After researching and writing 23 articles on the topic over these past six months, I just thought I’d be able to say I am crystal clear on how it all went down. The problem is, the story ends up sounding like this:
You see, a small group of wealthy older men discovered they shared an awkward fetish1. Upon careful planning, they devised a strategy to leverage their sexual compulsion as an imaginative movement for social progress powered by a vast army of shallow thinkers.2 This vast army, with matériel supplied by the world’s most powerful public companies,3 would simply wage a quiet hostile takeover of western liberal culture, justified by an objective fantasy. Nary a nursery school nor university nor arts organization would emerge unreconstructed.4
The vast volunteer army of shallow thinkers would perform this task for the exclusive benefit of that small group of strange wealthy men, whose gains would be paid for with half the population’s fundamental rights.
Even as they wrought social upheaval, the vast army would simultaneously see to the sterilization of as many youth as could be convinced they’d been ‘assigned the wrong body,’5 this being a tactical imperative for the campaign’s ultimate victory. Which would in turn require the full cooperation of all the governors and practitioners of medical science,6 an ambitious feat best achieved via the wholesale crediting of extravagantly flawed data.7 Finally, no one but those named herein (i.e., the wealthy fetishists, shallow thinkers, educators and medics) must be permitted to notice any of this; thus requiring the news media willingly to smother any impulse to notice it themselves.8
Not to be a downer, but isn’t that about where the evidence points? Of course I haven’t yet pulled every thread or examined every perverse incentive, but I feel I’ve covered the basics, and the exercise leaves me without much hope that further inquiry will bring a rosier outlook.
If this were a book and I were just a curious reader, I would say at least one central link remains missing, i.e.: what’s going on inside the mind of the trans-identifying young woman?
We have powerful testimony from detransitioned young women — including, by the way, a superb six-part series on the PITT Substack, of which part 5 was just published a few days ago. Yes, detransitioners have done heroic work, usually at great personal cost, to raise awareness and hopefully save others from harm. From their testimonies we’ve learned most of what we know about how the seduction process works, and on whom it works best.
But what about other outcomes? Aren’t there some women who earnestly believe their ‘transitions’ are unqualified successes? I have looked in vain for serious writing by trans-identifying women who would have us know the reasons they feel they’ve flourished due to presenting as male, and I’m inviting suggestions.
To be clear, I’m not talking about the popular ‘Female to Male’ presenters on YouTube or other social media. They are easy to find, but their shows are just that — shows, designed to market the appeal of looking young, androgynous and edgy while enjoying the protections, prestige and victim-valor conferred by the ‘pride’ flag. These role models never seem to leave their bedrooms, which I generally take to be in a parent’s home, because otherwise wouldn’t they welcome viewers into their high-functioning-trans-man living rooms? Where’s the pool table? Where’s the wet bar, and the dart board? Even a tennis racquet or a set of golf clubs would give the appearance of a life outside that room. I’ve never heard one of them mention their law school classes or even a part-time job at Starbuck’s. Their online influence work is measured and monetized: the incentives are pretty straightforward.
Five or six people I know have told me they know a young woman who identifies as a ‘trans man’ and ‘he’ is doing fine. I can’t say they’re wrong, but I can point to all the detransitioners who say they emphatically asserted the same thing until they couldn’t anymore.
Three of the most reputable authorities in the gender-ideology discourse are women who present as men and are willing to acknowledge as much: Buck Angel, Aaron Kimberly and Aaron Terrell. All of them use their platforms for one main objective, which is to urge caution and restraint before resorting to sex-trait modification. All of them forcefully oppose any such ‘care’ for minors.
Chase Strangio and her New Yorker profiler Masha Gessen both present as defiantly righteous former-women. I use that phrasing because both have wavered between he/him and they/them ‘identities.’ Regardless, Gessen is a lesbian mother who ‘transitioned’ around the usual age of menopause, and Strangio is a 40-something ACLU attorney whose status and livelihood depend on her commitment to any identity other than the biological one. Neither is the reliable narrator I’m looking for.
Maybe I’m missing some good candidates— if so, please leave a comment— but it feels like we’re down to Ellen/Elliot Page.
I didn’t read Pageboy, but I read some excerpts and about fifty reviews on Amazon. The picture they paint is familiar: a girl who’s experienced family instability, some abuse, an eating disorder, and persistent same-sex attraction she’s not comfortable with. It’s also somewhat atypical in that she stars in a hit feature film which exposes her to harassment by Hollywood creeps with power over her career. Even the charitable reviews notice that Page is a little incoherent, and maybe not completely sure what constitutes ‘authentic truth.’ The cover photo is, arguably, the point: it shows a woman in her twenties with a gymnast’s body that looks expertly beefed up by hormones and personal training; and a face that is androgynously beautiful and, importantly, young, like all the influencers. These are the apparent requirements for a professional ‘trans man’ to win public favor and hold onto it for a little while. It’s impossible to know whether Elliot Page is flourishing, but one thing many reviewers lament about the book is its bleak, depressive tone.
I’m left feeling that a deeper understanding of young women who pursue male identities will remain elusive. It’s an uneasy feeling given that my own daughter’s story is one I don’t really know. Last fall I showed her a post I’d written because I wanted her permission to publish a sentence or two about our relationship and an old photo of the two of us. She read the post, gave her permission, then surprised and delighted me by saying she might at some point write a guest article describing her ‘gender journey.’ I followed up gently a few times before putting it to the side. I can’t even guess what that testimony would reveal; I might never know.
(My daughter just read and approved that last paragraph, by the way, adding she’d prefer male pronouns but wouldn’t insist on them. That’s the oddball space we occupy after nearly eight years. Rookies: I know it’s not what you want to hear, but you’d do well to settle in, breathe deeply and hydrate.)
One thing I can do now is have conversations with parents and others whose untold stories I’m very eager to hear. That’s what I’m planning to do next. I bought some recording equipment and recruited my first guest, who is a lawyer, writer and ROGD mom with smart insights about navigating these waters.
I will post our inaugural conversation as a podcast—which has to be called UnMuted, right?— sometime next week. I’m excited to try something new, and (literally) bring in other voices, so please stay tuned!
I agree with all your points about groups 2 and 3. I know autism traits are shown to be over represented in trans-ID youth in the UK, and it’s reasonable to infer the same is true in the US. But I’d say the exploitive goals of group 3 combined with the access given to all those exploitive adults via tech solve the case without the necessity to prove group 1 causation. I think teens are choosing ‘trans’ because the handmaidens of ‘kindness’ are everywhere facilitating and validating the exploitation. In this reality, delusional thinking isn’t required of the victims.
Here's what I think hasn't been taken into account yet in most analyses of the AGPs' successes:
1) People with similar experiences and pathologies can and do end up doing the same things without ever coordinating with each other. It's human nature. Many, many social trends that happen do so with little or no "conspiracy" involved. People really are the same wherever you go, as 2 wise people once said. They are the same in bad ways as well as good. And the internet and social media greatly enhanced people's abilities to see other people like them, and embolden them. Note that this, again, requires no coordination or conspiracy. Just getting on the internet.
2) When people are hurt and angry, they understandably look for someone to blame. It's a lot easier to blame someone if you convince yourself that those motherfuckers did it all ON PURPOSE.
They also tend to be more motivated by their anger to write about it than the people who see it as an unfortunate trend rather than conspiracy.
3) What changed? One big thing that hasn't gotten enough attention: AGPs stopped hiding in shame in part because of the steady trend on the Left toward Not Judging People Negatively.
Take this 1991 study for example, that showed 53% of mothers of GD boys met the clinical criteria for Borderline Personality Disorder, compared to just 6% of mothers of normal boys:
https://www.jaacap.org/article/S0890-8567(10)60067-6/pdf
The article actually uses the words "normal" and "disorder' several times, and clearly treats the condition as a pathology, none of which would be allowed today, 30+ years later (WOW would I love to read an interview with the 2 women who did that study - was there ever a continuation of this "pilot" research? What stopped it? Why didn't they include fathers? Etc.)
Today, the "stigma" of being seriously fucked in the head is gone: people are posting their psychopathologies in detail on their online profiles as a badges of pride.
We have been the proverbial frogs being slowly boiled in a vat of incremental political correctness, for what, 50 years? 100?
4) That same unwillingness to speak up and judge is what keeps each individual liberal silent when an AGP acts up and transgresses a boundary. Thousands of AGPs who are unaware of each other's existences, transgressing one boundary, then another, then another, then another.
Is any of it a conspiracy? Sure, you can say that what Pritzker and Rothblatt and the rest are doing (Bilek's excellent article here, for those who haven't already seen it: https://thefederalist.com/2018/02/20/rich-white-men-institutionalizing-transgender-ideology/ )
is definitely coordination. But a lot of the money is opportunistic, after-the-trend-began investment: they didn't start the fire.