Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality

by Helen Joyce

A liberal, secular society can accommodate many subjective belief systems, even mutually contradictory ones. What it must never do is impose one group’s beliefs on everyone else.

You can subscribe to the doctrine of reincarnation or resurrection alongside fellow believers, or on your own. Gender self-identification, however, is a demand for validation by others. The label is a misnomer. It is actually about requiring others to identify you as a member of the sex you proclaim. Since evolution has equipped humans with the ability to recognise other people’s sex, almost instantaneously and with exquisite accuracy, very few trans people ‘pass’ as their desired sex. And so to see them as that sex, everyone else must discount what their senses are telling them.

Until recently, hardly any children presented at gender clinics, but in the past decade the number has soared. Every one of the dozen or so studies of children with gender dysphoria – discomfort and misery caused by one’s biological sex – has found that most grow out of it, as long as they are supported in their gender non-conformity and not encouraged in a cross-sex identification. Many of these ‘desisters’ are destined to grow up gay: there is copious evidence of a strong link between early gender non-conformity and adult homosexuality.

‘You’re here because you know something. What you know you can’t explain, but you feel it. You’ve felt it your entire life, that there’s something wrong with the world. You don’t know what it is, but it’s there, like a splinter in your mind, driving you mad.’ With these words the mysterious Morpheus tells Thomas Anderson, aka Neo, the hero of The Matrix, that his life is a sham. The film, released in 1999, has been interpreted in many ways, including as religious allegory, a vision of an online future and an expression of teenage alienation. But many trans people regard it as expressing their experiences. Some gender therapists even prescribe it as viewing for their clients’ families. It was written, produced and directed by the Wachowski siblings, both of whom were born male and came out as transwomen after its release. In 2020, Lilly, the younger and second to transition, confirmed that it was a ‘trans metaphor’. This chapter will use the film to explain gender-identity ideology. Its characters represent the figures that stalk transactivists’ discourse, from transphobes to detransitioners, and its premise and plot illuminate their worldview.

Pre-pubescent children easily pass as the opposite sex, and after socially transitioning may give little thought to their true sex for years. When adolescence beckons, they become distressed and agitate for puberty blockers. And, as much clinical experience now shows, that is an almost sure route to cross-sex hormones. So parents who socially transition their children are fast-tracking them to medical and surgical transition, all the while believing that such decisions are many years away. Pressure is growing to bring forward those irreversible steps. Since children who socially transition are unlikely to desist, the reasoning goes, why make them linger in a child’s body while their peers go through puberty? Some clinicians now prescribe cross-sex hormones below the former threshold of sixteen, and a small but increasing number offer surgery. A 2018 paper Olson-Kennedy co-authored mentions mastectomies being performed on transboys (that is, natal girls) as young as thirteen. She has been captured on video (by a parent from 4thWaveNow, a group of parents opposed to gender-identity ideology) brushing off parents’ worries about surgery on minors, saying that ‘if you want breasts at a later point in your life, you can go and get them’. In 2020 Trinity Neal, a sixteen-year-old male child in Delaware, had genital sex-reassignment surgery paid for by Medicaid. Gender clinicians who resist affirmation have been side-lined – or worse. The highest-profile casualty is Ken Zucker, who...

One paper, published in January 2020 in Pediatrics, a high-impact journal, claims that puberty blockers make it less likely that a person will consider suicide. But an analysis by Michael Biggs of Oxford University published a few months later in Archives of Sexual Behavior (the journal edited by Ken Zucker) shows that it is catastrophically flawed. The analysis is based on data extracted from a low-quality, non-representative online survey. No attempt was made to ensure that respondents were in America, or to stop people responding repeatedly (each response was entered into a prize draw). The survey is known to have elicited nonsensical answers about whether respondents had taken puberty blockers – most who said they had were already older than sixteen when the drugs were first used in gender medicine in the US. And finally, there was no attempt to adjust for pre-existing differences between those who took blockers (or said they had), and those who said they would have liked to. Clinicians would have been less likely to give the drugs to people with severe mental-health issues, for example, who would then be more likely to contemplate suicide for reasons unrelated to not getting blockers. Another widely reported paper, also published in 2020, claimed that undergoing ‘conversion therapy’ aimed at changing someone’s gender identity is associated with worse future mental health. It, too, has been subjected to an article-length demolition by other researchers. It is based on ...

Facebook group for parents taking the gender-affirmative approach with their children, the importance of the transition-or-death narrative is clear to see. If a newcomer expresses doubts, old hands immediately intervene to say they must affirm their child’s gender to stop them killing themselves. And another thing becomes apparent: some parents go beyond lovingly accepting their ‘trans child’ and actively encourage transition, perhaps to boost their liberal credentials, or because they like being their child’s saviour, or because they enjoy the excitement and attention a trans child brings. In discussions about gender dysphoria, many say their child has never experienced it, but merely announced when just a toddler that they were the opposite sex. Plenty have two or more trans children. One says she has eight children, without a single ‘boring cis child in the whole bunch!’ Such groups function to normalise ideas and behaviour that might otherwise lead parents to doubt the wisdom of the gender-affirmative approach. There are discussions of ‘tucking’ underpants for transgirls, which squash the genitals between the legs, and ‘packers’ for transboys (soft prosthetic penises and testicles that give a crotch bulge). ‘Best boy bump for the little guys’, runs the ad for one; the ‘Bitty Bug’, a tiny crocheted version, is available from Ravelry, a crafting forum. Reading as an outsider, these parents seem to have collectively lost their minds. But they are following the approach re...

In the late 1960s, some European liberals thought that breaking down sexual taboos was a task that had to be started young. In German kindergartens run along radical-left lines, teachers encouraged children to fondle them, view pornography and simulate sexual intercourse. Contemporaneous accounts show that parents often felt qualms, which they suppressed because of what they had been told about how children should naturally behave. What happened was child-abuse, though motivated by political conviction rather than sexual desire. But it did not take long before paedophiles saw their chance.

In 1979, Eileen Fairweather, a tyro journalist, was writing for Spare Rib, a feminist magazine. She was assigned to read the book Paedophilia: The Radical Case, which argued for lowering the age of consent to four. The author, Tom O’Carroll, was an early member of PIE who was later imprisoned for child-abuse. Fairweather recalls ‘anguished, earnest’ discussions about what to write. ‘I did draft something, arguing that the existing age of consent was not “patriarchal”, but protected children,’ she says. ‘But I never even dared show it to anyone.’ Paedophiles had so thoroughly infiltrated the gay movement by that time that if you dared criticise those calling for ‘child sexual liberation’ you were branded anti-gay. Fairweather says she sees ‘the same intimidation and paralysis of intelligence’ today, caused by the fear of being called transphobic. In the 1990s, Fairweather won press awards for her work uncovering paedophile rings in British children’s homes and schools. She became an acknowledged expert on how paedophiles exploit ‘institutional

The idea that being a man or woman is a matter of declaration offers women several false promises. One is that you can identify out of the exigencies of a female body, and by doing so gain access to male privilege. Alternatively, you can enjoy the benefits of being a desirable young woman in a society dominated by men – but later avoid the poisonous combination of ageism and misogyny that positions post-menopausal women as such a society’s most disposable people, since it is now understood that the mind is what matters. Body-denialism also offers women a way to suppress the shame and rage that they can feel at being physically weaker than men, and vulnerable to rape. It is teenage girls and young women who are most susceptible to believing all this, as the messiest realities of female lives – pregnancy, wanted and unwanted; childbirth; infertility; menopause – are, for the most part, still in their future.

In its erasure of sex categories, gender-identity ideology seeks to change not just the present, but the past, too. Any woman who, by force, luck or guile, succeeded in transcending societal strictures on her sex is now at risk of being retroactively transitioned. Boudicca and Joan of Arc are both often described as transmen. So is the Pharaoh Hatshepsut (who ‘was assigned female at birth but intermittently dressed and ruled as a King’, according to Amnesty UK). In 2019 the Washington Post removed mention of Jennie Hodgers, who cross-dressed in order to fight in the American Civil War, from a podcast entitled ‘Women who won wars’. In an apology, it said Hodgers’s inclusion had not been ‘in keeping with Washington Post style, which states that people should be referred to by their current identity’.

see Love Lives Here by Amanda Jetté Knox, a Canadian woman whose husband of twenty-two years came out to her as a transwoman in 2014, just a few months after one of their children came out as a transgirl. (The child now identifies as non-binary.) Knox now regards herself as a lesbian who was hiding that truth from herself until her spouse’s revelation. Love Lives Here was longlisted for several Canadian literary awards.

Women who refuse to be silenced must seek refuge in online anonymity. One is ‘Tinsel Angel’, who lives in the north of England. She met her ex-husband in a nightclub two decades ago. Before she moved in with him he told her that he used to cross-dress, but hadn’t since he met her. They married three years after meeting, and had a child a year later. Then followed several years when he cross-dressed but tried to keep it secret, and repeatedly promised to stop. ‘It made him unattractive to me at a visceral level,’ she says. ‘There was a pattern of lies being discovered, compromises being made and broken, boundaries being put in place and overstepped.’ One New Year’s Eve, her husband said that his resolution was to ‘do more girl stuff’. Tinsel insisted that he visit their family doctor, who referred him to a gender clinic. The year in limbo before full assessment was ‘hideous, terrible, horrible’. When he was finally seen, he received a diagnosis of gender dysphoria and decided to present as a woman full-time. ‘That was my red line,’ says Tinsel. She left soon afterwards. ‘If I told someone who didn’t know me well why my marriage ended, they would say, “that must have been very difficult for him,” ’ she says. A couple of years later, she came across the expression ‘trans widow’. ‘It’s very descriptive. He’s not dead, but his identity is dead. Actually, it’s worse: you’re supposed to pretend it never existed. I have heard widows say, “my husband and I adored each other, and I ...

Gender-identity ideology removes all grounds for challenging any male in women’s spaces. Signs on the campus of one British university spell it out: ‘If you’re in a public bathroom and you think a stranger’s gender doesn’t match the sign on the door, follow these steps: 1. Don’t worry about it, they know better than you.’ In other words, single-sex spaces are now in name only. To decide whether that matters you need to understand why they even exist. The reasons fall under three headings: risk reduction, comfort and an opportunity for women to be somewhere that their needs are centred.

One consequence of opening women’s spaces to males is to recast two common male sex crimes as rights. Exhibitionism – non-consensually displaying one’s genitals – is so common that many women will tell you that the first time they saw a penis was when a stranger flashed at them. Voyeurism – non-consensually viewing someone in a state of undress – is known to be a precursor to contact sex crimes.