The mixing of identity and sexuality in progressive politics can be confusing to the ears of normal people who resist the queer call to problematize gender. For normal people, men and women comprise a binary system necessary for the reproduction of the species and the delineation of social roles (see Gender and the Gender Role).
Most Americans remain normal; two-thirds of them know that gender corresponds to or is synonymous with sex (see Sex and Gender are Interchangeable Terms). And, despite polls showing a growing minority of Americans judge homosexuality to be morally problematic—this thanks to the association between gender identity doctrine and the natural fact of same-sex attraction (see Pride Fatigue, Bad Analogies, and Forced Acronyms)—half or more Americans understand that homosexuality, while rare (at most around 3 percent of the population), is within the range of normal human variation.
Despite this widespread understanding of obvious things, the assertion that “transwomen are women” has permeated contemporary discourse, often presented as an unassailable truth—a “truth” that warps reasoning. It’s a testament to power and propaganda that millions of Americans can’t tell us what a woman is. (See Sex = Gender Redux: Eschewing the Queer Linguistic Bubble; Bubbles and Realities: How Ubiquitous is Gender Ideology?)
Just today, I watched a video in which an intelligent-sounding man, when asked whether he was sympathetic to women’s concerns that trans-identifying males are entering female-only spaces, responded by saying that transwomen are women, therefore “ciswomen” have no grounds upon which to object to the presence of penises in their bathrooms and locker rooms. (Separating Sex and Gender in Language Works Against Reason and Science; An Ellipse is a plane figure with four straight sides and four right angles, one with unequal adjacent sides (in contrast to a Circle); Why We Must Resist Neologisms like “Cisgender.”) Here’s the clip:
When asked to provide a definition of “transwoman,” the man responded by noting that he was not a doctor (where have we heard that before). Yet, despite not being a veterinarian, he told the interviewer without hesitation what a dog is. When the contradiction was noted, he criticized the interviewer for her patronizing questions. “Patronizing”—that’s a big word for a man who doesn’t know a transwoman is a man (I suspect he does, though).
Queer groups and their allies were outraged by Judge Lawrence VanDyke’s recent dissent in Olympus Spa v. Armstrong, in which the Ninth Circuit denied rehearing en banc. The case arose when the Washington State Human Rights Commission (HRC) initiated an enforcement action against a Korean Spa based on the Spa’s policy of granting entry to only biological women and excluding, in addition to men, preoperative transgender “women” who have not yet received “gender confirmation” surgery to “correct” their genitalia. The HRC alleged that the entrance policy violated WLAD. WLAD, or Washington Law Against Discrimination, is a state public accommodations law that prohibits discrimination in public accommodations based on sexual orientation.
I will come to VanDyke’s dissent in a moment (it’s remarkable). But first, we should pause to recognize that this case is a paradigm of how legislatures and courts perpetuate the confusion of gender identity and sexual orientation.
Under Washington law, “sexual orientation” includes “heterosexuality, homosexuality, bisexuality, and gender expression or identity.” Although only a minority of Americans believe that all these categories count as sexual orientation, their lawmaking institutions have been corrupted by the presence of progressive legislators and jurists who subscribe to queer ideology—or are too scared to challenge it.
The acronym “LGBTQ” has proved to be an effective tool for erasing the distinction between two very different things in the minds of otherwise intelligent people: the subjective construct of gender identity and the objective reality of homosexuality (see The Ideological Function of the LGBTQ-plus Acronym).
Judge VanDyke’s dissent begins this way:
“This is a case about swinging dicks. The Christian owners of Olympus Spa—a traditional Korean, women-only, nude spa—understandably don’t want them in their spa. Their female employees and female clients don’t want them in their spa either. But Washington State insists on them. And now so does the Ninth Circuit. You may think that swinging dicks shouldn’t appear in a judicial opinion. You’re not wrong. But as much as you might understandably be shocked and displeased to merely encounter that phrase in this opinion, I hope we all can agree that it is far more jarring for the unsuspecting and exposed women at Olympus Spa—some as young as thirteen—to be visually assaulted by the real thing. Sometimes, it feels like the supposed adults in the room have collectively lost their minds. Woke regulators and complicit judges seem entirely willing, even eager, to ignore the consequences that their Frankenstein social experiments impose on real women and young girls.”
I am quite fond of frank talk, so I like this right off the bat, but Judge VanDyke’s reference to swinging dicks is more than frankness; he intends to shock his audience to make a point about the shock women feel at having to suffer a man in a women-only spa. This exposes our man-on-the-street’s sympathy for a minority finding their safe space as disregard for the feelings and safety of the majority.
I am also fond of VanDyke’s reference to “Frankenstein social experiments.” In the spring of 2024, I used the Frankenstein metaphor to frame my essay Fear and Loathing in the Village of Chamounix: Monstrosity and the Deceits of Trans Joy. This inspired students at my institution to circulate a petition urging the administration to terminate my employment. It was also the subject of a news story, produced by Andrew Amouzou for the local NBC affiliate. When asked for comment, I responded, “I won’t participate in furthering cancel culture. This will be my only comment.” One doesn’t give nonsense oxygen. (I discuss the controversy in The Snitchy Dolls Return.)
Missing the point of Judge VanDyke’s resort to vulgarity, Judge Margaret McKeown issued this statement, joined by twenty-eight members of her Court (the Ninth Circuit has fifty-one total active and senior status judges):
“The American legal system has long been regarded as a place to resolve disputes in a dignified and civil manner or, as Justice O’Connor put it, to ‘disagree without being disagreeable.’ It is not a place for vulgar barroom talk. Nor is it a place to suggest that fellow judges have ‘collectively lost their minds,’ or that they are ‘woke judges ‘complicit’ in a scheme to harm ordinary Americans. That language makes us sound like juveniles, not judges, and it undermines public trust in the courts. The lead dissent’s use of such coarse language and invective may make for publicity or entertainment value, but it has no place in a judicial opinion. The lead dissent ignores ordinary principles of dignity and civility and demeans this court. Neither the parties nor the panel dissent found it necessary to invoke such crude and vitriolic language. Decorum and collegiality demand more.”
Two other judges wrote, “Regarding the dissenting opinion of Judge VanDyke: We are better than this.” Are they really? They are allowing swinging dicks in women-only spas. Better than what? Certainly, no better than a man who imposes his will on women in women-only spaces. Worse, in fact, since the man can do this because progressive judges allow it.
Judge VanDyke responded to the outrage with this:
“My distressed colleagues appear to have the fastidious sensibilities of a Victorian nun when it comes to mere unpleasant words in my opinion, yet exhibit the scruples of our dearly departed colleague Judge Reinhardt when it comes to the government trampling on religious liberties and exposing women and girls to male genitalia. That kind of selective outrage speaks for itself.”
He wasn’t through:
“Sometimes ‘dignified and civil’ words are employed to mask a legal abomination. Or, to put it in vernacular perhaps more palatable to my colleagues’ Victorian sensibilities: ‘In law, what plea so tainted and corrupt, / But, being seasoned with a gracious voice, / Obscures the show of evil?’ Sometimes coarse and ugly words bear the truth. I coarsely but respectfully dissent from our court’s willingness to leave this travesty in place.”
Some have suggested that VanDyke is auditioning for a role on the Supreme Court. I’d say he passed with flying colors. As for Victorian sensibilities, he likely meant Elizabethan. But quoting The Merchant of Venice (Act 3, scene 2) was a classy move. And it was during the Victorian Era that Shakespeare ascended to the status of a prophet. So perhaps VanDyke correctly periodized the mood of his colleagues after all.
Today, I will show that the claim that the Orwellian “transwomen are women” crumbles under scrutiny when examined through the lens of lesbian identity. To make this argument, I will need to enlarge the scope beyond the situation of lesbians, but I want to begin with the problems lesbians face today.
I addressed this issue in the late summer of 2022 in my essay Lesbians Don’t Like Penises, So Our Definitions Must Change. I want to elaborate on my argument with additional evidence and reasoning. By addressing definitions, evidence, and experiences, one can expose the inconsistencies and implications of queer doctrine. I argue that trans-identifying males—men who claim to be women—are not women because the category excludes them, and that affirming otherwise undermines biological reality, erases lesbian identity, and perpetuates misogyny and deception.
Most women are sexually attracted to men. Why this is the case should be obvious: how would the species reproduce itself over time if it were otherwise? Only around 1-2 percent of women are attracted to other women.
It is important to clarify that, since approximately 7 percent of US women identify as bisexual, bisexuality does not encompass women who enter heterosexual relationships only to later realize or embrace their lesbian identity amid increasing societal tolerance for homosexuality—a tolerance that queer ideology undermines. True bisexuality involves genuine attraction to both sexes, not a transitional phase. This clarification will become relevant later in this essay.
Proponents of the “transwomen are women” narrative extend this fallacious construction to claim that trans-identifying males attracted to women are “lesbians.” Surely readers have heard the argument that males who say they are women are lesbians, since, if transwomen are women, then a woman with a penis is a lesbian.
This is the argument our man-on-the-street would presumably make. He would find the reasoning straightforward: if a transwoman is a woman, and she is attracted to women, then she qualifies as a lesbian, regardless of anatomy, including the presence of a penis—or an open wound where a penis used to be.
This logic fails when confronted with reality. If transwomen were truly women, we would expect their sexual orientations to mirror those of biological women. Yet, large-scale surveys reveal a stark discrepancy: nearly 70 percent of transwomen are attracted to women, not men. Calculating the odds, transwomen are between 35 and 70 times more likely to identify as “lesbian” compared to biological women.
This statistical anomaly obliterates the claim that transwomen are women; if they had female brains, then we would see comparable statistics between categories. We don’t. Clearly, these individuals are not lesbians but heterosexual males. If not attracted to men, they are homosexual males. We are our bodies. The brain of a female is, by definition, a female brain. From every angle, the queer argument makes no sense.
The truth underlying most male trans-identification is a sexual fetish known as autogynephilia, where men become aroused by presenting as women. There is a variant of this called autopedophilia, where men are aroused by presenting as girls. A psychiatrist will clarify that this is not pedophilia, but an identity. Okay. The point is that they demand feminine pronouns not for validation but because societal affirmation of their femininity heightens their arousal. This is the true meaning of “trans joy,” the euphoria reported when preferred pronouns are used. It also explains the rage displayed when “misgendered” (another Orwellian inversion). Such a man demands sexual gratification, and it angers him when his demands are denied. In such instances, the misogyny that lurks behind their condition is revealed.
This reality raises profound ethical questions about consent. When you use feminine pronouns for a man, have you consented to participate in his sexual fetish? Is it appropriate for corporations and governments to mandate such participation? Do women consent when compelled to share bathrooms or locker rooms with men? Our man-on-the-street believes consent is unnecessary. Indeed, in his mind, the ethics of consent have been transformed into bigotry. He admits it with his words. Now consider the scenario of a lesbian who unwittingly enters an intimate relationship with a trans-identifying male who passes as a woman, only to discover that “she” possesses a penis (or, again, an open wound where a penis used to be).
This is sex by deception—another term for rape. Refusing intimacy with someone who has or had a penis is not bigotry; it is a basic boundary. (See Sex by Deception and Distorted Notions of Revenge; The Queer Project and the Practice of Deceptive Mimicry; Is this Dating Site Encouraging Deception and Fraud?)
Transactivists accuse those who deny the delusion of gender identity not only of abolishing “trans rights,” but of the imagined offense of “trans erasure” (The False Doctrine of Erasure: Existence Does Not Depend on Affirmation). They go so far as to accuse normal and rational people of “genocide,” and on this basis, justify violence against others (see Trans Day of Vengeance Cancelled Due to Genocide; Antifa is Trans Activism; Self-Castration and TERF-Punching: Trans Rights are What Sort of Rights?). But by that logic, doesn’t including males in the category of women erase lesbian identity? If a lesbian is no longer defined as a same-sex attracted woman, her category vanishes. Trans ideology is thus an assault on homosexuality itself.
It is, as I have noted, and for many other reasons, also inherently misogynistic, for example, in reducing women to performative stereotypes—dresses, makeup, hair—rather than an essential biological category in a binary system. This explains why, as Douglas Murray notes, transwomen frequently appear in roles like porn actors, prostitutes, or drag queens (distinct from gay men who perform drag as art). We see this also in the inclusion of men in women’s sports, such as boxing (see Misogyny Resurgent: Atavistic Expressions of a Neoreligion). Queer ideology erases more than lesbians; it erases women as an essential category altogether, and the gender binary along with it. Indeed, it explicitly seeks this end.
But, again, the logic is nonsensical—and paradoxical. As Judith Butler’s postmodern approach to the question concludes, gender is a performance (see Judith Butler’s Gender Gibberish). Butler makes this argument throughout Gender Trouble (1990). Yet, in her obfuscations, Butler inadvertently confesses the binary she seeks to dismantle. The theory of gender performativity, despite its explicit aim to dismantle the gender binary, reinforces its persistence in thought through conceptual dependencies and selective examples.
Butler’s reliance on parody, such as drag performances, to subvert gender norms presupposes the binary as a stable “original” against which exaggeration gains any meaning, thereby tacitly affirming the very categories (masculine/feminine, man/woman) she seeks to destabilize. The drag queen is a simulacrum, and one only knows this because there is an original against which to compare. The same is true for the transwoman (see Simulated Sexual Identities: Trans as Bad Copy).
Knowing that she has said the quiet part out loud, transactivists criticize Butler for invoking binary terms as foundational reference points. In Second Skins (1998), Jay Prosser argues that Butler’s theory of performativity sidelines embodiment and dysphoria. She suggests that even when Butler destabilizes gender, she still treats “male” and “female” as the necessary coordinates against which gender variance is defined—rather than as categories some trans people seek to inhabit in a deeply material way. Viviane Namaste takes what Prosser calls the “elision of embodiment” further in Invisible Lives (2000) to criticize “the erasure of transsexual and transgendered people.” Prosser, Namaste, and others lament that, even in critique, the concept of performativity makes genuine multiplicity harder to envision. But they can do no better; they merely speak more gibberish in attempting to further obscure the reality. (See There’s No Obligation to Speak Like a Queer Theorist. Doing so Misrepresents Reality.)
Butler’s theory is more useful confronted (since Prosser and Namaste complain that she is insufficiently transgressive) by the feminist rebuttal that performativity’s emphasis on instability and lack of an inner essence undermines political agency not only for truly marginalized groups, such as lesbians, but dissolves “woman” as a coherent category, one necessary for, among other things, organizing around women’s exclusive interests, and moreover risks quietism by framing resistance as primarily parodic or personal rather than collective and institutional.
I am here borrowing Martha Nussbaum’s use of quietism in her 1999 critique of Butler, published in The New Republic, in which she convicts performative theory as the reduction of feminist resistance to cultural, individualistic, and stylistic gestures—i.e., personal acts of irony, mockery, or self-styling—rather than concrete, collective efforts to achieve institutional, legal, or material reforms, such as policy changes or structural challenges to patriarchy and oppression.
In the end, like all postmodernist attempts to destabilize common sense, Butler’s approach ultimately admits to the binary’s enduring power by failing to escape its gravitational pull in thought and practice. This is not Butler’s fault. The binary is real. As I have shown many times, there are only two genders, and gender is immutable. It is an anthropological fact (see The Pelvis Tells the Story: Archeology and Physical Anthropology are Most Unkind; Chicken Sexing—Science or Ideology?). The essential categories of male and female can only be symbolically erased by language, and that depends on society agreeing on the meaning of and using the words that construct an imaginary, one where objective truth no longer has any meaning. Queer theory is either incoherent or self-revealing—and it is often both.
To illustrate this truth by analogy, I hesitate to suggest that a man cosplaying as a woman is comparable to a white person in blackface. The former is much worse, since sex is a biological category, whereas race is largely socially constructed. I am making the analogy anyway because I think it might help the reader see my point.
If we presume that there is a biological basis to race, which is to say that nature has differentiated our species through time into relatively distinct constellations of phenotypic attributes (there is evidence for the claim), a white person claiming to be black is being deceptive (whether race should matter is a different question).
However much race is rooted in biology, gender is unquestionably so. Therefore, the phenomenon of womanface should be perceived as more offensive than white women cosplaying black women, as in the notorious case of Rachel Dolezal. But it is not, which is telling. (I have addressed this matter before, as well. See Racial Identity Disorder and The Strange Essentialisms of Identity Politics, the latter written before I had completed my deep dive into the horror of gender denying care; forgive me for talking around the problem.)
We do not choose our bodies; nature does. We are not disembodied gender identities. “Gender-affirming care” is thus a crime against humanity and nature, simulating an identity rather than affirming biological reality.
This truth bears not only on the trans question. The “intersex” argument is also at issue here. Transactivists often resort to the supposed existence of intersex persons when wishing to move beyond the subjective, claiming that medical science has problematized gender by recognizing such conditions. These are not identities but conditions. There are no intersex people. (See Smuggling in Assumptions Through Language: The Case of “Sex Assigned at Birth”; The Fallacies of Appeal to the Authority of Consensus and Expertise; So It’s Confirmed: Boxer Imane Khelif is Male.)
Briefly, people described intersex as resulting from two general types of errors. One type occurs during gametogenesis, in which diploid germ cells develop and differentiate into mature haploid gametes (eggs or sperm) via meiosis, where cell division reduces the chromosome number by half. The process does not always occur as nature intended, resulting in conditions such as Klinefelter and Turner. The other types are various disorders of sex development (DSDs). Chromosomal or phenotypic anomalies notwithstanding, such individuals are still either male or female, which is why many with such conditions object to being classified as intersex.
For those grounded in faith rather than science, queer theory also poses theological challenges. Many major religious systems accept the gender binary, but I will focus here on the challenges it poses to the Christian worldview. I am moved to comment on this matter because many people in my life are progressive Christians, and their willingness to defend queer praxis always astounds me.
Those who believe in the soul, if they accept the premise of gender identity doctrine, must also accept that God erred by placing a gendered soul in the wrong body. I debunked this earlier in the essay by showing that more than two-thirds of transwomen are attracted to women, a fact many transactivists and the medical industry must also know, yet they continue to insist that a transwoman is a female brain born in a male body, disregarding the fact that the brain of a man is a man’s brain, however it appears in scans obtained in the pursuit of junk science.
Such an incongruence more than implies divine fallibility. If the Christian looks for scriptural support for the claim that God erred, he won’t find it in the Bible. So important is this foundational truth that the first book of the Bible wastes no time getting to it. Genesis 1 states that “God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.” Genesis 2 describes God forming the first woman from the rib of the first man he created. These passages affirm a binary creation.
This is why self-described Christian figures like James Talarico, the Democrat politician who claims trans children are created in God’s image, a god whom he asserts is “nonbinary,” are viewed as heretics by many Christians. Talarico’s critics are not wrong. Indeed, I have suggested on social media that progressive Christians examine their fidelity to core tenets. Either one believes God knows what he is doing or that he doesn’t, in which case, while he may still exist, he is not worth following (unless one has to pretend he is to avoid the fiery lake).
For those who say it is not an atheist’s place to say this, non-Christians can still critique doctrinal consistency. Just as one need not be Muslim to assess adherence to Islam’s fundamentals, one need not be a Christian to judge their devotion to doctrine. Sectarian differences exist, to be sure, but abandoning core teachings disqualifies one from the label. A man may say he is a communist, but if he does not seek the abolition of class and state, he is not one.
Whether examined from the respective standpoints of science or Christianity, gender identity doctrine fails. The binary is self-evident in natural history and mammalian biology. Either nature or God produced two sexes. This is one of the things that “People of the Book” get right (as I point out in the essay Fulnecky’s Argument Through the Lens of Anthropology and Sociology). If one is a man of science or a man of God, he cannot tolerate deception and remain a man of integrity.
Insisting on truth is not unkind; to insist on the truth defends fundamental and natural realities and protects women, straight and lesbian alike. (See The Problem of Empathy and the Pathology of “Be Kind”; Mocking Nonsense: A Defense of Ridicule in an Age of Bad Faith.)
Those who weaponize “kindness” urge respect for the “LGBTQ community.” Family members are chastised for not embracing the worldview of relatives. Homosexuality is natural, observed in thousands of species, while gender identity is a psychiatric construct—invented with known origins and motives. (In addition to my essay using the Frankenstein metaphor, see also Anti-Minotaur: Reclaiming The Truth of Gender From the Labyrinth of Lies; The Story the Industry Tells: Jack Turban’s Three Element Pitch). Trana is a manufactured social logic designed to disorder common sense. But even if LGBTQ were a community, there is no moral obligation for those beyond it to lie. Nor is there justification for community or family members to be deceitful.
In the wake of the United Kingdom Supreme Court’s 2025 ruling affirming that the legal definition of a “woman” (and “sex”) under the Equality Act 2010 refers to biological sex, not certificated or acquired gender via a Gender Recognition Certificate, Douglas Murray appeared on Real Time with Bill Maher and responded to a question about this with “I just think apart from being a statement of the obvious, isn’t it amazing that the best legal minds in Britain spent years having to work out the first thing we knew as a species?”
Maher turned to Murray and asked if he believed people can be born in the wrong body. Murray responded firmly: “I don’t think people get born in the wrong body, no.” Maher pushed back. “Oh, I do.” When Murray noted the scientific fact that humans are not a hermaphroditic species, Maher resorted to the trite observation that, in Ancient Rome, there were people who did not fit comfortably with the binary. “Chicks with dicks,” he quipped. But chicks with dicks are men, as VanDyke bluntly put the matter.
Murray’s observation about common sense speaks powerfully to the problem of cognitive disordering that occurs when people uncritically accept definitions supplied by ideological movements. Maher’s inability to agree with Murray that people cannot be born in the wrong body is telling. It tells his audience that the comedian still has quite a way to go to escape the corruption of woke progressivism. This is troubling because Maher is more sensible than most on the left today, and he has a big platform. Perhaps this is why he often commits the fallacy of the golden mean, his rhetoric violating the classical logic principle of the excluded middle.
It is important to remember that those presenting as transgender today were yesterday diagnosed differently until queer politics and medical profiteering compelled psychiatry to alter the diagnostic criteria in successive editions of the DSM, the manual of conditions and disorders published by the American Psychiatric Association. The world watched the categories change from sexual deviations, including transvestitism (fetishistic cross-dressing in heterosexual males), to “transsexualism” (cross-gender identification and desire for transition, while retaining transvestism as primarily erotic and non-identity-based), to “gender identity disorder” (GID) to encompass both adult and childhood presentations, emphasizing incongruence and associated distress while still framing the identity itself as disordered, to, finally (as of now), “gender dysphoria,” i.e., clinically significant distress or impairment from the incongruence between experienced gender and “assigned sex at birth.”
The current definition explicitly states that being transgender or having gender incongruence is not inherently a mental disorder, thus imposing psychiatry’s rather fraught definition of delusion on the phenomenon of men who believe they are something they cannot possibly be. Such linguistic shifts are designed to manipulate consciousness, as humans think in language shaped by evolution (see Gender and the English Language). Here, the notion that, if a society believes in an impossible thing, then it is not a delusion, is exploited to generalize the pathology of denialism.
* * *
I began this essay by talking about lesbians. I was moved to do so because lesbians in my personal circle, when asked directly, confirm they are not attracted to individuals with penises, whom they regard, along with the majority of Americans, as men. A lesbian is attracted to people with vaginas; a woman who identifies as a lesbian but engages intimately with a man is, in fact, bisexual—again, if language is to accurately reflect the world.
Reflecting on this, I looked up the statistics on sexual orientation among transwomen and realized that I had more evidence for my argument. In reflecting on the matter further, I recognized the importance of noting that it follows that a trans-identifying male in a relationship with another man remains in a homosexual union; two males who are intimate with one another cannot be heterosexual. The gay man attracted to such a figure also harbors a fetish, as seen in markets like Asian “ladyboys” catering to sex tourism.
I once viewed trans issues as adjacent to gay rights, but after deeper investigation, I was horrified by what I found (in addition to the essays I already cited, see From Delusion to Illusion: Transitioning Disordered Personalities into Valid Identities; Disordering Bodies for Disordered Minds). Many others are similarly horrified. Attitudes are shifting toward scientific truth, and we must encourage open discourse if we are to relegate this latest scandal to the dustbin of history.
Whether we learn from it is an open question, but given history, I am not optimistic (see The Persistence of Medical Atrocities: Lobotomy, Nazi Doctors, and Gender Affirming Care; Medical Atrocities Then and Now: The Dark Continuity of Gender Affirming Care; False Gender Syndrome). The “transwomen are women” narrative is harmful and untenable, exposed by lesbian experiences, statistical evidence, consent violations, and biological/religious truths. It assaults women and homosexuals while profiting from delusion. By speaking out, we reclaim reality and protect vulnerable identities. The binary endures, regardless of ideology, but if we are to keep the truth of reality integral to how we understand the world, then we have to tell the truth—loudly and often.
* * *
When I posted a draft of this essay on Facebook (I often use Facebook to formulate my thoughts and get feedback), a progressive woman came around and accused me of caring too much about 1-2 percent of the population. She said I was “obsessed” with the matter. I expected this. It’s not the first time I have heard this line or some version of it, although it’s usually a progressive man leveling the accusation (some of them claiming to be women). The reality is that it is progressives who obsess over the matter. The progressive obsesses over those who refuse to deny the truth.
The progressive woman thus has her accusation precisely backwards. The reasonable man is merely defending the truth from ideology and perversion. The progressive—the unreasonable man or woman—confesses with this line an obsession with gender. It is an obvious projection.
It is, moreover, a ridiculous line. Imagine insisting on evolution and being accused of obsessing over creationism and intelligent design. How many creationists are there? Hopefully, no more than a few among scientists (I know of some). Or, better yet, imagine being accused of caring about the small percentage of the population that murders. Or the small percentage of the population attracted to prepubescent children.
In responding to the progressive woman, I confirmed that murderers constitute 0.0006 percent of the population. I asked, given such a small number, should I not be concerned with murder? I confirmed this, as well: the psychiatric condition involving a persistent sexual attraction to pre-pubescent children (ages 11 and younger) affects around 1-2 percent of the population. Pedophiles who actually act on their attraction represent far less than 1 percent. Should society not be concerned about pedophilia? (See Seeing and Admitting Grooming; What is Grooming?
Let’s stay on the problem of pedophiles for a moment. What if it were said that pedophilia is an identity and that the presence of people with this condition is not really psychiatric cases, just a variation along a continuum? “They like children. They can’t help it.” It is a short way from here to “Not everybody is attracted to adults. This speaks to the diversity of sexual attraction. We should strive to be inclusive.” How should we respond when we hear this: “Only 1-2 percent of the population are pedophiles, so why do you care so much?”
Does that make any sense to you? They’re men (95-99 percent of them) who are sexually attracted to ten-year-olds. That’s why we care so much. Imagine further that, at your place of work, you were required to welcome pedophiles as normal people and affirm them in their identity. That’d be weird, right? But our betters have normalized transvestism; why not pedophilia? (See Pedophilia and Other Paraphilias: A Primer in What Our Betters are Normalizing.)
If this were to occur—and there is some indication that things are moving in that direction (there are certainly people pushing it)—some people will go along with it because of “kindness.” The pathology of kindness robs persons of their protective sensibilities; they are accepting when circumstances signal danger. We see this in the furor over restricting drag performances, pornography to adults, and so-called gender affirming care. They want to keep open avenues. (See Defending Drag for Children; Drag Queen Lap Dance at Forsyth Tech: Humiliating the Gullible; Clowns are Scary; Luring Children to the Edge: The Panic Over Lost Opportunities; The Gender Hoax and the Betrayal of Children by the Adults in Their Lives; California to Hand Children to the Queer Lobby and the Medical Industrial Complex).
My danger-signalling apparatus remains healthy. I don’t want pedophiles around my children or me. Likewise, I don’t want men who say their women around my wife or, if I had any, daughters. That autogynephiles demand that others participate in their sexual fetish and get angry when rebuffed tells us that they are dangerous people. That they have assaulted and even killed those who refuse to affirm their delusions confirms it. I refuse to let state or society tell me that I have to affirm the delusions of those who believe incredible and harmful things—and I refuse to allow the delusional to intimidate me into submitting to their demands.
* * *
Early Saturday morning, I dragged myself from bed to write a Facebook post. I needed to unload several thoughts that were keeping me awake. I had already drafted this essay (early last week), so I decided to append these thoughts to today’s piece.
The thought that was troubling me most was the fact that I am 64 years old and have always been a news junkie; if trans identification were a persistent and stable phenomenon over those decades, I would have known about it. A man may have missed something along the way. But this is a mighty big thing to miss, and I can find no one of my generation whose memory of this period is at odds with my recollection.
It is not as if there were no transsexuals when I was growing up. What we now call “transgender” individuals were media celebrities and characters in films. Renée Richards was a big deal. Remember him? The state of New York allowed him to compete against women in tennis, which he now regrets because he knew being a man gave him an unfair advantage. (I write about this in Thomas Szasz, Medical Freedom, and the Tyranny of Gender Ideology). Tim Curry starred in The Rocky Horror Picture Show to great acclaim (I used to attend midnight showings in Coconut Grove, FL, and participate in the antics). The World According to Garp included a transsexual character, played by John Lithgow in the movie. (Lithgow is now suffering the slings and arrows of trans activists who are roasting him for participating in a J.K. Rowling production.)
Nobody really cared then because there was no project to make the rest of us affirm the delusion that a man can be a woman. We tolerated gender benders like everything else because, really, we didn’t care what a person thought of himself or how he expressed himself. My generation came of age in the 1970s, and our motto was, “Be whatever you want to be, do whatever you want to do, just as long as you don’t hurt anybody” (I think this was a line from the play Hair). Our favorite musical artists were gender benders. Hell, some of us did some gender bending ourselves.
But despite those high-profile cases, trans identification was so rare as to be remarkable. Now it is not so rare. Tracking the data on trans identification from 2014, by 2023, the phenomenon rose from less than half a percent to over 3 percent among youth aged 18-24, and from less than four-tenths of a percent to more than 1.6 percent among those aged 25-34. The trend is more dramatic among college youth, rising from two-tenths of one percent in 2011 to nearly 5 percent by 2025. This jump, which appears in some other Western countries as well, coincides with a dramatic jump in referrals to gender clinics. Since around 2010-2015, referrals to gender clinics have increased 10-20-fold, depending on the country you look at.
So, trans identification is not a stable presence? One might counter that the percentage of those who identify as trans is stable, but that growing acceptance of trans identities has allowed people to feel more confident in their identities and live openly in society. There are more now, not because the proportion of such people in society has grown, but because more people admit to being trans.
The problem with the counterpoint is that it is at loggerheads with the claim that the failure of the public to accept trans identities is a major cause of suicide and suicidality in this population. The appearance of emotional blackmail around this issue places the blame for the rise in suicidality on those who do not affirm the trans individual. Why should we only now find such a high rate of suicidality in youth today if widespread affirmation of trans identification is the norm? Huge swaths of society love-bomb trans people. It is a major part of progressive virtue signaling.
Some will further object that acceptance of trans identification has diminished of late. This is true. And so has the number of those who identify as trans. But that is a recent development. One may be hopeful that shifting public opinion has reduced the number of young people who identify this way, but that doesn’t change the trend that preceded the change in opinion.
So, I return to the initial thought that begins this section: If trans identities were a persistent and stable phenomenon, and if suicide in this population is a consequence of society not affirming them, then we would have noticed that decades ago. The problem of suicidality would have been worse back then. The growing acceptance of trans identification over the last 10-15 years would have been associated with a sharp reduction in suicide rates. But that is not what we see. Instead, we see the problem of suicide and attempted suicide in this population increase with the growing acceptance of trans identities. (It must be noted that suicide is rare. It is suicidal ideation that is elevated in this population. The vast majority of those who report such ideations do not end their lives.)
There is an additional problem with the suicidality claim. Studies on suicide in trans individuals often show that suicide mortality increases after sex-reassignment surgery. For instance, a longitudinal study in Sweden covering a period of thirty years found that people post-sex reassignment had a suicide mortality of around 19 times higher than the general population, and that suicide attempts were significantly elevated.
Studies of trans identifying individuals find that they have an extraordinarily high degree of comorbidities, i.e., other psychiatric conditions, such as bipolar and schizophrenia, as well as cluster B personality disorders, such as borderline disorder (see Never Again, and Yet Again: How Medicine Abandoned Science for Gender Ideology; Gender Denying Care: A Medical and Moral Crisis). These conditions are highly associated with suicidality.
Predictably, sex reassignment either does not help in these cases or increases the risk of suicide. This is understandable considering the consequences for persons suffering delusions trying to come to terms with having physically altered themselves. The results are generally not good aesthetically. In fact, they are often horrific (I will spare you the images). Also, gender affirming care is associated with significant and lifelong health problems.
Furthermore, the person is left with the nagging possibility that they are not the gender they want to be. This is what causes such individuals to constantly seek affirmation; if those around them tell them they are the gender they want to believe, then that may help them convince themselves. When they are not affirmed, they become sad or angry because it reminds them of their own self-doubt. Even when affirmed, the growing number of detransitioners testifies to the regret many of those who pursue gender affirming care feel. It is heartbreaking to watch them admit that they cannot undo what they should never have done in the first place.
Crucially, the approach of gender affirming care is at odds with the way psychiatry treats those who suffer from analogous disorders. A girl with anorexia is not affirmed in her delusion that she is overweight. Doctors do not perform bariatric surgery on her. (See Holy Anorexia and Its Analogs.) A man who believes he has too many arms or legs—variously labeled Body Integrity Identity Disorder (BIID), Body Integrity Dysphoria (BID), Xenomelia, or apotemnophilia (the last one classified as a sexual fetish)—is not prescribed amputation.
What would we think of a doctor who affirmed these delusions? It is recognized in these cases that a mental disorder is present, and the course of action focuses on resolving or ameliorating the condition, not on prescribing hormones or amputating body parts. Only with the delusion that a person is not the gender they are do we find doctors modifying physiology and physical appearance. This contradiction occurs because, unlike the other disorders, gender affirming care is profitable, the trans lobby is well-organized and determined, and the phenomenon of trans identification has been normalized. (See Orbiting Planet Madness: Consenting to Puberty and Other Absurdities; The Exploitative Act of Removing Healthy Body Parts).
The second thought that kept me up occurred to me earlier in the day, when I was returning from my hairdresser. I often think about ways to explain things to others, and my car is a useful incubator. I am a sociologist, and in sociology, there is an idea called “the definition of a situation.” It was developed by W. I. Thomas, an early symbolic interactionist. We often call this idea the “Thomas theorem” after him, even though it is not a theorem in the technical sense. At any rate, the Thomas theorem goes like this: “If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences.” (I have used the theorem before, e.g., The Definition of the Situation: Elon Musk and the Gesture; A Fact-Proof Screen: Black Lives Matter and Hoffer’s True Believer.)
The theorem explains the phenomenon under examination. While there have always been individuals who suffer from gender dysphoria (just as there have always been people who suffer from various types of body dysmorphia described above), the drastic rise in those who present with a trans identity is the result of what is known as social contagion, or mass psychogenic illness (see On Delusions, Illusions, and Collective Irrationality). We see this in moral panics and mass hysteria. It is not an uncommon phenomenon. A situation is defined as real, and so it is real in its consequences.
There are many examples of this. Anorexia comes in waves. Or consider the phenomenon of rapid-onset Tourette’s syndrome. It is well documented that girls who are friends with an individual with Tourette’s will, within months of knowing such an individual, also present with Tourette’s (see Why Aren’t We Talking More About Social Contagion?). This is because human beings are empathetic animals, and the young are especially susceptible to the pull of empathy.
We see the same thing with trans identification. Young lesbians who room together will often trans identify if one of the members of the pod is a trans identifying individual. In fact, the rise in trans identification among girls and young women—not just lesbians—is much more pronounced among females than males, because females are much more sociable than males, especially when they are young.
For those who are skeptical of the phenomenon of social contagion, it’s not an extraordinary thing. Consider how fashion works. Somebody sees something that “all the girls are wearing,” and they must wear it, too. The only neon dyed hair we saw as kids was on the lunch ladies. Today, young Americans of a particular political persuasion are almost certain to dye their hair with neon colors. Body piercings, tattoos, long or short beards (or no beards at all), etc. Most people feel the pull of contagion. If a fashion assumes the status of normality, those who resist its pull are the odd ones. This is the power of fads—and the determination of trend-mongers.
My objection to gender identity doctrine is manifold. First, it rationalizes body dysmorphia and social contagion in a manner that harms people. If gender affirming care were viewed objectively, as we did with the lobotomy, we would stop it. We would not accept the argument that we should leave the destruction of a misbehaving young man’s brain to doctors, affected individuals, and parents. The law should protect the young man from avarice and ideology.
Second, it is one thing for a person to believe they are the other gender, and even to express themselves by adopting atypical gender appearances and behaviors. As the foregoing attests, I am a libertarian on this matter. I look at a man in a dress today the same way I looked at such a man in the 1970s. But when David Bowie was asked why he wore a woman’s dress, he quipped that obviously it was a man’s dress, since he was wearing it, and plainly he is a man. However, it is quite another thing to compel society to affirm the lie that a man can be a woman.
For much of my life, I wore long hair. I was small in stature and slight in build. I could not grow a beard until I was in my thirties. I had very few hairs on my chest. I was misgendered a lot. Sometimes it was on purpose because long hair was unacceptable to some people; they wanted to drag me. Other times, the error was honest. It didn’t help that, for a bit, I styled my dress after Robert Plant and other rock stars I admired.
The point of sharing this slice of my biography is that we were free to appear how we wished, even if some did not wish us to appear that way, but we never demanded that those who did not share our culture, or who wished we appeared differently, affirm our culture and appearance. The same freedom of self-expression that allowed us to be who we wanted to be necessarily allowed those around us to be who they wanted to be, and that included their opinion of us.
A third objection concerns how we think about classes of things. When we talk about gender and race, we’re dealing with natural categories.
Gender is the easiest one to talk about because there are only two in animals and most plants, determined by large or small gametes: female and male (this is true even for intersex people). Gender is moreover an immutable characteristic. Gender is thus an objective category.
Race is also a natural fact, despite having a significant degree of social construction associated with it in the sense that people across cultures interpret race differently. To be sure, societies interpret gender differently cross-culturally/historically, but gender is a hard, natural fact on which cultural relativism has no bearing. With race, due to admixture (because people of different races can interbreed), it becomes fuzzy around the edges. But the natural fact of race is undeniable. The constellations of phenotypic characteristics cluster, a fact demonstrable through factor analysis. Homosexuality is a natural fact, as well, found not only in the human species but in many other species.
When we talk about civil rights, we have to respect those categories. To say that black women can’t go into a restroom or locker room that’s designated for white women only is discriminatory. The very fact of having such a racial designation is unjust. We have sex segregation, by contrast, because of the principle of equity. Women can’t fully enjoy equal rights unless the natural differences are taken into account. This is why we segregate sports or prisons by sex.
The trans identifying category is qualitatively different from any of those classes. It is either a mental disorder, as in the case of body dysmorphia, or it is a fetish, as in the case of autogynephilia. There are several other fetishes, pedophilia being one, addressed in this essay. If we presume that trans identification and gender dysphoria, like schizophrenia, for example, then we can treat those individuals compassionately and treat them medically in a therapeutic sense, because if a person really believes they are the other gender, this constitutes a delusion.
It’s similar to how a schizophrenic might believe all kinds of things that are not true. Apart from compassion and treatment, we don’t allow a schizophrenic man who thinks he should enter female-only spaces to do so based on his disorder. We recognize that he is a man, despite his psychiatric condition, and we require him to use the male bathroom. He gets no privileges. He doesn’t get to break the rules of sex segregated spaces because he suffers from schizophrenia. Likewise, we don’t grant pedophiles the privilege of violating the laws restricting sexual interactions between children and adults.
The same holds for transgender identity. Whether it is a mental disorder or a fetish, trans identification doesn’t give that individual the privilege to violate the rules of sex segregated spaces or to violate the rules that prevent sexual interactions between adults and children. It’s not discrimination to say to a trans person that he may not enter a female-only space; just because he thinks he’s a woman doesn’t give him any privilege to break the rule. The argument that trans rights are being violated because a trans identifying individual is not allowed to do something others are also forbidden to do is fallacious.
I saw a clip of a woman who presents as a man objecting to the law that forbids her from entering a male-only space. If the reader saw this woman, he would likely think it was a man. But this doesn’t change the fact that she’s not. I understand the trans man’s argument. Because she has so completely altered her appearance, the deception is near perfect, and so it would disturb women to have the trans man in the bathroom (this observation says the quiet part out loud).
However, in the case of a woman who passes as a man, it would be highly unlikely that a man would say, if this woman were in his restroom, that there is a woman in the restroom. It’s not something that men are going to be concerned about, since the concern is the statistics on male violence. Rape is almost exclusively male. You can find the odd case of the woman who rapes somebody, but that’s an extraordinary event and doesn’t change the fact that the real threat to women is men. Why women don’t want men in their spaces, even if those men present as women, is because it is impossible to tell the difference between a man who really thinks he’s a woman (my argument holds that it wouldn’t matter anyway), and a man with a fetish who dresses as a woman to enter a female space.
Whatever the individual case, it doesn’t obviate the general rule. While it may be frustrating and inconvenient, the trans individual’s options are restricted because there is a rule that supersedes any individual claim to a privilege. Because it is a qualitatively different category from gender or sexuality, it is not governed by the logic of civil rights.
A fourth objection concerns the homophobia and misogyny that underpin queer theory and praxis. As the Italian playwright Ignazio Salone powerfully entreated, a man must make a choice of comrades. I have chosen, among others, homosexuals and women. The reality that gender identity negates both compels me to reject the premise of doctrine. LGBTQ cannot be a thing because the “T” is antithetical to “LGB,” at the same time representing an entirely different quality of thing, and the “Q” is the ideology that attempts to force incommensurable things together. No higher unity is possible in revolving the contraction; no sublation is possible. One must cancel the other. I cannot betray my comrades.
So, back to the Thomas theorem. This is my final objection (for now). The demand that we affirm the delusion that a person can be the gender they are not—or two genders simultaneously, or no gender at all—is a project to change the definition of the situation. It is to move the delusion beyond the individual suffering from it to an illusion, which, as Sigmund Freud observed in his 1927 essay, “The Future of an Illusion,” gives it the character of religious belief.
As I explained in a recent essay on my platform (see The Glass Man is a Man: Negating Delusions by Making Everybody Delusional), if a man believes he is made of glass, then he is delusional, but if a society believes in glass men, then everybody lives in an illusion. It is like attending a magic show where everybody really believes that what they are seeing really is magic. It is the stance of psychiatry to accept a delusion when it has achieved the status of illusion (which is why psychiatry is unscientific). It is a basic fact of human nature that the definition of a situation can be universalized in this way. Most people in a society can live in an illusion. But I cannot. I will not. And I don’t believe you should, either.
What is more, it is neither compassionate nor kind to lie to people who believe plainly untrue things, especially when it is associated with self-harm. If somebody is cutting himself, the compassionate person stops him. There are people with alcohol and drug problems. Some people falsely believe they are overweight. They are harming themselves. You may not want to help them overcome their problems. But the least you can do is not participate in their denial and self-harm.
A truly caring person tells the truth. Yes, there are little white lies you must tell, like the ugly baby is cute. But lying to a person who believes an impossible thing that will, if affirmed, harm them, is not a little white lie. It’s a big lie. And that big lie is what we are being asked to believe. Don’t believe it.
freedom and reason 