisements for Myself.) A 90,000-word cover story for Harper’s about his participation in an anti-Vietnam War protest at the Pentagon in 1967 became a 1968 book entitled The Armies of the Night that won him the Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction. The Prisoner of Sex employed literary approaches that Mailer had perfected in The Armies of the Night. Like other New Journalists, Mailer made himself a third-person participant—indeed the protagonist—in the action he narrated. This strategy enabled him to portray himself, with large doses of self-mockery, as the much put-upon victim of whatever malign forces he deemed were arrayed against him.

In The Armies of the Night, he had been “the Novelist,” contriving to get arrested and then complaining about the breakfast menu in jail and wondering whether he should give away the bail money he had brought with him or use it to get himself out. In The Prisoner of Sex, he was “the Prisoner”—of “the legions of Women’s Liberation”:

…a vision of thin college ladies with eyeglasses, no-nonsense features, lips as thin as bologna slicers, a babe in one arm, a hatchet in the other, gray eyes bright with balefire. Four times beaten at wedlock, his respect for the power of women was so large that the way they would tear through him (in his mind’s eye) would be reminiscent of old newsreels of German tanks crunching through straw huts on their way across a border.

In a lengthy prelude, he either amused or exasperated his readers by recounting his dashed expectations of receiving the Nobel Prize for literature, a lunch he had eaten with a hostile but “never unattractive” Gloria Steinem, and a deadpan narrative of the six weeks he had spent during the summer of 1970, after his estrangement from his fourth wife, the actress Beverly Bentley, playing stay-at-home parent to five of his children in a Maine cottage. He wrote that “he could be a housewife for six weeks, even six years, if it came to that”—although in fact, as he admitted, he’d had to recruit his sister, his mistress, the two older of his daughters there, and a full-time cleaning lady to bring order to the ensuing chaos.

Mailer’s writing style, honed (if that’s the word) by his facility at turning out massive amounts of copy in short order (he wrote all 90,000 words of The Armies of the Night in two months), was in the classic American tradition of verbose rhetorical extravagance exemplified by Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, and Allen Ginsburg: often brilliant, often merely wordy and overblown. It is hard to know what to make of this nearly interminable sentence in which Mailer avers that the “male contempt of the pussy” hammered by Millet can be evenly matched by what he calls female “penis contempt”:

Now penis contempt may well accompany the others, for the look in the woman’s eye bemoans the fact that she is not a man, since if she were a man, or better still, a woman with command of a phallus entrusted to her, she would know how to use it, God she would know how to use it better than a man, which may not be an unfair portrait of a woman thinking across the gulf of sex: whereas a man is not often ready to explain that a phallus is not a simple instrument but a contradictory, treacherous, all-too-spontaneous sport who is sometimes the expression of a part of oneself not quite under Central Control, indeed often at odds with the will.

Is this bombast, misogyny, or a profound recognition of the terrifying vulnerability that men as well as women bring to the sexual act? Mailer’s preternaturally vivid prose, dumped onto the page in mounds like scoops of ice cream with nuggets of humor folded into the boozy apocalyptics, has a hypnotic quality that makes The Prisoner of Sex, for all its shortcomings, impossible to put down.

For some reason, Mailer never got around to responding specifically to Millett’s critique of An American Dream, except to say she had misread his work of fiction as an instruction manual on “how to kill your wife and be happy ever after.” (During the Town Hall event he railed repeatedly at the feminists present for not being able to distinguish between the words uttered by fictional characters and their creators.) Instead, he tore into Millett’s habit of quoting Miller and Lawrence selectively and out of context in order to make polemical points. Mailer had majored in aeronautical engineering at Harvard, and he used his acumen to drill down with mathematical precision into Millet’s textual distortions, citing passage after passage comparing Millett’s truncated quotations to their less malign authorial originals.

But his real quarrel was with Millett’s assertion that the sexes were exactly alike except for accidents of genitalia, and that men had contrived over the centuries—by imprisoning women in cycles of enforced monogamy, childbirth, and economic dependency—to bend them to their wills, sexual and otherwise. Millett argued for an end to all societal taboos against homosexuality, non-marital sex in general, out-of-wedlock childbearing, prostitution, and the double-standard, with the goal of creating a “permissive single standard of sexual freedom” that would make women the equals of men. Mailer derided this proposal as creating a “free market for sex, a species of primitive capitalism where the entrepreneur with the most skill and enterprise and sexual funds could reap the highest profit—the adoration of countless mates and mistresses in that ubiquitous world where men and women were as interchangeable as coin and cash.”

Besides Millett, Mailer attacked other second-wave feminists who had made headlines by demanding release from perceived male domination. Among them: Anne Koedt, whose 1970 essay “The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm” argued that the clitoris was the primary source of women’s sexual pleasure, so that conventional male-female sex was neither necessary nor necessarily normal; and Ti-Grace Atkinson, whose 1969 pamphlet “Radical Feminism” advocated the development of “extra-uterine conception and incubation” that would disconnect sexual intercourse from “[s]ociety’s means to population renewal” so that women would no longer have to “bear the burden of the reproductive process.” “[I]n order to improve their condition… [w]omen must, in a sense, commit suicide, and the journey from womanhood to a society of individuals is hazardous,” Atkinson declared. Koedt and Atkinson were probably among the most radical of the second-wavers, but there were others. Alix Kates Shulman wrote “A Marriage Agreement” in 1969, which proposed to turn wedlock into a tit-for-tat business partnership (“Husband does all the house-cleaning in return for wife’s extra child care”). Contributors to Robin Morgan’s 1970 anthology Sisterhood is Powerful lauded two medical inventions of the 1960s and early 1970s—the birth-control pill and the suction-abortion machine (“The entire process takes about two minutes,” Lucinda Cisler enthused)—that promised to level the sexual and career playing-field for women at last.

Mailer decried all of this as the “technologizing of sex.” He was already notorious for his opposition to contraception and masturbation as sterile dead ends of sexuality, and in The Prisoner of Sex he doubled down. He described the second-wavers’ call for a single standard of sexual freedom as “all part of the huge revolutionary statement that all fucking high and low, by any hole or any pit, was pleasure, and pleasure was the first sweetmeat of reason… Well, conception stood in the way of reason, for conception was embarkation on a train whose stations were obligation and guilt.” The prospect of conceiving a child, relished or dreaded, rendered sex serious. And the fact that conception took place inside the body of a woman rendered the difference between the sexes the most important of all human differences:

Men were by comparison to women a simple meat; men were merely human beings equipped to travel through space at a variety of speeds, but women were human beings traveling through the same variety of space in full possession of a mysterious space within… Women, like men, were human beings, but they were a step, or a stage, or a move or a leap nearer to the creation of existence, they were—given man’s powerful sense of the present—his indispensable and only connection to the future…

Mailer asserted, contra Millett, that Genet’s literature of prison homosexuality, far from parodying heterosexual males’ subordination of females, realistically portrayed a “world where everything is homosexual and nowhere in the world is the condition of being a feminine male more despised… For whatever else is in the act, lust, cruelty, the desire to dominate, or whole delights of desire, the result can be no more than a transaction—pleasurable, even all-encompassing, but a transaction—when no hint remains of the awe that a life in these circumstances can be conceived.” By this measure, heterosexual coupling with contraception was little different from homosexual encounters, Mailer averred. But this, he wrote, was exactly the aim of the feminist movement—to “technologize” women, turning them, unencumbered by the naggings of their reproductive systems and living atomized without the freight of either babies or prudish inhibitions, into efficient, career-oriented “units” of production in a brave new world—mechanized, contractual, and run for the benefit of the corporate state, but where they could count on their sexual desires being satisfied by someone or something. He called this phenomenon “Left totalitarianism,” marked by its mix of sexual radicalism, bureaucracy, and faith in science. He called himself a “Left conservative.” That was a fair summary.

Released exactly at the time when nearly every college-educated woman in America, schooled in Friedan and then electrified by Sexual Politics and its counterparts, was starting to call herself a feminist and resonating vicariously to second-wave radicalism, The Prisoner of Sex garnered enormous attention, most of it negative. On March 4th, 1971, within days of the publication of the magazine version, Willie Morris, the 36-year-old editor-in-chief of Harper’s who had commissioned the piece, resigned under fire. Morris, regarded as a 1960s wunderkind, had also commissioned the magazine version of The Armies of the Night, and his penchant for edgy, if critically acclaimed New Journalism narratives had cost the magazine advertising. This time the owners of Harper’s were said to be disturbed by the number and frequency of four-letter words in Mailer’s article, some in quotations from Miller and Lawrence, some in the writings of the feminists Mailer scrutinized, and some in Mailer’s own vocabulary choices. Then came the book reviews. Some were flattering. The critic Anatole Broyard, writing in the New York Times, called The Prisoner of Sex “a love poem” to women and Mailer’s “best book.” Most women seemed to think otherwise. Novelist Brigid Brophy’s review, also in the New York Times, was scathing. She called the book “an appreciative meditation by Norman Mailer on Norman Mailer. It establishes merely that if Kate Millett could put him down with bad logic and bad prose, he can puff himself up with more and worse of both.”

But it was Mailer’s appearance at the Town Hall event on April 30th that firmly, perhaps finally, placed him and his views on women beyond the ideological pale. His double role—he was both panelist and moderator—had been the idea of the dancer and choreographer Shirley Broughton, who liked to bring artists and celebrities together in symposia that she called the Theater of Ideas. She had hoped to induce Millett to join the panel, but Millett refused to debate Mailer. Other leading second-wave feminists also declined, including Friedan, Steinem, Ti-Grace Atkinson, and Susan Brownmiller, author of Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape. They were apparently offended by the notion of a male moderating a panel on feminism, and they also might have wondered whether they would be participating in a publicity stunt orchestrated by Mailer himself. Broughton did manage to recruit Jill Johnston and the literary critic Diana Trilling. Johnston was something of a cult figure. Technically she was the dance critic for the Village Voice, but her column had long since evolved into a rambling, free-association exploration of her sexual orientation. (Her book Lesbian Nation, a compilation of those columns, would follow in 1973.) Friedan headed NOW at the time, and she sent Jacqueline Ceballos to represent the organization in her stead.

Finally, there was the Australian-born Greer, in New York promoting her internationally bestselling first book, The Female Eunuch. The Female Eunuch was even more popular with women readers than Sexual Politics; an excerpt appeared in the March 1971 issue of McCall’s, a leading middlebrow women’s magazine. Greer, although academically trained (she had a PhD in English literature from Cambridge and a teaching post at the University of Warwick), knew how to write in a zesty, racy style that never shied away from the outrageous, as, for example, when she famously advised women: “[Y]ou might consider the idea of tasting your own menstrual blood—if it makes you sick, you’ve a long way to go, baby.” Mailer had quoted this passage with a degree of awe in The Prisoner of Sex: “[N]ow women were writing about men and themselves as Henry Miller had once written about women.”

The thesis of Greer’s book was that women had internalized this male revulsion—exacerbated by consumerist, cleanliness-obsessed suburban culture and the stifling nuclear family—at the grosser aspects of their reproductive functions. They had weakened and desexed themselves—taken on “impotent femininity”—in order to make themselves acceptable, and then, as wives and mothers, became resentful, nagging shrews who damaged their children irrevocably. Greer urged women to flaunt their sexuality and leave their husbands or, preferably, not marry at all, and bring up their children in free-form communal arrangements in which the youngsters would essentially “raise themselves,” liberated from the stifling “Oedipal” dynamics of the middle-class Western household.

Greer was already a celebrity in Britain, annoying other feminists by flaunting her own sexuality and announcing that just as men hated women, women also hated women—a claim which undercut the idea that sisterhood was powerful. In The Female Eunuch, she had mocked NOW and its push for legal tinkering with the system instead of outright rebellion. The prospect of her confrontation with Mailer was irresistible. The Town Hall sold out all 1,500 of its seats and went to standing room only, even though the tickets cost $25, about $161 in today’s dollars. The attendees, zoomed into close-ups by Pennebaker’s telephoto lenses, included such notables of second-wave feminism as Friedan, Steinem, Robin Morgan, Susan Sontag, Elizabeth Hardwick, and Cynthia Ozick, as well as Broyard and the poets Gregory Corso and John Hollander. What followed was a raucous piece of performance art that gave the audience its money’s worth. According to Greer, in an essay for the September 1971 issue of Esquire entitled “My Norman Mailer Problem,” the Town Bloody Hall rushes became the subject of a legal dispute between Mailer and Greer over whether Pennebaker had the right to use them. In any event, the reels languished on Pennebaker’s shelves for several years until Hegedus, newly hired by Pennebaker, viewed them, decided to edit them, and proved that a panel of five talking heads sitting at a table on a stage can make for rip-roaring entertainment. (The title of the documentary came from Greer’s exasperated cry that she was being “heckled” by Mailer at the “Town bloody Hall.”)

From the beginning, it was a contest between the outsize personalities of Greer and Mailer over who was to own the evening. Greer, six feet tall, with a mane of brunette hair and inch-long eyelashes, had attired herself in a fur stole and a long black sleeveless dress that showed off her arms and shoulders. Around her neck she wore an enormous silver pendant: a Venus’s mirror with a raised fist inside. At 32, she was at the peak of her good looks, which coincided with the peak of her readerly popularity (none of the 16 books she published after The Female Eunuch sold so well). It wasn’t hard for her to upstage Ceballos and Trilling in their ladylike suits and Johnston in her blue jeans and denim jacket. She sat herself down next to Mailer, the latter looking natty in a pinstripe suit and a frizz of graying corkscrew curls. Pennebaker’s hand-held cameras feasted on the electricity generated by the physical proximity of the two. “There was just so much sexual tension between Norman and Germaine, and I knew I wanted to keep that element in the film,” Hegedus recalled in a 2004 video interview accompanying the release of the film on Blu-ray. “But also I wanted to keep the humor, because it was very funny,” Hegedus said. “Norman was witty and funny, and Germaine was. And Jill was hysterical.”

L–R: Ceballos, Greer, Mailer, and Trilling

Still, except for a list of NOW demands (wages for housework, pensions for retired housewives) read by Ceballos that received only polite applause, the evening was essentially a spectacle of Mailer as Prometheus chained to the rock, with the eagle, or in this case, a convocation of feminist eagles, pecking at his liver. Only occasionally was there applause for him, or for his half-hearted defender on the panel, Diana Trilling. Greer, for example, who was next up after Ceballos, used her time at the microphone to blowpipe lethal darts at Mailer and his turbulent marital life: the “masculine artist, the pinnacle of the masculine elite… more killer than creator.” “The masculine artist’s path,” she said, was “strewn with the husks of people worn out and dried out by his ego,” Greer continued. To masculine artists, “we were either low, sloppy creatures or menials, or we were goddesses. Or worst of all we were meant to be both, which meant that we broke our hearts trying to keep our aprons clean.” There was the obligatory reference to Sylvia Plath. She got a sustained ovation. Come the feminist “revolution,” Greer declared, art “will be the prerogative of all of us and we will do it as those artists did… who made the cathedral of Chartres or the mosaics of Byzantium, the artists who had no ego and no name.” Another sustained ovation. Mailer shot back that this flight of romantic historicism, from women’s liberation to utopian collectivism, was “a species of social instrumentality that I call diaper Marxism.” Boos for Mailer.

Next on was Johnston, who (she later revealed) had spent the afternoon drinking at the Algonquin Hotel. She was indeed, as Hegedus recalled, hysterical. “All women are lesbians,” she began. Then, in a slurry monotone, she read a rhythmic monologue that was essentially an early version of slam poetry: “He said, ‘I want your body,’ and she said, ‘You can have it when I’m through with it.’” The audience laughed and cheered. After she had gone on for a while, Mailer informed her that she had exceeded the assigned 10-minute limit for speeches and ought to wrap it up. Boos. Mailer took an audience vote on how many wanted to hear more from Johnston. She lost by a hair—so she left the podium to roll on the floor in a dry-humping session with two female admirers. “Either play with the team,” Mailer suggested, “or pick up your marbles and get lost.” She appealed for additional time. “Come on, Jill, act like a lady,” he said. An attendee called out, “What’s the matter Mailer? You feel threatened because you found a woman you can’t fuck?” “Hey cunty,” Mailer replied. “I’ve been threatened all my life, so take it easy.” Johnston stomped off-stage. The audience loved it.

Trilling, an old-school liberal, tried to split the difference. She said that while she found Mailer’s insistence on the primacy of biology in relations between the sexes, especially his rejection of birth control, prone to go to “dangerous poetic excesses,” she “would take Mailer’s poeticized biology in preference to the no biology at all of my spirited sisters.” She could not resist criticizing “Miss Greer,” declaring that she was not impressed by her theory of the “Oedipal” nuclear family that “rejects children.” “One of the characteristics of oppressed people is that they always fight among themselves,” Greer retorted during a subsequent disagreement. “I don’t feel as oppressed as you do, and I’m not fighting with you,” said Trilling. “I have a great deal of loyalty to my sex and I’ve had it for a very long time. But that doesn’t mean I can be indiscriminate about the positions that I subscribe to just because they’re put forward by other women.”

Mailer began his own contribution to the discussion by telling his “dear old friend” Diana Trilling that she had, as usual, misread him. “What I was trying to say in my usual incoherent fashion in The Prisoner of Sex,” he went on, “was that biology—or physiology, if you will—is not destiny, but it is half of it. And if you try to ignore that fact, you then get into the most awful totalitarianism of them all—because it’s a Left totalitarianism… If we get a left-wing totalitarianism, that will mean the end of all of us, because we will have nothing but scrambled minds trying to overcome the incredible shock that the destruction of human liberty came from the Left and not the Right. And there is an element of women’s liberation that terrifies me. It terrifies me because it is humorless, because, with the exception of Germaine Greer’s book on The Female Eunuch, there’s been almost no recognition that the life of a man is also difficult, and that of all the horrors that women go through, some of them absolutely determined by men, even more of them, I suspect, determined by themselves.”

After that, it was question time and a rout. The heavyweights in the audience had been seated ringside in order to prime them, and the taunts poured in. Betty Friedan accused Mailer of defining women in essentialist fashion as “the eternal face of Eve.” “Women have the right to define our agency,” Friedan said. With a wave of his hand, Mailer responded: “I simply don’t know what you’re talking about.” Boos. “Betty, you’re just making speeches.” More boos. Susan Sontag called Mailer “patronizing” for introducing Trilling as a “foremost lady literary critic.” “I will never use the word ‘lady’ again in public,” Mailer promised sardonically. (His half-hearted attempt to provide a serious answer didn’t go down any better.) Feminist writer Lucy Komisar accused Mailer of writing novels that promoted male sexual violence, to which Mailer replied, “I look forward very much to the advance of women’s liberation because women are finally going to have to come into contact with the best aspect of the male brain which is its modest accuracy.” His explanation of the difference between a character’s viewpoint and that of the author segued into a discussion about the militaristic nicknames Mailer may or may not have given to his own penis. Some additional levity was provided by the following exchange with Cynthia Ozick, who had just described Mailer (with apparent sincerity) as “a sacerdotal, sexual transcendentalist priest”:

OZICK: Mr. Mailer, in Advertisements for Myself, you said—quote—”a good novelist can do without everything except the remnant of his balls.” For years and years I’ve been wondering, Mr Mailer, when you dip your balls in ink, what color ink is it? [laughter]

MAILER: Miss Ozick, if I don’t find an answer quickly, we’re gonna have to agree that the answer is yellow. [more laughter] I will cede the round to you. I don’t pretend that I’ve never written an idiotic or stupid sentence in my life, and that’s one of ’em. [laugher and applause]

But the Q&A was a mostly fraught and bad-tempered affair. Anatole Broyard asked Greer what women were asking for. “You may as well relax,” she snapped, “because whatever it is they’re asking for, honey, it’s not for you.” She scoffed that Mailer’s domestic arrangement in Maine had been “four nurturing women and three boys: Norman and his two sons.” Mailer’s response: “Did you come all the way from Australia to land a cheap shot like that?” He said that women’s liberation had “lesbian overtones… a detestation of men.” Then a member of the audience named Ruth Mandel rose to announce that she had no need for children. “Biologically,” she explained, “I don’t find myself tied down to my body so that it limits the definitions of me… Is [Mr. Mailer] tied down so much to his body that he can’t define himself outside of it?” Here Mailer tried to put a fine point on what was bothering him:

MAILER: What I was trying to say in The Prisoner of Sex over and over again is that there’s nothing in Women’s Liberation… that deals with what I think is the heart of the problem… [which] is that human nature strives in the way it works against painful, torturing paradoxes. And I’m quite aware that many women—perhaps most of the women on Earth by now—don’t want to have children; don’t want to be in that sexual organic biological game. And maybe they’re right! I don’t know. And I’m not saying “stop them!”; I’m not saying they’re evil; I’m not saying they’re wrong; I’m saying we’re gonna have to find out. Human history has got to the point where the majority of women are essentially rebelling. But we could save a lot of time if we cut out the crap and the name-calling. Because the one thing that is really gonna close off the ranks of men against the power of this movement is precisely the fact that men have had to deal with the abysmal lack of a sense of justice that women have for their point of view. Now you may counter by saying, “Yes, but that’s just a male sense of justice.” Alright and maybe it is. But in the dialogue, you’ve got to allow us our terms as well… Let me point out to you where the paradox of male and female violence takes place.

The mention of male violence seemed to inflame the audience (there was already nearly inaudible heckling), but Mailer plunged ahead:

MAILER: You’re asking for a dialogue, well, here it is! This is my half of the dialogue and you can counter it—

HECKLER: We want to teach you!

MAILER: I’ll teach you and you teach me! Fuck you! I wanna teach you too! I mean, fuck you, y’know? I’m not gonna sit here and listen to you harridans harangue me and say “Yes’m! Yes’m!” [smattered applause] Let me aim the point. If a man has sworn that he will not strike a woman and the woman knows that uses that and uses it and uses it, then she comes to a point where she is literally killing that man because the amount of violence being aroused in him is flooding his system and slowly killing him. So she’s engaged at that point in an act of violence and murder even though no blows are exchanged. Now all I’m getting at is that this is the simple existential difficulty of the moment. The argument about the justice in this human relation is where is that point? Because that is where there is absolutely never any agreement—whether it is the man or the woman who is playing with that point. If you women are not willing to recognize that life is profoundly complex, and that women as well as men bugger the living juices out of it, then we have nothing to talk about. Again.

Mailer might have been summarizing his own wedded life. With Beverly Bentley, especially, as she recounted in Joseph Mantegna’s 2010 documentary, Norman Mailer: American, it had been a roller-coaster lurch between tenderness and screaming matches that at least on one occasion ended with his beating her. (Paradoxically, perhaps, he remained on affectionate terms with some of his ex-wives; his third, Jeanne Campbell, starred in his tumultuous 1971 movie Maidstone along with Bentley, and Adele Morales hovered on the set.) But the point that he was trying to make—about the different ways in which men and women express aggression—was lost on the Town Hall audience.

The months that followed produced further controversy. Greer’s Esquire article appeared, and there she averred that her “masculine artist” jabs had been aimed specifically at Mailer’s stabbing of Morales and his inability to live with Bentley. She implied that the Town Hall event had been a façade for Mailer’s efforts to pre-empt her book tour in order to promote his own career, and that he had hired Pennebaker to do the filming, which was supposed to be the exclusive province of the BBC, trailing her on the tour. The legal conflicts to which she alluded apparently petered out, and indeed, Trilling, in her own memoir of the event, said she had seen Greer and Mailer posing together with a copy of The Female Eunuch just before the panel began. Rumors persisted that either the two had slept together or that Greer had hoped they would. Greer denied both rumors, although she told Hegedus in 2004 that she had wanted Mailer’s “approval. I wanted him to find me interesting, intelligent, and attractive.” (One of the paradoxes of the Mailer-Greer fallout is that the two actually had much in common in their anti-modern stances—but it was a commonality that neither ever explored. Their writing styles—hyperbole, self-dramatization, and a tendency to dump every thought that crossed their minds into their prose—were also surprisingly similar.)

Gore Vidal entered the fray in July 1971, writing a 4,900-word article for the New York Review of Books that was ostensibly a review of Patriarchal Attitudes: Women and Society, by the novelist Eva Figes. Vidal paid only perfunctory attention, however, to Figes’s complaints about capitalism and sexual taboos and devoted most of the article to an attack on The Prisoner of Sex. “There has been,” he wrote, “from Henry Miller to Norman Mailer to Charles Manson a logical progression. The Miller-Mailer-Manson man (or M3 for short) has been conditioned to think of women as at best, breeders of sons; at worst, objects to be poked, humiliated, killed.” Five months later, Vidal and Miller were guests on the Dick Cavett show, along with Janet Flanner, the Paris correspondent for the New Yorker; her prim suit, pumps, and white gloves looked oddly discordant with her enormous physical frame. It was another audience debacle for Mailer.

Waving a copy of Vidal’s article, Mailer proclaimed that Vidal’s writing was “no more interesting than the contents of the stomach of an intellectual cow.” The audience booed. “Gore Vidal,” remarked Flanner, “is the cow on the program.” To which Vidal added: “And Norman Mailer is the veal.” Mailer had good reason to be outraged at Vidal’s insinuation that “the next reincarnation for me is going to be Charles Manson,” as he put it, but he could not get his point across. (The fact that he seemed to be sloshed, lurching across the vast brown 1970s shag rug on the television stage to take his seat, didn’t help.) Neither Flanner nor Cavett (who later said he felt “twinges of guilt about not having treated [Mailer] nicer”) showed much sympathy for his agoniste’s performance. Flanner said she was “bored” by the display, and Cavett told Mailer he could “fold it five ways and put it where the moon don’t shine.” Mailer looked out at his hostile audience: “This joint is loaded with libbers.” And yet, as at the Town Hall, he had a way of sucking the air off the stage. It was impossible for the viewer not to be riveted by his performance.

Mailer was never to return to the subject of The Prisoner of Sex, at least in print. He went on to win a second Pulitzer Prize in 1979, for fiction, for The Executioner’s Song, a novelized but extensively reported account of the Utah murderer Gary Gilmore’s violent life and death by firing squad in 1977. He wrote several more novels and works of nonfiction that received the usual mixed reviews. He had not only lost his battle against the “libbers”; he had lost the war of feminist opinion. When Mailer died in 2007, the novelist Joan Smith, writing in the Guardian, called him “an arch-conservative who pulled off a stunning confidence trick” and a “faux-radical who used the taboo-breaking atmosphere of the ’60s as cover for a career of lifelong self-promotion.” In the Nation, Katha Pollitt wrote: “What a failure of imagination and humanity there is in his ravings about the evils of birth control and women’s liberation, his cult of hatred and domination and violence, his fatuous pronouncements about what women should be (goddesses, whores, mothers of as many children as a man could stuff into them), his pronouncements of doom on a culture that let them get out of their cage.” Rebecca Mead wrote in her 2017 New Yorker article: “What is most shocking about revisiting Town Bloody Hall today—either in the form the Wooster Group presents it, or without their commentary—is the raw misogyny of the language Mailer feels comfortable in using in the public forum that has been provided to him.” It seems that all that can be remembered today about Mailer and women is that he said they belong in cages.

Mailer certainly had his faults, personal and writerly. His marital life invariably included strings of infidelities, even during his last and happiest marriage to the former model Norris Church. His stabbing of Morales might have been mostly owing to drink and the excesses of Greenwich Village bohemian culture, but he did have a genuinely alarming tendency to romanticize lethal violence as a rite of male passage into masculinity. It was a rite that he himself seemed compelled to perform, although non-lethally, in any number of brawls and fistfights with other men, including Vidal, whom he punched with a liquor glass at a 1977 party in another spat over The Prisoner of Sex. In what was surely the most embarrassing episode of his life he used his reputation to help parole the convicted killer Jack Henry Abbott out of a federal prison in 1981. Mailer giving him a job as his assistant and landed him two articles about his prison experiences in the New York Review of Books. Six weeks after his release, Abbott stabbed to death a young waiter in a restaurant who had denied him the use of an employees-only restroom.

The Prisoner of Sex suffers from hasty writing and Mailer’s penchant for indulging in verbal gymnastics at the expense of clarity and argument-construction. Mailer managed to misspell the surname of Valerie Solanas, Andy Warhol’s would-be assassin, whose 1967 SCUM Manifesto (“destroy the male sex”) was one of the books he covered. He overrated as literary figures both Henry Miller and D.H. Lawrence. Miller, at least in the excerpts Mailer provided from Tropic of Cancer, Tropic of Capricorn, and Sexus, basically wrote pornography. His authorial style consisted of jackhammer prose lacking even rudimentary efforts at either characterization or color; it’s all Miller’s first-person narrator shoving various things into the private parts of women who love it. And it is hard not to laugh out loud at the overripe Chatterley sex scenes, with gamekeeper Mellors painstakingly teaching Her Ladyship how to say four-letter words in Nottinghamshire dialect. Mailer’s extended quasi-mystical romanticization of women and their wombs, aligning them with the forces of the universe just because they bear babies, seems over the top even if one agrees with Mailer about the profound biological differences between the sexes.

Nonetheless, it is a brave and important book. Mailer understood that sex isn’t merely about pleasure: obtaining an orgasm from some frictional source or other. Human beings endow sex with meaning. A man wants to know that the woman he is with experiences pleasure from him, and a woman that she is particularly desired. (The absence of these elements is at the root of the sourness and disappointment accompanying today’s hookup culture: the abrupt and crude coitus, the unwanted moves, the nagging suspicion that your partner might have found you revolting—or worse, nondescript—instead of lovely.) The fact that meaning is integral to the human sexual act derives from the fact that the act itself is full of meaning; it is the act that makes life. Mailer had a point in decrying its technological manipulation and the relentless effort to sever the connection between sex and reproduction.

One of the astonishing things about reading The Prisoner of Sex a half-century after its publication is the realization that many of the radical-sounding future phenomena that Kate Millett and Ti-Grace Atkinson demanded and Mailer denounced as dystopian have not only come to pass but are an integral, even humdrum part of everyday life. Even when Mailer was writing in 1971, his distaste for birth control seemed laughably retrograde to everyone but fringe religious traditionalists. Now, of course, we have government-mandated, government-subsidized free contraception, and we seem to be on our way to government-subsidized free abortion as well. We have fairly succeeded in obliterating those supposedly non-essential differences between the sexes; the very word “sex” to denote biological self-identification has been replaced by “gender identity,” a fluid and entirely subjective concept that includes picking one’s own personal pronouns. Indeed, so thorough has been the revolution in this department that Germaine Greer has met the fate of Danton; in 2015, transgender activists tried to push her off the university lecture circuit for refusing to go along with the now-de rigueur proposition that transwomen are really women. There is something ironic about the fact that a long-term consequence of women’s liberation has been the erasure of “woman” as a definable category.

And if we don’t have artificial wombs quite yet, we do have the “surrogate” wombs of Second- and Third-World women hired to gestate fertilized eggs that may or may not have been produced by the people whom the law deems their parents. We do not have children who “raise themselves,” as Greer had hoped, but we have millions of children who might as well be doing so, with fathers and sometimes mothers who have long since disposed of their parenting responsibilities, and millions of other children parked in day care or with nannies. Far from burdening women with housewifery and babies at the expense of career advancement, we have a record low marriage rate and a birthrate that has collapsed to the point of alarm among demographers. We also have a record number of single people—15 percent, double that of 50 years ago—living alone, especially in cities, isolated in rabbit-warren, “high-density” apartment buildings where, during this time of coronavirus, they can neither meet nor mate. All this to the tune of survey after survey indicating that women are actually less happy than they were during the early 1970s.

Mailer was remarkably prescient. In The Prisoner of Sex he wrote about the liberated woman of the future: “She was a way of life for young singles, a species of city-technique. She gave intimation by her presence that the final form of the city was nearer to the dormitory cube with ten million units and the perfect absence of children or dogs.” He was wrong about the dogs. At the Town Hall panel Diana Trilling said “in 50 years we’ll find out” what radical feminism might do to those it would affect. Those 50 years are now up.

Charlotte Allen has a PhD in medieval studies from the Catholic University of America. She has written frequently for the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and First Things. You can follow her on Twitter @MeanCharlotte.

I am not a conspiracy theorist. And as recently as a year and a half ago, if someone had told me the things I am reporting here, I would have accused them of culture-war paranoia. That was before I enrolled in a professional training program that I’d hoped would expand my skills as a therapist, but instead delivered an extreme form of ideological indoctrination.

The Sexual Health Certificate Program is a prestigious University of Michigan program conducted in affiliation with the American Association of Sexuality Educators, Counselors, and Therapists (AASECT). As someone who recently studied in the program, I can attest that, notwithstanding whatever mission AASECT once had, it now operates largely as a de facto activist group that seeks to reshape standards applied to mental health care and education, and to limit the rights of parents to make decisions about their children.

And no, I am not an extreme social conservative complaining about the failure of these organizations to support “abstinence only” sex education. Nor do I object to teaching kids that it’s okay to be gay or bisexual. The agenda of AASECT now extends far beyond those old debates, and into an overlapping set of doctrines that encompass gender, violent BDSM subcultures, polyamory, pornography, and intersectionality. My opinion is that it is no longer focused on teaching scientifically verified knowledge or responsible clinical practices, and now seeks to instead impose an orthodox set of beliefs about sexuality.

To be specific, AASECT’s program teaches:

• that self-defined gender identity should dictate a person’s status in law, while biological sex is all but meaningless;
• that any supposed differences between boys and girls are culturally imposed artifacts or labels applied to humans at birth;
• that incorporating violence into sexual play is normal, healthy, and fun;
• that children questioning their gender identity should be given easy access to pubertal suppressants and cross-sex hormones—both of which, they claim, carry little to no risk—whether their parents support such steps or not;
• that polyamorous sexual relationships are just as rewarding, sustainable, and healthy as monogamy;
• that “sex work” is just another kind of legitimate career aspiration;
• that not only is the use of pornography normal and healthy, but that the refusal to use pornography is unrealistic, and even pathological;
• that discussion of the conceiving and raising of children is, at best, peripheral to the study of sexuality; and, at worst, a relic of patriarchal and heteronormative systems of oppression;
• that personal religious or moral beliefs that would limit consenting sexual activity are harmful, and tantamount to “sex negativity”;
• that the most important lens through which to view any situation, including those involving sex, is the lens of power and oppression—a worldview rooted, academically, in Critical Theory and, politically, in faddish doctrines connected to social justice;
• and, perhaps most importantly, that all of the foregoing is to be encoded in the system of pedagogy transmitted to children, at the earliest possible age.

Many (though not all) of these ideas can be sourced to what some call “gender ideology,” a loosely defined set of beliefs that rest on the premise that all of us have an inherent, soul-like gender identity that transcends biological reality. Gender ideology also presents the idea of man and woman as a “false binary,” and replaces the reality of human sexual dimorphism with a “spectrum”-based construct. Until enrolling in this program, I had never even heard the term gender ideology, nor known that this sort of fringe belief system was taught at reputable schools. My experience shows how a process of radicalization has permitted this view to spread within rarified professional subcultures without much in the way of public notice.

When I signed up for the University of Michigan’s unique, year-long “Sexual Health Certificate Program” (SHCP), however, I truly did believe the experience would be both professionally and intellectually rewarding. I care about sexuality. I know that it is a fundamental component of the human search for joy and meaning. As a Michigan-based psychotherapist and licensed professional counselor, I wanted to deepen my understanding of sexuality, and become better equipped to provide care for the many clients who come to me with issues related to sexual health. The American Association of Sexuality Educators, Counselors, and Therapists sounded like the perfect fit for me, and the idea of becoming an AASECT-certified sex therapist appealed to me. I applied and was accepted for the 2019-2020 cohort. When I showed up, my class included participants from around the world—including Iceland, Egypt, Lebanon, and China—just as you’d expect at the kind of high-value, authoritative program that we all believed we’d signed up for.

The doubts started to creep in early, though—on day one, to be exact. Our first classroom module was titled “Sexual Attitude Reassessment.” I amused myself with the thought that this sounded like an unsettling euphemism for a brainwashing session. Sadly, that’s what it was.

It quickly became clear that the issue of sexuality—the ostensible subject—often would serve merely as a pretext for more general harangues about society, and the urgent need to remake it according to AASECT’s ideological blueprint. In a keynote lecture entitled “Why Fetishism Matters,” the speaker argued that the world we inhabit is socially constructed, and told us (with what now seems like admirable candor), “I’m not neutral. I’m here to recruit you to a particular point of view about how kink should be valued.” The same speaker said that he’d been accused of teaching students that any form of sexual behavior is acceptable as long as there is consent from all parties. “Yes, that’s exactly right,” he said. Clearly, our attitude “reassessment” was well underway.

From the get-go, the scientific content was mostly superficial, and was often undercut by claims that the very idea of truth is a harmful (and even oppressive) construct. The teaching was not so much impartial and informative as it was evangelistic. Yet it was also self-contradictory: Declarations that there are no real “correct” moral values were uttered (without irony) alongside absolutist proclamations about the correct way to understand sex—and morality.

As I learned, “Sexual Attitude Reassessment” (SAR) is an established term in the field, one that is often used to describe curriculum content that serves to educate sexual-health professionals about the wide range of sexual experiences that they may encounter among clients. The object is to ensure they won’t be shocked when such encounters occur, and to invite them to reassess their judgments and assumptions about various expressions of sexuality. These are valid and important goals. Unfortunately, the SAR in the SHCP descended into an exercise in overstimulation and desensitization—specifically, two full days of pornographic videos and interviews. At times, it felt like the famous brainwashing scene from A Clockwork Orange. There was a series of videos of people masturbating (one of which involved a strange interaction with a cat), a woman with “objectiphilia” who had a sexual attraction to her church pipe organ, various sadomasochistic acts, and a presentation on polyamory designed to make it clear that the polyamorous lifestyle is healthy, wholesome, and problem-free.

The focus on BDSM was a particular fixation throughout the program. In the SAR, we were shown videos of a woman meticulously applying genital clamps to the scrotum of a willing man, and a dominatrix teaching a class how to properly beat people while demonstrating on an eager participant. We also watched an interview with a sex-dungeon “dom” (the male equivalent of a dominatrix) who described one of his experiences: His client had instructed him, as the dom recounted it, “I want you to bind me and then beat me until I scream. And no matter how much I scream or beg you to stop, I want you to keep beating me.” The dom did as he was told, continuing the beatings through the customer’s begging and pleading, until the client went totally limp and silent, seeming to dissociate. At this point, the dom unbound the man, who then began to weep uncontrollably in the dom’s arms.

BDSM is a real and active sexual subculture, and I don’t object to its inclusion in the course materials. But I was shocked to see how much further the professors in the program took things, insisting that BDSM behaviors—up to and including the sexual “Fight Club” style of behavior described above—must be uncritically viewed as wholesome and beautiful. Students learned to sing from the same psalm book, with one memorably exclaiming “I’m so inspired by the wisdom and beauty in the BDSM community!” and insisting that the behavioral codes observed among BDSM participants can help us create a similar climate of safety and respect “in all our relationships.”

The program was focused on an agenda of “centering” the experience of minorities—in this case, sexual minorities. This meant that huge portions of time in class after class were spent focusing on BDSM, LGBTQIA+ issues, and polyamory, not to mention the obligatory discussions of oppression and privilege that were shoehorned into every discussion. Meanwhile, mainstream sexual health issues that affect wide swaths of the population, such as marriage, reproduction, and family life, were treated as niche topics. Further, while many Americans view sexuality through the prism of faith, religion hardly came up at all. And when it did, it was typically so that religious values could be denigrated. Even the few religious people in the program got the message: Whenever any made passing reference to their own observant religiosity, it was usually in a spirit of shame or penance.

Such self-flagellation was perhaps a fitting response, as the program is designed to convert therapy offices and classrooms from places of learning and self-discovery into venues for moral re-education. For example, when one professor was asked by a therapist in the program about a couple that had come to therapy because the husband’s pornography use was hurting the marriage, the professor suggested that the wife’s prudish anti-porn attitude was the real problem that needed treatment. This was too much for me, and I asked whether he might have an alternative suggestion, since I have some clients whose moral beliefs preclude them from using pornography. I was surprised to see that he had no coherent answer, presumably because this is not the kind of question he usually gets asked. (Following such classroom exchanges, I would sometimes get private messages from classmates to the effect of “I’m so glad you said that. I was feeling the same thing” or “I don’t feel like I’m allowed to have a different opinion.”)

According to the precepts taught at the SHCP, it is immoral to apply a moral lens to sexuality. While it was acknowledged that some people do experience their sexual behavior as “out of control,” it was generally assumed that those who claim to have a problem with pornography addiction are probably just dealing with some kind of “sex-negative” indoctrination. (We got the same message when it came to sex addiction—an issue that, as I will discuss below, is at the root of much of the academic radicalization I observed.)

Of course, there is a very real debate about how to understand the problem of compulsive use of pornography in our society. And it is absolutely true that sexual shame is a problem, and one that often is linked with religious beliefs and upbringings. But the suggestion that therapists should take it upon themselves to “correct” the moral beliefs of clients with whom they disagree would appear to violate the codes of ethics that guide the counseling profession. This is dogma masquerading as therapy.

When it came to pedophilia, here’s where professors and students landed: Pedophilia is an inborn and, for clinical pedophiles, unchangeable sexual orientation. They did reject pedophilia as a legitimate sexual choice—but not, as one might hope, through thoughtful application of moral principles to sexual behavior. Rather, they simply declared that minors are by definition unable to give consent.

Where the program really lost touch with common sense and logical consistency was on the topic of gender. Of course, gender dysphoria is a real phenomenon, and some people really do go through their entire lives with a longing to bring their identity and appearance in line with their non-birth sex. But it’s also true that some people come to their trans identity later in life, or desist from a previously declared trans identity. In the case of prepubescent children especially, most trans-identified individuals who present for clinical treatment end up reverting to a self-identified gender that aligns with their birth sex—boring old cis people, in other words. Yet one professor confidently declared that at birth, we are all handed a “gender envelope” containing our gender identity, and that this identity can’t be affected by outside forces like trauma or culture (ignoring mounting evidence that this sort of thing happens often, especially in the case of teenage girls, thanks in large part to the spread of gender-ideology dogma itself).

This quasi-religious conception of gender was connected to the message that trans-identifying children should be given easy access to puberty blocking drugs and cross-sex hormones. Both treatments were breezily declared to be safe options with little risk of adverse consequences—something that, again, we now know to be untrue. And yes, we were fed the morbid claim that any delay in affirming a child’s self-diagnosed trans identity could relegate them to the grave: “Do you want a live trans-child or a dead cisgender-child?” is the question we were trained to use to pressure parents into immediate affirmation. To summarize: If a child agrees to have an adult pedophile stimulate his genitals, that desire should be disregarded (because children are by definition unable to give real consent). But if a child wants to have an adult surgically remove those genitals, his desire should be honored: Suddenly, the child’s expression of consent is not only valid, but ironclad; and acquiescence is not only permissible but mandatory.

Interestingly, though, the mystical “gender envelope” logic sometimes broke down when it came to discussions of sexual orientation. Usually, it was asserted that LGBTQIA+ individuals are born that way. But straight-identifying persons are another story, apparently. Many, we were told, have had their sexual desires artificially limited by social conditioning. Obviously, the phenomenon of closeted men and women is hardly unheard of. Yet I found it notable that the same commitment to unfettered self-identification that’s applied to trans-identifying children young enough to believe in Santa Claus apparently isn’t deemed reliable when it comes to the sexual preferences of their adult parents.

A meta-theme that emerged from the course was the idea that we wouldn’t just be graduating into roles as therapists or clinicians. Our professors were also counting on us to be reliable combatants in the culture wars. They often used us-versus-them language, referring to the work of social justice that “we” are trying to accomplish, as if my enrollment in the program had implicitly bound me to an activist team. And SHCP instructors didn’t mince words on the identity of the “enemy” in these wars: conservatives who engage in “moralizing” about sex, promote abstinence-only education, oppose pornography and the legitimization of “sex work,” and who question the existence of the gender envelopes their children were supposedly handed in baby heaven. One of my professors had the honesty to explicitly admit that progressives have deliberately distorted scientific data in some areas, exaggerating the extent to which sexual orientation is known to be inborn, to advance their political purposes, albeit in (as he saw it) a good cause. The professor did not condemn the practice, and I was left wondering which of the “scientific” claims I had been fed in the program could be trusted.

While terms such as Critical Theory weren’t explicitly included in the materials, every lecture was saturated with the idea that society exists in a state of oppression, and that our duty was to apply our expertise in the service of the oppressed. The assumption was that the reason sexuality is such a difficult area of life for so many people is not, as one might think, because sex is complicated and humans are morally fallible, but solely because of systems of oppression that marginalize minorities and instill people with shame. In a reversal of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s famous claim, the SHCP approach to sexuality suggests the line separating good and evil passes not through every human heart, but instead cleaves those identity groups who have power from those who do not.

In fact, many of the materials we studied had been written in a way that simply assumed that avant-garde approaches to gender and sex are linked, in some vague way, to other social-justice struggles. For instance, the Transgender Training Institute—whose founder, Dr. Eli Green, was one of my professors in the program—teaches “that in order to enact true social change through education… an Intersectional approach is necessary to disrupt and dismantle the multiple oppressions (racism, classism, ableism, sexism, heteronormativity, colonialism, and more) that impact transgender and non-binary individuals and communities (and beyond).” In class, Dr. Green boldly proclaimed that “anti-oppression frameworks are the future of sex education.”

Within such frameworks, sex education shall not be deemed truly inclusive unless it incorporates explanations of every possible kind of sexual activity one might consider pleasurable, up to and including kink, polyamory, and BDSM. When I directly asked one professor in the program whether very young children were really psychologically ready for exposure to some kinds of content, he argued that “age appropriateness” was a conservative myth. For the AASECT faithful, no age is too young to encourage a child to wonder whether they identify as a non-binary, polyamorous, kinky, pansexual. We were even given pointers about how to sidestep local regulations by creatively shoehorning banned sexual content into lessons. (Pro tip: See if you can look into your local school district’s “anti-bullying” policies and lessons. Unlike sex-education curricula, parents typically aren’t given easy access to the content of these lessons; nor do they usually have the right to opt-out their children from them. So some activists are using these lessons as a pretext for teaching gender ideology without parents finding out.)

In one class activity, Dr. Green had the class vote (anonymously) about which age they think a variety of topics in sexuality education should be taught. For each topic, the bulk of the class voted “elementary school.” Whenever votes for a later stage of education were revealed, exclamations of shock and horror rippled throughout the room, often accompanied by derisive laughter. Dr. Green called out students who made especially derisive comments, saying, “We need to be careful not to commit microaggressions against people who might have different opinions.” I appreciated this nod to impartiality.

But the professor’s expression of tolerance was short-lived. It became clear that what he meant by “different opinions” was ignorant opinions. “In this work that we care so much about, we have a long way to go,” Dr. Green told us. “And we have to be aware that we are going to be opposed by people who are going to attack us and bring accusations against us. So, it’s important that we be aware of the arguments and strategies that are going to be used by those who oppose us.” Then, to inform the class about the kinds of attacks “we” would face, Dr. Green showed us an episode of Last Week Tonight with comedian John Oliver. Everyone cracked up as Oliver set up and then knocked down a series of caricatures of conservative views on sex education. The ensuing class “discussion” was, unsurprisingly, focused on venting anger and contempt for conservative views, as opposed to understanding them. How is this kind of training helpful for therapists and educators who will work with people whose political and moral beliefs span the cultural spectrum? Are we supposed to treat some with compassion, but laugh others out the door when they express wrongthink?

Notwithstanding the lack of viewpoint diversity I observed during my course, there is public disagreement among sexuality specialists on certain issues, especially sex addiction. In the not-so-distant past, AASECT did not take a clear stance for or against the sex addiction model. But some within AASECT—such as Dr. Michael Aaron, a sex therapist and clinical psychologist—believed the group should come out firmly against the sex addiction model, which he claims is “extremely destructive to clients as it often addresse[s] sexuality concerns from a moralistic and judgmental perspective.” In one of those lengthy digital melodramas that plays out within certain professions, Dr. Aaron used the AASECT listserv to implement what he calls “renegade, guerilla tactics” against his critics, eventually blustering his way to victory after two years of vicious online character assassination. That’s why the AASECT position now reads, in part: “It is the position of AASECT that linking problems related to sexual urges, thoughts or behaviors to a porn/sexual addiction process cannot be advanced by AASECT as a standard of practice for sexuality education delivery, counseling or therapy.”

Aaron recounted the whole story in a 2016 Psychology Today story, and ticked off more than a dozen ideological allies who’d assisted him in overturning AASECT’s traditional position on pornography and sex addiction. That essay helped me understand why the content of my academic program seemed so torqued and partisan: Some of my professors at the University of Michigan were the very same people who’d “won” this civil war within AASECT, and who still retain the same militant rhetorical tactics and us-versus-them approach when they discuss these issues in the classroom.

It’s not the purpose of this essay to argue for or against the so-called sex addiction model. But it was unsettling to see AASECT representatives use their classroom pulpit to extol one side of the debate and mock the other. The arguments they gave were not rooted in science, nor in rationality, but rather in their moral objection to the very idea that anyone would cast scorn on porn and promiscuity (this from the same people who, in every other context, view morality as a four-letter word). And after everything I experienced in the SHCP, that should not surprise me: For all their scientific pretentions, many of my professors never really elevated their discourse above a children’s Gender Unicorn handout or I Am Jazz.

When I entered the SHCP, I took it for granted that education should do two things: introduce students to a well of wisdom and knowledge about a given topic, and push them to think critically about that topic. These are not the goals of AASECT. To be fair, some actual education and quality therapeutic training did occur in the program. But the bulk of what I encountered was indoctrination. The main goal of SHCP is to turn participants into evangelists for AASECT orthodoxy who will root out heretical beliefs in schools and therapy offices.

However, the story of the SHCP isn’t just about a single specialized program at a single American university being co-opted by extremists. It’s a case study in how a radicalized viewpoint can emerge from a small group of ideologically motivated actors, become the official belief system of a trade body, then form the basis of an academic course, which in turn trains legions of professionals, who then proceed to spread this same gospel to children, parents, and vulnerable patients. And while we aren’t quite past the point of no return, doctors, therapists, and teachers who haven’t already bought into this ideology have become afraid to speak out lest they be branded bigots, transphobes, or proponents of conversion therapy. After all, the ideologues have the imprimatur of AASECT and the University of Michigan, right? What hope do dissenters have of protecting their reputations and livelihoods?

I admit that I, too, feel a temptation to go with the pack—to use virtue signaling to show others that I have absorbed the orthodoxy I was taught. That’s the path of least resistance. But I know that such concessions only encourage the process of radicalization. I might be able to mouth this nonsense while secretly rejecting it. But others—especially children—might be seduced by it. That’s why I’ve chosen to speak out. And I encourage others to do the same.

Tim Courtois is a Michigan-based licensed professional counselor.

Increasingly, we are seeing insistences that Social Justice has become a new religion. The purpose of this essay is to explore this topic [See video] in some depth. Because this essay is inordinately long—because the topic is inordinately complicated—it is broken into sections, as listed below. The reader is encouraged to engage with it in pieces and to treat it as he or she would a short book on this topic.

Table of Contents

• Social Justice and Religion – What I intend to say and not say about whether Social Justice is best thought of as a religion—mostly housekeeping and a bit dry
• Ideologically Motivated Moral Communities – A Durkheimian view of the religion-like sociocultural phenomenon to which both Social Justice and religions belong
• Religions Meet Needs – An elaboration on the previous section that explains why human beings organize into ideologically motivated moral communities
• Social Justice Institutionalized – A presentation of how Social Justice exhibits institutionalization, which is central to organized religions
• The Scholarly Canon – How academic scholarship in “grievance studies” serves as a scriptural canon for Social Justice
• Faith in Social Justice – An exposition on faith and its role in the Social Justice ideology
• The Mythological Core of Applied Postmodernism – A lengthy discussion of mythology inside and outside of religion and how postmodernism and its currently ascendant derivatives fit into this framework. (If you really want to understand the deepest part of this essay, it’s probably in this section, which can be read first if desired.)
• Pocket Epistemologies – A discussion of the means by which an ideological tribe aims to legitimize the “special knowledge” that serves it and how this manifests in Social Justice
• A Focus on the Unconscious – A more focused discussion upon the methods of special knowledge production of ideological tribes and the postmodern numinous experience
• Ritual, Redemption, and Prayer – A short section about the role these play in ideological tribes and how they manifest in Social Justice
• Gender Nuns and the Grand Wizards of the Diversity Board – Addresses the function of the priest caste within ideological tribes, including Social Justice, and how they put their faith into practice
• Summary – A short summary of the case made about whether Social Justice constitutes a religion. TL;DR: Yes and no, and mostly yes.
• What Can We Do with This? – A brief discussion of secularism, construed much more broadly than usual, and how it applies to dealing with a very religion-like Social Justice

...

[Over 1 hour of very worthwhile reading]

James A. Lindsay is a thinker, not a philosopher, with a doctorate in math and background in physics. He is the author of four books and his essays have appeared in TIME, Scientific American, and The Philosophers’ Magazine. He led the "grievance studies affair" probe.

Transgenderism, the belief that an incongruity in your biological sex and the sex you feel you truly are is a medical condition, has seemingly overnight gone from a fringe issue, painted as one of tolerance for a small vulnerable group, to a bizarre and perverted Orwellian nightmare.

Now we no longer merely have to accept that people can be born in the ‘wrong body’ we must change our everyday language or face accusations that we are hate criminals. Women are being robbed of the meaningful descriptors pertaining to our biology. We are being robbed of the very name “woman”. We are now labeled with names like menstruator, bleeder, non-man, and cis-gendered. It is incredibly strange and completely incoherent. It is also much more serious of an issue than most people are gauging it to be.

The Government of Canada, under the helm of Justin Trudeau, is on a mission to destroy safeguarding and corrupt statistics and the media in this country do not care. The Government’s Gender Based Analysis (GBA+) initiative is one of the most misogynist things to ever occur in the history of this country. Among other insanities they are pushing the idea that it is ‘gender’. and not sex, that results in an imbalance of power and resources in society.

This is just an introductory post and I will go into much greater detail soon. I am particularly focused on the attacks on spaces for marginalized women. Prisons in particular are a serious concern and should be front page news. Women have been assaulted in prison because violent male sex offenders were allowed to transfer into female facilities. That is completely insane.

Women in shelters and trauma programs are also being deprived of the necessary female only spaces that are vital to their recovery. Most women who require drug treatment shelters or trauma support groups have been victimized by male violence and it is unconscionable to rob them of their meager resources.

While this aspect of this total madness is my most pressing concern I am also interested in other areas, especially the medical interventions being foisted on children. If there is anything that you think I should know more about feel free to send me an email or a DM on Twitter.

Everything about this phony movement is cynical.

• They have co-opted language used to describe people with Intersex conditions such as “assigned sex at birth”. Intersex advocates have fought for years to stop the unnecessary surgeries often performed on Intersex children. Now the transgender movement is misusing this term to promote the idea that it is sane to ‘transition’ children. This ‘transition’ includes radical interventions that interrupt normal development. This movement also frequently conflates gender identity with Intersex conditions in a bid to appear more legitimate, this is indecent and cruel.
• Opposing gender dogma is met with accusations that to do so is to support “conversion therapy”. The truth is that most children labeled as gender nonconforming will grow up to be homosexual. They should not have their healthy development interrupted. They should not be told that they have been born in the ‘wrong body’. It is transgenderism that is the real conversion therapy.
• Gender Studies came out of Women’s Studies and proceeded to bizarrely consume it. It’s nonsensical theories have been used to spread the misogynist notion that being a woman means identifying with stereotypes and therefore “woman” is a costume and an identity that a man can claim. In gender identity garble there is no real identifier for the half of humanity that endures sex based oppression. It has also been used to justify the dismantling of women’s resources on university campuses. Women’s centre’s are now centre’s for ‘marginalized genders’ where men who ‘perform’ their male fantasy of womanhood are constantly centred while young lesbians are asked when they are going to ‘transition’ to males. This is quite the clusterfuck.

In 2015, the British Association of Gender Identity Specialists (BAGIS) submitted a written brief to the Transgender Equality Inquiry, which had been undertaken by the UK Parliament’s Women and Equalities Committee, explaining why it was “naïve to suggest that “nobody would seek to pretend transsexual status in prison if this were not actually the case.”

“There are, to those of us who actually interview the prisoners, in fact very many reasons why people might pretend this,” wrote Dr. James Barrett, the President of BAGIS. “These vary from the opportunity to have trips out of prison through to a desire for a transfer to the female estate (to the same prison as a co-defendant) through to the idea that a parole board will perceive somebody who is female as being less dangerous through to a [false] belief that hormone treatment will actually render one less dangerous through to wanting a special or protected status within the prison system and even (in one very well evidenced case that a highly concerned Prison Governor brought particularly to my attention) a plethora of prison intelligence information suggesting that the driving force was a desire to make subsequent sexual offending very much easier, females being generally perceived as low risk in this regard.”

The idea that many male offenders would opt to serve their sentences in women’s correctional facilities is not something that should shock a thinking person. But it appears that common sense is forgotten once the words “gender identity” are invoked. Male offenders, including violent offenders and sex offenders, currently are incarcerated in women’s prisons in various western jurisdictions. This policy has been adopted in numerous countries under the guise of tolerance. Recently, Ireland had its first transfer, when a fully intact male sex offender was placed in a women’s prison in Limerick. The California Senate also recently voted in favour of such accommodations. This policy often is referred to as “self ID.” It means that your status as a male or female is determined by your belief (or claim) about your sex and not by your actual biology.

This is happening in Canada, where I live, even if most Canadians have no idea about it. The people who live in prison, including female prisoners, have very little constituency among politicians or journalists. The media reports on this issue rarely. And when they do, there is miniscule, if any, acknowledgement that self-ID poses a serious danger to incarcerated women. Just the opposite: Self-ID is portrayed as a step toward progressive enlightenment, full stop.

...

Back in September of 2016, I released three videos, expressing my concern about Bill C-16, which was then under consideration by the federal government, following the passage of similar legislation in a number of provinces. C-16 purported to merely add “gender identity” and “gender expression” to the list of prohibited grounds of discrimination. However, it was embedded in a web of policy, much of it created by the Ontario Human Rights Commission, which indicated that the bill comprised the tip of a very large iceberg. I was particularly upset with the insistence that failure to use the “preferred pronouns” chosen by individuals whose gender-related identity did not fit neatly, according to their personal judgement, into the standard categories of boy and girl or man and woman would now become an offence punishable by law.

Worse is the insistence characteristic of the bill, the policies associated with it, and the tenth-rate academic dogmas driving the entire charade that “identity” is something solely determined by the individual in question (whatever that identity might be). Even sociologists (neither the older, classical, occasionally useful type, nor the modern, appalling, and positively counterproductive type) don’t believe this. They understand that identity is a social role, which means that it is by necessity socially negotiated. And there’s a reason for this. An identity — a role — is not merely what you think you are, moment to moment, or year by year, but, as the Encyclopedia Britannica has it (specifically within its sociology section), “a comprehensive pattern of behavior that is socially recognized, providing a means of identifying and placing an individual in society,” also serving “as a strategy for coping with recurrent situations and dealing with the roles of others (e.g., parent-child roles).”

Your identity is not the clothes you wear, or the fashionable sexual preference or behaviour you adopt and flaunt, or the causes driving your activism, or your moral outrage at ideas that differ from yours: properly understood, it’s a set of complex compromises between the individual and society as to how the former and the latter might mutually support one another in a sustainable, long-term manner. It’s nothing to alter lightly, as such compromise is very difficult to attain, constituting as it does the essence of civilization itself, which took eons to establish, and understanding, as we should, that the alternative to the adoption of socially-acceptable roles is conflict — plain, simple and continual, as well as simultaneously psychological and social.

To the degree that identity is not biological (and much, but not all of it is), then it’s a drama enacted in the world of other people. An identity provides rules for social interactions that everyone understands; it provides generic but vitally necessary direction and purpose in life. If you’re a child, and you’re playing a pretend game with your friends, you negotiate your identity, so the game can be properly played. You do the same in the real world, whether you are a child, an adolescent, or an adult. To refuse to engage in the social aspect of identity negotiation — to insist that what you say you are is what everyone must accept — is simply to confuse yourself and everyone else (as no one at all understands the rules of your game, not least because they have not yet been formulated).

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A behind-the-scenes glimpse into the firestorm sparked by professor Jordan Peterson's dismissal of gender-neutral pronouns and his meteoric rise to global fame for denouncing political correctness.

In the last decade, in many parts of the English-speaking world, transgender advocacy has made substantial, and at times, expansive gains, with trans rights becoming embedded in institutions and enforced by the state. Like any significant historical event, this gender revolution has multiple causes. One is digital technology, providing virtual worlds which transcend physical reality and online networks for spreading activism. Another is academic theory: postmodernism and queer theory. I want to make the less obvious argument that transgenderism has been promoted by feminism.

Not all feminism, of course. From the start of the second wave, some radical feminists opposed the inclusion of male-to-female transsexuals under the general heading of “women.” Their argument culminated in Janice Raymond’s Transsexual Empire (1979): “All transsexuals rape women’s bodies by reducing the real female form to an artifact.” Transsexualism, she observed, was the creation of medical men like John Money and Harry Benjamin. As the current wave of transgenderism was building at the beginning of the 21st century, a handful of radical lesbian feminists warned that it was detrimental to the material interests of women. They included Sheila Jeffreys, an English political scientist then teaching at the University of Melbourne, and Gallus Mag, a pseudonymous American blogger. At the time, their warnings must have seemed hysterical; they now appear remarkably prescient.

These radical feminists argued that “trans activism is misogyny” and “a men’s rights movement.” They were correct about its objective consequences being bad for females, as set out by the philosopher Kathleen Stock and the journalist Helen Joyce. The end of segregation by sex threatens the dignity and safety of women rather than men, because men are more violent and sexually predatory than women. Men in prison, for example, have a huge incentive to claim a female identity. In sports, the physical advantages of men are so great that their entry into women’s competitions automatically takes places from females. Women who enter men’s competitions, by contrast, are destined to lose. In the realm of sexuality, young lesbians are vulnerable to aggressive pursuit by transwomen, which activists celebrate as “breaking the cotton ceiling.” There is no equivalent pressure on men, whether straight or gay.

Transgenderism also undermines the female sex in more subtle ways. In progressive communities, a growing number of young women assert that they are men or nonbinary, and that has consequences for ordinary social interactions. People become so fearful of “misgendering”—which has become a postmodern form of blasphemy—that they stop using female pronouns for women who do not display a feminine style. Long-established schools for girls can no longer refer to their pupils’ sex. Discussion of women’s bodies now requires circumlocutions like “menstruators” and “everyone with a cervix.”

In my view, then, radical feminists are correct that transgenderism—in its objective consequences—harms the interests of women and girls. The fact that a policy is bad for females is not a decisive argument against it, of course. We always balance competing interests, and one may argue that the benefits for transwomen outweigh the costs for women. My interest is not in the normative question of whose claims should prevail, but in the sociological question of who pushed these claims. In short, who has led this “men’s rights’ movement”?

Let us list the major players in Britain. Former Prime Minister Theresa May announced that “being trans is not a mental illness.” “As an ardent, passionate feminist,” Nicola Sturgeon, First Minister of Scotland, wants to eliminate sex segregation. Conservative MP Maria Miller headed the Committee for Women and Equalities, a select committee of the House of Commons, which proposed reforming the Gender Recognition Act to make it easier for people to change their legal sex; she derided critics of this proposal as “women who purport to be feminists.” Dawn Butler, Shadow Minister for Women and Equalities in the Labour Party, insists that “trans women are women” and arranged for them to enter the party’s all-women’s shortlists for parliamentary seats. Ruth Hunt transformed Stonewall from a charity that campaigned for homosexual rights to one devoted to transgender rights, even at the expense of lesbians. Mermaids, which advocates for the transgendering of children, is run by Susie Green. Polly Carmichael, director of the NHS Gender Identity Development Service, lowered the age at which puberty-blocking drugs could be administered to children who identify as trans—now disproportionately girls. Katharine Viner is chief executive of the Guardian newspaper which has championed the transgender cause for many years.

Virtually the entire feminist establishment has embraced transgenderism, from celebrated feminist Members of Parliament like Jess Phillips (Labour Party) and Mhairi Black (Scottish National Party) to organizations like the Fawcett Society, Engender (the feminist group funded by the Scottish government), the Women’s Equality Party, and Women’s Aid. Transgender doctrines are enforced by the burgeoning diversity-industrial complex which was created by feminists and is disproportionately staffed by women. It was a woman employed as a university Equality Projects Officer who started a petition to transfer a violent transwoman to a women’s prison; the petition was so successful that it persuaded the government to divide prisons by gender identity rather than sex. In universities, transgender doctrine is promoted by feminist academics like Sally Hines and Alison Phipps. Because radical feminism has almost disappeared from universities, academic opponents of transgenderism—now labelled as “gender-critical”—are, for the most part, women whose scholarship isn’t directly linked to contemporary feminism. Kathleen Stock, for example, worked on the philosophy of aesthetics. But there are some gender-critical voices within the feminist establishment. Joanna Cherry (Scottish National Party) is one of only two Members of Parliament who publicly question transgender orthodoxy. Karen Ingala Smith’s charity NiA runs women’s shelters in the old-fashioned sense, restricted to females. Such exceptions are rare.

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Ivy was meant to be a woman. She’s felt this way since she was a child and did everything in her power to become one but why is it so hard for Ivy to accept her new body? It’s a question she struggles with in this intimate film about her journey from being a man to a woman.

Since coming out at 24, Ivy was always sure about her decisions until a medical trip to Thailand triggered unexpected doubt. She talks about love, loss and reluctant acceptance in this beautiful narrative about her courageous and life-altering decisions to transform into who she wanted to be.

In the volume Gender Rituals: Female Initiation in Melanesia, anthropologist Brigitta Hauser-Schäublin recounts meeting a woman who had undergone a male initiation among the Central Iatmul fisher-foragers of Papua New Guinea. One day years back, when the woman was a young, pre-pubescent girl visiting her mother’s village of Tigowi, she had climbed a Malay apple tree to get some fruit. At that moment, two men were blowing flutes in a fenced-off enclosure nearby and saw the girl in the tree. This was a serious matter, as the flutes were meant to be kept secret from the women and children, who were never supposed to see the men’s sacred instruments. The men dragged the young girl back to the men’s house, where she was gang-raped. She was then scarified and given a limited version of the men’s initiation ceremony, where she learned the secrets of the men’s house and their sacred musical instruments.

When she was finally allowed to leave, she was given a tiny loin covering instead of the grass skirt women were usually granted after going through their own initiation. “Her mother cried at her daughter’s state when she returned and immediately brought her back to Palimbei [a different village],” Hauser-Schäublin writes, adding that,

Although she had gained what was considered culturally important ritual knowledge, the woman nonetheless felt degraded, dishonored, derided, and incredibly shamed. Thereafter, she led a rather disorganized life, and the way she related her story to me, many decades after, mirrored the feelings she must have experienced and a suffering from which she never really had recovered. I recorded a similar instance in Aibom village. In both cases, the initiation was meant, and experienced, as a severe punishment and stigmatization. By retrospectively legitimating the discovery of male secrets, more-over, the practice seems to have been intended also to protect them. Were the girls not initiated, they would have passed what they had discovered on to others. Initiation, however, ensured that they would never do so.

Male cults where men would punish women with rape or execution for intruding on their rituals can be found across cultures all over the world, from hunter-gatherers to agricultural societies. Among the Arunta hunter-gatherers of Australia, anthropologist Walter Baldwin Spencer tells the story of a woman who, desperately thirsty, ventured near a water-hole to drink, and inadvertently saw the men’s sacred pool and ceremonial stone. The men decided to punish her with gang-rape, “a punishment which is not infrequently inflicted after the committal of some serious offence, as an alternative to that of being put to death. In consequence of this men of all classes had intercourse with her, and when this was over she was returned to her proper Unawa man [husband],” Spencer writes.

Of the Mundurucu horticulturalists of the Amazon, “the men consciously state that they use the penis to dominate their women,” write anthropologists Yolanda and Robert Murphy, noting again the practice of men punishing the women who witness their rituals or sacred objects with gang-rape (in this case flutes, similar to the Central Iatmul of Papua New Guinea). We see the same phenomenon with the Mehinaku fisher-horticulturalists, also of the Amazon.

Anthropologist Thomas Gregor’s first introduction to the men’s house was given to him by a Mehinaku man, who informed him that, “You are in the house of the spirit Kauka. Those are his sacred flutes. Women may not see anything in here. If a woman comes in, then all the men take her into the woods and she is raped. It has always been that way.” Itsanakwalu, a young Mehinaku woman in her early twenties later would tell Gregor personally that, “I don’t want to see the sacred flutes. The men would rape me. I would die. Do you know what happened to the Waura woman who saw it? All the men raped her. She died later.”

While the punishments enacted by these men’s cults are extreme, they reflect larger, cross-culturally common efforts—individually or collectively—by males to constrain female autonomy and control their sexuality.

In his work examining ethnographic evidence from 190 hunter-gatherer societies, evolutionary psychologist Menlaos Apostolou notes the prevalence of arranged marriages, writing that across these societies “the institution of marriage is regulated by parents and close kin. Parents are able to influence the mating decisions of both sons and daughters, but stronger control is exercised with regard to daughters; male parents have more say in selecting in-laws than their female counterparts.” As anthropologist Janice Stockard writes of !Kung hunter-gatherer populations in southern Africa, “Traditionally in the !Kung San, marriage is a relationship among a husband and wife and the wife’s father and is at the outset firmly based on compatibility between the two men.”

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There’s no relief from our current cultural conversation on transgender rights. Its implications touch all of us, and the media coverage is relentless. Here at Quillette alone, you may read about the long-term consequences of transitioning for children, the political costs of deadnaming, Twitter’s policies on “hateful conduct” (including tweeting things like “men aren’t women”), the controversy surrounding trans women competing in female sports events, and the widening chasm between trans-inclusive feminists and trans-exclusive “radical” feminists.

Surrounded by this whirlwind, I thought it would be useful to provide a historical meta-survey on the issue, tracing the debate back to its origins, so that we all might be better positioned to digest the next news cycle. Below, you’ll find a brief history of our culture’s “gender” talk: its origins, its philosophical evolution, and its current controversies. Gender as we’ve come to understand it, I will argue, is an idea so shot through with murky confusion. We will soon have to replace it with something more intellectually durable, or abandon it altogether.

Once upon a time, everyone believed that humans are sexually dimorphic, coming in two sexes: male and female. Of course, we also knew about biologically intersex people—who exhibit rare variations in sex characteristics, and so don’t fit neatly into either category. But, just as it’s true to say that humans have ten fingers, even though a few are born with more or fewer, and just as we distinguish between day and night despite the shades of dusk and dawn, we accepted the idea that humans come in two sexes, despite the reality of intersex individuals.

In that simpler time, we also believed that males and females can be children or adults. When human males and females are children, they’re boys and girls. When they’re adults, they’re men and women. We used man and woman to track the distinction between adult males and adult females in our species, just as we do with other species: doe and buck, rooster and hen, sow and boar, cow and bull, etc. You’ll still find these sex-based definitions of man and woman in most dictionaries. For example, the Oxford English Dictionary’s first three senses of woman refer to adult female humans, and similarly for man. The OED tells us that the word woman comes from the Old English word wīfmann, meaning “female human”: wīf (which meant female, not wife) modifying mann (which meant human, generically). Let’s call this “the Traditional View” of manhood and womanhood: they’re rooted in biological sex.

Things began to change in the middle of the 20th century, when psychologists and philosophers proposed a distinction between sex and what they called “gender.” (A classic text here is psychologist John Money’s 1955 article, Hermaphroditism, gender and precocity in hyperadrenocorticism: Psychologic findings.) The term gender they borrowed from linguistics, and stipulated that it refers to something other than sex—typically the social features of life as a male or female (i.e., the socially learned rules and roles that a culture associates with biological sex). Boys wear blue, girls wear pink, and so forth.

For psychologists, the benefit of this distinction was that it allowed the emergence of a vocabulary to describe people we now call “gender nonconforming,” and people who experience what we now call “gender dysphoria.” To be gender nonconforming, back when this language was emerging, was to be of one biological sex, and yet to fail to behave in a manner typical of that sex. To experience gender dysphoria was to be of one biological sex, and yet to have a sincere belief that one was “meant to be” the opposite sex, or to have a deep-seated desire to be of the opposite sex. Trans author Julia Serano, author of the 2007 book Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity, puts it this way: Trans people “struggle with a subconscious understanding or intuition that there is something ‘wrong’ with the sex they were assigned at birth and/or who feel that they should have been born as or wish they could be the other sex.” More recently, trans writer Andrea Long Chu (author of On Liking Women) described it as follows: “I am trying to tell you something that few of us dare to talk about, especially in public, especially when we are trying to feel political: not the fact, boringly obvious to those of us living it, that many trans women wish they were cis women, but the darker, more difficult fact that many trans women wish they were women, period.”

The sex/gender distinction also helped philosophers speak about (and combat) unjust social norms and conventions that systematically oppress the female sex, as well as biological essentialism, the view that these social norms are justified by biology. As early as 1949, Simone de Beauvoir argued in her book The Second Sex that females are socialized by their former masters (men) to be, as she wrote, “‘truly feminine’—that is, frivolous, infantile, irresponsible: the submissive woman.” And this is unjust. But before one can confront an injustice, one must name the injustice. For that task, we used the word “gender.”

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