“The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.” —George Orwell
Readers of Freedom and Reason know that I view postmodernism as largely a crackpot approach to understanding the world. More than this, it has become a means to undermine reason and science, which in turn brings harmful consequences, as we have seen with the practice of gender-affirming care, previously known as transgender healthcare or transgender medical care, where children are given sterilizing hormones and sometimes surgically mutilated. (See Making Patients for the Medical-Industrial Complex.) Before the rebranding, such barbaric practices, thankfully infrequent, were known as transsexual healthcare or transsexual medical care. The change in branding reflects the artificial distinction queer theorists and sexologists make between sex and gender, with sex reconceptualized as strictly biological, a distinction that comes with a tacit admission that one cannot change one’s sex. The rebranding has accompanied a drastic rise in those seeking such care.
The lie that a man can change his gender is dependent upon acceptance of the artificial distinction queer theories and sexologists make. The premise of postmodernism—that there is no ultimate truth—is central to the queer theory piece of the alliance determined to problematize fundamental and well-understood truths in this area. Postmodernists problematize reason and science by challenging the idea that they are objective, universal, and unbiased sources of knowledge. Postmodernists argue that reason and science are shaped by cultural, historical, and social contexts, and that reason and science can be used to serve certain ideologies and power structures—both true and not trivial but obvious observations. All this lies at the heart of the transhumanist movement, of which transgenderism is an expression. As I will show in a future essay, all this is rooted in the nihilistic strains of anarchism.
In addition to skepticism of universal truths, queer theory, a field of second-wave critical theory, that is a critical theory corrupted by the poststructuralist epistemic, shares with postmodernism generally a rejection of the assumption of fixed categories and identities, deconstruction of binaries, focus on language and representation, emphasis on agency and resistance, intersectionality (the stacking of oppressions), and embracing ambiguity and complexity. The ideological denial of fixed categories, the political project deconstructing binaries, and living with ambiguity are obviously ideological endeavors. Some of the rest sounds like standard social science. A closer examination of, say, the emphasis on agency and resistance, however, reveals the anarchist, as well as identitarian tendencies, where social norms exist to be transgressed and the only truths are personal ones.
In this essay, I leverage Jean Baudrillard’s description and conceptionalization of the precession of the simulacra to explore the terrain of synthetic sexual identities (SSIs), popularly known as trans gender or trans identification. The subtitle “Trans as Bad Copy” does not deny that there are convincing copies. Blaire White and Buck Angel, especially the latter, from an external point of reference, pass as the gender they wish to. However, most trans identifying individuals, especially taken in their totality, do not pass. Technology has not yet reached the point where convincing simulacra, or simulations, can be made routine in this domain. This is why there is so much effort on changing language to change mass perception in attempt to complete the simulation in the lurch.
Recall the scene from George Orwell’s Nineteen Eight-Four where O’Brien is interrogating Winston in the Ministry of Love. During the torture and brainwashing process, O’Brien tries to force Winston to accept the Party’s version of reality, which includes the idea that two and two make five if the Party says so.
O’Brien: Do you remember writing in your diary, “Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four”?
Winston: Yes.
O’Brien (holding up his left hand, its back towards Winston, thumb hidden and the four fingers extended): How many fingers am I holding up, Winston?
Winston: Four.
O’Brien: And if the party says that it is not four but five—then how many?
Winston: Four.
This goes on like this for a while. Winston is repeatedly punished for failing to see as true what is obviously false. He is not allowed to lie. He must believe the falsehood that two and two make five. He must not see the truth in front of his nose.
O’Brien: You are a slow learner.
Winston: How can I help it? How can I help seeing what is in front of my eyes? Two and two are four.
O’Brien: Sometimes, Winston. Sometimes they are five. Sometimes they are three. Sometimes they are all of them at once. You must try harder. It is not easy to become sane.
When University of Pennsylvania teammates of swimmer Lia Thomas, deadname William, complained about having a man on the women’s swimming team and naked in the women’s locker room, they were ordered by university officials not to speak the obvious truth and threatened with referral to psychological counseling if they objected to having Thomas on the team. “The Party wants you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears,” we learn from Nineteen Eighty-Four. “It is their final, most essential command.” Alas, it is indeed not easy to become sane, and in the aftermath of the scandal Thomas’ teammates Riley Gaines and Paula Scanlan came forward to to tell the truth, which in the case of Gaines was rewarded with an attack by a mob of trans activists.
The theory of linguistic relativity, popularly known as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, developed by linguists Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf in 1929, asserts that the way individuals structure language (or language is structured for them), both in terms of grammar and vocabulary, has a profound impact on their perception of the world. Language constructs a shared understanding of events and phenomena unfolding around us. This theory has led to the belief that changing definitions and meanings restructures consciousness, which in turn changes cultural understandings—the collective beliefs, norms, and values of a society—such that individuals are socialized in the new understanding advantageous to those in power. However, the hypothesis runs up against the gender-detection brain module, which is a result of natural history, a very powerful force to attempt overcome linguistically, especially since the language faculty evolved to convey reality in order to organize human action. The innate rigidity of perception necessitates the imposition of language codes enforced through various social control strategies including coercive techniques. (See Neutralizing the Gender-Detection Brain Module.)
Before getting to the example of a bad copy and the revealing reflections that copy (his self-designation) makes about the problem of advanced order simulacra, and his attempt to deny the original (“the blueprint,” as he would like to have it in an attempt to put the map before the territory), I will need to explain the precession of simulacra and discuss the problem of simulation generally, which I will do through real-world examples, as well as fictional ones. This will require an overview of poststructuralism, postmodernism, and the method of deconstruction.
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One of the tools postmodernists and queer theorists use in undermining reason and science is deconstruction. Deconstruction is a literary theory associated with French philosopher Jacques Derrida. It emerged in the late twentieth century as a central component of poststructuralist thought, a reaction in French philosophy to structuralism, a theory and method emphasizing the study of patterns and their underlying structures. Structuralism held sway in a number of fields, including anthropology, linguistics, literary theory, and sociology. Structuralists seek to identify the organizing principles that give coherence and meaning to phenomena. Poststructuralists doubt this is possible, expressing special distain for the idea of binaries and binary oppositions. Structuralists argue that these binary oppositions are fundamental to the way we think and create meaning. The pairings of contrasting elements that are found in various aspects of human life, such as good and evil, male and female, and culture and nature. The meaning of each element in a binary is defined in relation to its opposite. For example, we understand what “good” means because it is in contrast to “evil.” Poststructuralists deride this view as an oversimplification. This criticism is primarily associated with thinkers such as Michel Foucault and Roland Barthes.
Deconstruction seeks to challenge and destabilize traditional assumptions about language, meaning, and truth. At its core, it is concerned with revealing the inherent complexities and contradictions within language and texts—it’s looking for patterns after all—and questions the idea that language can accurately and precisely convey fixed and objective meanings, doubting even there are any such things. Instead, deconstruction emphasizes the fluidity of language and the multiple interpretations that can arise from any given text. It doesn’t matter so much what the actor intends or means, but how others react to his words and actions—that is, how those words and actions make the receiver feel. (See Watch What You Say; Those Who Read and Hear are Alive.)
How does this jibe with the project to change perception with language? Postmodernism is a political project in which language is seen as a useful means of inventing reality rather than conveying reality. There is intentionality; it means to assert the legitimacy of its method by changing assumptions. If language conveys reality, this suggests that there is an external and shared world that exists independently of language; the function of deconstruction is therefore what postmodernists call “problematization.” The praxis of problematization destabilizes fixed meanings and challenges and even transgresses established norms. By selectively embracing multiple perspectives through the epistemic privileging of knowledge systems and experiences of marginalized groups, postmodernists undermine dominant discourses they claim to marginalize certain identities. Thus deconstruction represents a destabilizing move that clears the way for an alternative description and explanation of reality, one that moves from shared and objective truth to individual and subjective “truths.”
Normally, we use language to communicate and gain insights into shared reality. In natural history, language evolved to coordinate social action. Science depends on this function. To say language invents reality is different from saying language shapes perception of reality, which is a well-known anthropological fact; our understanding of reality is not fixed or absolute but is subject to the cultural, historical, and social influences of language; rather, if language invents reality, then ontological claims, i.e., claims about being, dissolve in a prevailing epistemological system, with truth claims depending on who commands the system. I will put aside the paradox of such a conflation for now and focus on the claim that what is real reduces to construction through language and other forms of symbolic communication.
Deconstructionism becomes significant in the way postmodernism and critical theory corrupted by it view the role of language in constructing reality. Postmodernism emphasizes the subjective nature of knowledge, the influence of discourse and language in shaping reality, and the plurality of interpretations, which means there is no one truth to be ascertained. It’s all a matter of standpoint, which can be reduced to each individual. Deconstruction aligns with postmodern principles by critiquing the notion of stable meaning and the existence of fixed truths, supporting the postmodern skepticism towards metanarratives, i.e., grand overarching explanations of history or society, and the rejection of essentialist concepts that claim to capture the essence of any subject. (There’s another paradox here with respect to queer theory, which I will take that up in a future essay.)
Jean Baudrillard was a French philosopher, sociologist, and cultural theorist known for his influential ideas on postmodernism, hyperreality, and his formulation of the concept of the simulacrum. I teach Baudrillard in my freshmen seminar People, Machines, and Monsters. One of his notable works, the book my students read, is Simulacra and Simulation, published in 1981, in which Baudrillard explores the concept of the “precession of simulacra.” The concept means to convey the idea that, in contemporary society, the relationship between reality and its representation has been fundamentally altered to the point where the representation precedes and shapes our understanding of reality, rather than the other way around. For Baudrillard, simulations or copies of reality have become more powerful and influential than the actual reality they are (at least were) meant to represent. This is the postmodern condition.
Baudrillard’s treatment is useful because his sociology grounds him in a method realistic enough to distinguish between postmodernism as an epistemic approach to interpretation of images and texts and postmodernism as a condition of late capitalism. I would use different language, of course, describing the present situation as authoritarian state capitalism dependent upon what Sheldon Wolin calls “inverted totalitarianism” rather than naked force is usefully captured by the concept of the postmodern—for a society governed by the social logic of modernity would appear very differently than contemporary society. (See Totalitarian Monopoly Capitalism: Fascism Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow; The Selective Misanthropy and Essential Fascism of the Progressive Standpoint.) I will leave to the reader to learn, if he has not already, more about the way Baudrillard reworks Marx’s theory of the commodity (use and exchange value) for the postmodern condition. It is not necessary to know the totality of Baudrillard’s contribution in the area to understand his thesis regarding the precession of simulacra.
A simulacrum is a representation of a presumptively actual thing. Simulacra abound. There is hyperreal tourism (Disneyland and Disney World), which create artificial and idealized versions of experiences and real-world places that often bear little resemblance to the original cultural and geographical contexts that inspires them. Virtual reality and video games provide simulated and highly-immersive experiences; players interact with artificial worlds that have no direct connection to the physical reality they actually inhabit (which postmodernist suggest are themselves artificial). In modern media culture, news stories and representations of events are simulated. Well-known brands and logos have become simulacra, representing more than just the products or services they offer; they symbolize aspirations, cultural meaning, and lifestyles that go beyond their original functional purposes. The development of virtual assistants such as Alexa and Siri presents simulacra in the form of computer-generated voices that interact with users. These virtual entities have no physical existence as sentient things but simulate human-like interactions, and the humans in the interaction treat them as persons. On social media platforms, individuals construct idealized versions of themselves as avatars, online personas that may differ significantly from their real-life identities, leading to the routine practice of self-representation as simulacra. Buildings and entire towns designed to replicate famous landmarks from different cultures are simulacra, offering artificial representations with no direct link to the original cultural and historical contexts. Pushing this idea further is the town Disney constructed, Celebration, that has no original but is a simulacrum constructed from architectural and cultural typifications of small towns. It is simultaneously a real town.
This idea of simulacra is explored in numerous novels and movies. The one that stands out in my estimation is the 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, in which author Philip K. Dick explores themes of authenticity and identity and the blurred line between humans and machines. Ridley Scott’s 1982 film Blade Runner is based on this book. This story is the jewel at the heart of my freshman seminar. Set in a post-apocalyptic, dystopian future, where, due to radiation poisoning, many humans have emigrated to off-world colonies, leaving behind a desolate and decaying Earth, the story follows Rick Deckard, an Earth-bound bounty hunter tasked with “retiring” (terminating) rogue androids which are virtually indistinguishable from humans and are equipped with advanced AI and synthetic emotions. The central conflict of the film involves six highly sophisticated Nexus-6 androids, referred to as “replicants” in the film, which escape from an off-world colony and come to Earth. The replicants wish to reach Tyrell in order to be modified; they have been given a four-year lifespan and want more life (which in the end they discover is not possible given their design). The book and film have significant differences, but the problem of differentiating reality from simulation is common to both.
In a theme fleshed out in the book, hinted at times in the film, owning a living animal has become a status symbol in this culture. Most animal life has been wiped out, and actual animals are expensive. Many possess artificial animals in a desperate attempt to connect to nature, and the goal of the industry producing them, the Rosen Association (the Tyrell Corporation in the film), is to make as realistic as possible the simulations. In the book, Rick Deckard owns a synthetic animal, an electric sheep, which he keeps as a substitute for a real one. In the film, in an interaction with a replicant named Rachael, Deckard notes an owl in a conference room at the Tyrell Corporation:
Rachael: Do you like our owl?
Deckard: It’s artificial?
Rachael: Of course it is.
Deckard: Must be expensive.
Rachael: Very.
Later, Deckard asks the replicant Zhora, employed as an exotic dancer at a nightclub called The Snake Pit, whether the snake she dances with it real.
Deckard: Is this a real snake?
Zhora: Of course it’s not real. You think I would be working in a place like this if I could afford a real snake?
In both the book and the film there is a test called the “Voigt-Kampff test” that bounty hunters (or blade runners, in the film) use to determine if an individual is human or an android. The Voigt-Kampff test is a fictional empathy test designed to assess emotional responses, as androids lack genuine human emotions and empathy. The test involves posing a series of questions and scenarios to the subject while monitoring physiological responses such as changes in heart rate, perspiration, and pupil dilation. The theory is that humans will respond emotionally to questions about morally challenging situations, while androids will lack the appropriate empathetic reactions. As the story unfolds the distinction between humans and androids becomes increasingly ambiguous, raising questions about the nature of consciousness, empathy, and what it means to be human.
Deckard experiences moments of uncertainty about his own identity, whether he may be an android himself, and grapples with existential questions similar to those he hunts. What drives Deckard is the quest for authentic experiences in a dystopian and hyperreal world. One of the lines from the film, uttered by Eldon Tyrell, the CEO of the Tyrell Corporation, a man driven to engineer replicants with heightened emotional capabilities and complex cognitive functions, seeking to surpass the boundaries of what is traditionally considered human, speaks to the end of the precession of the simulacra, which we are now coming to: “‘More human than human’ is our motto,” Tyrell tells Deckard.
Baudrillard identifies four stages in the precession of simulacra. In the first order of simulacra, representations are based on a simple reflection of reality. There is a clear connection between the sign (representation) and the referent (the real object or event it represents). It is a faithful copy of the referent, the original. For example, a photograph is something of a first-order simulacrum, as it is a direct representation of the object or scene it captures. It is of course one-dimensional and cannot capture the thing itself. No copy of something can represent the thing itself, thus simulacra vary in their capacity to represent reality. In the second order of simulacra, representations are no longer a direct reflection of reality but a simulation or copy of the original. There is still a semblance of connection to the real, but the representation starts to deviate from the actual referent. An example of this is the use of advertising, where images or slogans depict products in idealized ways that may not necessarily reflect the reality of the product. It is here that stereotype and typification are found, which serve as the basis of successive-order simulacra.
Stereotypes are simplified and standardized representations about a particular group of people based on shared characteristics or attributes. These characteristics are often exaggerated or oversimplified. Stereotypes can be positive, negative, or neutral. Stereotyping is a natural cognitive process that helps individuals process large amounts of information quickly. Typifications are similar to stereotypes, but are more focused on categorizing individuals based on specific observable characteristics or behaviors. A typification involves abstracting and classifying individuals or groups based on certain traits or actions they display. Typifications can be useful in understanding general patterns and tendencies among individuals. However, like stereotypes, they can also be limiting if they prevent people from recognizing individual differences or lead to unfair judgments and prejudicial treatment. They are the source of generalized second-order simulacra.
In the third order of simulacra, the simulation or representation has completely detached from any connection to reality. It becomes a hyperreal, a self-referential system that bears no resemblance to the original. The simulation becomes its own reality, and the distinction between the representation and reality blurs. An example of third-order simulacra is the simulated reality in video games or virtual reality, where users can interact with lifelike environments that have no direct correspondence to any physical reality or fact of nature. This is the arena of the hyperreal, the creation of representations that have no referents. Rachael and Zhora are third-order simulacra.
In the fourth order of simulacra, the hyperreal has become so pervasive that the idea of simulation collapses altogether; there is no distinction between reality and simulation. It becomes a world of pure simulation, without any reference point to reality. In this stage, everything is a simulation, and there is no original reality left to refer back to. This is the situation presented in the Matrix, a 1999 film written and directed by Lana Wachowski and Lilly Wachowski (formerly Larry and Andy, both of whom are now trans identifying). The difference between virtual reality and the matrix is that one lives in the latter—and doesn’t know that he lives in it. Neo, the central character in the Matrix, is pulled from the only world he has ever known and delivered into the reality he never knew, a brutal and unforgiving world, then shown the desert of the real, a simulation of the actual world the Matrix conceals.
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Baudrillard warns that as we move into higher orders of simulacra, the relationship between signs and their referents becomes more complex, and the direct connection to reality is gradually diminished, leading to the emergence of hyperrealities and simulations that are removed from the original reality they were meant to represent. Somewhere towards the end of the precession, we no longer see the symbols that communicate the simulation, as the liberated could in the Matrix—and Neo unaided by technology. All we see if the stimulation, which could very well include us. As I noted, Deckard has doubts about himself. And so does this individual:
I do not subscribe to TikTok, the presumed source of the video. I do not know this person’s name. I don’t care to. I do know the person’s gender, however. This is a man. This man very much desires to be a woman but knows he is not one, so he needs to erase women as an essential category and replace them with a simulacrum, one that he can step into—a woman suit, if you will. A stereotype. This is what serial killer Jame Gumb, whom the media has dubbed “Buffalo Bill” because he “skins his humps,” is seeking in Thomas Harris’ 1988 novel The Silence of the Lambs; denied gender-affirming surgery by the industry, autogynephile Gumb is building a woman suit out of the skins of young obese women he kidnaps and keeps in his basement. (In the movie Blade Runner, Detective Harry Bryant, the chief of the Replicant Detection Unit and Rick Deckard’s boss, refers to replicants as “skin jobs.”)
The man in the TikTok video admits that, while in Asgard he can be anything he wishes, back on Midgard, back on Earth, on the other end of the rainbow bridge, he is not a woman, so he means to convince his audience (himself) that nobody really is. It is a mythical thing. After all, a woman is only a woman because she was assigned that status at birth. She is a therefore a “cis woman,” whereas the “trans woman” achieves his status. “Trans woman are women,” Stonewall tells us, since anyone can be one, and the claim that they are not leans into privilege—a special right only cis women do not deserve; owning and asserting the privilege makes the cis woman a bigot; attempting to resist the erasure of that privilege makes her a reactionary, a fascist (a lesbian is that for just being).
With the construct cis gender defined as somebody who “identifies” with the gender they were “assigned” at birth, as if the category woman could be either an achieved or an ascribed status, gender ideology tacitly assumes that if an individual identifies as a woman that person conforms to societal stereotypes associated with women. Otherwise, even if one cannot define what one is, how would one know if one is not one? The trans identifying man dresses as he imagines women are supposed to dress. Sometimes he significantly alters his body’s appearance with hormones and surgeries to look like what he imagines women look like. Imagine that he may in the future have parts of braindead women grafted on and transplanted into his body. A slippery slope? This is something the man in the video tells us is on the way. And he is not the only one. Indeed. Not as slippery slope. A project.
The appearance of women is variable. The man’s only reference in fashioning his SSI is something he must appropriate from his environment, a stereotype, a reductive representation of women in a particular place at a particular time, often the type of women he’s attracted to, which is why he most often appears as a commercial exaggeration, an unreasonable facsimile of a woman, typically an exotic dancer, a porn star, or a prostitute—a sex worker. Do you now see the function of exposing children to drag queens in libraries and night clubs? (See Clowns are Scary; Luring Children to the Edge; If All This Strikes You as Perverse, You’re Right. It is; ) Do you now see why children are asked by the counselors and teachers whether they really are what they think they are? (See Ideology in Public Schools—What Can We Do About It?) Do you now see why it is so important for you to use the chosen or preferred pronouns, which we are now being told are not chosen. (See NIH and the Tyranny of Compelled Speech.)
By reducing natural history of a metanarrative and then rejecting the truth of the narrative, gender ideology simultaneously denies and disrupts the ontological character of the category while overlooking the complexity and diversity of manifestations of women, their appearances and their experiences, assuming that all women conform to a stereotype or one in a set of stereotypes, historically defined by men, by identifying as women—that women identify as women instead of being women. Woman is a persona, a costume; it’s a role, John Money told us; it’s performative, Judith Butler tells us; the category is not fixed. But the reality is that gender is neither achieved nor ascribed; it is a natural category, an adult female human, an evolved being, the result of natural history, that can present and act in an infinite number of ways. The tom boy is not a boy, but is a girl. Without or without her breasts, she will become a woman.
Gender ideology defines women and men in terms of what is perceived as feminine and masculine, attributes that are themselves abstract representations of the gender binary that is denied by poststructuralism in its rebellion against structure and science. We see this not only in the way trans identifying men appropriate a stereotype of a woman, but in those who claim to be genderfluid, presenting one day (or moment) as feminine, the next day (moment) as masculine, both presentations stereotypical—and then completely giving away their gender on the days they present as androgynous (if they can manage to pass otherwise). The binary presentations are always representations of stereotypes in a cultural space and time, in the pink and the blue of the trans flag. But few can pass as what they are not. Genderfluid, like the unicorn of the trans woman, is make-believe. Admitting that unicorns are make-believe doesn’t erase the fact of unicorns, it just specifies what sort of fact the unicorn is.
We see this elsewhere, in the switching of personas (in a system of, often comical, often terrifying stereotypes) by those claiming to have multiple personality or dissociative disorder (MPD). We see this in young people sharing DSM-5 diagnoses and then learning to wear the checklist convincingly (self-institutionalization). We see this in pods of girls in social media chatrooms catching Tourette’s. (See Why Aren’t We Talking More About Social Contagion?; See also The Exploitative Act of Removing Healthy Body Parts; Disordering Bodies for Disordered Minds.) We see this in the disappearance of lesbians, a phenomenon Katie Herzog analyzes in her 2020 article “Where Have All The Lesbians Gone?” We see this with furries, individuals who have a strong interest in anthropomorphic animal characters, often represented in art, literature, and media. Anthropomorphic characters are animals with human-like traits and characteristics, such as walking on two legs, talking, and exhibiting human emotions. These are just some of simulacra that walk on the postmodern landscape.
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In Simulacra and Simulation, Baudrillard discusses the “map-territory relationship.” This concept explores the relationship between representations (maps) and the reality they are intended to represent (territory). Baudrillard refers to Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges’ short story “On Exactitude in Science.” In the story, Borges presents a fictional tale about an ancient civilization that creates a map so detailed that it covers the entire empire to the point where it becomes the same size as the territory itself. Baudrillard uses Borges’ story as a starting point to discuss the concept of hyperreality in Simulacra and Simulation, drawing parallels between the map in Borges’ story and the modern society’s tendency to create simulations, images, and signs that begin to replace or overshadow reality. For Baudrillard, the proliferation of simulations and signs in contemporary society leads to the blurring of the distinction between reality and hyperreality, where the signs and simulations become more real or significant than the original referents they are meant to represent. By referencing Borges’ story, Baudrillard is warning of the appearance of copies or simulations that have no original or reality to refer to. We can apply this observation to the function of praxis in gender ideology where activists are encouraged to transgress boundaries rationalized as arbitrary and oppressive, action presuming that norms are constructed a priori to meet imperatives of an oppressive society. (The fallacy of illegitimate teleology appears baked into French philosophical traditions.)
In traditional cartography, a map is a representation of a geographical territory; in Baudrillard’s analysis, the proliferation of simulations and representations in our society has led to a situation where the map (the representation) precedes the territory (the reality). Simulations and media representations become dominant, shaping our perceptions and experiences of reality. With the proliferation of simulations, we have moved beyond the mere representation of reality into a state of hyperreality. In this condition, simulations and representations become more real and significant than the original reality they are meant to represent. The simulacra become more convincing and influential than the reality they copy. The result of this is the loss of referentiality. The traditional map-territory relationship relies on the referentiality of the map to the territory it represents. For years cartographers have sought a map of the world that accurately conveys its dimensions. In the hyperreal state, simulations no longer have a direct reference to an underlying reality. Accuracy and precision are irrelevant. The relationship between representation and reality becomes detached, leading to a loss of the connection between the two. Baudrillard argues that, in contemporary culture, the boundaries between the simulated representations (maps) and the actual reality (territory) have not only become blurred to the extent that the representations can be mistaken for the reality itself, but that the synthetic would be preferable to the original if awareness were obtained.
This is depicted in the film The Matrix when the character called Cypher, a crew member of the rebel group led by Morpheus, who seeks to free humanity from the Matrix where most humans are unknowingly trapped, betrays the group. Cypher becomes disillusioned with the harsh reality of the real world outside the Matrix and makes a deal with the sentient AI program Agent Smith to be reinserted into the simulated reality and have his memory erased. In exchange, Cypher provides information on the location of Morpheus, who is considered a significant threat to the machines. Similarly, we see with trans activists, for the most part trans identifying men, who are prepared to betray others to validate the simulation they desperately wish to live in—right down the demand that we erase their existence as a man by demanding the state punish those who deadname them or misgender (i.e, correctly gender) them. We are to erase our memory of the truth of gender and replace it with a simulation without any actual referents. And so the corporate state tells us how we must think about gender, even if it contradicts the evidence of your eyes and ears—until that time when your eyes and ears will betray you. (See Neutralizing the Gender-Detection Brain Module.)
As I wrote above, a woman, the adult female human, can be represented in many ways, and has been throughout history and across culture, but gender ideology cherry picks culturally and temporally specific attributes of women’s identities and experiences without considering or acknowledging the individual perspectives and choices women make in their lives. The trans identifying man is not what he wishes to be—or how he wishes others would see him. He cannot even know what it feels like to be that which he isn’t, so he seeks to blur the lines between reality and simulation, attempting to craft a map that precedes the territory, the lay of this land determined by stereotype and typification but which is said to essential and nonessential simultaneously, a pending entry in the Newspeak dictionary. This is why we are told that a man does not think he is a woman when he identifies as such but that he is in fact a woman, his authentic self there from the beginning. His gender, preexisting, and contrary to his sex, is found and affirmed. “Trans women are women.” To fail to affirm his gender is an act of genocide, for he is at once a woman and a member of an oppressed sexual minority. But what he is has not actual definition. It is whatever he says it is.
The same is true for all individuals who imagine themselves to be what they are not. A furry may have a cat identity, but he cannot know what it feels like to be a cat. Like a child, he can only pretend to be such a thing. (Remember how much it annoyed your parents when you acted like a cat or a dog? That’s because badly acting like something you’re not is obnoxious and creepy.) But he does not have to be a cat since he can be a cat-human, walking about upright.
In his Theory of Moral Sentiments, Adam Smith long ago told us that the only way any of us can know what some other person thinks or experiences is through our imagination, and our imagination depends on the cultural and social materials available to us, by abstracting from concrete instantiations of the thing itself a symbolic representation of it. If we attempt to render the abstraction in concrete form, we find that it is a copy of a copy or a representation of a representation, not the thing itself, a degree of abstraction distancing representation of some thing from its original referent, thereby, and only falsely, disconnecting women from the reality of the category. This is what “cis” means to convey: an actual woman is not really a woman, but a person who identifies as that which she was assigned at birth.
By assuming the term “cis,” and the Ministry of Love demands we all do, it is implied that women who identify as such are endorsing the stereotypes that the trans identifying man appropriates to convey his belief that he is what he cannot know internally, that is, what it is to be women. The slogan “Trans women are women” is like “2+2=5,” and it is not merely a demand to lie, but a demand to believe what cannot be true: that women are nothing essential, they are not natural things, but some thing to be acquired, possessed. A woman suit. Denied the truth that she is her body, the woman becomes arbitrary in order to make way for the copy to assert its authenticity; the trans identifying man is no mere symbol, but an intentional agent affecting reality. There is a thing-in-itself there—and it is a man wishing to impose a self-serving order on the world at the expense of others. Not erasing him requires erasing women.
When the trans-identifying man says he is more of a woman than the woman who can only assume she is a women, because the man has, to use the words of the man in the video, “picked out his own curtains” (sometimes the line is rendered with “drapes”), he boasts of his effort to be what the cis woman has been ascribed while denying that woman is not anything but what she is: the result of natural history, which can be many things, including appearing as stereotypically male—something the trans woman could accomplish without changing a thing. (He would of course suffer the pain of his alleged misgendering far more than the stereotypically butch woman.) This creates a system in which women are assumed to support feminine stereotypes merely by not choosing an alternative identity; hence the need for a special name of the category of simply being a woman.
When a woman, an adult female human, says that she is real, the trans identifying man hears her telling him that he is fake. Fake implies inferior, he complains, as if he is a bad copy of a woman. He is indeed a bad copy, only slightly less frightening than Buffalo Bill. You hear danger when the trans identifying man says that being born with a “pussy cat” (a vagina) only makes the woman a coward (a fraidy cat, he should have thought to say). He asks why so many men would rather kiss a puppy dog than a kitty cat. Would they? He is, of course, thinking of himself. He is an autogynephile, a narcissist who is in love with himself imagined as a woman, prepared to use women to reach this end. In truth, he sees women as inferior, as he is a misogynist, a man more woman than woman if he just puts his mind to it. A man more human than a woman, which is why the woman possesses a privilege—a special right to be who she is—and not an objective sex-based right. After all, he had to make an effort to appear as a stereotype of a woman, a simulacrum locked in space and time—and even then with cultural and regional variation. He asks rhetorically, What makes a woman a woman intrinsically? Babies? But trans men have babies. The ability to conceive? They’re working on that in labs all over the world. Soon “cis-women” won’t be necessary. See? There is nothing essential about womanhood after all.
Here’s the better slogan, then: “Transgenderism is transhumanism.” The man in the video is more human than human because he is a simulacrum of a woman, a bad copy, to be sure, but one that is superior because it is not the original, which is deceit. And it will be getting better with technological advance, a project in which we must involve everybody. He laments, “You are the blue print, and I am the copy.” Then he attempts to save himself from his insight: “Then why do you change all the same things we do?” Why do women seek plastic surgery? The patriarchy? Internalized misogyny? Isn’t that what is causing young females at an alarming rate to remove their breasts and sterilize themselves? On his question of whether the original blue print, the mother of our species, the mitochondrial Eve, would recognize the original and its copy as the same species, the answer is, yes, of course she would; humans have an evolved gender-detection module, and it is almost never fooled. Eve would never confuse this man with a woman. She had a few. He never will.
The man has warped his body into a bad copy of a woman, a shabby third-order simulacrum. He is desperate to live in the fourth order where he doesn’t have to defend his existence to those who live in the actual world. He has allies who affirm his delusion. He enjoys the power of the state and the law at his back. But it is not enough. He knows others know he is not really what he thinks he is—and they know that he knows he is not really what he thinks he is. The only shot he has as validating himself as something he cannot be is if he can find some way to compel the rest of us to live in the fourth order with him. To deny the real and enter the Matrix. That’s what is at stake here. Transgender ideology is totalitarian ideology. Resist it while you can.
The trans woman is not even liminal except in the effect he has on others—and he only has that effect if we let him, which we do when we treat him as a ritual object, a totem, a fetish, in this religion of wokeness. He is not really betwixt and in between. He is not somehow across from his gender. He is deeply deluded and profoundly alienated from self. He is at once a frightful sight and an unstable weapon. However, with respect to gender, he is nothing else but a man.
freedom and reason 