On the podcast Triggernometry, Helen Webberley, a former physician who trucks in child mutilation, said something quite revealing about gender identity doctrine. She said that gender identity is fixed at birth (or possibly conception, though “we don’t know,” she admitted). Whatever one’s body looks like, it’s the body of one’s gender identity, she explained, which is something one is born with. Bodies don’t matter. Of course they don’t. That’s why Webberley is so obsessed with changing their appearance.
Put simply, in Webberley’s warped worldview, it’s gender identity that determines the person’s gender. A woman is a person claiming to be one. If that sounds circular, that’s because it is.
I have written about Webberley and the problem of circular definitions before. In my December 20, 2025 essay, An Ellipse is a plane figure with four straight sides and four right angles, one with unequal adjacent sides (in contrast to a Circle), I write about Webberley’s appearance on Andrew Gold’s Heretics podcast, in which she refuses to define what a woman is. She skirts the question by claiming it was a “gotcha question.” But it’s not. It’s the crux of the matter. Unless one has a non-tautological definition, one is not in the ballpark of defining reality. (See also Believing Something Does Not Make it True.)
Both interviews are highly revealing of the Queer worldview. The Triggernometry podcast is perhaps more revealing of the fascistic mind at work here because her debate partner, Kellie-Jay Keen (aka Posie Parker), provokes her extremism. Keen, for those who may not know, is the British activist who caused a stir several years ago with her anti-trans slogan “adult human female.” I embedded a link to Andrew Gold’s Heretics podcast in that podcast. I do the same here:
Konstanine Kisin, one of the hosts of Triggernometry, who moderated the debate, brought up a former guest, the transman Buck Angel, who, while appearing as a male, would not have a body identical to Kisin’s since he had a vagina. He brought this up because Webberley had said that a transman is indistinguishable from a cisman. Kisin said they could not be indistinguishable since Angel has a vagina. Webberley insisted that Angel is a man with a vagina. Some men have vaginas, in her worldview. In fact, some men not only have vaginas, but they also have breasts and all the rest of it. That doesn’t make them women. It all goes back to gender identity. Nothing is really fixed except that. Gender identity is the soul in the religion of Queer. It is a priori and eternal.
Thus, Webberley assumes gender identity. It is an article of faith that undergirds the doctrine. It is known only because individuals testify to its existence—or when others testify to it on their behalf. How would we know Angel has always been a man? Because he tells us he is? (Angel admits to being a woman, for the record.) People tell others all sorts of things. A child might tell his parents he is a cat. It would be naive to accept the child’s claim at face value. He may be pretending he is a cat, but he is not. Although it would be silly to do so, we have objective ways of testing his claim.
Keen wonders whether there is some test to see whether gender identity is real. That question is not so silly. Webberley obscures Keen’s point by talking about the surgical procedure appendectomy. Doctors aren’t always sure that a person is suffering from appendicitis (and apparently, in roughly 40 percent of the cases, they are not). Webberley would like us to accept that, since, like appendicitis, we do not always know for sure whether something is real, it is okay to alter bodies with drugs, hormones, and surgeries.
Webberley represents appendicitis as analogous to gender identity while admitting that there are objective metrics that help doctors feel more confident about whether an appendectomy is necessary, such as white blood cell count. So it’s not analogous. She also skirts the fact that appendicitis is an emergency situation in which committing a Type I error, i.e., removing a healthy appendix by mistake, outweighs the risk of a Type II error, i.e., missing a diseased appendix and sending a patient home. Doctors prefer a Type I error because a burst appendix is deadly.
It was disappointing that neither Kisen nor Keen noted the problems with her analogy. However, the question remains: is there an objective metric for diagnosing gender identity? Of course, there isn’t. Gender identity is a subjective thing and therefore unfalsifiable. It exists only in the minds of those who claim it and the industry that invented it. However, one can test to determine a person’s gender, which is based on gametes, chromosomes, and reproductive anatomy. That is a falsifiable claim. Moreover, if we hold Webberley to her assertion of gender identity, then her entire argument for endocrinological and surgical intervention collapses, since a man’s female-appearing body is already a man’s body.
I want to drill down on this because it exposes how cracked Queer theory is. In Webberley’s worldview, a boy can be born with what appears to be a girl’s body. But it’s not a girl’s body; it’s a boy’s body because his gender identity is that of a boy. This identity is innate and fixed. For Webberley, that is the truth of the matter. Those who think it’s a girl’s body—like the doctor who wrongly assigned sex at birth—are in error since boys can have bodies that look like those of girls. Put simply, a boy is a boy whatever his body looks like.
If this is true, why transition the boy to make his body look like a boy’s body? Boys’ bodies can naturally look like girls’ bodies, so what needs to be changed? A boy can have small, feminine hands (Andrew Gold made this point in his interrogation of Webberley). The boy already looks like what he is. This objection is met with the psychiatric construct gender dysphoria. “Because the boy feels uncomfortable looking like a girl.” Oh horror. Girls’ bodies are so awful. How terrible for the boy to be trapped in a girl’s body.
Misogyny aside, would it not be better, instead of pursuing radical medical measures that will rob “him” of sexual function and make “him” a lifelong medical patient, to help the “boy” negotiate “his” dysphoria by understanding that boys’ bodies can look like girls’ bodies? Isn’t the queer argument that such expectations are oppressive? Why change a body with puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgeries if by definition the patient in question already has the right body? The girl won’t ever have a penis, but that’s okay because some boys don’t have penises. Some boys have vaginas instead. They have boy vaginas. It’s just a range of variation. Celebrate diversity rather than compel individuals to conform to stereotypes.
For that very reason, misogyny should not be put aside, but rather confronted, since it is in its internalized form that the girl wishes she wasn’t a girl. She is unhappy because she wants to be a boy. That is the problem to be addressed. Manufacturing a simulated sexual identity does not solve the problem of self-loathing. Amputating breasts and attaching fake penises aren’t analogous to correcting birth defects or the results of accidents.
This is the problem with the prefix “trans.” If gender identity is fixed at birth, then the boy is not changing his identity, only his appearance, and therefore isn’t trans, which literally means “across, beyond, or through.” There is nothing to get across to or beyond. There is nothing to push through. He is already on the correct side. If boys can have vaginas, they aren’t trans anything. They are simply boys with vaginas. Of course, boys don’t have vaginas (not real ones anyway). I am steelmanning the Queer argument.
I’m confident Webberley did not intend to do this, but her argument erases the concept of “trans.” And, if there’s no such thing as “trans,” then there is no such thing as “cis.” We are either boys or girls, some with vaginas and some with penises, neither exclusive to gender identity.
The debate also covered cross-sex hormones. The problem here follows from what was stated above. Webberley says we are merely giving the boy (which he is already, thanks to gender identity) testosterone because he does not have testes to produce it. But, according to Webberley, some boys have ovaries, which produce estrogen. So why would doctors not let him fully develop according to the trajectory of a boy with ovaries? Why work at cross-purposes with the boy’s body? The doctors aren’t fixing anything because nothing is broken. Society needs to accept him for what he is, not how he looks.
Webberley’s argument is entirely circular. A boy is a boy because he or others say he is, a thing that they cannot define. The truth beyond the circularity is that some girls have come to believe, for whatever reason (I have suggested self-loathing, but there could be others), that they are boys. It’s like a girl with anorexia who thinks she’s fat. The appropriate course of action is psychological counseling to help her see herself the way she is objectively: emaciated and on a path to self-destruction. We don’t prescribe her Ozempic or perform bariatric surgery. She’s not really fat; she thinks she is. We do not affirm her delusion. That would be medical malpractice.
As for whether adults should be able to change their bodies, Keen fails to aggressively pursue the relevant ethical point when this subject was raised. It is not whether a person who thinks he is a cat believes he should have the freedom to undergo surgery to make himself appear more cat-like. The ethical question is whether doctors should be allowed to make the delusional man more cat-like. If a man thinks he has one arm too many, we don’t amputate one of them to make him happy. He is clearly suffering from a brain or psychiatric disorder, and the ethical thing to do is deal with that, not manufacture a physical disability. (See The Exploitative Act of Removing Healthy Body Parts.)
Gender affirming care, which is, in point of fact, sex-denying and not care at all, is a paradigm of medical atrocities. Doctors who commit atrocities should go to prison. Nazi doctors were hanged at Nuremberg. Helen Webberley belongs in prison. (See Medical Atrocities Then and Now: The Dark Continuity of Gender Affirming Care; The Persistence of Medical Atrocities: Lobotomy, Nazi Doctors, and Gender Affirming Care; Fear and Loathing in the Village of Chamounix: Monstrosity and the Deceits of Trans Joy.)
Lots of other things were said during the debate, but Webberley went full fascist at the end, saying that people like Keen are not entitled to their views, nor should debates like the one they just had—that she had agreed to participate in—be allowed. What should happen to those who criticize gender identity doctrine?? Criminal prosecution, Webberley said. Only Webberley’s views should be allowed. Every podcast on the topic should be a celebration of gender identity doctrine. I’m not exaggerating. She said this and more. She even said that correctly gendering a queer person should be a crime.
Keen, for her part, agrees with me concerning atrocities. She also agrees with me on free speech. She does not advocate punishment for those who believe gender identity is a thing. One is free to say that some girls are really boys with vaginas. Others are free to criticize this belief. But those who act to harm others—that’s a different matter. Speech acts and atrocities are qualitatively different things. Webberley is a wicked person.
freedom and reason 