Down the rabbit hole (Guy Smallman/Getty Images)

When people say things like ātranswomen are womenā, ātransmen are menā, and ānonbinary people are neither women nor menā, what do they mean? In my bookĀ Material Girls,Ā I suggested that many of them are immersed in a fiction.
Getting immersed in fiction is a familiar state for most of us. Nearly all of us do it, and some of us do it several times a day. When you dip into a novel, binge on a box set, or even just daydream furiously about succeeding romantically or seeing your enemies fail, youāre doing it.
When immersed in a fiction, your direct aim isnāt to recognise and respond to the world as it actually is. To borrow a phrase from philosophy, your thoughts and behaviour arenāt directly ātruth-trackingā. Thatās usually ok, because fictions are supposed to be harmless bits of fun, or interesting encounters with possible-but-not-actual scenarios. But what they areĀ notĀ supposed to be are accurate reports of reality as you personally find it now. When immersed, itās as if many of your thoughts are flying parallel to earth without touching it.
As a trans person, there are different possible motives for immersing yourself in fictions of changing or escaping your sex, such as strong feelings of dysphoria. If youāre highly uncomfortable about the sexed aspects of your body ā say, because they fail to fit prevalent bodily norms, or you think they do ā you might experience relief to act as if you are of the opposite sex, or of no-sex.
Itās reasonable to analyse the worryingly high rise of girls and young women in this position in the context of the invention of the smartphone, the related spread of social media and pornography, and the over-sexualisation and objectification of young women in our culture generally. A less well-known motive for immersion, specific to some but not all within the male trans demographic and also likely to be influenced by pornography, is the presence of a fetish known as autogynephilia (or āAGPā).
In plain language: AGP is a sexual turn-on for some males to enter into the fiction of being a woman. Thereās a huge effort made by trans activists to deny this. And it seems particularly hard for people without much experience of the adult world of sexuality ā idealistic young people, say, or university lecturers ā to believe it. But numerous sources attest to it, and itās important we recognise it clearly when it comes to discussing incursions into womenās rights.
See, for instance,Ā this Vice articleĀ from 2016, published before progressive media started to pretend autogynephilia could never happen, that frankly describes a club night where men cross-dress as women for sexual pleasure, sometimes also role-playing that they are being āforcedā into āfeminisationā by a dominatrix. Residual doubters should also read Deirdre McCloskeyās transition memoirĀ Crossing, where the sexual element is cheerfully admitted. Or just look closely atĀ this pictureĀ of a transwoman addressing the New York State Democratic Party.
When it comes to people who arenāt trans, the typical motivations for immersion in trans activismās foundational fictions seem of four main sorts. First, thereās a desire to be kind to trans people, without a lot of further thought about what that might look like. Second, thereās those who want to seemĀ kind because of the social capital it brings these days. Third, thereās a desire to avoid ostracisation, since you know you will be socially punished if you donāt. And fourth, thereās a desire to undo human sexed categories with the power of words, because you heard from some whackjob academic that this was a coherent and politically desirable thing to aim for.
Now many of the fictions in which we immerse ourselves are harmless. But that isnāt the case with trans fictions, when disseminated at industrial scale and coercively maintained by the progressive establishment. At the other end of this particular story arc are unhappily infertile young adults; women prisoners made to share facilities with male rapists; sportswomen crowded out of competition by men they canāt hope to beat; young lesbians guilted into dating males; wives being coerced into participation in the cross-dressing fantasies of their husbands; and trans people with wholly inadequate healthcare relative to their well-being.
Horrific as those plot twists are, though, I want to take a more oblique look at the story leading up to them. For it seems to me that trans activism provides a fascinating case study of what can happen when a political movement abandons truth as a direct aim and pursues fiction instead. Maybe all movements pursue fiction some of the time, but few have truth-denial so firmly built into their foundational axioms. So here are four instructive features.
1) Providing a convincing back storyĀ
What does a fiction need in order to seem vivid and realistic ā to grip your attention and draw you in emotionally? Partly, it needs background detail that looks compelling to the average reader, and is distracting enough that she doesnāt question any plot holes. And what more convincing-looking detail could you find than that supplied by people whose day job it is to be clever and to know things? On this basis, parts of academia have been enlisted, enthusiastically, to furnish surrounding details for the foundational fictions of the trans industry.
A just-publishedĀ articleĀ by philosopher Dan Williams describes a related phenomenon. In todayās world, he argues, āpundits and opinion-producersā provide apparently supportive arguments and other justifications for conclusions that people were already motivated to believe anyway ā and they do so āin exchange for money and social rewardsā. A marketplace for the rationalisations of desired beliefs has developed, he suggests.
In the domain of trans activism, I think that the rationalisations offered by academics tend to support immersion in fiction rather than full-blooded belief. After all, when deciding who to bully first, the trans activists still seem to know who the women and who the men are. But otherwise the process is similar to that described by Williams.
The game for some academics is to provide convincing-looking backgrounds for predetermined fictional conclusions such as ātranswomen are womenā, ātransmen are menā, and ānonbinary people are neither women nor menā. Since the system currently rewards them for doing this, I think their unconscious motive is often career advancement and social recognition from peers, though itās inevitably dressed up as something moral.
In the area Iām most familiar with, academic Philosophy, a dedicated band of thinkers seeks to provide complex and technical post-hoc rationalisations for mantras first expressed by adolescents on Tumblr in 2011. The fact that truth in its traditional sense is not their object of inquiry could not be made plainer. See, for instance, philosopher Katharine Jenkins, who starts her 2016Ā articleĀ on the nature of womanhood, published in prestigious philosophy journalĀ Ethics, by declaring: āThe proposition that trans gender identities are entirely valid ā that trans women are women and trans men are men ā is a foundational premise of my argument, which I will not discuss further.āĀ (Itās telling that āvalidā is used here in theĀ Tumblr senseĀ of identities being validated like passports or parking tickets, and not in the sense of logical validity more traditional for academic philosophy). The conclusion of Jenkinsās paper, not enormously surprisingly under the circumstances, is that we should use the term āwomanā to refer to all and only people who have a female gender identity, whether they are actually female or male.
Another example of this peculiar genre is a 2020 article by Elizabeth Barnes, who like Jenkins, makes explicit that her reasoning has been constrained in advance by a desire to fit with the conclusion that anyone who wants to be classified as a woman should be counted as a woman, and anyone who doesnāt want to be classified as a woman should not be. Barnes then advances a hilariously tortured rationalisation for claims like ātranswomen are womenā, arguing that there arenāt any ādeep, language-independent facts about which people are women, which people are genderqueer, etcā.
She justifies this partly by making an extremely involved analogy with metaphysical discussions of tables. In a nutshell: she argues that in metaphysical terms, there arenāt any tables, strictly speaking, though perhaps there are āsimples arranged table-wiseā. Nonetheless we can still utter the true sentence āthere are tablesā. Similarly, though for somewhat different reasons, the metaphysical facts about womanhood and other āgenderedā groups come apart from the truth conditions of sentences involving ⦠oh I give up, I donāt have to pretend to take this stuff seriously anymore. (I confess, though, that I remain disappointed Barnes didnāt try to argue that women are āsimples arranged woman-wiseā.)
In the social sciences, meanwhile, things donāt seem much better. Here the aim of research often seems to be to rationalise certain background beliefs. These beliefs are designed to make immersion in the original fictions appear beneficial or at least cost-free; or else to make refusal look costly in moral and social terms. For instance: āthere is an extremely low prevalence of regret in transgender patients after surgeryāĀ (i.e. medically-assisted immersion is harmless); āadministering cross-sex hormones to gender dysphoric adolescence lowers suicidal ideationā (i.e. medically-assisted immersion is beneficial); āquestioning the āontological realityā of transgender identities leads to transphobic harassmentā (i.e. as a non-trans person, refusing to immerse yourself in the fictions of trans people causes trans people to be harassed); ānon-suicidal self-injury is common in trans youth and emphasises the need for interventions that reduce transphobiaā (i.e. as a non-trans person, refusing to immerse yourself in the fictions of trans people causes trans youth to self-harm); and so on.
The main point of such articles seems to be to operate as a giant guilt-trip for the reader. As with the philosophers earlier, the ultimate aim here isnāt a relatively neutral pursuit of truth but rather a simulacrum of academic discourse which will bring the reader to accept certain predetermined conclusions. This is suggested, partly by the fact that many of the people who produce these sorts of articles seem to have vested interests, economic or personal, for keeping the whole fiction on the road; but also partly because what they produce is so often full of sloppy mistakes, and failures to observe even basic methodological norms. Others are more qualified to illustrate these flaws but, with respect to the research articles I linked to just now,Ā this piece,Ā this one,Ā this one,Ā this one, andĀ this oneĀ seem revealing.
A charitable explanation of this unusual level of incompetence is that the goal was never truth in the first place. If motivating others to become immersed in fictions is your aim, then the actual use of reliable truth-tracking methodologies is bound to be less important than the superficially convincingĀ appearanceĀ of their use.
2) Exploring a parallel universe
A compelling fiction can give us a snapshot of what life might be like if our starting point was different to the world we know: what else might be true, say, if British people lived under a totalitarian dictatorship with powers of mass surveillance (1984); or if there was a species of otherwise human-like beings that had no fixed sex (The Left Hand of Darkness); or if Germany and Japan had won WWII (The Man in the High Castle), and so on. Filling in the fictional consequences of an initial made-up scenario is another way that authors make certain stories vivid and interesting.
Kids immersed in make-believe stories do something more basic but still similar, using toys and other household props they have around them. So for instance, a kidās make-believe game might go: if this doll is a āexplorerā, and this chair is an āelephantā, then, if I put the doll on top of the chair, āan explorer is riding an elephantā.
So too does trans activism, with the help of the media and the academy, work to fill in the consequences of the original fiction that transwomen are āwomenā. Partly this is a matter of working out what would follow logically, given the way the concepts āwomanā and āmanā usually work. For instance, if transwomen are āwomenā, then transwomen are a sub-set of women generally, so we also need a special word for the sub-set of women that arenāt trans: ācis womenā. If transwomen are āwomenā, then, since women before the age of sexual maturity are āgirlsā, transwomen before the age of sexual maturity are āgirlsā too. Since women who have children are āmothersā, transwomen with children are also āmothersā. Since women exclusively sexually attracted to other women are ālesbiansā, transwomen exclusively sexually attracted to other women are ālesbiansā as well (and so on and so on).
And then thereās the practice of extending the entitlements and resources of women to transwomen, because transwomen are āwomenā, so they are imagined to share precisely those entitlements and need exactly those resources too. As we now know to womenās cost, being immersed in the fiction that transwomen are āwomenā has led to the dismantling of single-sex services and resources built painstakingly over years, largely in the pursuit of aesthetic verisimilitude for males.
Meanwhile, if transwomen are āwomenā, and certain events and experiences characteristically happen to women, then the logic of the fiction dictates that transwomen must undergo these too. So for instance, transwomen are supposed to suffer from āmisogynyā, because women suffer from misogyny (a fiction given further oomph by the fact that experiencing misogyny or even sexual violence is a common sexual fantasy of autogynephilic males). Transwomen haveĀ period symptoms, menopause symptoms, and so on.
This working out of fictional consequences goes on at the particular as well as the general level. Martine Rothblatt is a transwoman, and transwomen are female; Martine Rothblatt is paid more than any woman CEO in America; so this makes Rothblatt theĀ āthe highest paid female executive in AmericaāĀ according toĀ New YorkĀ magazine.Ā Lia Thomas is a transwoman, and transwomen are women; Lia Thomas is a faster swimmer than any woman at the University of Pennsylvania; this means Lia Thomas has brokenĀ āwomenās recordsāĀ for swimming. Novelist Torrey Peters is a transwoman, and transwomen are women: this means Petersā novelĀ Detransition Baby is eligible for longlisting in theĀ Womenās Prize for Fiction 2022.
In this story-world, womenās achievements are gradually reduced, to be replaced with altogether grimmer kinds of headline involving āwomenā engaged in characteristically male crimes such as paedophilia, violent assault, and indecent exposure. Last week, the ScottishĀ Daily RecordĀ reported thatĀ Shay Sims, āa femaleā in court who had āpleaded guilty to three charges of assault by beating, criminal damage and outraging public decencyā, had āraised her dress up and lowered her pants to reveal a penis and continued to walk 40 feet with the penis exposedā. And last Wednesday, theĀ New York TimesĀ reported thatĀ an ā83-year-old womanā, already guilty of killing two other women, had been discovered carrying the torso of a dismembered woman out of an apartment building.
What, meanwhile, of the consequences of the original fictions that transmen are āmenā?Ā In the contrasting case of the fiction that transmen are āmenā, given the centrality of the concept āmanā to so many discourses, in theory there should be ample material for campaigners to get stuck into. To some extent they have: for instance, in the ongoingĀ campaignĀ in the UK to have a transman registered as a legal āfatherā on a birth certificate. But curiously, in most other areas menās spaces, resources, entitlements, and achievements are being left untouched.
3) Retconning the past
Some story-makers engage in āretconningā ā making new stories continuous with old ones by changing elements of the old one retrospectively. Famously ā at least, for people my age and older ā in the soap operaĀ Dallas,Ā the character Bobby, previously killed off, was brought back a whole series later, alive, with the explanation that it had all been a dream while he was in the shower.
In trans activism, a form of retconning takes place all the time, as a further means of producing convincing back stories for current fictions. So much of the trans activist story-world depends on trans people having been a permanent feature of human life throughout history, no matter what the surrounding cultural or historical context. And so we find the retrospective fictional transing of notable sex-non-conforming figures from history: for instance, Marsha P. Johnson;Ā Ewan Forbes;Ā James Barry;Ā Joan of Arc;Ā Queen Hatshepsut;Ā Kurt Cobain. We also get the creative reinterpretation of other cultural traditions, with the Hijra, Faāafafine, FakaleitÄ«, and Kathoey people all anomalously represented under the essentially Western, relatively modern concept of ātransā.
And then, of course, we also get the fiction of the ātransā child ā the most audacious retcon of them all. Transwomen who are āwomenā must once have been āgirlsā, and transmen who are āmenā must once have been āboysā ā which, by extrapolation, means that there must be āgirlsā in the population of male children, and āboysā in the population of female children, right now. āTransā children (so often female, but never mind about that)Ā āknow who they areā, and should have the āfreedom to be themselvesā, we are told. Yet this āfreedomā may well involve a childās taking drugs that will make her infertile; or give her premature osteoporosis; or bring about the surgical removal of her breasts, ovaries, and womb before sheās had any chance to reflect on the implications.
Thousands of children and teens worldwide have been encouraged by adults to thoroughly immerse themselves in this fiction ā indeed, to start believing in it, full stop ā instead of treating it as one make-believe game among many, as part of a healthy development. Childrenās bodies are being used as props in adult dramas they have no way of properly understanding until itās too late for them.
4) Remembering to turn off your phone
When you go to the cinema, youāre sometimes reminded to switch off your phone. Annoying ringtones can grab the attention of someone immersed in a fiction and return them unpleasantly to consciousness of the real world.
Reminders of reality are also lurking out there, ready to distract those currently immersed in trans activist fictions. Thereās the annoying fact that biological sex in humans is immutable. Remembering this can be a real buzzkill when youāre trying to persuade yourself that Lia Thomas is just an ordinary woman unusually good at swimming. This, I think, is why trans activists systematically object to statements that biological sex in humans canāt be transcended.
In a recent case, several student editors of the academic journalĀ Law and Contemporary ProblemsĀ publiclyĀ resignedĀ when they found out their journal would be publishingĀ an article of mineĀ entitled: āThe Importance of Referring to Human Sex in Languageā. (Please do read it to annoy them.) There are several precedents for this, of course ā most obviously, the anomalously severe treatment ofĀ Lisa Littmanās paper on rapid onset gender dysphoriaĀ a few years back.
A fear of breaking the fourth wall is also, I think, what makes trans activists panic so much about J.K. Rowlingās forthright interventions on the harms of modern trans activism to women and girls. Rowling has the courage to describe the reality of male behaviours that harm women and girls, regardless of the identities of either. Perhaps precisely because she understands so well the difference between fiction and reality, the creator of āHe-Who-Must-Not-Be-Namedā is both willing and able to name things that others dare not. She also has the communicative power and cultural clout to get her message out to millions. To those emotionally or indeed financially invested in trans fictions, and who desire others to remain immersed too, this must be terrifying.
And then thereās theĀ Detrans Subreddit. It has 27K members, mostly young, and many of whom talk frankly about the harms to their bodies and minds caused by premature transition. Some of those who post on this subreddit are desperate for help, and their testimonies are truly shocking. You might well wonder: why donāt those in the progressive media report on the phenomenon more unambiguously? For this is a medical scandal unfolding in plain sight.
The answer is that the existence of detransitioners reminds people that psychological identifications can be temporary, especially in adolescence, and that thereās no inevitability about transitioning on the basis of feelings of dysphoria. The idea that someone is āborn transā or has no choice but to transition, given āwho they really are insideā, is a myth. Detransitioners establish this. Now, not all trans people are committed to ignoring this fact ā far from it. But many do seem to be, as do large numbers of self-styled trans allies. And collectively they seem motivated to exert pressure on others to ignore it too, no matter what the public cost.
Even more painfully, perhaps, the phenomenon of detransitioners reminds parents of transitioned children that they might well be making a terrible mistake in allowing their child to be medicated ā a mistake that may later cause grave and irrevocable problems for their childās well-being. I hear that some of the prominent figures publicly engaged in trying to shut down balanced discussion about the welfare of trans children in the UK are privately in this position, and often wonder how it can be that such vested interests go undeclared.
These people remind me of Christof, theĀ Creator-characterĀ inĀ The Truman ShowĀ ā desperate to stop their child from reaching the artificial horizon of the little world that has, unbeknown, been shaped just for them.
This is adapted from a post originally published on Kathleen Stockās Substack.
Join the discussion
Join like minded readers that support our journalism by becoming a paid subscriber
To join the discussion in the comments, become a paid subscriber.
Join like minded readers that support our journalism, read unlimited articles and enjoy other subscriber-only benefits.
Subscribe