“The transsexual body is an unnatural body. It is the product of medical science. It is a technological construction. It is flesh torn apart and sewn together again in a shape other than that in which it was born. In these circumstances, I find a deep affinity between myself as a transsexual woman and the monster in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Like the monster, I am too often perceived as less than fully human due to the means of my embodiment; like the monster’s as well, my exclusion from human community fuels a deep and abiding rage in me that I, like the monster, direct against the conditions in which I must struggle to exist.” —Susan Stryker (1994)
“They have to stick their instruments in. They have to leave their mark. They can’t just watch. They can’t just appreciate. They can’t just fit into the natural order. They have to make something unnatural happen.” —Michael Crichton (1990)
“What is natural cannot be immoral.” —Magnus Hirschfeld
Mia Hughes and Michael Shellenberger acquired internal documents from the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) that expose the lack of medical and scientific foundations in the field of transgender medicine. Widely trusted by such organizations as the American Medical Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the Endocrine Society, and numerous global practitioners, WPATH is considered the foremost authority on gender medicine. However, internal WPATH documents reveal that its members are cognizant of the fact that their practices result in victims, among them a 10-year-old girl, a 13-year-old developmentally delayed adolescent, and individuals grappling with schizophrenia and other severe mental illnesses. The documented injuries detailed in the WPATH Files include sterilization, liver tumors, loss of sexual function, sterilization, and even death.
These harms were known well before the WPATH revelations. Watch this 2021 interview with psychiatrist Dr David Bell, who served as a staff governor at the Tavistock Trust (Bell is a former president of the British Psychoanalytic Society). He tells presenter Cathy Newman, “Children have been very seriously damaged” by NHS gender clinic. Bell wrote an internal report in 2018 raising the concerns brought to him by colleagues about the way the Gender Identity Development Service was treating patients. For this, he was disciplined.
In the summer of 2022, it was announced that the Tavistock transgender clinic was to be shut down by the NHS after a review found it unsafe for children. However, the health service scheduled young people who believe that they are trans to be moved into regional centers. It took the WPATH files to spook the NHS into making a more pronounced move towards child safeguarding, the service announcing just days ago that children will no longer be prescribed puberty blockers at gender identity clinics in the UK.
Hughes and Shellenberger emphasize that the revelations in the WPATH files underscore that gender medicine involves unregulated and pseudoscientific experiments on children, adolescents, and vulnerable adults. Indeed, as I have been arguing on Freedom and Reason, gender medicine represents one of the most egregious medical scandals in history (see, e.g., Thomas Szasz, Medical Freedom, and the Tyranny of Gender Ideology; The Exploitative Act of Removing Healthy Body Parts).
In the face of Nazi doctor level atrocities being carried out in gender clinics (I will spare you the nausea-inducing images), these developments has been met with hysteria concerning recent allegations that transgender individuals were targeted by Nazis during the Holocaust. This bit of problematic history is associated with concern for those who will be denied “lifesaving gender affirming health care,” or GAC, by states with Republican majorities.
GAC has never been about lifesaving medicine—or medicine at all, really, only the exploitation of medical technology to achieve movement ends. The misanthropic/misogynistic desire to transcend humanity and nature, to be something more or other than human, to deny biology for simulation, and the ideology that enables that desire to manifest in practice, lies in back of the destruction of childhood innocence and the erasure of girls and women.
Anti-/post-humanist pathologies reflect the rise of transhumanism, of which transgenderism is a subset (trans-speciesism is another). The longing for cyborgs and replicants, for technology to modify or replace some or all of our bodies (e.g., the brain-computer interface Neuralink), and for artificial intelligence to organize knowledge and practice (e.g., Google’s AI system Gemini), is the same desire that manifest in what Jennifer Bilek identifies as “synthetic sex identities,” or SSIs (see my essay Simulated Sexual Identities: Trans as Bad Copy.)
Bilek’s construction is especially evocative in light of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus. Published in 1818, Shelley’s epistolary novel explores a variety of themes, including the limits of human knowledge, the consequences of unchecked ambition, the nature of humanity, and the power of societal rejection. It is foremost a warning about the perils of biotechnology.
Victor Frankenstein, a young scientist obsessed with cheating death by unlocking the secret of reanimation, successfully creates through his experiments a living being assembled from body parts collected from charnel houses, dissecting rooms, and graveyards (in a scene from the 1931 Universal Pictures film starring Colin Clive and Boris Karloff, a corpse is cut down from the gallows). Horrified by his creation come to life, Frankenstein rejects the creature, who is left to navigate the world alone. The creature, abandoned, hideous, and isolated, descends into bitterness and revenge.
My public interpretation of Shelley’s novel, which I present in my first-year seminar Becoming Human: People, Machines, and Monsters, is that it primarily serves as a cautionary tale about the dangers of unchecked scientific ambition and the potential consequences of playing god. Frankenstein’s pursuit of knowledge without considering the ethical and moral implications of the results serves as a warning about the perils of scientific overreach.
To be sure, the perils include the personal. The novel explores themes of alienation and the consequences of societal rejection. The creature, initially innocent and longing for human connection, is shunned because it is hideous. This theme, it’s oft noted, reflects observations of social prejudice and the consequences of society’s tendency to judge individuals based on appearance.
At the same time, despite learned compassion for the disfigured and deformed, the monstrosity unbridled science created rightly provokes the reaction of those who come upon it. Their horror is justified because the thing is an abomination. Justified is their desire to prevent the manufacture of more things like it.
In 1994, Susan Stryker cribbed Shelley’s insight for his essay “My Words to Victor Frankenstein Above the Village of Chamounix: Performing Transgender Rage,” published in the Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies. The piece was inspired by Stryker’s involvement in Transgender Nation, a militantly queer, direct action transsexual advocacy group. The year prior, Striker had been involved in disruption and protest at the American Psychiatric Association’s 1993 annual meeting in San Francisco.
Stryker was also reacting to Mary Daly’s 1978 book Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism, in which Daly uses the metaphor of Frankenstein’s monster to describe transgender people, suggesting that they’re attempting to transcend their biological sex and create a monstrous hybrid of genders.
Leaning into the monster as self-description, and the interpretation of Shelley’s work as a treatment of social prejudice and the tendency of superficiality, eschewing concern for the problematic of monstrosity, Stryker draws parallels between the experiences of transgender individuals and Frankenstein’s creature.
Examining themes of embodiment, transformation, and societal rejection as they relate to both the creature and transgender individuals, Stryker argues that the creature’s journey can be understood as a metaphor for the experiences of transgender individuals who are often marginalized, misunderstood, and rejected by society.
Stryker emphasizes the idea of performative identity (see the work of Judith Butler) and how creatures such as himself must navigate the expectations and norms imposed by society. The creature’s attempts to conform to societal expectations and the ultimate rejection by society resonates with the experiences of transgender individuals who often face societal pressure to conform to gender norms.
Stryker also explores the theme of rage in both the creature and transgender experiences. The rage expressed by the creature is represented as a just response to the injustice and rejection it faces; that the creature is a frightener is not because it’s frightening but is rather the consequence and function of societal reaction. Like the creature, transgender individuals experience anger and frustration as a result of discrimination and prejudice.
Here we see the preparing of hurt and fury for the propaganda of the deed that inspires a generation of youth to “punch a TERF.” To be sure, trans violence is on those who perpetrate it; but, having normalized monstrosity, Stryker elevates the role of frightener to virtue.
In this essay, to trace the path that brings us to Frankenstein’s new laboratory, the gender clinic, I focus on the development of sexology, a scientistic field of ideological endeavor that manufactures knowledge and expertise for the development of medical approaches for handling sexuality and gender matters. Sexology is in its overgrowth the pseudoscience that underpins WPATH’s apparent legitimacy.
The ostensive goal of sexology, beyond providing basic knowledge about human sexuality, is to ensure that healthcare professionals are equipped to provide for those who suffer form sexual dysfunction—ostensive because a jargon has developed to justify transgender health care, promoted as a compassionate move to address the need of individuals realizing their “authentic selves.” This “need” has led to the establishment and proliferation of the gender clinic.
Programmatically, over its nearly century and a half development, the spirit behind sexology has evolved from an interest in human sexuality (scientia sexualis) to a religious-like worldview where ecstasy is sought and the sexed self problematized (ars erotica). What remains of sexology in the latter is an “afterlife” manifest in, as Joab Lubin and Jeanne Vaccaro put it in the pages of Social Text, “the recrudescence of sexological aesthetics, modes, styles, and logics in the ongoing present.”
In their essay “After Sexology,” the authors write, “In the post-WWII period in the United States, many of the epistemologies, methods, practices—and along with them, many of the disciplinary functions and discriminatory logics—of sexology were thoroughly institutionalized under many other names.” They identify the gender clinic as one of the principle sites. Other disciplinary sites: the welfare state, the prison-industrial complex, and the criminalization of sex work.
“We hold these sites to collectively limn the afterlives of sexology that animate the present,” they write. Their contention is not that ars erotica is a new space but that scientia sexualis supersedes and “rescripts its rituals and logics into a new program for systematizing social relations to sexuality.”
It is sexology’s afterlife that animates Andrea Long Chu’s argument in his New York Magazine piece, “Freedom of Sex: The Moral Case for Letting Trans Kids Change Their Bodies.” “We must be prepared to defend the idea that, in principle, everyone should have access to sex-changing medical care, regardless of age, gender identity, social environment, or psychiatric history,” he writes.
Chu criticizes the left for relying heavily on the concept of gender identity—borrowed from psychiatry and shaped by gender studies and the strategies of the marriage equality movement (“born this way”)—to advocate for trans rights. While this approach has led to some progress in social acceptance, he argues, it lacks a coherent ethical framework to justify the biological interventions involved in GAC. Critics rightly question why affirming someone’s gender identity requires altering their biology if gender is merely a social construct.
I will come to Robert Stoller’s work later in the essay, but social construct is not exactly what the psychiatrist had in mind when he introduced the concept of gender identity. Chu is nonetheless correct when he notes that advocates for GAC have fallen back on the clinical diagnosis of gender dysphoria, previously known as gender identity disorder, which defines distress stemming from the mismatch between gender identity and biological sex.
Chu’s criticism is that framing trans identity solely as a medical condition perpetuates the notion that trans individuals suffer from a mental illness, allowing psychiatrists to gate-keep access to GAC. By centering the debate on medical diagnosis, progressives have inadvertently reduced the issue of justice to a matter of who meets the criteria for a particular diagnosis, providing fodder for the anti-trans movement to pathologize trans youth systematically.
Against this, Chu asserts that acknowledging sex does not mean endorsing its constraints, as evidenced by children wishing to alter their sex, and implores his readers to defend these desires independently from the concept of gender. To truly advocate for transgender rights, Chu argues, we must recognize transgender individuals as full members of society who seek to change their sex, regardless of the origin of their desire to do so. Any attempt to explain the origin of transgender identity risks excluding those who do not fit within its framework. This is the essence of the critique of sexology’s afterlife.
For Chu, who came to his trans identity via the sissy porn route (as he tells it, sissy porn found him), transformation is about finding wisdom in giving into one’s sexual desires. Perhaps it isn’t about euphoria for Chu, who declared in a 2018 op-ed in the New York Times, “My New Vagina Won’t Make Me Happy.” But many young men believe it will.
To clarify the distinction between scientia sexualis and ars erotica, then, Michel Foucault, in the inaugural volume of his History of Sexuality, introduces the juxtaposition between the science of sexuality and the erotic arts. I want to make a couple of notes here that I hope make the point clearer (the reader can follow up). I will mention two pieces of scholarship in this area.
First, Sanjay Gautam, in Foucault and the Kamasutra (2016), explores the significance of Foucault’s assertion that, in scientia sexualis, truth and self assume authoritative roles, while, in ars erotica, pleasure takes precedence over truth and self, self understood as the self-reflecting ego.
Translating Gautam’s point into Freudian terms: in the latter, a man abandons the reality principle (along with the sublimations necessary for social existence) and hands over his agency to Eros, the pleasure principle, the amalgamation of life-preserving instincts manifests in various forms, including sublimated impulses. Using concrete cultural manifestations of ars erotica, Gautam explores Foucault’s crucial characterization of pleasure as an event of “desubjectivation,” entailing the loss of self-awareness.
Second, Gerald Doherty, in “Ars Erotica or Scientia Sexualis” (published in a 1996 issue of The Journal of Narrative Technique), notes Foucault’s observation that ars erotica is characteristic of certain societies, primarily those in the East (Rome being Foucault’s lone Western example). In these societies, truth is extracted directly from pleasure, encompassing its gradual durations, intensities, intricacies, liberating effects, and its connection to other realms of existence. Here the religious and transhumanist elements become obvious.
Doherty notes that this knowledge, essentially esoteric, is closely guarded and transmitted by a master who, through initiatory rituals, guides the disciple along the path to erotic enlightenment. The ultimate outcome for the disciple is, in Foucault’s words, “an absolute mastery of the body, a singular bliss, oblivious of time and limits, the exile of death and its threats.”
In this view, the death of sexology as a (attempted) science of human sexuality prepares the way for a sexual anarchism wrapped in quasi-religious sentiment—bliss—that rebels against the system of institutions and practices supposed to suppress sexual desire. The Ego is restrictive. The Superego is oppressive. Chu’s argument is that of a child finding arbitrary all constraints on his impulse. It is the voice of the Id.
The rebellion is manifest in the queer practice of boundary transgression, such as sex between adults and children, a taboo established to deny children the freedom of their bodies. This direction is obvious in the role that doctors and teachers have assumed as mentors in the project to sexualize children and put them on the path of transcending their gender identity, the very definition of which allows for the redescription of gender/sex as potentially incongruent with gender/sex.
This is what makes possible the Orwellian construction “sex assigned at birth,” a linguistic invention that abnomalizes as imposition of the medical gaze shaped by natural historical knowledge while normalizing the imposition of oppressive power in the hands of groomer dissimulated as such—and the medical-industrial complex that waits with open maw to consume the deluded. Being assigned a sex is something to rebel against.
Because of the gravitational pull of its subject matter, sexology pulled into its orbit many irregular moons—and there are not a few Frankensteins among them. In the transhumanist wish to transcend the limitation of the natural body, sexology, even when dismissed as afterlife by the advocates of depathologization, has emerged as a major player in normalizing and facilitating the creation of monsters. And, as it stands, hormonal and surgical alterations of bodies depend on the medical-industrial complex.
This balance of this essay sketches the history of the developments that lead us to the existence of WPATH.
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Generalizing Ingolstadt: Medicalizing Human Sexuality; Manufacturing Gender Identities
Austrian psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebing coined the term “sexology” in his book Psychopathia Sexualis, first published in 1886. Experts used Psychopathia Sexualis to diagnose and explain sexual deviancy. Krafft-Ebing organized the myriad of sexual perversion into three categories: anesthesia (absence of sexual instinct), hyperesthesia (exaggerated sexual instinct), and paraesthesia (perversion of sexual instinct).
“Claiming to speak the truth, it stirred up people’s fears,” said of the godfather of queer theory of the book in his The History of Sexuality. “Involuntarily naïve in the best of cases, more often intentionally mendacious, in complicity with what it denounced, haughty and coquettish, it established an entire pornography of the morbid, which was characteristic of the fin de siecle society.”
Sexology is defined as the study of human sexuality. Victorian sensibilities to the side, it sounds innocuous enough. Leveraging various academic and practical disciplines, such as anthropology, biology, medicine, psychology, and sociology, sexologists have since Krafft-Ebing’s time constructed a vast literature with a scientific appearance (scientism or ideology imbued with the beard of scientific authority), which is not say it is devoid of science but rather to suggest that it is, in its totality, pseudoscientific in character.
In practice, sexology has always been fraught with problems: ethical violations, ideological corruption, issues surrounding methodological rigor, the problem of the self-report (i.e., the problem of subjectivity), small samples sizes, unrepresentative samples, etc. Especially problematic is research involving children.
Gender identity in the field of sexology has been shaped by the contributions of several key figures. Magnus Hirschfeld stands out as an early advocate, establishing a theme in his seminal work Die Transvestiten. Harry Benjamin further advanced the field by establishing standards of care and introducing the Benjamin Scale, laying the groundwork for the medical and psychological aspects of transgender experience. John Money, whose work on gender identity, and the atrocity known as the David Reimer case, sparked discussions on the nature versus nurture aspects of gender. These are a few of the figures I discuss below.
There are others I won’t cover: In the 1970s, Virginia Prince expanded the discourse by socializing the term “transgender” and advocating for acceptance of these phenomenon beyond medical definitions. More recently, Julia Serano, in his 2007 Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity explores the intersections of gender, feminism, and transgender experiences. I note omissions to make the point that this essay is not intended to be a comprehensive review of the history of sexology, but rather is aimed at exposing the reader to the crackpot ideas behind GAC.
Alfred Kinsey, American biologist and professor of entomology (that’s the study of insects, by the way) at Indiana University, conducted extensive research on human sexuality and is, alongside Masters and Johnson (discussed in a moment), one of the most celebrated sexologist of the period. Indeed, he is often celebrated as the “father of the sexual revolution,” and credited with laying the groundwork for the gay rights movements of the 1960s and 1970s.
Kinsey’s research challenging prevailing societal beliefs about sexuality is lauded by progressives for helping demystify and destigmatize many aspects of human sexual behavior that were previously perceived as deviant. To be sure, the normalization of homosexuality is to be celebrated (because homosexuality is normal), but contributions to this end are often used to smuggle in the project to transgress the entire normative structure regulating sexual behavior, especially where children can be found.
In 1947, Indiana University, in collaboration with the Rockefeller Foundation, established the Institute for Sex Research, with Kinsey as its director. In the 1940s and 1950s, Kinsey and his research team conducted two large-scale studies popularly known as the “Kinsey Reports,” the first, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, published in 1948, the second, Sexual Behavior in the Human Female, in 1953, both proving highly influential in shaping popular attitudes about human sexuality.
The Institute’s research included the study of sexual behavior and experiences across various subpopulations, including those in children. The reports purported to reveal a wide range of sexual experiences and orientations, including variations in behavior, desire, and orientation, that differed from the prevailing norms of the time. There was a complex subterranean system operating beneath mainstream society, a system closer the Id.
Controversy surrounded Kinsey’s work. There were accusations of biased research and unprofessional conduct, such as encouraging sexual activity among associates. Kinsey’s approach involved gathering information about experiences and sexual behaviors among minors, including information about erections and orgasms. Survey instruments asked explicit questions about sexual behaviors, the wording of which influenced participants’ responses and led to inaccurate or misleading data. There were concerns that some participants might not have fully understood the implications of the questions, especially children. Some of these data were obtained through interviews with individuals who reported their own childhood experiences, but, in other cases, through observation, as well as through interviews with parents, guardians, and other caregivers, data were gathered on children.
It is not as if Kinsey was operating at a time where ethical awareness was dim. The high-profile Nuremberg doctors’ trial began in December 1946 and was decided in August 1947 (see Robert Lifton’s The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide). Kinsey and his team were operating with full knowledge of the new ethical regime in the wake of the Holocaust. Nor was Kinsey laboring under the cover of darkness. Kinsey’s research was the stuff of popular as well as professional acclaim.
(To be sure, Kinsey’s groups were not the only researchers and physicians violating human ethics rules in the aftermath of World War II. The Tuskegee syphilis experiments, conducted on black sharecroppers, started in 1932, but ran until the federal government shut it down in October 1972, well after the Nuremberg, and was the subject of some sixteen published studies. The widespread adoption of psychotropic medications and advancements in psychiatric treatments led to a decline in the use of lobotomies by the 1960s. It has only been more recently that the procedure has come to be seen as discredited and considered ethically questionable due to its often irreversible and severe effects on patients’ cognitive and emotional functions. These examples are significant in light of GAC, which continues despite its recent setbacks.)
Kinsey observed and documented intimate interactions between men and women in various arrangements. More than this, he personally engaged in sexual relations with participants and even with members of his research team. So did his wife. There are allegations that he urged his research associates to participate in sexual activities with each other and exerted pressure on both students and team members to engage in such activities with him. Kinsey’s assistant, Clyde Martin, reportedly had sexual relationship with Kinsey’s wife.
Not only did Kinsey encourage his researchers to openly discuss their sexual histories and those of their spouses but, on one occasion, he arranged a sado-masochistic scenario involving two men. His researchers had to step aside occasionally as Kinsey entered to change blood-stained sheets. Kinsey went to the extent of documenting sexual encounters among subjects, assistants, and acquaintances through recorded videos and images, and he himself reportedly participated in some of these activities.
Kinsey’s findings on child sexuality have been a particular area of controversy. Kinsey’s team relied on information that included individuals who had likely been involved in inappropriate or illegal activities, such as child rape.
The most scandalous accusation made against Kinsey is related to his involvement with child sexual abuse. These allegations claim that Kinsey may have condoned or supported such behavior through his research.
For example, it was revealed that Kinsey worked with a 63-year-old pedophile named Rex King who allegedly attempted to engage in inappropriate activities with boys aged 2 months to 15 years. Recent revelations indicate that this data on child sexuality originated from this man, contrary to Kinsey’s initial claim of multiple sources. The act of shielding King in this manner may have potentially facilitated his actions.
The controversies not withstanding, Kinsey’s influence on discussions of sexuality remains a powerful one. Significantly, Kinsey’s findings challenging prevailing societal norms and taboos around sexuality that exist to protect the interests of children is rarely part of the celebration of his work. (For a sympathetic account nonetheless supporting my critique of Kinsey, see Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy’s Kinsey: Sex the Measure of All Things.)
William Masters and Virginia Johnson (who never earned a university degree) were an American couple who conducted extensive research on human sexual response and functioning. They initiated their research within the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology at Washington University in St. Louis, establishing a non-profit research institution established in St. Louis in 1964. Initially named the Reproductive Biology Research Foundation, it was later rebranded as the Masters and Johnson Institute in 1978 (the cult of personality around sexologists is typical).
Masters and Johnson pioneered the use of laboratory observation and physiological measurements to study sexual behavior. Their work, including their 1966 book Human Sexual Response, provided, among other things, insights into the physiological aspects of sexual arousal and orgasm. However, as with Kinsey’s work, their studies lacked proper controls, suffered from small sample sizes, and relied heavily on self-reported data, methodological limitations that bring into question the validity and generalizability of their findings.
Like Kinsey, Masters and Johnson were known for conducting observational studies involving participants engaging in sexual activities while being monitored by researchers. The approach compromised the privacy and dignity of participants, as well as violated informed consent. In some cases, participants were reportedly not fully informed about the specific procedures or the potential emotional and psychological effects of their participation. There were also allegations of unprofessional behavior and conflicts of interest within their clinic. The fact that many of their subjects were sex workers biased the research.
While normalizing paraphilia, Masters and Johnson excluded from their subject pool same-sex attracted individuals and, worse, endorsed conversion therapy. In 1979, the two released their “Homosexuality in Perspective” report addressing the clinical treatment of homosexuality. In the report, they documented the alleged successful transition to heterosexuality of several dozen homosexuals who, according to the researchers, aspired to lead heterosexual lives.
Collaborating with Robert C. Kolodny, the two also authored Crisis: Heterosexual Behavior in the Age of AIDS (1988), which contained scientific inaccuracies concerning HIV/AIDs that spread fear across populations. (See Paul Robinson’s The Modernization of Sex, as well as Janet Hyde and associates’ Understanding Human Sexuality, for more.)
John Money was a psychologist and sexologist who argued for gender being primarily a social construct and the result of social learning. He had more to do with transgenderism than perhaps any other figure. Key terms, such as “gender dysphoria” and “gender role,” are traced to Money’s work (others, such as “lovemaps” and “gendermaps,” have been less successful). Money is purported to have established the world’s inaugural gender clinic at John Hopkins University in 1966 (although, as we will see, Magnus Hirschfeld may hold that distinction).
In 1955, Money pioneered using the term “gender” instead of “sex” to delineate the distinction between, on the one hand, the behavioral characteristics or traits associated with gender, and, on the other hand, the biological attributes of gender. (I have shown on the pages of Freedom and Reason that gender and sex have been for centuries understood as synonyms; see, for example Sex and Gender are Interchangeable Terms; see also Mystification in the Marketing of “Live-Saving Gender-Affirming Health Care” and Manipulating Reality by Manipulating Words.)
It is important to note that anthropologists and sociologists had been exploring gender/sex roles and their cultural and social dimensions for decades before Money’s work gained prominence. Figures such as Ruth Benedict, Margaret Mead, Robert Merton, and Talcott Parsons, among others, had already made significant contributions to our understanding of how societies construct and perpetuate gender/sex roles. In this sense, Money made no new contribution to social scientific understanding of gender.
However, Money advocated for an interpretation, now a central assumption in the contemporary trans movement, albeit not universally accepted, that while humans may possess biologically determined sex characteristics at birth, these attributes do not dictate one’s gender. Money believed that, since gender was shaped by cultural and social factors, indeed determined by environmental factors, it could therefore be changed. On those grounds, the presumption being that gender is an imposition, Money advocated for a gender-neutral approach to raising children.
Money was also a proponent of sex reassignment surgery for individuals with gender dysphoria. He believed physically altering genitalia was necessary for complete realignment of gender identity. This is an odd belief in light of his thesis that gender is strictly a sociocultural phenomenon. Nonetheless, he thus played a major role in promoting the idea that sex reassignment could be an effective treatment for those suffering from incongruence between their internal sense of gender and their physical bodies.
Money formulated his perspectives on sex and gender through experiments conducted on intersex infants, i.e., babies born with ambiguous or indistinctive male or female sex characteristics, a very rare occurrence in the species. It was in this context that Money latched on to the term gender, conceptualized as roles tied to the presentation of individuals as masculine or feminine, particularly those whose genital organs, due to birth defects, were neither fully male nor fully female in appearance.
However, as reported in Salon, Money’s interests were not exclusively with intersex children; he soon developed an interest in the gender identity development of children possessing typical sex characteristics. Money’s intention was to extend his theory regarding the flexibility of gender to encompass all children. Testing his theory on infants with typical sexual development posed a challenge for Money.
What mother would willingly subject her healthy baby to the process of being guided into the opposite gender, involving numerous surgeries and extensive therapy sessions? Enter David Reimer.
David’s story has been told many times, but it is important to recall it once more for our purposes here. If you have not before heard the story, prepare to have your conscience shocked.
Reimer was a boy who was surgically altered in the mid-1960s to appear as female and socialized to be a girl. Money was the doctor in charge of his case. The Reimer case is a paradigm of falsifying the thesis that gender is a social construct.
Born in 1965, initially given the name of Bruce, David was an identical twin. Both boys were normal. At seven months old, the mother noted that the boys were experiencing difficulties urinating, leading to a diagnosis of phimosis, a common condition typically resolved through circumcision. During the surgery, the doctor severely injured David’s penis. Reconstruction proved impossible. The consulting psychiatrist told the parents that David would never be able to engaging in normal heterosexual relations.
In December 1966, the parents watched a television program featuring Money discussing his work at the John Hopkins gender-identity clinic in which the doctor confidently asserted that a man could be transformed into a woman. The Reimers reached out to Money who found in David and his brother his ideal test subjects. He had a boy to experiment on with a control identical in every other way.
Money suggested to the parents that the twin be raised as a girl and hormonal therapy be given to feminize the boy’s body, as well as surgically refashioning his genitalia into a synthetic vagina in a procedure called a vaginoplasty, which involves a double orchiectomy (or castration, i.e., the removal of the boy’s testicles) and inversion of the penis, thus turning the boy into a eunuch (now recognized as a gender identity).
Against the advice of other doctors, the Reimers, swayed by Money’s persistence, agreed to the castration and construction of female-appearing genitalia for the then 22-month-old Reimer. Following Money’s guidance, Reimer’s parents raised David as if he were born a girl. As Brenda, he wore dresses and played with dolls and a sewing machine.
The intricate details of Reimer’s medical situation were kept secret from everyone outside the immediate family, including his twin brother, who believed David had always been a girl. The experiment was published in the 1972 book (co-authored with Anke Ehrhardt) Man & Woman, Boy & Girl: Gender Identity from Conception to Maturity and was widely publicized, a 1973 New York Times Book Review essay hailing it as “the most important volume in the social sciences to appear since the Kinsey reports.”
In reality, the twins suffered severe psychological distress at the hands of Money. As part of his research, Money exposed the twins during “counseling sessions” to sexually explicit material. Writing for spiked, Lauren Smith (“Dr John Money and the sinister origins of gender ideology”) reports that “they were questioned by Money on their sexual desires and preferences, and were shown naked pictures of other children and of adults having sex. He asked them to strip off their clothes and inspect each other’s genitals, sometimes with as many as five or six other colleagues observing. Sometimes, Money would take pictures.” “Most perverse of all,” Smith reports, “Money would often ask the young twins to ‘play at thrusting movements and copulation,’ pretending to have sex in various positions while he watched them. When the twins refused to do as he said, he would reportedly become irate and scream at them until they complied.”
As an adult, David publicly discouraged the medical practices that had been visited upon him. Suffering from severe depression, he committed suicide in his thirties. Like Victor Frankenstein, Money had created a monster, this one preceding him in death. This should have been the end of it. But, as is the practice of ideologues, when the experiment fails, restate the premise.
Today’s trans advocacy rarely drops Money’s name. However, the more audacious pedophiles celebrate his legacy. In an upcoming essay, I will examine the influence of pedophilia in the construction of gender ideology, but it is noteworthy for the present essay that Money believed that pedophilia could be practiced safely, that when done properly, the child would suffer no harm.
Hence, Money’s work is featured on the North American Man-Boy Love Association (NAMBLA) website. In the 1990s, Money provided interviews with Paidika, a psychology journal devoted to pedophilia. In one interview, Money is quoted as saying: “If I were to see the case of a boy aged ten or eleven who’s intensely erotically attracted toward a man in his twenties or thirties, if the relationship is totally mutual, and the bonding is genuinely totally mutual, then I would not call it pathological in any way.”
Dr. Robert J. Stoller (1924–1991) was an American psychiatrist and psychoanalyst widely considered to have introduced the distinction between sex and gender into psychoanalysis, a distinction now taken as basic, however fallacious. Stoller’s work on gender identity emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s and focused on understanding the development of gender identity and the experiences of individuals who experienced incongruence between their gender identity and their “assigned sex at birth.”
Money is often credited with Stoller’s ideas, but the latter’s work was significantly different in key ways. Stoller challenged prevailing theories that attributed gender solely to socialization and upbringing. He emphasized the role of internal psychological processes and the importance of recognizing and affirming an individual’s self-identified gender.
In Sex and Gender: On the Development of Masculinity and Femininity, published in 1968, Stoller introduced the term “gender identity.” He argues there that gender identity is a deeply ingrained sense of being male or female, which develops early in life and is distinct from an individual’s biological sex (a concept that gender ideologists insist is an attempt to negate the socially constructed nature of sex).
Stoller’s ideas on gender identity were influential in shaping subsequent research and clinical practices related to transgender and gender non-conforming individuals. The psychiatric category Gender Identity Disorder (GID) was included in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) starting with the DSM-III in 1980. It was categorized as a disorder that reflected distress due to an incongruence between one’s assigned gender at birth and their experienced or expressed gender identity. The DSM-IV, published in 1994, retained this classification. However, in the DSM-5, published in 2013, the diagnosis was renamed to “Gender Dysphoria” and underwent significant revisions. (More on the significance of this later.)
Stoller held several, let’s say, “interesting” opinions. It was his contention that sexual perversions are a form of emotional revenge for childhood wounds, a theme that resonates with those interested in what makes a serial killer or sexual predator (see Psycho). Stoller believed boys with feminine features who were attractive were more likely to identify as girls because others around them responded to them as if they were more female than male. He also believed in dream telepathy, the pseudoscientific idea that supposes a man can share dreams with other men unassisted by technology (see the science fiction movie Dreamscape for a treatment of this). (You can read more about this here: The Gender Hoax and the Betrayal of Children by the Adults in Their Lives.)
Dr. Harry Benjamin (1885–1986) was a German-American endocrinologist and sexologist widely recognized as one of the pioneers in the medical treatment of transgender individuals. In the early 20th century, Benjamin began seeing individuals who sought his help with issues related to what would come to be called gender identity. Benjamin dedicated himself to remove the stigma reported by transgender individuals by mainstreaming their delusions.
In 1966, Benjamin published his seminal work, The Transsexual Phenomenon, which had a profound impact on the medical and psychological industries mainstreaming transgenderism. The book presented his observations and clinical experiences, providing a framework for rationalizing transgender identities and describing various treatment approaches, including hormone therapy and sex reassignment surgery. The Transsexual Phenomenon helped establish medical protocols for the treatment of transgender individuals, and his ideas influenced the emergence of specialized gender clinics worldwide.
Established in 1979, the Harry Benjamin International Gender Dysphoria Association (HBIGDA) was named in his honor. It is now known as the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH). The association provides guidelines and standards of care for transgender healthcare professionals. (You can down load a PDF copy of WPATH’s Standards of Care, Version 8 here.)
A major piece of the depathologization of transgenderism involves pathologizing the normal through neologism. Testifying to the power of gender ideology in shaping social logic, the term “cisgender,” coined in the 1990s by a German sexologist and medical doctor named Volkmar Sigusch, has become common to the English language over the last several years.
The neologism is constructed from the Latin prefix “cis-” meaning “on this side of” or “not across.” It’s used to describe people whose gender identity matches the sex they were assigned at birth, thus subdividing the gender categories into trans (simulation) and cis (original). The term was later popularized in academic and activist circles as a way to describe and acknowledge the experiences of people who are not transgender, which one would think is accomplished simply by the absence of a trans identity.
The function of such terms is to problematize gender, a strategy used by postmodernists to disrupt ordinary understanding. This goes to queer theory’s praxis of transgression. It is hoped that, by doing this, an equivalency is manufactured that puts men and women on the sample plane as men and women who want to be the other gender—or no gender at all. Really, it’s not an equivalency but a new gender hierarchy where men mimicking women are more woman than actual women.
Like Money, Sigusch has made controversial statements about pedophilia in the past, including suggesting that some children might have positive experiences with adult sexual partners. In a 2018 interview with the German newspaper Die Zeit, Sigusch stated that he does not consider all sexual relationships between adults and children to be abusive, and that there may be situations where children are, in his words, “the seducers.”
These statements were widely criticized by child safeguarding advocates and other experts in the field who argue that any sexual activity between adults and children is inherently abusive and harmful. Yet, today, children are routinely sexualized by progressive parents, teachers, and administrators. Current Pride activities include exposing children to a broad range of sexual fetishes and kinks and involving them in the action. (See Child Sexual Abuse and Its Dissimulation in the Rhetoric of Diversity and Inclusion; What is Grooming?; The Elite Obsession with Prepubescence; Luring Children to the Edge: The Panic Over Lost Opportunities; The LGBTQ Lobby Sues Florida; Ideology in Public Schools—What Can We Do About It? Whose Spaces Are These Anyway? Political Advocacy in Public Schools.)
Magnus Hirschfeld, a German physician, sexologist, and eugenicist founded the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee in 1897, an organization that advocated for the decriminalization of homosexuality (again, a laudable goal) and provided resources and support for sexual minorities. In addition to the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee, Hirschfeld had also established the Institute for Sexual Science (Deutsche Institut für Sexualwissenschaft) was renowned for its groundbreaking research on transgender issues and advocacy) in Berlin, which served as a center for research and education on sexuality and gender identity. Hirschfeld’s work is celebrated for contributing to the understanding of diverse sexual orientations and, in revisionist accounts, what are today considered transgender identities.
It is important to emphasize that the term “transgender” was not in use during Hirschfeld’s time (In 1965, psychiatrist and sexologist John Oliven proposed that the term transsexualism be replaced by the term transgenderism, later advocating expanding the term to cover transvestism). Hirschfeld referred to these men as transvestites, which is what they are, i.e., men dressing as women, which, in the push to make the simulation appear authentic, sometimes included body modification. Hirschfeld helped people who sought medical interventions, such as hormone therapy and surgeries, to align their physical appearance with their gender identity.
In the late nineteenth century, Hirschfeld was a frequent visitor to the Great Berlin Trade Exhibition (Große Berliner Gewerbeausstellung) which showcased exhibits known as “human zoos,” where individuals from German colonies in New Guinea and Africa were publicly displayed for visitors to observe. There, Hirschfeld would ask those on display personal questions about their sexual practices. This inspired his 1914 book The Homosexuality of Men and Women.
Hirschfeld came to believe not only that homosexuality is universal (it is) but that male homosexuals are naturally effeminate; gay people had the opposite sex’s brain or psyche (soul). They are women born in the wrong body. Hirschfeld also claimed that homosexuals were more likely to attempt or commit suicide than heterosexuals because society denied their legitimacy. Hirschfeld denied the gender binary, arguing that there were thousands of genders.
Hirschfeld’s institution provided a refuge for such individuals, surgically modifying them and providing employment opportunities, mainly as “maids,” i.e., house servants.
Hirschfeld’s name has come up lately in the context of a narrative positing that transvestites were a dedicated target of the Nazis, this to draw a parallel between fascism and the various restrictions on GAC spreading across the trans-Atlantic space. As readers may have noted, we live in a political environment where opposition to the nihilism of gender ideology, as well as to mass immigration and DEI initiatives, are depicted as paralleling the völkisch nationalism said to underpin German national socialism.
The “truth” of the claim concerning Nazi persecution of transgender people was apparently established by a court decision in 2022, in which it was reported that transgender individuals faced systematic persecution under the Nazi regime. I put truth in scare quotes to indicate the inherent problem of legislatures and courts determining the truth of historical claims, but also because the court’s ruling is being misrepresented.
The Regional Court of Cologne is said to have ruled that denying that trans people were victims of the Nazis qualifies as “a denial of Nazi crimes.” In Germany, there are laws against denying Nazi war crimes and engaging in Holocaust denial. Specifically, Section 130 of the German Criminal Code (Strafgesetzbuch) criminalizes the incitement of hatred against segments of the population or against an individual on the basis of their race, religion, nationality, or ethnicity. This includes denying, trivializing, or justifying the Holocaust or other Nazi crimes against humanity. (Predictably, the ruling was followed a few months later by the Bundestag, Germany’s parliament, formally releasing a statement recognizing trans people as victims of fascism.)
The matter has garnered particular attention over the last few days because a J. K. Rowling tweet, activity by the author over which trans activists daily await, has provided an opening to once again accuse her of “stirring controversy” with “anti-trans” remarks on social media. In the offending tweet, she disputed the historical fact that Nazis burned books related to transgender healthcare and research.
Rowling’s critics highlighted a September 2023 Smithsonian Magazine article (“New Research Reveals How the Nazis Targeted Transgender People”) that claims that Adolf Hitler’s regime targeted various marginalized communities, including Jews, homosexuals, and transgender individuals, in its campaign to eliminate “lives unworthy of living” (Lebensunwertes Leben). This included the notorious burning of the Institute of Sexual Science’s library contents in 1933.
The Smithsonian Magazine article, authored by University of Washington historian Laurie Marhoefer (pronouns “he/they”), cites the case of Toni Simon, a transvestite whose permit to dress as a woman in public was revoked by the police in Essen, Germany (transvestites were required to obtain a permit in the Weimar Republic to be exempt from laws against the practice). Marhoefer also cites the case of H. Brode who often went out dressed as a woman and dated men. He had a transvestite certificate as well. The Nazis considered Brode to be male, Marhoefer writes, and determined that he was homosexual, and it was on the grounds that he was sent to the concentration camp.
Marhoefer, as readers might suspect, refers to Simon and Brode as “she” and assumes on this basis that Brode was not a gay man—even though he was in fact a man and preferred sex with men. The definition of homosexual is sexually or romantically attracted to people of one’s own sex. Confusion over language is how queer historians manufacture pseudo-history. Marhoefer tells his audience that the history was hidden because these victims were misgendered. In fact, they were gay men and this is the reason the Nazis persecuted them. That Liddy Bacroff, a gay male prostitute sent to the Mauthausen camp and killed, told police that his “sense of my sex is fully and completely that of a woman” didn’t change the fact that he was a gay man and the Nazis would have seen him that way. The Orwellian inversion of misgendering to mean its opposite was not in play then—and it is only at play now because of a trick of language. Marhoefer’s work is therefore ahistorical. Not a good look for a historian.
Putting right the language, then, none of this unexpected. Nazis rigidly adhered to traditional gender roles and norms, viewing deviation from these norms as a threat to the natural and social order of things. It is well known that homosexuals were persecuted and subjected to the brutal conditions of Nazi concentration camps; the homosexual community appropriated the pink triangles gay individuals were forced to wear. Marhoefer is giving us concrete cases of the practice while distorting the meaning of these events. This is the postmodernist attitude.
The Smithsonian Magazine had to make significant corrections to Marhoefer’s essay. The most important of these: “The court took expert statements from historians before issuing an opinion that essentially acknowledges that trans people were victimized by the Nazi regime.” The emphasis is mine to draw out the character of the change. The editor notes: “the story was edited in the third paragraph to more accurately reflect the decision of the German court.” The subtitle tells the reader that it is a possibility.
Since sterilization is a common outcome of GAC, that homosexuals were often forced to undergo sterilization as part of the Nazis’ eugenic policies should not be lost on the honest student of history. Nazis subjected homosexuals to hormone treatment, as well as surgical interventions, including castration and other genital surgeries. These procedures, carried out by regime doctors, were conducted without consent. Experiments were conducted without regard for the well-being or autonomy of the individuals involved and were often accompanied by extreme suffering and trauma. In the tangle of ideology, what is in front of people is easily missed.
Which brings us to the person of Erwin Gohrbandt. An associate of Hirschfeld, Gohrbandt’s involvement in sex reassignment surgery during the 1930s, particularly vaginoplasty procedures, pioneered effort in the field of transgender healthcare. Alongside Ludwig Levy-Lenz, Gohrbandt performed these surgeries on Hirschfeld’s transvestites.
Among the patients who underwent sex reassignment surgery were Dora Richter and Lili Elbe. Dora Richter, a servant at the Institute for Sexology under Magnus Hirschfeld, underwent one of the earliest documented sex reassignment surgeries in 1931. Lili Elbe, a Danish artist, also went under Gohrbandt and Levy-Lenz’s knife during this time.
Later, Erwin Gohrbandt served in the Social Office of the Reich Youth Leader. This was a major leadership position in Hitler Youth (Hitlerjugend). In August 1939, he assumed the role of consultant surgeon for the army, and subsequently, in 1940, held the position of Inspector of Medical Services in the Luftwaffe. Later that same year, he took on the responsibilities of Head of the Surgical Department at the Municipal Robert Koch Hospital, concurrently serving as the Clinic Director of the Third Appointed Surgical University Clinic.
Most damaging of all, in 1944, Gohrbandt served as a member of the scientific advisory board under General Commissioner for the Sanitation and Health Service Karl Brandt. There, Gohrbandt contributed to the development of human experiments conducted on prisoners at the Dachau concentration camp. Nazi scientists appropriated the medical theories on sexuality advanced by Hirschfeld and Krafft-Ebing to justify the sterilization of gay men.
However, despite the Nazi regime’s clear antipathy towards homosexuality, there were instances of gay men being attracted to the party. (See Luke Goodwin’s Gay Emancipation: The Effort to Delete Paragraph 175.) In 1938, Hitler orchestrated the assassination of Ernst Röhm, leader of the SA, the predecessor to the SS, citing Röhm’s openly homosexual identity as justification. Prior to Hitler’s rise, Röhm had aligned himself with Friedrich Radszuweit, who founded the League for Human Rights (BfM), publicly acknowledging his homosexuality and influencing Radszuweit’s political views. Following Hitler’s ascent to power in 1933, Radszuweit attempted to reassure his followers by suggesting that the Nazis were merely targeting the socialist principles advocated by Hirschfeld, and that the Nazi Party would eventually repeal Paragraph 175, which criminalized homosexuality. However, Heinrich Himmler disproved this notion by establishing the Reich Office to Combat Homosexuality and Abortion in 1936.
Röhm was not the sole member of the gay rights movement to align with the Nazis. Gohrbandt was also a member of the Nazi Party.
Unlike Gohrbandt, Hirschfeld, a Jewish man, was targeted by the Nazis. He was also a socialist. In 1933, shortly after the Nazis came to power, the Nazis launched a campaign of book burnings targeting works they considered “un-German” or subversive. Hirschfeld’s Institute for Sexual Science was raided by the Nazi paramilitary organization, the SA, and its extensive library and archives were destroyed. Hirschfeld was forced into exile, fleeing Germany to escape persecution. He never returned to Germany, dying in France in 1935. (Levy-Lens likely faced a similar fate.)
Magnus Hirschfeld was a pioneering figure in the movement for sexual liberation. He made significant contributions to the advancement of gay rights through his activism, research, and advocacy. A vocal advocate for the rights of sexual minorities, Hirschfeld campaigned for the repeal of anti-gay laws and promoted tolerance and understanding of homosexuality. As a physician and pioneering sexologist, he conducted extensive research on human sexuality, challenging prevailing stereotypes and misconceptions about sexual minorities. He was actively involved in political efforts to reform laws that criminalized homosexuality. He was instrumental in organizing the first International Congress for Sexual Reform in 1921 and promoting international cooperation on issues related to sexual health and human rights.
As a life-long advocate for homosexual rights and bodily autonomy, much of this is work with which I agree. My aim in this critique is to alert readers to the fact that many of the articles of faith in queer politics—such notions as that homosexuals have the brains or psyches of the opposite sex and the necessity of sex reassignment procedures to relieve gender dysphoria—originate in Hirschfeld’s work, and the invention of the gender clinic lies in the intersection of politics and scientism.
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Prometheus Unchained
Many medical professionals support the idea that individuals seeking transformative surgeries with disfiguring and sometimes monstrous outcomes should be granted the freedom to pursue them. In the United States, this type of surgery is already being conducted. Among the standard types of gender-affirmation surgery, San Francisco-based medical firm Align Surgical Associates Inc., backed by industrial groups such as the American Society of Plastic Surgeons, the American Medical Association, and the Aesthetic Society, specializes in a procedure known as “nullification.”
I wrote about this in September 2021 (see Disordering Bodies for Disordered Minds), but to remind readers, this surgery aims to create a “relatively smooth genital area” and a “mostly unbroken transition from the abdomen down,” catering to those who desire a physical appearance more aligned with their “internal sense of self.” The firm offers this service to individuals who wish to embody an external representation closer to their internal identity, even accommodating those who wish to have no genitals, albeit for a fee.
In July of last year, Christopher Rufo released a short video covering the history and purpose of transgender ideology. In the video, he identifies several key figures in the development of this phenomenon. He names the group of writers in the 1980s who organized the contemporary rhetoric of queer theory and transgender studies: Judith Butler, Gayle Rubin, Sandy Stone, and Susan Striker. Perhaps no figure epitomizes the pretentious nature of gender ideology as Striker, which is why this essay is wrapped in his self-celebrated transgressive monstrosity. Striker (strangely Rufo uses Striker’s preferred pronouns) identifies as a “lesbian trans woman,” which translates to heterosexual man. But what about the ideology’s enablers? Here Rufo makes a significant contribution.
In the video, Rufo talks about billionaire Jennifer Pritzker, born James, the brother of current Illinois governor JB Pritzker, who has poured millions to universities, schools, hospitals, and activist organizations, pushing queer theory and trans medical experiments. Meanwhile his brother signed legislation officially advancing gender ideology in the state’s educational curriculum, as well as directing Medicaid funds to pay for transgender hormone treatment and surgeries (I hear that California will soon be paying for illegal aliens to receive these treatments).
Rufo discusses the case of the Ruth Ellis Center in Hyde Park where large-scale medical experiments are performed on predominantly impoverished black youth. Rufo uses this case to illustrate the school-to-clinic pipeline that steers young people towards transgenderism to build an army to wage war against the normative structure of Western society and provide the world of proof of concept in the broken bodies of those who are sucked into the religion.
The weakness of Rufo contribution, and this is due to his superficial understanding of Marxism (a shallow grasp and agenda he shares with others rightwing activists like Jordan Peterson and James Lindsay), is in taking the propagandistic claims some gender ideologues make about Marxism as a serious indication that this twisted worldview is a manifestation of Marxian thought.
In fact, queer theory, like critical race theory, is an expression of neo-Hegelian thought, literally Marxism stood on its head (I have critiqued this confusion in The Perils of Left-Wing Identitarianism, and more recently Queer Theory is Not Marxist; see also What Critical Race Theory Is and Isn’t. Spoiler Alert: It’s Racist and Not Marxist). Rufo cites Pluto Press’ collection of essays titled Transgender Marxism as an authority on this question, highlighting Rosa Lee’s arguments concerning transsexualizing Marxism.
There is something crucially important revealed by all this, however: the desire expressed by Lee and others to transcend the limitations imposed by nature. This is transhumanist desire. Indeed, this is the point Striker wishes to make in his piece on transgender rage. Striker wants to transcend who he is. He wants to become something more than himself. Queer theory is a piece in the overarching intellectual attempt to justify the project. Gender ideologues appropriate Marxism to manufacture the appearance of leftwing bonafides.
I will cover queer theory in greater depth in a forthcoming essay, but to summarize the connection here, both sexology and queer theory challenge not merely traditional notions of gender and sexuality but scientific fact. Sexology, particularly in the works of pioneers like Hirschfeld, Money, and Stoller, aimed to study and understand diverse sexual behaviors and identities beyond the confines of societal norms. Queer theory, influenced and specified by thinkers like Foucault and Butler, critiques and questions established binaries and sexual norms related to gender and sexuality.
Both sexology and queer theory emphasize the social constructed nature of gender, and the phenomenological experience of it. Sexology in the service of transgressive practice takes an obvious fact—that societal factors that shape individual sexual experiences and identities—and uses it to deny natural history. Queer theory piles on, arguing that gender is not inherent or fixed in sex, but rather a socially constructed category that is fluid and subject to change. At the same time, both sexology and queer theory suggest that gender is an innate feature of the individual that can be incongruent with the sex of that person. On top of this, we are told that sex itself is not an objective thing but an imposition at birth.
Following Foucault, queer theorists see reality as a result of discursive formation. They invite us us to explore the ways in which the power through language determines gender and sexuality. Their work examines how power structures, such as medical and legal institutions, shape and regulate sexuality. At the same time, queer theorists celebrate the sexologists for opening up space and paths for gender nonconforming transgressives—for producing the medical technologies and the subjectivity that allow for extreme body modification.
One might therefore consider the power dynamics embedded in social institutions and norms, and how these impact the lived experiences of individuals with non-normative sexualities and genders, by considering the following questions: What is the character of the medical-industrial complex? What is its purpose? To make well the sick among its stakeholders? Or to generate large and sustainable returns on investments for its stockholders? What is the relationship of doctors and administrators to this industry? How are our knowledge-producing institutions situated with respect to the industry? (See Making Patients for the Medical-Industrial Complex; Feeding the Medical-Industrial Complex.)
Here’s the answer from the scientific standpoint of historical materialism (an analysis rightwing ideology precludes on reflex): The medical-industrial complex is made up of a network of corporations that ultimately determine what counts as disease or medical conditions, what causes these, what counts as treatments, and so forth.
These relations are determined by to the imperative to accumulate capital, to generate income for investors and stockholders. The health care companies are intertwined with health insurance companies, medical supply and biotechnology firms, pharmaceutical companies, and the corporate-captured regulatory bodies that legitimize the system by appearing to monitor it for benefit, efficacy, and safety. Administrators are bureaucrats of various rankings who run the hospitals and clinics for the network of corporations.
Doctors are highly paid employees of the complex. Alongside the scientists and engineers who work across the complex, doctors represent expert labor. As privileged employees in the professional sector, doctors do the bidding of their corporate masters, a bidding many are eager to do because of the compensation—at least the amount of money they’re paid assuages the guilt those with a working conscience might otherwise feel exploiting the masses. Recall Upton Sinclair’s observation during his 1935 gubernatorial run: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
The training doctors receive in accredited universities that dispense medical degrees is shaped by an ideology (“medical science” is today an instantiation of scientism) determined by the apparatus of the complex—all this for profit generation. The more doctors push (unnecessary and dangerous) drugs, (unnecessary and dangerous) surgeries, etc., the more income is generated for the investors and stockholders. At the behest of investors, administrators push doctors to push these things.
Because of the profit motive, health care companies are always on the prowl for more customers, and that means not only medicalizing more domains of human life, i.e., creating more diseases and conditions, but also by aggressively diagnosing and treating the diseases and conditions they manufacture.
For example, as noted above, introduced in the third edition, “gender identity disorder” (GID) was included as a diagnostic category in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-3). The DSM-5, published in 2013, introduced significant changes to the diagnostic criteria and terminology related to gender identity. In the DSM-5, the diagnosis of GID was replaced with “gender dysphoria,” or GD. The change from GID to GD depathologized gender identity and the focus shifted to the distress or discomfort individuals claimed to experience due to a mismatch between their gender identity and their birth sex.
What explains the introduction of gender identity disorder in the first place? According to the progressive narrative, during the 1970s, there was a growing recognition among mental health professionals that individuals who experienced distress or dissatisfaction with their “assigned sex” at birth and identified strongly with the opposite gender may benefit from specialized clinical attention.
It should not have surprised readers to have learned that this “recognition” was influenced by the emerging field of sexology, which advanced Money’s repurposing of gender roles and Stoller’s invention of gender identity—with modern-day Frankensteins Hirschfeld and Gohrbandt’s pioneering hormonal and surgical technology and technique in back of such ideas.
Trans activists agitated for the inclusion of gender identity in the DSM. If they could get their desire for hormones and surgery recognized as a psychiatric disorder, then doctors could prescribe hormones and conduct surgeries and insurance companies could pay for some or all of it. The inclusion of GID in the DSM-III was pitched as a progressive step toward acknowledging and providing a framework for addressing gender-related concerns within the mental health field.
Created demand opened a new area of profit generation. Once the transgender care pipeline had been established and normalized, GID was depathologized and gender dysphoria introduced. Now the activists are pushing for GAC with no objective justification at all. Transhumanist desire should be enough. Yet they depend on the medical tools to modify their bodies.
More patients are made this way and in many other ways and, in many cases, made this way for life because their disease is caused by the treatment; the treatment regime is a terminal one. This is especially true of GAC. The complex is vast and injuries, maims, and kills scores of people annually.
Both sexology and queer theory rationalize this as a progressive project to promote inclusivity and acceptance of diverse sexualities and genders dissimulating the reality of pain and suffering in carving fetishes into flesh with quasi-religious rhetoric of “authentic selves.” Sexology, by feigning research, seeks to provide a scientific veneer, or at least scientistic knowledge about sexual diversity in order to challenge the alleged oppressive structure of heteronormativity. Transgressive queer theory, rooted in postmodernist nihilism, when faced with limitations on the scientism that makes all this possible, redescribes science as the discursive power projection of white male heterosexism.
When the theory and practice of “transgender healthcare” is challenged, its defenders cite (albeit in a highly-selective manner) the voluminous literature and professional associations, including American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG), American Medical Association (AMA), Australian Professional Association for Trans Health (AusPATH), American Psychiatric Association (APA), American Psychological Association (APA), American Society of Plastic Surgeons (ASPS), Canadian Professional Association for Transgender Health (CPATH), Dutch Association for Gender Dysphoria Care (V&VN G&GZ), Dutch Association of Plastic Surgeons (NVPC), Dutch Professional Association for Transgender Health (NVSH), Dutch Society for Endocrinology (NVE), Endocrine Society, World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH), Royal College of Physicians (UK), Royal College of Psychiatrists (UK)—just to name some of the associations advancing “gender-affirming care.”
Where these associations are longstanding and considered venerable, they have been corrupted by the profit-motive and by other corporations, for example pharmaceutical companies. Where they are new, they are contrivances functioning to falsely legitimize the practices they have established. They exist to provide a circular justification. In truth, WPATH, previously the Harry Benjamin International Gender Dysphoria Association (HBIGDA), has no more legitimacy than the Reiki Healing Association (RHA), established in 1995 to legitimize and advance the energy healing technique in which a Reiki master guides the flow of healthy energy (life-force energy) through the client’s body to reduce stress and promote healing. There is also the Reiki Alliance, an international community of Reiki Masters dedicated to the practice of Usui Shiki Ryoho, the Usui System of Natural Healing. Does the existence of professional associations make Reiki scientific?
Reiki is not well-supported by empirical evidence and is considered to be pseudoscience. The fundamental principles of Reiki, such as the existence of a universal life-force energy that can be manipulated and channeled, have not been demonstrated or validated through rigorous scientific investigations. The energy is analogous to the thetans of Dianetics fame, or the myriad of gender identities said to dwell in the dysphoria of a distressed child (see Step Away From the Crazy). Several studies examining the efficacy of Reiki show no significant difference compared to a placebo or sham treatment. Furthermore, the mechanisms proposed to explain how Reiki works, such as energy flow and balancing, are not consistent with our current understanding of biology, physics, and the functioning of the human body.
Neither does science find support for reflexology, a form of massage therapy that involves applying pressure to specific points on the foot said to affect the wellness of the entire body. The reflexologists have associations, too, for example the Reflexology Association of America (RAA), established in 1995. Like Reiki, the mechanisms proposed by reflexology, such as energy flow or stimulation of reflex zones, is not supported by scientific evidence. Some studies have reported improvements in relaxation, pain reduction, and subjective well-being. (Ever had a foot massage?) However, like Reiki, these findings are often based on self-reported measures and subjective experiences, which can be influenced by placebo effects and other biases.
Transgender health care cannot boast of a superior record. And neither Reiki nor reflexology nor the auditing necessary to bring out the thetan, the authentic self of the person, involve puberty blockers or cross-sex hormones or mastectomy or castration. While a man will waste his money on Scientology, he will likely not have his body wrecked in the process. Even if scientists were to demonstrate the validity of gender ideology, one would have sufficient cause to suspect those scientists have been captured by the industry. The COVID-19 and global warming hysterias make clear that scientists are easily corrupted by agendas that line their pockets with money and lend them prestige. When promotion and tenure determine the trajectory of one’s career, science can make fantasies appear real.
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The Stryker essay I began with, “My Words to Victor Frankenstein above the Village of Chamounix: Performing Transgender Rage,” is an example of the new fascist ideology that passes for scholarship in today’s university. It celebrates the monsters of the Hirschfeld-Gohrbandt tendency as instantiations of queer liberation, while portraying the opponents of such atrocities as unenlightened reactionaries. Flipping language, the gender ideologue turns those who safeguard others, especially children, into the fascist.
There is something of value revealed here: it explicitly reveals the transhumanism that underpins transgenderism, the desire to deconstruct Western civilization and transform human relations into a cybernetic totalitarian utopia where humans are medically transitioned to machines and monsters at will. Destroying humanity and the foundation of Western civilization is necessary for establishing the post-human world the new fascists desire. (This explains the alliance of queers and Islamists, however one sided that alliance is in actuality.)
In many ways, Striker’s essay is an unintentional reimagining of Filippo Tommaso Emilio Marinetti’s 1909 Futurist Manifesto. In the line from Marinetti to Striker, the profoundly misogynistic desire that lies at the heart of fascistic thinking is palpable. For Marinetti it was realizing the dreamt-of metallization of the human body. For Stryker, it is the reconstruction of the body via the technology that makes that metallization possible. That Striker leverages Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, an early 19th century prophecy of the modern Prometheus, could not put the problem transgenderism poses to humanity more plainly: this is a war against species-being (Gattungswesen). (To explore this with me further, see my essay The Selective Misanthropy and Essential Fascism of the Progressive Standpoint.)
Of course, the monster in Frankenstein did not step into his monstrosity. He was made that way by a scientist hellbent on transcending the inevitable fate of man (death) to produce a living thing that could only be, as it was unnatural, a monster—however natural were its parts. Shelley was making a point, the subtitle of the novel making that point even clearer, that biotechnology in the hands of the desire to transcend the body will only result in tragedy.
Shelley sought the empathy of the reader not to normalize the making of monsters but to show the world how wrong it is to create monsters. Shelley did not celebrate the monstrous but put it before us in all its pathetic and tragic being to warn us away from biotechnology, a warning cribbed by Michael Crichton in Jurassic Park when he writes about scientists that “they are focused on whether they can do something. They never stop to ask if they should do something.”
Stryker is not making this argument in “My Words to Victor Frankenstein.” Stryker understands that he has made a monster of himself, and he not only wants people to regard him the way he falsely believes Shelley’s readers regard Frankenstein’s creation, but that monstrosity serves the grand purpose of shedding nature, of laying the ground for a world without morality, a totalitarian world where people can ask doctors to make them into monsters and force other people to accept their monstrosity. It is the nihilistic desire for Friedrich Nietzsche’s Übermensch, the human who creates his own values based on his “authentic self” (see Thus Spoke Zarathustra).
While the sane and rational world awaits to see whether the restrictions on the madness take hold and expand, the new fascists will tell you about the old ones to scare you without revealing (or, for many, not knowing) what lies at the dark heart of fascism whatever form it takes: the desire to determine the truth of the world through unbridled power and lies. (See Anti-Minotaur: Reclaiming The Truth of Gender From the Labyrinth of Lies.)
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freedom and reason 