Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality

by Helen Joyce

In the early twentieth century, however, Hirschfeld and a handful of other European sexologists were developing a new model. Surprisingly, their theories were uninformed by, and impossible to reconcile with, evolutionary theory and Charles Darwin’s insights into the origin and significance of the two sexes.

For Ashley, the hearing in 1969 was an utter humiliation. ‘Intercourse using the completely artificially constructed cavity could never constitute true intercourse’, Lord Justice Ormrod ruled. Her deportment was ‘reminiscent of the accomplished female impersonator’. Most devastatingly, he concluded that ‘the respondent is not, and was not, a woman at the date of the ceremony of marriage, but was, at all times, a male’. It was irrelevant, he said, that Corbett had known Ashley was transsexual. Only the union of a man and a woman constituted marriage. And Ashley and Corbett were both men. The ruling established in British law that, at least for the purposes of marriage, man and woman were purely biological terms. Since no operation could change biological sex, no transsexual would be allowed to marry in their new sex role. Since the National Health Service was already carrying out the occasional sex-change operation, that meant the British state was willing to pay for a man’s body to be reshaped to approximate a woman’s, but not to enable that person to marry, since a union with a woman would be practically and socially impossible, and one with a man would be unlawful. (At the time the obvious solution – to allow same-sex marriage – was inconceivable.)

In 1955 Tamara Rees, a male transsexual who had undergone surgery in the Netherlands a year after Christine Jorgensen’s operation, married a man in a church in Reno. The county clerk declared himself unwilling to look beyond first impressions, saying that ‘as long as they come in here with a dress on, they’re women’. But four years later, when Jorgensen and her fiancé applied for a marriage licence in New York, her fame invited closer scrutiny. Her attorney pointed to her passport, which gave her sex as female, and a letter from Harry Benjamin stating that she ‘must be considered female’. Nonetheless, the city clerk decided that her birth certificate, which she had been unable to change, barred her marriage to a man.

book, How Sex Changed: A History of Transsexuality in the United States,

that, between Jorgensen’s sex change in 1952 and death from bladder cancer in 1989, the sine qua non of womanhood in American law and practice changed. As doctors, journalists and lawyers wrote and talked about Jorgensen and other transsexuals, they spun into being a new way of thinking about what it meant to be a woman. No longer was it possession of the type of body that can become pregnant; now it was the ability to have receptive heterosexual sex, twinned with an inner sense of being female, something like a subjective version of John Money’s gender roles.

Now the focus had narrowed. What mattered was whether an individual could provide the sexual, not reproductive, services that a man expected of his wife – an individual rather than societal contract – and how she felt about herself. Though it was not yet consistently named, ‘gender identity’ had arrived.

The title of Green’s book, published in 1987, gives his findings away: The ‘Sissy Boy Syndrome’ and the Development of Homosexuality. (He chose his title as a comment on the stigmatisation of effeminacy.)

Since then, another dozen studies, in various countries, have looked at children suffering from misery caused by cross-sex feelings – now called gender dysphoria. In every one the majority outgrew their dysphoria, and a majority of those ‘desisters’ turned out gay

Susan Bradley, a child psychiatrist who set up Toronto’s first gender clinic for children in 1975, recalls a child she worked with whose dysphoria continued into adolescence. They lost touch for a time. Then she ran into him. He was dressed in smart men’s clothes, and told her that he had fallen in love with a young man who loved him back. He now accepted himself as gay, and had abandoned all thought of being a girl.

Green tried hard to persuade the parents of his ‘sissy boys’ to be accepting. ‘We would say: you don’t need to be a jock to be a boy,’ he told me when I interviewed him in London in 2017, two years before his death. ‘You don’t need to be a girl to draw pictures. There are other boys like your son. Find [non-feminine, non-macho] activities he likes, such as board games. We would say to the father: “So he’s not an athlete. He still deserves a father.” ’

Since 2003 Vasey has spent much of his time in Samoa, studying the fa’afafine, a ‘third gender’ consisting of males who were highly effeminate in early youth and often not discouraged in that feminine self-expression as they grew up. Samoan culture regards them as neither men nor women (though still unambiguously male). Fa’afafine rarely undergo body modification, and do not typically experience distress because of their sex. ‘If a fa’afafine went to New Zealand or Australia and had a sex-change operation and returned to Samoa, no one in Samoa would say that individual is now a woman,’ says Vasey. ‘But traditional, non-Western frameworks for understanding masculine women or feminine men as “third genders” are often warped when viewed through a Western lens, which reinterprets them as transwomen or transmen. It’s a type of colonialism.’

But male cross-dressers do not usually express cross-sex identification. ‘I was looking for the bridge’, says Blanchard, ‘between wearing women’s clothing as a masturbatory aid and wanting to be a woman.’

form. Blanchard turned to Greek to name this sexual desire: ‘autogynephilia’, which means love of oneself as a woman.

All in all, Blanchard saw no reason to change his initial broad-brush division between androphilic transsexuals and the rest. The self-described bisexuals in the second group, he concluded, were autogynephiles who were attracted to women, but also desired men to validate their feminine identities. Those who described themselves as asexual were concealing their desires, perhaps even from themselves. He later drew finer distinctions within the group of autogynephiles, according to the nature of the fantasies. If these centred on clothing, the man was more likely to be content without medical transition. If they centred on the body, especially on imagined female genitalia, he was more likely to be severely dysphoric, and less likely to be able to find peace without surgery. None of Blanchard’s work was intended to put obstacles in the way of transition. He wanted to understand the clinic’s patients, and help them decide what to do.

She talks about the ‘pain, frustration and incomprehension’ autogynephiles feel about not having the bodies they want. Many of their fantasies are clearly sexual, even if unusual – for example, imagining being penetrated in a non-existent vagina while placing something in one’s anus. But almost anything coded female or feminine, she writes, can cause an ‘intense, perplexing, shame-inducing erotic arousal that seems to simultaneously animate and discredit [autogynephiles’] desires to have female bodies’. Her informants recount erotic fantasies of pushing a baby buggy, joining a knitting circle, being called ‘ma’am’, having bubble-gum-blowing contests with girls, wearing clip-on earrings, taking birth-control pills, having a Pap smear test, and so on and on.

‘When you call a typical gay man homosexual, you’re not disturbing his sexual hopes and desires. By contrast, autogynephilia is perhaps best understood as a love that would really rather we didn’t speak its name.’ This explains why such rage is mostly directed at women, even though it is men who commit almost all anti-trans harassment and violence. Blanchard’s observations of extremist transactivism in recent years have led him to believe that the leaders are mostly autogynephiles. Their anger results from ‘envy of women and resentment at not being accepted by women as one of them’, he has tweeted. ‘They direct their ire at women because it is women who frustrate their desires. Men are largely irrelevant.’ Consider the favoured insult of the angry youth wing of transactivism: TERF,

Child, Interrupted The catastrophic consequences of an adult ideology for gender-dysphoric minors

When Richard Green and others first studied them in the 1970s and 1980s, no clinician believed their feelings actually made them members of the opposite sex, or dreamed of treating them with drugs or surgery. They simply sought to predict how those children would feel as adults.

And everywhere the same pattern is evident: almost every child who takes puberty blockers progresses to cross-sex hormones. A different Dutch clinic says its desistance rate is 3.8 percent; at the Tavistock, it is 1.2 percent. The notion that puberty blockers give time for dysphoria to resolve is simply untenable. Instead, they are part of a treatment pathway that ushers children towards adulthood identifying as a trans person.

Doctors are usually cautious when treating children, especially when interrupting normal physical development. But very surprisingly, puberty blockers have never been put through clinical trials for use in gender medicine, and are not licensed by their manufacturers for this purpose. Their main uses are to treat hormone-related conditions in adulthood, in particular endometriosis and prostate cancer, and to ‘chemically castrate’ sex offenders. The two studies that looked at what happened when they were used to delay puberty in animals suggested this caused defects in spatial memory and increased behaviours thought to be analogous to depression in humans.

Jennings was born a boy in 2000, socially transitioned as a pre-schooler, started puberty blockers at age eleven and oestrogen at twelve, and underwent sex-reassignment surgery at eighteen. After a consultation with a surgeon, Jennings says: ‘I haven’t experienced any sexual sensation. The doctor is saying an orgasm is like a sneeze. I don’t even know what she’s talking about.’

Many people are unaware of the impact of missing puberty on fertility. They read articles about transmen giving birth, and do not understand that those transmen must have experienced much or all of female puberty before starting testosterone. Or they hear mention of ‘fertility preservation’ – the extraction and storage of eggs and sperm – before sex-reassignment surgery and do not realise that without at least partial puberty, there will be no eggs or sperm that can be preserved. There is also widespread ignorance about the effects of cross-sex hormones on the fertility of people who transition in adulthood.

Buck Angel, a transman who performs in pornographic films, has sought to publicise unpleasant effects of testosterone use in females: vaginal atrophy and agonisingly painful uterine cramps. Transmen who decide to go through female puberty and retain their sex organs to keep open the opt...

For transwomen, yet another downside of blocking puberty is that it keeps the genitals child-sized. This means there is too little skin for standard sex-reassignment procedures. More must be ha...

And finally, the cross-sex hormones to which early social transitioning almost inevitably leads come with their own risks. For transmen, they are associated with higher risks of cardiovascular problems, including high blood pressure, heart attacks and stroke, dementia in later life, liver problems, diabetes and joint problems. Less is known about the impact on transwomen, but low testosterone is known to cause fatigue, brittle bones and high cholesterol levels in biological males, and taking oestrogen is likely to raise their risk of some cancers, including breast cancer.

All in all, gender affirmation not only locks in persistence but creates trans adults who have lost fertility and sexual function, and exposed themselves to unknown health risks, in return for passing better. And those trade-offs are being made, not by adult trans people in full awareness of the risks, but in childhood, when parents and clinicians decide to socially transition children, or give them puberty blockers, without anyone acknowledging where this is almost certain to lead.

These parents say that their attempts to protect their children are actively frustrated by everyone else. It is now common for schools to accept children’s announcements of new identities without question, and even to change children’s sex in school records without informing parents. I have heard from parents who discovered that pupils were told to use one name and set of pronouns for their child – except when the parents were around, when they should switch back to birth name and pronouns – and others who were told that if they continued to ‘misgender’ their child, social services would intervene.

The stories of detransitioners, which are the most dangerous for the gender-identity narrative, are also silenced. They find each other online: on Twitter, where they use the lizard emoji to signal their detrans status, or on the detrans subreddit (though as I write transactivists have taken it over by claiming that it was a hate forum). Seen from within gender-identity ideology, they are apostates. Some of the abuse I have seen heaped on them is truly shocking. They are accused of faking their stories to incite transphobia, or of being in the pay of the American evangelical Right. Or they are told that they screwed up, and should now shut up and stop causing trouble for ‘real’ trans people.

Irreversible Damage, a book about female detransitioners by journalist Abigail Shrier published in 2020, is the first time their stories have been widely heard. Shrier struggled to get the book published and advertised. The first publisher to consider buying it backed out after staff threatened a walk-out. Amazon refused to accept ads for it,

Many detransitioners find telling their story impossibly painful. It takes courage to speak truth that others do not want to hear – especially when you used to be one of those trying to shout the truth-tellers down. They often feel deep shame, says Lisa Marchiano, the Jungian therapist. Some I have spoken with recall with remorse their own attacks on people who spoke against paediatric transitioning. Others regret having encouraged others to transition when, with hindsight, they were all caught up in the same craze. Many feel like fools for being so sure they wanted something and then realising they were wrong.

Watts wonders whether Girl Guides has considered the consequences for personal care (her questions have gone unanswered). ‘How would you, or your five-year-old, feel about her being cleaned up after a toileting accident by a male who identifies as a woman, and you’re not even supposed to know?’ she asks. Watts also objects to leaders being told that conversations about gender identity can be confidential. ‘I understand the need for discretion and sensitivity,’ she says. ‘But that should apply just as much to the girls, whose interests Girl Guides is supposed to represent. Girl Guides is potentially putting teenage girls and boys in the same accommodation and not telling parents. All leaders have safeguarding training, and we learn never to agree to keep a secret. We’re keeping information from parents that might alter their decisions. It undermines trust, and builds a barrier between children and parents. It’s gaslighting on a massive scale.’

In 2017 Tinsel started a thread on Mumsnet and discovered other women whose marriages had ended when their husbands transitioned. Their experiences were very similar, she realised – and in many ways echoed those of women whose husbands subjected them to physical or emotional abuse. Women whose husbands are transitioning frequently have their sanity questioned, their memories discounted and their judgment undermined, says Tinsel. Another similarity was boundary-pushing: promises are made, for example not to cross-dress in front of the children, only to be broken. A third was emotional manipulation. ‘[My husband] insisted that everything he did, and the decisions he made, were the consequences of his identity, and if he had not done those things he would have killed himself,’ says Tinsel. ‘That’s a tactic often employed by manipulators: give me what I want or I’ll kill myself.’

Transactivists generally dismiss fears that females will be harmed if males who identify as women access female single-sex spaces and services. Transwomen are merely going about their business, they say, and any concern is prejudiced, even prurient – in the cutesy catchphrase that has spread from the US to other countries: ‘We just need to pee.’ They reject real-life examples, even ones as egregious as Yaniv, as not really trans, or as indicating nothing about trans people in general. Some accept that trans people may be predatory – but say that women do not cease to be women because they are nasty. These are all logical fallacies.

It is surely true that Yaniv is unrepresentative. But someone does not have to be representative to cause harm. Yaniv is a ‘reductio ad absurdum’, the ridiculous end-point of a series of logical deductions that requires you to discard your assumptions. If you start from the position that transwomen are literally women, then, inexorably, you must conclude that male people can force a woman like Shelah Poyer to treat their genitalia as if they were female. Most transwomen won’t do this, but Yaniv shows that some will. If you cannot see how this infringes women’s rights, you are reading the wrong book.

Finally, the claim that Yaniv’s nastiness does not justify expulsion from womanhood ‘begs the question’. This expression is often misused to mean ‘raises the question’, but actually means ‘assumes that which is to be proven’. You beg the question when your argument adds no supporting evidence, but merely repeats the starting proposition in different words – for example, arguing that God exists by pointing out that it says so in the Bible.

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.